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Abbey Robot, or An Adventure With The Machine Beatles

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So I trained a network on all the Beatles lyrics I could find. It never quite wrote a whole song, so what I did was took it's lines and arranged them into some kind of sense. Some kind.  I haven't edited anything internally, rearranged words or anything like that, I have cut a few lines short. It turns out reasonable couplets from time to time, and in a few cases it wrote a whole chorus in one go. It seems to be fairly good at early Beatles poppy fun, and also it did quite well at the later, more psyched out stuff. When it gets weird(er) is when it combines the two. I'd love to hear some of these so if you're musically inclined please do help yourself and let me know what you come up with. This is probably my favourite, I imagine it as a kind of Strawberry Fields/Only a Northern Song kind of psychedelic wobblefest. Love Down Shine I wanna hold your days like you made forever,  Love down shine. I'm comes for the lonely life when we're doin
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An AI writes Doctor Who

So I trained a neural network (it's not really much of an artificial "intelligence", as this post will demonstate) on the entire collection of Hartnell-era Doctor Who scripts. This network was set to use whole words - some only use characters. Very simply, the network tries to follow words with other words which it thinks are likely to be in that position, based on what it 'knows' about the order words appear in the training text. Rinse and repeat. As the system trains it gets better at putting words in order, but still makes some weird choices: These files have been edited for clarity, capitalisation, line breaks and so on, but not actual content - that's all from the softwatre. -------------------------------------  [ outside the TARDIS ] (The Doctor is trying to confuse them) DOCTOR: Oh, it's very kind of you. BARBARA: Oh, Doctor, what's wrong? DOCTOR: Oh, it's a huge, isn't it? IAN: Yes. DOCTOR: Oh, my dear, I'm sure yo
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The Amen break ring

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A set of silver stacking rings featuring the famous "Amen break" More on  the Amen break here . Of course it's relatively simple to apply this technique to any other sound sample. Maybe the Apache break, or Funky Drummer. Or even something which isn't a breakbeat. 
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Jewellery Pickle Comparison and Test (aka, The Great British Pickle Off)

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The question of pickling jewellery seems to come up quite a lot. What can I use as pickle? What's the best? Short answer is that any acid will work to "pickle" (to remove oxides from after heating) copper or silver. Longer answer is that some acids are more effective, quicker, than others. Much longer answer is this video in which I test vinegar, citric acid, sodium bisulphate (aka pH down aka safety pickle) and phosphoric acid against each other. For some reason Blogger embeds video at tiny size, so if you'd prefer then  click here to watch on YouTube .
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VOTEROBOT2017

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I trained a neural network on the various party's manifestos and now I want to vote for it. All text generated by AN COMPUTER which didn't understand words until a few hours ago (and still doesn't) and now it's making almost as much sense as our glorious leaders.. All images licensed for reuse.
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Making a wooden ring - choose your own adventure

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So, I make quite a few tutorial videos and people always say "yeah, that's cool but what if I don't have all that gear" Well, hopefully this video addresses that problem.
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Casting with Delft Clay

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A custom request from a lady of excellent taste, asking for a spitfire ring. Challenge accepted! This video shows how to casting a spitfire using the Delft clay casting system. Delft clay is an oilsand designed for fine casts - it's a mixture of sand, clay and oil. The process is fairly straightforward but as you'll see, it's not as failsafe as other casting methods. I got it right second time though!
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