New book: How to Make Money with ChatGPT

16 March 2026

How to Make Money with ChatGPT is out now, and can be found on the magazine racks in newsagents. It shows readers how to use ChatGPT to create products and services that they can sell.

I contributed chapters on building website templates, simple web apps, and Python tools. I also wrote tutorials on creating calendars with creative prompts, prompt engineering services, and making Excel templates for business that you can resell.

Across the projects I worked on, I found that AI was an accelerator but it took a lot of work and refinement to achieve a useful result. It was interesting to experiment, and I often found that I was nudging up against the limits of what the tool could achieve. For the programming tasks I found that my own experience, in both web design and Python programming, were essential for steering the AI in the right direction. In Python, I created a program that takes your photos and videos, sorts them by date, date-stamps each clip, and builds a single video of them all. This is something I used to do manually each year to record family memories, but which will be easier to achieve now with AI.

I've published demo files from the book online so you can see the results I was able to achieve, and can try the code. Really, though, the book is about showing you how you can create your own unique outputs that exactly meet your needs.

The process that the book demonstrates and the outcomes achieved apply equally to other AI tools, so if you have a preferred alternative to ChatGPT, it's still worth picking up a copy if you're interested in the core ideas.

The book was co-authored with David Crookes and Ryan Butt and published by Anthem Publishing. If you can't find a copy in your local shop, you can order it online.

Find out more about How to Make Money with ChatGPT.

Permanent link for this post | Blog Home | Website Home | Email feedback

Adventures in space and time

04 March 2026

I recently took part in a day-long workshop on immersive theatre, run by the team behind Bridge Command. Subscribers to my newsletter will know that I joined a mission last year and enjoyed it enormously, and that I've previously performed in immersive theatre show You Me Bum Bum Train. This workshop seemed like a perfect opportunity for me to deepen my understanding of immersive theatre, and exercise my improvisation skills.

At the workshop, we learned how to create truly immersive story-driven experiences, and had an opportunity to invent one of our own using one of the Bridge Command spacecraft as our location. (It feels wrong to call them "sets": They feel very real). Based on some of the presentations during the workshop, I have written an article to capture the key lessons about writing immersive theatre.

I think the article is a nice companion piece to my previous events reports covering how to write comedy and how to write for games. Across all three, there was a recurring theme: Story matters.

I've also published a review of My Life Story's December gig at Dingwalls, which appears in this month's Record Collector in an edited form. This was marking 25 years since the release of third album Joined Up Talking (yikes!). The gig was an uplifting celebration of the album, and it seemed like the years fell away.

Permanent link for this post | Blog Home | Website Home | Email feedback

Get rapid results with Python

02 March 2026

One of the best things about Python is that there's a rich ecosystem of libraries you can use that enable you to do things like draw graphs, manipulate PDFs and download data. I put these libraries at the heart of my latest article for The Official Raspberry Pi Magazine, the cover feature about learning Python.

There have been many Python tutorials published over the years. My self-determined mission for this one was to get readers to interesting results quickly. Instead of comprehensively covering all the syntax, I wanted to demonstrate the key ideas and give readers some programs to tinker with. So, we start with a guess-the-year quiz game, which introduces input, loops, variables, lists, and conditional statements. Readers have a game they can customise for any theme, such as sports, music or films.

This leads into a set of short programs, each one demonstrating a different library. You'll see how to twinkle the LEDs on the Sense HAT, draw with the turtle, merge PDFs with PyPDF2, create graphs with matplotlib, watermark images using pillow, and generate colourful QR codes. My favourite program in the collection is one that looks up your carbon intensity using the requests module and the Carbon Intensity API.

When I was starting to learn programming on the Amstrad CPC 464 in the 80s, I picked up a lot by typing in programs from magazines, so I hope that these short examples will prove similarly instructive.

Some of them might also be useful to more experienced Python programmers who perhaps haven't come across these libraries before, or are inspired to extend one of their projects by adding graphs, carbon awareness or feedback though the Sense HAT.

You can read and download all the programs from the article, including enhanced versions of a couple of them.

Find the magazine in your newsagent or order issue 163 of The Official Raspberry Pi magazine here.

If you want to explore Python further, my book Mission Python shows you how to build a space adventure game, and my free ebook Coding Compendium includes my previous Python tutorials and projects.

I've also extended my Raspberry Pi and Python tutorials with an updated tutorial for the Python turtle, for those who want to explore that module further.

Permanent link for this post | Blog Home | Website Home | Email feedback

Dip into the blog archive

June 2005 | September 2005 | January 2006 | March 2006 | April 2006 | May 2006 | June 2006 | July 2006 | August 2006 | September 2006 | October 2006 | November 2006 | December 2006 | February 2007 | March 2007 | April 2007 | May 2007 | June 2007 | July 2007 | August 2007 | September 2007 | October 2007 | November 2007 | December 2007 | January 2008 | February 2008 | March 2008 | April 2008 | May 2008 | June 2008 | July 2008 | August 2008 | September 2008 | October 2008 | November 2008 | December 2008 | January 2009 | February 2009 | March 2009 | April 2009 | May 2009 | June 2009 | July 2009 | August 2009 | September 2009 | October 2009 | November 2009 | December 2009 | January 2010 | February 2010 | March 2010 | April 2010 | June 2010 | August 2010 | September 2010 | October 2010 | December 2010 | March 2011 | April 2011 | May 2011 | June 2011 | July 2011 | August 2011 | September 2011 | October 2011 | November 2011 | December 2011 | January 2012 | February 2012 | March 2012 | June 2012 | July 2012 | August 2012 | September 2012 | October 2012 | December 2012 | January 2013 | February 2013 | March 2013 | April 2013 | June 2013 | July 2013 | August 2013 | September 2013 | October 2013 | November 2013 | December 2013 | January 2014 | February 2014 | March 2014 | April 2014 | May 2014 | June 2014 | July 2014 | August 2014 | September 2014 | October 2014 | November 2014 | December 2014 | January 2015 | February 2015 | March 2015 | April 2015 | May 2015 | June 2015 | September 2015 | October 2015 | December 2015 | January 2016 | February 2016 | March 2016 | May 2016 | July 2016 | August 2016 | September 2016 | October 2016 | November 2016 | December 2016 | January 2017 | July 2017 | August 2017 | October 2017 | November 2017 | January 2018 | February 2018 | August 2018 | October 2018 | November 2018 | December 2018 | January 2019 | March 2019 | June 2019 | August 2019 | September 2019 | October 2019 | January 2020 | February 2020 | March 2020 | April 2020 | May 2020 | June 2020 | September 2020 | October 2020 | December 2020 | January 2021 | February 2021 | May 2021 | June 2021 | October 2021 | November 2021 | December 2021 | January 2022 | February 2022 | March 2022 | May 2022 | July 2022 | August 2022 | September 2022 | December 2022 | March 2023 | April 2023 | May 2023 | June 2023 | October 2023 | November 2023 | January 2024 | February 2024 | May 2024 | June 2024 | July 2024 | September 2024 | October 2024 | November 2024 | December 2024 | January 2025 | February 2025 | September 2025 | October 2025 | November 2025 | January 2026 | March 2026 | Top of this page |