Change ringing simulators on computers or other handheld devices can rapidly improve progress in handbell ringing, especially for those handbell ringers who have few opportunities for ringing with a live band.
I've been thinking about this for a while, but this week I finally got around to making a prototype. I call it the eBells Hub. It's a gadget that you can plug a set of eBells into, and it makes the bell sounds. That's it. There's no configuration, you just...
Yesterday was our practice session with Caroline, but Tina wasn't available and I didn't manage to get anyone else. So Caroline and I rang with Wheatley, the software ringer for Ringing Room.
I don't know how widely used Wheatley is. I have heard of people using it, but I've only...
A while ago, during discussions with the eBells consortium, the following question came up: what are the minimum hardware requirements for online ringing? We know that Ringing Room doesn't really work with tablets or smartphones, so we assume that everyone has a laptop or desktop PC to use, but what if...
Two weeks ago I rang a quarter of Bristol in which the pairs were assigned randomly just before we started. We had agreed in advance that whoever got the tenors would conduct - which ended up being me. Yesterday we took the concept a step further by randomly assigning individual...
This morning Tina, Julia and I rang a peal of Cambridge, Kent and Plain Bob Minor in Ringing Room. This is only the fourth peal in Ringing Room, and the first handbell peal, i.e. with everyone ringing two bells each. (There have been two peals in which one person...
Most of my online ringing in the last couple of months has been with Gareth Davies' Five O'Clock Handbell Club. The way it works is that Gareth sends an email on Thursday with suggested quarters for the following week. Everyone who wants to can say which quarters they would like...
Yesterday we had another go at a quarter of Little Bob Maximus in Ringing Room, and succeeded. There were a few tricky patches with delays, but nothing as bad as in the previous attempt. We finished in just under an hour.
There still haven't been many 12-bell quarters online: 4...
It's Lincolnshire week! Yesterday I attempted a quarter of Lincolnshire Royal in Ringing Room, with Mike Purday, Simon Rudd, Simon Humphrey and Alban Forster. It was going really well until just before the end of the second course, when we were hit by such severe delays that we had to...
After ringing a quarter of Cambridge Maximus in Handbell Stadium last Saturday, tomorrow we're going for Yorkshire. I've hardly ever rung it (although I do have a memory of an unsuccessful peal attempt in the mid-1990s) so I thought I'd better do a bit of practice with Mabel. I started...
Three online quarter peal attempts again this week, but only two scored. On Wednesday we tried Yorkshire Royal in Ringing Room, but there were a lot of delays and it didn't go. Thursday was London Major, again in Ringing Room, which we rang very well. Actually that was my...