The day Zig & Zig faxed me

12 November 2024

I was sad to see that Future Music magazine is to close, with its final issue being number 414. I contributed a couple of articles to the magazine around 1993, and it's amazing to see that a title I wrote for then has lasted this long.

One of the articles was an interview with Reel 2 Real, who had a hit with 'I Like to Move It', which more recently found fame in the Madagascar films. Reel 2 Real had recorded a track with Zig & Zag, puppet presenters of The Big Breakfast TV show. Future Music's style guide at the time encouraged humour, so I thought it would be fun to do a box-out on this collaboration. It also helped with wordcount, given it had been quite hard to get the technical detail I needed in the main interview.

I phoned the Channel 4 press office. "Would you like to make up some words from Zig & Zag that I can use in the article?"

"Oh no!" said the lady on the phone. "We couldn't do that."

I was disappointed.

"They would want to do that themselves," she said, brightly.

It amused me to think of the Channel 4 PR people deferring to the crazy puppets in this way, but they got me comments which arrived by fax in the Future Music office. After some confusion there ("er, anyone know why Zig & Zag are faxing us?"), it was posted to me, and this week I rediscovered the fax.

Here's what they wrote:

• ZAG: Eric came to our posh Docklands apartment. It was our first meeting and unbeknownst to us our first recording session. Eric decided there was no time like the present and got us to hire a DAT machine and record our single 'Them Girls, Them Girls' there and then. He was quite demanding but always had a smile on his face.
• ZIG: I checked through Uncle Eric's wallet when Zag was singing. He is very rich. He is a member of four video clubs.
• ZAG: We love Real to Reel and hopefully we can work with them again. Respec in every aspec!
• ZIG: Boolaka! Boolaka!
• ZAG: Oh dear! It's Booyaka, oh never mind!
• ZIG: Boolaka! Boolaka!

I suspect their writers Ciaran Morrison and Mick O'Hara might have helped with the joined-up writing, but the misspellings of names are Zig & Zag's.

So, farewell Future Music. Its sample packs and tutorials were helpful when I was recording my album Artificial, and I loved studying the studio photos to see what gear the interviewed artists were working with. I remember noticing that Jean-Michel Jarre's studio included a Novation Mininova, because I have that synth too. 414 issues is an incredible run for a specialist magazine, but it's becoming harder for magazines to survive. If there's one you love, support it today!

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What is green software?

30 October 2024

For my latest article for the BBC, I researched green software, which is software that makes efficient use of energy and hardware.

I have a keen interest in tech sustainability (see my previous articles on reducing website carbon emissions, digital product passports, and hard drive recycling). I have noticed the impact that software has on the life of hardware. I have an iPad Mini that works beautifully, except that the OS can't be updated now and so some apps refuse to run. It's becoming gradually unuseable as software support fades away, even though the hardware could last a lot longer.

The Green Software Foundation has created the Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) specification, which helps to measure the carbon footprint of software. You take the energy consumed by the software (in kilowatt hours), multiply it by the amount of carbon emitted by your energy source (in CO2 per kilowatt hour), and add the carbon emitted through the hardware the software is running on.

In this way, the equation counts the carbon emitted as the software runs, and the carbon resulting from the lifecycle of end-user devices too. There are several ways you can drive down carbon emissions, reflected in the SCI score. You can:

• Make your application use less energy, for example by optimizing its code or removing wasteful features entirely.
• Use less carbon-intensive energy, for example by switching to greener energy sources or running big software jobs when the grid is powered by more solar power.
• Use less hardware. For example, you could support older devices for longer so that users are not forced to upgrade, or you could use fewer servers in a data centre so that resources are used more effectively.

Importantly, you cannot game the SCI score by using carbon offsets. The score only goes down when your software's carbon intensity goes down.

The SCI calculation works on a unit scale like per user or per minute. “If your company’s doing well, it’s selling more of what you’re creating and your carbon emissions are increasing,” says Asim Hussain, executive director, Green Software Foundation. “What you need is a rate. If you’re [a video conferencing company] during Covid, your emissions would’ve shot up, but your carbon per minute should be going down year by year. That’s what you should focus on as a software team.”

Calculating the SCI necessarily requires estimation. How accurate is it? “I don’t agree that there’s a number that’s correct,” says Hussain. “When organisations are revealing numbers, they’re not counting carbon molecules in the atmosphere. They’re using their own models, which have their own assumptions baked into them. But if you’re fully transparent, you can’t be accused of greenwashing.”

To dig deeper into the issues, I took the Green Software Foundation's free short course on green software, which provides an excellent introduction.

Read my article on the BBC website: The green software that could make big carbon savings.

