Writing
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Occasional writing on technology, astronomy, temperature metrology, creativity and photography.
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A Writing Room, Built by Opus 5
I gave Opus 5 a brief for a small writing tool: show someone their own words two ways, change one thing between them, and let them choose by reading. It built the thing, wrote the tests, and reported that they all passed. Then I looked at the screen.
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A Piece of Type, Built by Opus 5
I have been fascinated by printing since a friend showed me a Victorian block. One prompt to Opus 5, typed on my phone, produced a working 3D model of a piece of foundry type with its fifteen parts labelled; a few tweaks put a figure 2 alongside it.
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A Live Bus Board, Built by Fable
The train board's live feed stumped me for a year, until my host began running Node.js and the real departures finally arrived. Then I handed the bus board to Fable, one of Anthropic's Claude models, to see how it would cope. It coped well.
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The Dwarf Mini Smart Telescope
A small, relatively affordable instrument that can find and stack deep-sky objects from a light-polluted garden. First images and early impressions.
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Home Assistant: building a WSPR radio integration with AI assistance
WSPR signals tell you how radio propagation is behaving on any given day. I wanted that data inside Home Assistant, so I built an integration to bring it there.
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Building a Live Train Display
A small, always-on departure board for my two nearest stations, Meols Cop and Southport. The look came first; the live feed is now running, showing real departures for Meols Cop.
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Building a Ham Radio Dashboard
A lightweight online dashboard that brings live operating conditions, RF propagation and an ISS video feed into a single readable view, adapted for G0IKV from VA3HDL's open-source HamDashboard.
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From Wireless to YouTube: my first video
I set myself a challenge: learn to make a YouTube video. The subject chose itself, a short comparison of two Roberts radios, one from the 1950s and one from today, and what carries across the seventy years between them.
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Marine Lake in metal: an old Southport printing block
In 2012 a friend let me examine an old metal printing block showing Southport Marine Lake and its landmarks. Its date and purpose are uncertain; an archaeologist put the typeface at around 1890 to 1920.