100GHz

A collection of photos of my 100GHz horn antenna built from riveted aluminium.

Supermax sitcom

Introduction

Fade-in

Black to fade to cheery title sequence into a supermax sitcom world where nothing changes. Such is the life of the evergreen show, The Simpsons, Family Guy, Friends etc etc etc. But where all of NBC's horses and men cant keep Mat LeBlanc lookin' young, the same can't be said for Maggie Simpson (36).

Fifty-thousand years

‎26/‎02/‎2023

Actor is sitting on a stool on a plain, empty stage. Modern aluminum crochet hook in one hand, ball of wool of an arbitrary colour in the other.

Our tools. This is what we had. Pre-history.

A hook,

Actor holds the hook up.

Carved from wood in the gap between two roots, sheltered from the wind not rain. Carved from bone, chipped and snapped from a leg not far enough through its fifty-thousand rotations. Cast from steel only re-heated in the heart of a furnace

Just as it has been moved and twisted by my hands, mux my fifty-thousand year brothers and sisters, my hands mould to it in twin grooves.

Our tools.

Another Year of Bodies

 Short Film Week [7]

Another Year of Bodies is in my opinion, my best short film. It was submitted twice to the Into Film of the Month festival, coming runner up.

Mr Parrot's Strange Dream

Short Film Week [6]

You can watch it on YouTube.

070420

 Short Film Week [5]

The unnamed 070420 was me taking advantage of my, for the first time ever, clean room, containing only a set of draws, bed, glass and telephone.

There's Somebody at the Door

 Short Film Week [4]

For the jelly eating noises i bought 4 small packs of 70p jelly from the co-op and ate them while mic'd up. It was one of the most terrible things I've ever done.

-Will, Assessment submission 

KRONOS

 Short Film Week [3]

[KRONOS_automateddistress_2200.21.2.2301] [Priority:10] 

KRONOS is an idea that was meant to have actors and visuals and polish. Unfortunately all those plans fell through and years later I decided just to go for it. Simple. Solo.

So…

It's 2200 hours on the 20th February 2301, and a meteor has just hit earth, no one saw it

coming.

Half the population died instantly, the other half died the day after save from a handful of

survivors left huddled in bunkers across the world to pick up the pieces. propped

apocalypse.

But this is the future, and they have the Time machine.

Within three years the machine is done and everyone is ready to go.

Three military personnel are chosen, the best in the world to be the first people to change

history.

The day arrives and with a flash the machine is gone, everyone has their fingers crossed.

The machine tears through history, everything is going smoothly.

Calm before the storm, because things start to brake, red lights flashing and the machine

starts to fall out the sky. Whenever this thing crashed, it's going to make a big bang.

Estimated crash time?

2200 hours 20th February 2301, let's hope it crashes somewhere out of the way.

The machine plows straight into 2301,

In the resulting explosion half the population died instantly, the other half died the day after.

But don't worry because this is the future, we've got the time machine.

-Taken from my notes (19/09/2019) 

The original storyboard can be found here.

You can watch it on YouTube.

Meatball

Short film week [2]

For the Christmas of 2020, my parents brough me a large bottle of liquid latex.

The Next Day

 Short film week [1]

After winning the Hinterlands Film festival short film competition, and getting £200 cash in an envelope for it, I bought a couple 2x4" planks and some 4x8ft facing and built 2 large 8ft square walls.

Short Film Week

Starting the 27th November! (tomorrow)

It's Short Film Week! Each day ill post an old short film that I like, some of which have never been seen my non-will, human, eyes.

Monday - The Next Day

Tuesday - Meatball
Wednesday - KRONOS
Thursday - There's Somebody at the Door
Friday - 070420
Saturday - Mr Parrots Strange dream
Sunday - Another year of Bodies

2.5D Printer

 

I taped a pen onto a 3D printer to draw a picture of my cat.

Watch the timelapse on YouTube.

Used a free web photo to 3D model converter, which I could then slice to produce the required G-Code.

Mechanical Tongue Drum

Mechanical Tongue Drum is a art piece that I created in 2022.

Tristar panoramas

 Where we're going we don't need the Garden Gnome Package Viewer

A long long time ago, Tristar boats hired a man to take some 360 degree photos inside their boats and produce a panorama tour.

For some reason he chose to use the Garden Gnome Package Viewer.

This involved the potential clients having to download a 3rd party application called the Garden Gnome Package Viewer and they were left with a ton of stupid high-quality images.

The Garden Gnome Package Viewer.

Why is it called that.

Anyway so I remade it.

I ended up using an amazing tool called Panolens and using a neocities site to host it.

