Spring 2026 Blog 

It’s been an equally busy few months heading into spring. I’ve finished my second game and have my film, Ritual, in line for an "open" film festival (unfortunately, it wasn't selected for a well-known festival, but moving forward!).

Game Development: Roots to Riches

My new game, "Roots to Riches," is now hosted on Itch.io. It was a total labour of love that took about three weeks to finish (see  Projects).

• The Tech: One full week was spent porting it to RetroPie, Windows, and Linux, plus compiling it in Love.js.

• Reception: I’ve had a good amount of play on Itch so far, which feels like a great "cap" on the project.

• The AI Debate: I used AI to help with the code, and some art  assets. I’ve noticed AI use is still quite contentious  for creative use. I always go back through the AI-produced code to manually tweak the annotated sections, which actually helped me build a technical understanding . As a footnote, I totally respect developers who choose to preserve their skills by creating non-AI-coded games; I truly admire the level of skill and dedication that path requires. 

Home Automation & Hardware

My Kitchen Assistant sytem has been a massive hit in the house! I’ve also been playing with Home Assistant, experimenting with various automations:

• Sensors: I replaced my humidity/temp/pressure sensor with a more robust version. The old one was stuck at 100% humidity, the new one is much better.

• Networking: I re-initiated my Meshtastic node  in the loft to boost the mesh and see who else is in the area.

• ESP32 Projects: I built a small remote control for an ESPHome-friendly "Local Bytes" smart plug. It works nicely, though integrating it with Google Assistant has lost me.

Work & Mobile

I also coded an Android SDK app that helps me out with tasks at work. 

That’s about it for now, though I might edit this if I remember a few more things!

First 2026 Blog 

The festive break was a whirlwind of creativity. Most of my energy went into music production and video projects for YouTube. Only a small portion of the work I decided to release in the end!

Music Player & Visual Experiments

I’ve been refining my music player, leaning into a "pared-down" aesthetic. I’m particularly happy with the vibe-coded status ring, as track scanning can be a bit laggy at times. The full player, complete with Bluetooth controls, is still running strong.

On the visual side, I’ve been experimenting with MilkDrop 3 Pro for YouTube Shorts. It’s a fantastic tool for creating visuals and its built-in editor has a depth I’m still exploring. If you’re into video editing, I also highly recommend DaVinci Resolve, t’s been a joy to learn.

Upcoming Releases

My latest film, RITUAL, is currently under consideration with a few film festivals. To respect the premiere process, I’ll be holding off on a public share until after August 2026.  Music: I’m officially releasing a new single on January 16th! This is a self-published venture with a new publisher.

Hardware & Lab Changes

For various reasons I’ve decided to sunset a few radio projects, specifically the Meshtastic node, the TTN node and the Raspberry Pi NOAA receiver.

I’ve also decommissioned the HamClock. While it looks great, keeping a Pi 4 running 24/7 wasn’t practical for how often I used it (I didnt have a dedciated screen), but for now, it's time to move on.

New Year Build: Home Server 2.0

My Raspberry Pi 3 B+ (running OpenMediaVault) has served me well, but it’s struggling. Navigating 90GB of family photos was becoming too sluggish for this server.

The Upgrade:

I’ve picked up a Lenovo i5 Mini PC with 32GB of RAM.  I’ll be documenting this in the "Projects" section.

Winter 2025 Blog 

I’ve been quite busy lately exploring music video creation and releasing music through a publisher. I’m currently trying out some new options and have gained Official Artist Channel (OAC) status on YouTube, which offers several benefits I’m currently exploring.

I’ve really enjoyed making YouTube Shorts; I have a third one scheduled for release in January to coincide with my new single. I spent about a week on this track it’s a Trance piece inspired by a synth I discovered in Ableton.

I found the genre as difficult as ever to get right. I think a lot of the challenge stems from the full frequency bandwidth the genre requires; the dynamics are very hard to manage without causing distortion or losing clarity. I also chose to avoid long track lengths this time, as creating an interesting narrative for an extended mix would have required much more work.

The track is set for a January release, hopefully alongside the YouTube Short to help promote it. I have plenty more projects in the pipeline!

Please keep an eye on my Official Artist Channel on YouTube Music to discover my latest tracks and videos

Winter 2025 Blog    

It's been a busy few weeks as I finished off another MilkDrop visualizer video, managed to independently publish some of my catalogue of music onto main-stream music streaming services, and kick-started my own official SRG774 YouTube channel.

In terms of a YouTube channel, this is all new to me and is a great platform for music videos. I hope to continue with uploading projects as and when I have time to complete them, and hope to update again soon.

Night Train Video

The whole aesthetic is something that appeals to me and utilizes an older track from my back catalogue.

The synthetic video utilizes the same MilkDrop visualizer engine as 'Storm', but is a bit more highly curated to the music, in my opinion. 