This is an important and interesting topic, so I hope to have an opportunity to write about it again in the future. Subscribe to my occasional newsletter for updates on all my writing and creative projects, including any future pieces about green software.

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Can career changers plug the gap in cyber-security roles?

10 October 2024

I was fascinated to discover how being a police officer, astrophysicist or arts graduate helps to build a solid foundation for a career in cybersecurity.

For my latest article for the BBC's Technology of Business site, I interviewed people who had changed from markedly different careers into cybersecurity. The common thread was how valuable skills from other careers are in cybersecurity. That could be the ability to assess risk learned on the beat in Scotland, the skills to process huge amounts of data learned while studying galaxies, or the attention to detail developed in a personal assistant role.

With a shortage of four million cybersecurity professionals worldwide, the Chartered Institute of Information Security (CIISec) is advising companies to hire based on skills. “A lot of security is about people, process and technology," says Amanda Finch, chief executive, CIISec. "When we do our survey of the skills we’re short of each year, technical skills come out lower than communication, analytical and problem-solving skills.”

Some companies clearly are hiring for transferable skills: 41% of companies are trying to switch non-technical people into cyber-security roles within the company, and 39% of new cyber-security employees came from a non-IT role.

Together with my previous article on getting into tech without a degree, I hope my new article on cybersecurity careers will inspire readers to consider tech careers, whatever their past experience.

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New Korg synthesiser gallery opens at the Musical Museum

18 September 2024

The Musical Museum (Brentford, London) has opened a new gallery dedicated to Korg synthesisers and drum machines.

The museum's original collection tells the story of recorded and reproduced music. It includes a Violano, a combination of a violin and a 44-key piano which plays itself using music rolls. The Orchestrion from 1910 is a coin-operated mini-orchestra, performing music rolls with its built-in piano, xylophone, glockenspiel, drums, cymbal and triangle. The first thing you see when you arrive at the museum is a cabinet dedicated to Fisher Price toys, including the record player I loved as a child with its colourful disks of nursery rhymes.

Now, the collection has been brought up to date with a room packed with Korg instruments, many of which include sequencers for automating the playback of music parts. The killer feature? They're here to be played! A museum staff member said that you can ask for any of them to be switched on.

As well as modern instruments such as the Volca series of affordable and compact synths, there are classic synths such as the Korg MS-20 (with a wonderful oversized blackboard variant for use in Japanese classrooms), the Electribe sampler, and the Korg M1, which was used on Madonna's Vogue. At the launch event yesterday, visitors had an opportunity to try the PS-3300 recreation for the first time in the UK. This is an upcoming reissue of 1977's ultra-rare synth, used by Jean-Michel Jarre and Gary Numan, now with some added preset buttons to get you started.

The main gallery also has an original 1930 theremin you can play, and a concert hall with a Wurlitzer. This was masterfully demonstrated yesterday with a performance that included a song from The Phantom of the Opera and Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody.

The museum is well worth visiting if you have an interest in electronic music or recorded music. There are three main rooms in the museum, including the new Korg gallery, making it one of London's smaller museums. They are currently running a fundraiser and are interested in meeting new volunteers, so get in touch if you think can help.

Thank you to the museum staff and volunteers, performing musicians and the team from Korg for a great day at the launch event yesterday.

Play my album Artificial, which explores what happens beyond artificial intelligence when the machines get emotions. My novel Earworm tells the story of a record label that uses computer-generated music to manipulate both artists and fans.

The gallery is organised chronologically, with posters and promotional materials displayed above the instruments.

For the first time in the UK, the PS-3300 recreation.

A bank of Korg Volca devices you can tinker with. Some of these are also on sale in the museum shop.

The Korg MS-20 Blackboard version, mounted on the wall. How cool would it have been to have had one of these in your classroom?

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Learn electronics and file handling in Python

29 July 2024

Issue 144 of the MagPi is out now, including my cover feature on getting started with electronics and part two of my Productive Python series.

If you're a Raspberry Pi user who's never dabbled with electronics, I hope my feature will give you the confidence to begin. It shows you how to wire up an LED safely and control it from Python. There is also a shopping list of useful components and a guide to follow-on projects you can find online to build your skills. The program in this article turns your LED into a Morse code transmitter. I've extended it slightly to take your text input and convert it into the flashing Morse code. The photo I've used to illustrate this on my site shows strips of paper with Morse code messages stamped into them. I photographed it at the Porthcurno Museum of Global Communications.

