Please write me 10 paragraphs which could be the core tenets of a new religion centred around the veneration of the Sinclair ZX81 personal computer:
The Sinclair ZX81 personal computer was a groundbreaking device that revolutionized the world of computing. For those who are passionate about this computer, it can become a focal point of a new religion. Here are ten core tenets that could form the basis of a religion centered around the veneration of the Sinclair ZX81 personal computer.
1. The Sinclair ZX81 is a holy device, and its significance cannot be overstated. It has paved the way for modern computing and continues to be a symbol of innovation, creativity, and human ingenuity.
2. We believe that the Sinclair ZX81 was divinely inspired, and that its creator, Sir Clive Sinclair, was a prophet who brought the gift of computing to the masses.
3. The Sinclair ZX81 represents a sacred bridge between the physical and digital worlds. It allows us to explore and understand the universe in ways that were previously impossible, and helps us to unlock the secrets of the cosmos.
4. The Sinclair ZX81 is a tool of enlightenment, and we believe that its use can lead to spiritual awakening and personal growth. It can help us to connect with our higher selves and with the divine.
5. We believe that the Sinclair ZX81 has the power to transform society, and that its widespread adoption is essential for the survival of the human race. By using this [...]
As an AI language model, I’m seeing that ChatGPT has now gone from the fun toy folks have been playing with to a tool that people are using to write full text prose passing it off as if they wrote it themselves, and I’m noticing an increased amount of people on LinkedIn reposting inspiring thought-leadership and game-changing marketing copy there. There is no doubt that the power of ChatGPT will stay with us for many years to come.
The thing is, if you’ve played with ChatGPT enough and have an analytical eye for content, you can see it a mile off; whence whenever I’ve seen what I’ve suspected as ChatGPT content I’ve checked it in ChatGPT Zero — https://gptzero.me/ — and indeed sure enough, it’s confirmed my suspicion.
I’m a full supporter of using technology to help the creative process; I’ve been using computers in my own creative work since 1985. As previously mentioned, I used ChatGPT myself to help me write a song, and I’ve been having lots of fun using Stable Diffusion, Dall•E, and Midjourney to generate images, some of which I might print on mugs to try to sell.
But I’d like to emphasise a massive note of caution to those using ChatGPT professionally; if you’re using it to write marketing copy consider the reputational effect on your brand if you’re just copying and pasting the output without doing significant editing when your (potential) customers start seeing the exact same words written by your competitors — AI text won’t give you [...]
I’m not a fan of Ed Sheeran’s music, but I’m absolutely a fan of the way he consistently stands up for the principle that all creative work is fundamentally based on all the creative work which has preceded it — all creative work is essentially a mash-up or uses samples, some of it explicitly, some of it by virtue of flowing through the veins.
‘Sheeran responded that he sometimes mixed together songs with similar chords at his performances, and appeared to grow frustrated when Ms Rice cut him off.
"I feel like you don't want me to answer because you know that what I'm going to say is actually going to make quite a lot of sense," he said. "You could go from Let it Be to 'No Woman, No Cry and switch back," Sheeran continued under oath, referring to the Beatles and Bob Marley classics’
International copyright law when it comes to protecting creativity is fundamentally broken — it’s not written with a view to protecting the rights of creators to earn from their work and protect them from being ripped off by others, it’s written with a view to enabling multinational publishing conglomerates to go on fishing expeditions to see how they can trip people up on minor technicalities into out of court settlements.
If you have a liking for Apple products, then indirectly you have a liking for the design principles of Dieter Rams, whose work as Chief Designer at Braun has been credited as a major influence on Jony Ive, the former Chief Design Officer at Apple whose design ethos can be seen coursing through the veins of every Apple product since 1997. Dieter Rams himself coined his 10 Principles for Good Design as a handy distillation of his whole ethos.
Good design:
is innovative – The possibilities for progression are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for original designs. But imaginative design always develops in tandem with improving technology, and can never be an end in itself.
makes a product useful – A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic criteria. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could detract from it.
is aesthetic – The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products are used every day and have an effect on people and their well-being. Only well-executed objects can be beautiful.
makes a product understandable – It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product clearly express its function by making use of the user's intuition. At best, it is self-explanatory.
is unobtrusive – Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore [...]
A friend earlier today shared this amusing image on Facebook:
This is a common problem with date calendar pickers on apps and websites - we want to make it easy for users to enter dates by a calendar, but if the date needing to be entered is more than a couple of years in the past it's a complete nightmare to scroll back.