I enjoy the end scene, which subconsciously I realise is like the power feed that runs along the side of the London Underground.

"Storm" (Official Visualizer)

Hello! I'm excited to present the official music video visualizer for my new single, "Storm."

"Storm" is a blend of rock-electro fusion. The track utilizes a generative rhythmic technique inspired by live drumming in electronic acts and evolved from an initial heavy metal electronic sound experiment.

 I integrated strong elements of feedback and noise, drawing influence from progressive guitar driven rock bands to create its final complex texture.

For the visualizer, I sought striking, fluid motion graphics. I chose the powerful MilkDrop 3 PRO engine, known for its ability to create abstract, sound-reactive visuals. After testing and fine-tuning the results, I purchased the licensed version to share the content freely and professionally.

I personally curated  the visuals, adjusting presets to find the exact dynamic look I wanted. This process gives me a level of direct creative control over the content generation that is often missing with current video AI solutions.

Enjoy the track and the visual experience!

Winter 2025 Blog

Hello and Welcome to My Latest Blog!

As promised, I have managed to produce a film, and it does in fact utilise AI, but perhaps more so in an  augmented sense, with just one clip. 

I also discovered Creative Commons licensed clips in Wikipedia Commons, which would serve as the visual basis of the film and allow me to stitch together a screenplay and narrative. this concept struck me as an excellent format to explore the modern changing world around us.

I wanted to showcase my own electronic music, so my orginal soundtrack would be a key element.

The films final cut is nearly 12 minutes.

For reference, the film was edited in DaVinci Resolve and the soundtrack was composed, arranged, and mixed in Ableton Live Suite.

Full Synopsis and upates to follow...

Watch this space!

Autumn 2025 Blog

I have experimented with Stable Diffusion to generate images locally. I used the same prompt for both Google's latest image generation and Stable Diffusion 1.5. 

The difference was quite stark, and my AMD gaming PC took around 15 minutes to "denoise" the image. 

My next project is to make ar short film, leveraging AI video generation.

Watch this space!

Ultra-realistic close-up of a man’s face, cinematic lighting with soft shadows, high detail on skin texture, pores, and stubble, sharp expressive eyes, subtle emotion conveying intensity and tension, realistic hair strands, slightly tousled hair, natural skin tones, photorealistic, shallow depth of field, soft background blur, dramatic but natural cinematic mood, 8k detail, intricate textures, sharp focus on eyes and facial features

Autumn 2025 Blog

Hello, my main focus in hobbies and projects lately has shifted slightly. I've gotten back more heavily into music production and find it a great way to focus my creative energy. I've been trying to produce a finished track and continue to draw inspiration from the countless electronic artists I've listened to. I also appreciate the live and generative techno and ambient scenes for inspiration. See My Music section.

I actually went from an Elektron groove box to the full version of Ableton and I'm now favoring its wider sonic palette and all-in-one nature for creating music without too much gear and setup.

Thanks for the heads-up! Here's the updated text, tidied up for clarity and flow.

**Update, please check out my Projects page to see a techno set I carried out in VCV Rack. For those unfamiliar, VCV Rack is a "virtual modular synthesizer" that emulates a real modular system. It's a great tool for anyone interested in this kind of music production.**

Radio and Tech Projects

On the radio front, I've been a bit lazy lately. I aim to spend some time on FT8 this autumn and really enjoy looking up logs on QRZ after making a log. It's really interesting having a peek into another radio operator's world. I've also been keeping my HAM clock going and am really impressed with how reliable and well-maintained this system is. I continue to monitor my Raspi NOAA for weather satellite receiving, getting some very nice images from time to time on the Russian Meteor satellites. However, with my unamplified antenna, I very rarely receive good NOAA images, this is a project I may retire down the road.

On the meshtastic and LoRaWAN front, I still have my nodes in place as more of an infrastructure, but I haven't had the desire to carry out any experiments in that space.

I recently upgraded my news dashboard from a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 to a Raspberry Pi 4. This project has had many iterations, namely updating the screen, tweaking the news sources, adding a random picture, and a switchable wallpaper screen via a switch to shield the information if needed. It's one of my most favourite and useful projects. Find the orginal iterations in Projects.

Other Creative Pursuits

I've also created a number of prototype products that I haven't shared here just in case I were to develop them, but I've found that that's easier said than done. They basically involve Arduinos and interactive displays with a unique design.

A couple of other projects not shown here have been unique Alternate Reality Games (ARG)  linked with GitHub, and a redevelopment of a novelty cross platform web video game and an ear training game. These were essentially "vibe coded" through many iterations and through debugging. I have also extensively reworked my own music player platform to showcase my "top" tracks as I've moved away from other hosted solutions for various reasons. I also love the freedom and control of using GitHub in general.

So that about wraps it up for now! Thank you.