Last issue, part one of Productive Python looked at time travel experiments in Python, showing how to create clocks and calendars to help you manage your time. This issue, I shared two programs I've written to automate frequent tasks. The first Python program searches through PDFs (such as ebooks and magazine back issues). The other is a Python program to download web pages and put them into a Word document. The examples show you how to process files and web content, and how to save the output to text files and Word files. I hope these programs are useful starting points for readers as they think about other routine tasks they could delegate to Python.

If you encounter errors when trying to use pip install in an old tutorial (for example Raspberry Radio or ArtEvolver in my free Coding Compendium ebook), you need to set up a virtual environment. My latest Productive Python tutorial also walks you through the steps involved in doing this using Thonny. It's easy, but it's new, so I recommend you take a look if you haven't done it before.

The MagPi can be ordered or downloaded online and is available in newsagents, including WH Smiths.

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Time travel experiments in Python

12 July 2024

For the latest issue of The MagPi, I've written a tutorial about creating new clocks and calendars with Python. I've been thinking recently about how Python can be used to improve your productivity, so for this article, I provided some examples of using the datetime module to represent time in useful and inspiring ways.

The article includes a "hello world" example that tells you how many days it is to Christmas. It then shows you how to make a calendar like the one shown on the right, where a bar graph shows how much of the current day, month and year has passed. (Or remains, depending on whether you're a calendar-half-full or calendar-half-empty kind of person). If you're working on goals with a deadline of the current month or year, this can help you to see how much of your available time has already passed, and how much is left.

The second example is a countdown clock, made by wiring up a four-digit seven-segment display to the Raspberry Pi's GPIO pins. By setting this to the end of the work day, you can see how much time is left at any moment. This helps you to choose the biggest task next that will fit in the time available, or can inspire a mild panic to get you moving if you are on an end-of-day deadline that's closing in too fast. With magazine listings, the idea is to keep the code simple. One enhancement I thought of, but didn't include, was for the clock to have different finishing times on different days, because some days I finish at different times to others.

You can download the code for these examples here, and can find issue 143 of The MagPi online or in your newsagent.

You might also be interested in my pomodoro timer for the micro:bit, which also features in my free Coding Compendium ebook.

Issue 143 of The MagPi also includes an article I wrote about Spin, a DJ deck that plays AI-generated music. You use buttons to choose the parameters you want for generating the music and can scratch it using a real record deck.

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New 3D Amstrad game: Anaglyph Aliens

19 June 2024

I've written a new listing for the final issue of Amtix CPC magazine, which has just been published. It's a game called Anaglyph Aliens that uses 3D red/blue glasses to make aliens fly out of the screen at you.

I've long held an interest in 3D effects. One of the first articles to go live on this website more than 25 years ago was about stereograms, and my book Cool Scratch Projects in Easy Steps showed you how to make 3D games using Scratch (and included a pair of the glasses).

I was curious about whether it would be possible to create a 3D game for the Amstrad. It all came down to how well the machine's built-in colours matched the lens colours in 3D glasses. While there was some ghosting as a result of colour leakage, the 3D effect worked. I wanted to make sure the game design used the depth as a gameplay element, and not just background scenery, so the aliens fly towards you.

I also wanted the program to make sense as a listing, intended to be read and typed in. In the 90s, listings often had lots of sprite data, which was boring to type in. This wasn't really questioned at the time because there was no other way to get the software, other than buying it on tape which was unviable for most short programs. Now that we can easily download software, there's little appeal in reading or typing in a listing that is unintelligible.

To that end, this listing draws the aliens in BASIC, and then uses a tiny machine code routine to convert them into sprites. I really wish I'd had this idea in the 90s. It would have made Fishtank a more interesting and shorter listing, for a start, even without changing the experience while it was running. Anaglyph Aliens also uses the small machine code routine as music data, so that it's possible to have a (strange) jingle before each game, without needing to type any music data in. (I didn't include this line in the mag version, to save space).

It surprises me when I find myself thinking of a new coding technique on the Amstrad, given I've hardly used the platform for years. It feels like my old programming knowledge from my well-spent teenage coding years is still there, but enhanced by the things I've learned since about user experience and the time I've spent programming in Python and Scratch.

Play Anaglyph Aliens in your browser now, or download the disc. If you don't have a pair of glasses to hand, you can order them cheaply on eBay, or find a pair in Cool Scratch Projects in Easy Steps.

As I said, issue 12 is sadly the final issue of Amtix CPC. For this last issue, I've also written a short history of the CPC seen through the final issues of the major magazines and a Flash Back review of Highway Encounter. Over the last few years, the magazine has published 12 issues, plus an annual, coming to a total of about 750 pages. It's been a joy to read and to write for. Thanks to the publisher Chris, editor Colin, the contributors and the readers for making it happen. If you have any gaps in your collection, back issues are available here.

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