Along the way I also built a simple python program to allow me to click on a point on the unprocessed image and get the cartesian coordinates that Panolens takes.

Broadcasting in the Æther

A Handbook for antenna design for use in sigil magick by William Greenwood.

BitÆ is an idea that has stuck with me for a long time. Originally written as a research paper, then later a zine (2022) and finally a radio package (2023)

The radio package can be found on my Soundcloud, or streaming on XMDV Radio.

DARWIN

My body is a river

My name is Darwin and my body is a river is a zine that I wrote about departure boards.

Download

During its creation, I wanted to accurately show the LED readout of a departure board. I thought the easiest way of doing this would be to create by own font, which turned out easier than I though I would be.

For some reason I seemed to have subconsciously known this was going to happen and had been taking photos of every departure board I saw for the last couple months.

Armed with this substantial set of reference images I created: DARWIN regular.

You can download the font here.

Or see the specs.

Invest in Wheat

 A test run.

A map of the streetlights in Salford. Highlighted are those used in the route.

A series of sickers, placed around the salford, on lampposts or other stickable surfaces. Each sticker has a more outlandish message: starting with small scale, local, messages and ending with esoteric outbursts.

[...]

This is a random act designed only to make someone see a sticker out of the corner of their eye and just think "What the fuck did that sticker mean... oh is that another one?" If no-one where to see this it wouldn't matter to me. Importantly, i will not be able to see the effects of this project, and this is not the larger goal. Sometimes something weird has to happen to someone and my god-given goal is to make that thing happen, to give someone an experience that they'll tell to someone and that person wont believe them.

Excerpt from my notes (26/01/2023)

Invest in Wheat was me terrorising Jack again.

Pressure Cooker

 

Jack Christian walks you through a full 3 course meal (and a drink) prepared entirely within a hotel room, armed with only a knife, ingredients and a cheap suit.

Pressure Cooker is a cooking show. Produced in whole by me and Jack.

Dreamed up near the end of our first year of uni, we hastily purchased a room in a unnamed budget hotel.

You can watch it on YouTube.

And check out The music of pressure cooker playlist on Spotify.

For a couple months, it screened as part of the Lift-Off Global Network (we got a laurel somehow).

Scaling up

 A new national loaf

Scaling up: A new national loaf is a essay I wrote about bread, efficiency and the revolution.

Using a piece of scrap 6mm steel, some bricks and mud, I was able to build a very simple and capable oven. I used metal sheet because i wanted a cooking surface as well as a furn style oven compartment. This oven is suitable for no more than 4kg of bread dough and is pretty crude, but the bricks that built the mansions of the capitalists could build a far larger, more beautiful oven.

If the grid collapsed and infrastructure failed, how would you feed the masses? Concentrated communities run on concentrated collaboration. How could you organise to semi-mass produce the most staple of staple foods?

TLDR: Waterwheels.

A HTML version can be found, hidden on the XMDV Radio site: here.

Pete Webber

 The protagonist of bowling

It's the 10th frame of the 2012 US open finals and Mike Fagan just got 3 strikes in a row.

Pete Weber steps up to bowl. He has to get a spare and then a strike to win.

Pete Weber, known as PDW, is trying for his 5th US open title over 4 decades, more than any bowler before or since has won.

Pete Webber: The protagonist of bowling is a short radio documentary I wrote and produced in my first week of uni, it is arguably the best piece of radio I've ever made. Soundtracked by Underworld.

It is currently available on my Soundcloud and streaming on XMDV Radio

Ciabatta: Now in maple

Introduction 

Based on a vague sentence from The Sourdough School by Vanessa Kimbell that basically ended with "you'd need a whole book to describe this so I'm not even going to try", I decided to try smoking bread.

Kimbell mentions that there are two ways of going about doing this:

1. Smoke the grains before you mill them
2. Smoke the loaf whole

The first apparently imbues the entire loaf with the smokey flavor, with the second mostly affecting the crust.

Method

I had some maple lying around, picked up as scrap from a local violin repair shop and intended to be used to make a couple sets of straight razor scales (long story). I whittled it down and collected the shavings, 

ending up with a couple grams of maple chip.

My smoker was 2 foil turkey roasting trays i got from Lidl, the bottom one with a couple holes stabbed in it, sitting on one of my baking steels on top of the hob.

Results

The smoke lasted only a couple of minutes, before all the wood was burned and the bread started to cook further. It would be better to have a proper setup to cold smoke them as it left the crusts thick and the bottom charred.

It tasted disappointing at first, but after being left to cool, the flavor really came out. It tasted like I was eating it with smoked cheese and bacon fat.