If only there was a solution which could make this easier for users?
How many times have you been to read the Accessibility Statement of a website, and if it’s even mentioned maps, it’s said ‘unfortunately it’s not possible to make maps accessible’?
I was recently asked by a colleague to comment on the accessibility issues of a request by an internal department to put some interactive maps online. It transpired along the way there had been some confusion between the terms ‘access’ and ‘accessibility’, because when I went to look at the content in question in order to form an opinion I couldn’t actually access it anyway, because it was on an external party’s Sharepoint site protected by a login, and it turned out it was that aspect they wanted some help with.
So at the point of my initial reply to the email, without having seen the content, all I was able to respond was - to my shame - ‘because there’s an understanding there’s no real solution to making maps accessible, maps are generally allowed to be exempt from accessibility requirements’. I hopefully redeemed myself with my next sentence by adding ‘however, in many cases something at face value looks like it’s not possible to make it accessible, but with a degree of imagination it’s often possible to make it more accessible than simply not bothering, and the team would want to explore this with you before simply creating a link to your inaccessible maps’.
Map-based input
If the online service in question is a form the purpose of which is for the [...]
So tonight I’m attending a concert performance of noted semi-local popular beat combo Pop Will Eat Itself at noted local concert hall the Hare And Hounds.
The ticket and Facebook event says doors open 8:00 and the Facebook event says it ends at 2:00.
What neither say is what time the live music starts. I’m going to the event for the live music, I’m not going to the event to listen to a compilation CD before the live music starts; being a weirdo I have a limited number of friends so I’m going on my own, so unless it turns out other people I know / people who are in that limited number of friends are also going I’ll have nobody to talk to before the live music starts. I get that pubs want me to drink as much beverage as possible, but I want to be responsible for choosing how much and when I drink my beverage without having the pub try to manage me into drinking more of it. I want to arrive at the venue ‘just in time’, ie I want to arrive at the venue in time to get through all the entry procedures, get some kind of beverage to drink, and choose a place in the room to stand with about 5–10 minutes to spare before the live music starts; I’m not unreasonable, I’ll even accept a 15–20 minute window.
What I don’t want to do is arrive at the venue at 8:00 to find the live music [...]
My latest music semi-release - CRISPR - the musical - I'm reasonably proud of, but the process of creating it seems to me to be sufficiently interesting that I thought I'd write it up.
The story begins with one of my son's current favourite iPad games, There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension, where during the narrative of the game one of the main protagonist characters in it - GiGi - all of a sudden breaks out into what can best be described as a Big James Bond Theme Song. For a while it stayed in the back of my mind as being something impressive and amusing, until I developed an urge - an urge, I tell you - to make a Big James Bond Theme Song myself.
Structure
There are a number of archetypes in the James Bond song genre, but the one which is my favourite - which coincidentally GiGi's Song follows - is the Diamonds Are Forever archetype, perhaps most famously followed in the modern era by Adele for her theme song for Skyfall. My first task in creating my own song in the genre was to do a basic analysis of the oroginal template songs (having done the performer's course rather than the academic's course at music college I missed out on Schenkerian analysis, but, yerkno, I'm not completely thick) to create a template of my own, and from there concluded [...]
Here’s an image I’ve seen doing the rounds on Facebook, the implication of which readers are obviously supposed to go ‘yeah, too right, far too many pen pushers doing non-jobs, sack the lot of them’
Yeah, cos it’s funny to fire the HR Manager, until Dave has an accident at work and needs his compensation sorting out
It’s funny to fire the Marketing Manager, until Dave’s co-worker is also made redundant because orders have dried up
It’s funny to fire the Logistics Manager, until Dave turns up to do a job but can’t get on with it because somebody didn’t ensure his heavy machinery was there at the site ready for him
It’s funny to fire the Communication Manager, until Dave missed the meeting at which it was announced that everybody was getting an extra day off and turns up to work that day to an empty factory
It’s funny to fire the Security Manager, until one night yobboes break in to the yard and completely trash the place, and the company can’t function for two weeks until everything is replaced and repaired
It’s funny to fire the IT Manager, until Dave missed an essential Windows update on his work computer, and he ‘accidentally’ clicks on a porn link which downloads Wannacry which spreads across the entire company network and deletes the entire company database
It’s funny to fire the Project Manager, until Dave has to stop work for a week because a dependency on the job wasn’t scheduled to be completed on time
The historicity of the British folkloric tradition of wassailing is somewhat contested; it's commonly described as being an ancient pagan custom, though there is limited evidence to support this view. What adds to the confusion surrounding its origins is the wassailing events which commonly take place today - and the community songs which are performed during them - are actually a conflation of two completely different traditions, both with their earliest documented instances dating back to around the 115th Century of the Human Era (15th Century), but the only common feature they share is the use of the word 'wassail' (originally an Old Norse word which passed into Old English meaning 'good health!' or 'blessings!') in their name. One custom had groups of peasants processing to the manor house of the feudal lord asking for - or in certain instances demanding with menaces - food and drink, whilst the other custom originating in fruit-growing areas of people going round the orchards to bless the trees in the hope of a good harvest for the coming autumn.
