The Rusty Rocket

I've always maintained that a probem can be solved with code, so I was set a challenge. The challenge was make a friend's commute to and from work easier and more enjoyable. As they catch the train every day, my focus was on making their train journey easier. I've always enjoyed travelling by train but most of the time I get rather anxious when waiting on the train station platforms and I see crowds waiting for the same train as I am. Will I get a seat? Will I have to stand? Will I even get on? How can a problem like that be solved with code? One way would be to somehow get everyone to move off the station platform just before the train arrives, giving you the freedom to choose where you would like to sit. I soon hit on the idea of writing something that would announce in a convincing way, bogus train arrivals on other platforms. I found a really nice library of train station announcements and working with Pygame, put something together in Python. It took a couple of hours

Driving around the local area with my car radio tuned to 87.5 FM, I was really surprised at what I was able to pick up. After repeated tests, I've been able to work out that there's a small pirate radio station in my neighbouring town. They play a variety of music, it's a real (sometimes rather odd) mix with no commentary between tracks and every now and gain there is the sound of someone typing out a text message, so the audio source is an iPhone. It's been a really nice surprise to find and I've been listening to it lots as I pass through the town. After further investigation, I was able to track one of the signals down to an area hotel on the edge of the town and I wondered if they were broadcasting music on their own in-house station, or it could be emanating from one of the nearby factories. When I was a student working in the factories during the summer months, you would have to wear ear defenders but these had radios in them that we tuned to an internal frequ

At the start of the year I decided to enter another game dev competition but this time with a more serious theme behind it. The Serious Games Showcase and Challenge Europe is a competition based around the learning and training through gameplay and so I started to put together an entry based around one of my hobbies, amateur radio. The idea for the game was a simple one, you have to complete the puzzles in order to bring an old radio back online before transmitting your final message. I was also going to use this as an education tool to give some of my pupils an insight into the game development process. It was all built in Scratch as this would allow my pupils who have had little exposure to coding to still be involved. This game really works Scratch hard as I got it to track the ISS and lunar cycles in real time as part of the game. After months of developing and involving my various classes in the testing and refining process, I put together a little prop to showcase it but also pu

It has been a difficult time for this ChatGPT business project but such a lot of progress has now been made. The AI came up with a great plan to monetise the digital display downloads, and that was to get customers to purchase activation keys that remain active for a limited period of time. I set about implementing this functionality but found it really hard to get correct as there were two systems that needed to be in sync in order for this to work: The payment system in order to issue the customer with their daily activation key after payment and the downloaded content that has to check that the key is correct. ChatGPT came very close to the mark but didn't write its code completely correct but that might be down to me not prompting it sufficiently enough to get an accurate result out of it. After questioning ChatGPT about this problem more, we worked together to produce a key generation system that would take the purchase day's number in the year and joins it to serial numbe

The really good news is that one of my games has recently passed the $100 mark and at the time of writing, this equates to £80.16. I'm going to use this money in a little experiment - Can I set up a little side hustle business with just $100 and have ChatGPT guide me in what to do? I'm going to follow ChatGPT's suggestions to see where it leads me and more details can be found in the video below, including the all important business plan. I first started by asking it the question:  " I have $100 and would like to start a creative business. I am interested in game design, animation and comic cons. Do you have any suggestion for a side hustle business? " The suggestion of selling digital assets was an interesting one, and combined with the comic con booth idea, I thought these suggestions got me off to a strong start. Wanting to explore the idea of stalls further, I refined the request slightly by adding in the point that I would like the business to help stall hold

Quantum Leap was an obsession of mine during the 90s and I'm still a huge fan of the show even now. As we'll be off to another comic con shortly, I wanted to try and make another prop to take along to the even and the Ziggy handheld that featured in the original series seemed a great ideas as it would be challenging to make but would be easy to carry around with me on the day. The short video below details how it was made with downloadable resources further down this page. The first thing I did was to pull up some reference material in the form of screenshots that clearly shows the handheld. There are also props that you can buy and the images they had on the various websites were a lot more detailed. From here I was able to build a simple model from within Tinkercad . I made sure I included the main blocks of the design and made up the more smaller components. I thought if I could achieve the general look and outline of the handheld, then it will be easily recognisable. I want