Definitely a choice flavor, paired with a slow-fermented rye mite I think it would be amazing, but it definitely jars with a plain white yeasted bread.

When back at home, there is an apple tree nearby that needs to be chopped down, if I take some fresh trimmings and weld up a crude smoke-box, I should be able to make some really nice Christmas breads.

Blackjack 2

 

wha,,t,,,,

Blackjack 2 is a card game, lambda calculus function, website, art project and 1 player game.

I'd be breaking the rules if I told you any more.

Telcam

 

live on port 23

Obsessed with the idea of a terminal experience, with all its ANSI colour codes, I became determined to "transmit" video with it.

Setting up a functional telnet server with python was incredibly easy, from there i only had to deal with the video side. A previous project had left OpenCV burned into my head and google search history, so this also turned out trivial.

When comparing colours, I have a colour space I like to use. If the HSV colour space can be imagined as a cylinder, my XYV colour space is the box containing that cylinder and the colour values the coordinates within that space, no non-Euclidian weirdness.

I settled on 3 different levels of saturation " ", "-", "=" and "#", hard-coding a CSV of each combination and its approximate XYV colour.

The colour detection is terrible. It seems to work some of the time, but something is definitely up with the hard-coded CSV file.

The finished system runs at about 1 fps.

Space Weather

Issued by XMDV Radio, created by William Greenwood, supported by the NOAA

"Utter Radio's answer to the shipping forecast" - Garry Morrisroe

While Checking the weather one day i got distracted. The Met Office has a page hidden away on their website called "Space Weather" describing the current solar climate (its actually pretty complex and unstable).

I quickly attempted to get their API. unfortunately, for some unknown reason, they where not going to give me free access to huge amounts of valuable data that a large amount of man-hours had gone into interpreting. Luckily the US Government was.

The plan: An automatically generated space weather report. Generated every day and broadcasting on all my stations as well as the newly associated Utter Radio, who's playout system I now had the password for.

Originally attempting to bodge it to work with the audio streaming scripting language liquidsoap, I instead chose to switch to python. It requests the .txt file provided very kindly by US taxpayer dollars, does a ton of regex to get it formatted properly, runs it through a TTS (eSpeak with the Scottish accent), sticks a ident at the start and end and then underlays a bed (sonified data from the sun).

At some point I plan on building some kind of system to sonify the day's solar data (also kindly provided by the NOAA).

It currently broadcasts between 10pm and 2am on Utter Radio.

You can listen anytime, or read-along with the regex-ified version here. (blocked on some connections due to the weird port, no SSL and dynamic DNS)

Break Glass and Climb onto Tracks

 

Welcome to Break Glass and Climb onto Tracks, with me, Will.

Playing non-stop breakbeat, jungle, rave &c. Official station of PrawnOS: !!Now broadcasting(?) across the third and along the fourth in beautiful 32kbs mpeg!! Available 24/7 in the player below, or 00:00-02:00 on XMDV Radio!

This station runs off the same machine as described in my post on XMDV Radio.

It can be found: here.

XMDV Radio

Live: From the bottom of the Marana Trench

XMDV is here! Previously created as a run of one off radio shows with your beloved hosts: Raymond D. Ozone and Anthony Tanner, it has been reborn as my newest audio vehicle.

Now broadcasting around the clock, XMDV Radio provides you with one-off William shows like: PDW, Broadcasting in the Aether, The rules of Blackjack 2 &c.

But how did this happen? And at no cost to myself?

The Setup

1. Laptop running Debian 12
2. Liquidsoap scripting language
3. Icecast streaming server
4. DuckDNS and Lets Encrypt to make it accessible
5. Neocities client

The whole system is currently running on a 9 year old Asus laptop that I loving call "my servers".

I used to run it on a c201 chromebook, as one of the few -maybe only- users of CrawfishOS (fork of the esteemed -at least 5 users- PrawnOS). Long story short: computer was cursed. One day I tried to download docker and the WiFi driver deleted itself.

So I "upgraded" to the current machine.

The above setup list is complete, but it does not include the hundred of hours to understand and build each part of this pretty extensive system. This was my first real computer project, and I was starting with entirely no experience of Unix computers, networking, scripting, HTML, CSS &c.

The same machine also runs Break Glass and Climb onto Tracks, Spaceweather and the Utter News playout system.

The Content

XMDV draws on everything I've created that I feel is both fit for consumption and judgement, as well as fitting the station-sound (weird).

One of my favourite parts of it are the various idents and jingles, created by splicing together parts of speech from shows on the station.

Pretty much anything that's on the station is also on my Soundcloud.