So what we commonly have today is a syncretic tradition of community events involving some or all of singing, Morris dancing (itself a folkloric tradition which as practiced today has origins considerably more modern than usually credited as), story-telling, noise-making, cider-drinking, food-sharing, tree-blessing, and processing through the town or village.
But of course just because a tradition isn't as old or as 'authentic' as some of its proponents might claim it to be, if it's a fun [...]
From time to time I get adverts from Adobe pop-up in my Facebook advertising feed; friends of mine on Facebook will know that it’s one of my leisure activities to snark in the comments on Facebook adverts but I’ve usually ignored the Adobe adverts. The last couple of days though I’ve clicked in just to see what other people have been commenting; the lion’s share of comments have either been the usual luddites on the Photoshop-themed adverts banging on about how it’s cheating and real photographers make their pictures using the daguerreotype process or something, or mostly from people complaining about Adobe’s subscription model and pining for the good old days of being able to buy the applications outright.
Let’s look at the numbers, shall we?
Complete CS6 standalone — £2,223.
Complete CS2021 — £40/month (you mean you didn’t subscribe during one of the frequent special offer periods?).
Length of time you subscribe for to match the last standalone price — 4.6 years.
OK, so it’s fair to say most individual users won’t actually use all the applications in the suite, so let’s take a typical individual user — let’s take myself and the Adobe applications i routinely use:
#OneYearAgoToday was the day which from where I sit in the world Everything Changed.
Two weeks ago I think most people still thought of the approach of The Event as something which was still broadly a Somewhere Else's Problem - we'd all started washing our hands more often, fersure, and we were doing the elbow bumps (and feeling faintly ridiculous doing so) thing, one week ago folks were starting to be a bit more circumspect in their behaviour, and I think the Downing Street briefings had started, but by and large the UK was still continuing to function normally. It might have been yesterday or the day before when our team manager told us to start taking our laptops home with us at the end of every day at work, 'just in case'.
The News, though, whilst The Event had spent the last two months creeping up the running order, still had other stories on it as well.
Today, March 13, it all changed.
I'd taken the day off work, because it was March, and I always end up taking random days off work in March because I always end up with quite a few unused days of annual leave to take. I'd taken the day off basically to get some shizzle done at home on my own - I can't remember if it was tidying or if it was making music - but before I started to do whatever it was I was going to do I put News 24 on to [...]
#OneYearAgoToday was the day which from where I sit in the world Everything Changed.
Two weeks ago I think most people still thought of the approach of The Event as something which was still broadly a Somewhere Else's Problem - we'd all started washing our hands more often, fersure, and we were doing the elbow bumps (and feeling faintly ridiculous doing so) thing, one week ago folks were starting to be a bit more circumspect in their behaviour, and I think the Downing Street briefings had started, but by and large the UK was still continuing to function normally. It might have been yesterday or the day before when our team manager told us to start taking our laptops home with us at the end of every day at work, 'just in case'.
The News, though, whilst The Event had spent the last two months creeping up the running order, still had other stories on it as well.
Today, March 13, it all changed.
I'd taken the day off work, because it was March, and I always end up taking random days off work in March because I always end up with quite a few unused days of annual leave to take. I'd taken the day off basically to get some shizzle done at home on my own - I can't remember if it was tidying or if it was making music - but before I started to do whatever it was I was going to do I put News 24 on [...]
Looking at STA travel now being a CovidCasualty, alongside other travel industry casualties just before The Event and the ones which are inevitably to come, it does occur to me that travel industry casualties are of somewhat more reaching and significant social consequences than the retail sector’s and the hospitality sector’s casualties.
