Posts

Welcome to the Phone Box Studio

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Towards the end of last year, I have been developing software to help me manage a radio station. The last update I posted was in December and it can be found here . I have since been developing the software further over the last couple of months and I now have it how I like it. It even allows me to host my radio station online with scheduled sets. I want to experiment with live sets too and I've been looking around for the best way to do this. After a great deal of searching, I'm going to use Mixcloud as this seems to be reasonably priced and handles all the copyrite licencing and royalties. But before I can even start live streaming, I first need a studio. I set about repurposing old projects I have in the workshop and starting assembling a little recording studio, complete with sound proofing sponge tiles that recently fell off the roof from the cinema at the bottom of the garden. The studio booth, made from parts of an old wardrobe was rather narrow, so installing my BT pa...
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Building the Doodle Booth: Getting AI to Build Me a Side Hustle: Part 2

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 This is part 2 of the " Getting AI to build a side hustle " project. Part 1 can be found here . After getting to know my interests, Gemini AI came up with a couple of really good suggestions on how to make a little bit of money on the side. The option I have decided to go with is the building of a doodle booth. A doodle booth, for those who don't know (and I was one of them until I started on this project) is a tabletop stand that mimics one of those passport photobooths. The idea is that the artist sits on one side and draws someone on the other whilst peering through a window. The finished drawing it usually fed through a slot at the front, in keeping with the whole photobooth feel. Now, I like to build things in the workshop and I had an old wooden stand I had built for an event. This saved me a great deal of time when building the framework of the drawing booth and the video below shows the progress I have made so far. The booth is all made from salvaged wood and oth...
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Getting AI to Build Me a Side Hustle Part 1

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I've seen projects like this before, I even gave it a little go a few years ago myself, where AI guides you in setting up a side hustle to help bring in a little bit of extra money alongside your day job. Now that AI systems are much more sophisticated compared to a couple of years ago, can this experiment be repeated with more favourable results? My preferred AI at the moment is Google's Gemini and so I set about working with it to first formulate an idea. My requirements were as follows: Must incorporate one or more of my interests Allow me to meet new people Helps me learn or improve on a skill (not a priority but a nice thing to have) I then worked with Gemini further to help it understand my hobbies and what I enjoyed doing. I was wanting to steer it away from any digital-based solution as I wanted to see where a more analogue route would take me and it actually came up with a couple of really interesting suggestions. The first was to sell vintage board game pieces. The i...
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Developing my own radio station software for pirate rigs and online radio stations

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If you look back through this blog and through the videos on my YouTube channel, you'll come across many projects involving my interest in pirate radio and hacking little FM transmitters . My favourite project being this one here , that involves the BBC Microbit and got featured in a Microbit magazine. These were all purely for experimental purposes, you understand. Since those posts were written, I've also been looking at creating an online radio station and experiemented a bit with Number Station  in the past, where every Sunday I would hop online and scan the airwaves for shortwave transmissions and overlay them on top of an ambient backing track. This taught me a great deal about the process of getting a station online. I started looking around for software that would allow me to schedule shows but everything came at a price and the free solutions out there were either too complicated for my needs or didn't have what I wanted. So I'm writing my own. This project is...
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Upgrading my Talking Ziggy Handheld

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I have been upgrading my Ziggy handheld prop from Quantum leap . This time I've been using ChatGPT to allow my to have a conversation with Ziggy. In my previous post here , (you can still download the free files to 3D print your own by the way) I got the prop lighting up and I then went on to use Amazon Alexa Blueprints to build trigger words and phrases to allow the handheld to respond. It worked but it wasn't the best. I've been trying to integrate ChatGPT into the project to allow me to communicate with Ziggy's handlink in a better way. Through the use of a cheap mini mixing desk thingy I got free from Wish years agao (after collecting enough points), I've also been able to recreate Ziggy's floaty, echoey voice too. Take a look at the video below to see it in action and to learn more about the build. The video also features another of my older builds. A few years ago now I worked on building my own telephone network that repurposed decommissioned BT publ...
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Unsolved Mysteries: The Salisbury St. Ann's Gate Cipher

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I recently attended a talk on the cracking of the Enigma code, in which we were able to get hands on with one of the machines as well as learn more about its history from a presentation given by Dr Mark Baldwin.  It got me thinking about the many unsolved cipher mysteries out there and I was amazed to learn that I have a coded mystery right on my doorstep here in Salisbury. I don't think I'm clever enough to solve it though. The story goes, that in the short period after the Second World War, an army truck was driving through the Cathedral Close here in Salisbury where it struck the stone archway of St. Ann's Gate, one of the entrances into the Close. There's actually a picture of the damage at the time. When the damaged stone underneath the window had to be removed, it apparently revealed a hidden cavity within the arch. Tucked inside was a weathered piece of parchment comprising of a page of indecipherable letters. I could only find part of the Salisbury cipher code o...
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The Virtual Fortune Teller Zoltar

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A few years ago I built a six foot Zoltar fortune teller cabinet that had a coin-operated animatronic mannequin of Zoltar himself. I've been to a number of comic cons with the cabinet and run school group showing how he's programmed, but he's getting a little tired and worn out. This is an update video on how I'm trying to build a virtual version of the fortune teller to allow more people access to his words of wisdom. The virtual Zoltar makes use of a cloud messaging platform called Ably which allows the fortune teller to 'see' all the questions coming in from anyone accessing the sight. If you watch him long enough, you will start to see these requests coming in and being answered. Be careful what you wish for, it might just come true! .
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