March 2025 Blog

Throughout February and now coming into March, I've been quite busy with various hobbies.

For instance, after a couple of failed attempts, I finally managed to get a partial SSTV decode from the ISS during its "Fram2Ham SSTV Simulation" . I purchased another V-dipole specifically for the occasion, but I didn’t have much luck with it. Instead, I switched to my homemade QHA antenna and finally managed to capture an image. I know it’s not much, but I’m still learning. The satellite was at an elevation of only 19 degrees, so I’m hoping to build on this experience.

I still have my Raspberry Pi NOAA V2 running, but I might need to fine-tune the balance after swapping antennas about a month ago. It seems my images don’t quite have the same bandwidth they once did at similar elevations, it occasionally locks up, meaning I have to restart the Pi. It’ll need a bit of tweaking down the road, but I’m happy to still be receiving weather satellite images.

I’ve spent less time on FT8 recently, but I made a good few contacts when conditions were favorable. I also tried FT4 one evening, which runs on the same software as FT8. It worked well, though FT8’s robustness makes it my preferred mode, given my less-than-ideal loft antenna setup.

Moving on to my other passion—sci-fi—I spent about a week working on an animation short in a photo montage style- 'The Citadel', complete with my own original soundtrack. The artwork and voiceover were AI-generated, and I consulted generative AI for the script. I also took the opportunity to brush up on my editing and screenplay skills using Shotcut. Feel free to check it out and enjoy!

Oh, and I was impressed to see that Meshtastic has updated its app to show more telemetry details.

Thank you!

January 2025 Blog

It's been a busy month for my hobbies. I spent most of the Christmas break producing electronic music using my recently acquired Elektron Syntakt and Ableton 12 Intro. As you may have seen in a site update, I created a new GitHub page to showcase the tracks I like. I decided not to embed the page directly, as it seemed to introduce some lag when streaming and playing the tracks. However, there are still occasional pauses between tracks.

Exploring the creation and mastering of electronic music has been a fascinating experience. While I haven’t mastered any instrument, I’ve dabbled in music off and on throughout my life, and it feels great to produce a track from scratch. I’m also interested in the mastering process and sound design.

This process has given me a newfound appreciation for the brilliant mastering and mixing work that ensures most tracks can be played on any speaker and still sound great. The inspiration and motivation needed to generate original ideas, refine timing, set the mood, and manage the countless nuances in music can feel overwhelming at times.  I also think it will be a long time before AI can fully bridge the gap in this creative space.

Moving on to radio: Although I haven’t been active on FT8 lately due to my focus on producing music, I did find time to build a rather large QHA antenna, following an excellent guide. While constructing it, I joked that it could at least double as a good umbrella stand if it didn’t work! Unfortunately, the finished project produced slightly worse images than my inexpensive V-dipole. I’ve decided to repurpose it to capture SSTV signals when they’re available from the ISS and similar sources. Not every project is a win!

December 2024 Blog

This month, I’ve had great interest in radio-related projects, particularly receiving NOAA APT signals via VHF radio and decoding them to produce weather imagery. Initially, I simply asked a generative AI for guidance and ended up going down a rabbit hole of outdated software that didn’t yield the results I was looking for.

The image below is the result of a weekend's worth of work using my current setup. After some simple Google searches, I discovered an up-to-date guide on how to receive these signals. It turns out that I have the wrong type of antenna, but the guide provided a more definitive and straightforward approach to achieve my goal.

During my initial research, I learned that with my current multiband vertical omni antenna, I could still decode a signal, but I would need to wait for a very high-elevation pass directly overhead. The image you see represents just that—a pass where the satellite was overhead, you can see that moment in the middle.

While monitoring, I heard the tones of the NOAA downlink, and I witnessed a nice, clean waterfall of the wave pattern. I plan to post more in a dedicated section once my V-dipole antenna arrives.

Now, onto another project I’ve been working on intermittently for a few weeks: creating a widget for QRZ.com. QRZ free tier seems to only allow basic Markdown and CSS styles, which makes producing a widget or embedded content quite challenging. Analyzing other widget providers, like those for visitor counters, revealed that these widgets are essentially just updating images. This sounds simple but delves into the realm of servers and web automation which was new to me via GitHub.

Initially, AI led me to GitHub Actions, but I couldn’t get it to work at first. I explored other directions, like using third-party sites and JavaScript animations, trying to create a clock widget. Eventually, I came full circle to my original goal: displaying the date in an up-to-date, clickable thumbnail. While I could display the time (hours and minutes), It would mean over strecthing the limt of Githubs free tier.

The last snag I encountered was the Cron Job not running. It turns out that GitHub servers need a few hours to register the Cron Job setup for it to work. Anyway, if you’d like to clone this project and remix it for your own QRZ page, please refer to my GitHub page for the details.