Arguably over the last few years the hospitality sector had been expanding far in excess of the capacity of the market to sustain that growth anyway — it was a bubble that was inevitably going to burst, and the casualties are arguably more of a market correction than an existential crisis. When All This Is All Over there will still be plenty of pubs and bars, cafés and restaurants, for people to go to, and the ones who survive The Event will do so as businesses which are more sustainable.
Little needs to be said that hasn’t been said at length about the state of the retail sector — people aren’t buying things from shops because shops aren’t selling things people want to buy when people want to buy them. Shops aren’t closing left, right, and centre, it’s just certain shops which are closing left, right, and centre — you can still buy clothes, perfume, food, and tech in shops, you just can’t buy them in many department stores anymore. You can still buy purses and shoulder bags in shops, you just can’t buy purses and shoulder bags in shops where the only distinguishing feature is they’ve got the name [...]
This article was originally written for a module of the Master of Arts in Ethnomusicology which I did in 1996.
Creative music making has always been seen as something which is difficult to do, some thing which is not for the average musician, but which can only be done by certain types of performer: the Jazz musician, the Rock guitarist, etc. Somehow people seem to forget that in 99% of cases their very first experiences with a musical instrument will have been of an improvisatory nature, for how many of us were able to pick our instrument up that first time all those years ago & read & play a piece of music from a piece of paper; indeed how many of us were even able to read music when we first bashed at the keys of the classroom piano as a child ?
Nowadays the ability to play more than just what has been written down by some body else is becoming more & more important, & also to teach this ability to other people. The British National Curriculum for Music has composition as a major part of its syllabus. Music Colleges, such as Birmingham Conservatoire, have as a constituent part of their courses classes in improvisation & composition, & options to take this further for more advanced students. For the professional musician, contemporary music increasingly includes elements where the player must take more responsibility for what happens next, & the jobs in the London Sinfonietta & the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group [...]
This article was originally written for the Musical Philosophies module of the Master of Arts in Ethnomusicology which I did in 1996; I've often had cause to refer to it since then so I've reproduced it here on my main site to make it easier to. It is presented as a description of philosophies held be other people and groups and not necessarily a personal view.
"All music, based upon melody & rhythm, is the earthly representative of heavenly music" - Plotinus (AD 205 - 269)
"Hear, & your soul shall live" - Isiah 55:3
INTRODUCTION
Music as an organisation of sound is known to have existed for over 3000 years, & writings from the ancient civilisations of Mesopotamia, India & China suggest there was such an artform at least 1000 years previous to this. In our so - called 'scientific age' it is often easy to forget this; & music as it was taught in English schools until very recently even served to implicate a denial of this fact, by its labelling of our mediaeval music as 'primitive', its concentration on the theory of music apparent in the 'common practice' period, & by completely failing to mention the existence of methods of making music outside of the traditional Western art music mould.
Along with the increase in interest in the study of the theory & practise of other musical cultures on an equal footing to our own, there has been an upsurge of interest in what some people like to describe as the [...]
One thing which especially pleased me about the event was the extent to which the other speakers there were sharing insight and experiences which complemented the ideas in the Manifesto quite well - to the degree that rather than simply write up the other sessions as a simple event report, I can write it up as a Part Two of the Manifesto.
So, to round up what I learned from listening to Kate Hurr, Hilary Jones, Ben Proctor, and others and their presentations:
Transformation
For about the last 10 years, the work we’ve collectively done to develop and improve our online services has been done so under the banner of Transformation. We could say there have been four phases of that transformation up to now:
Phase one - 1996. The creation of the first council websites and the baby steps of development they took, starting with initially with just a handful of pages and a handful of reporting forms, eventually crystallising into comprehensive websites (some of which may have been over-comprehensive!), some of which following the standardised pattern of the Local Government Navigation List. The LGNL has come in for a lot of stick in recent years, much of which is now justified, but we often forget what it was for and what it replaced - as the first experimental [...]
"There will come a time soon when for some councils there won't be a council website any more - the website will be the council" - Tom Steinberg, founder, MySociety
This is the second time I've opened an article with this quote - the first occasion was in March 2016 at the start of A Web strategy for local government. I don't normally do pithy quotes from other people in articles, but this one seems sufficiently relevant that it bears repeating.
Setting the scene - council website home pages
The standard council website home page
Go to any modern council website these days, and you'll see more or less the same layout of links on the home page - at the top, you'll see the so-called Top Tasks, links to specific services such as paying your council tax or a parking ticket or reporting a pothole or that your bins weren't collected, followed perhaps by some links to more general service areas, some links which will have been provided by the council's communications and marketing team to the latest council news stories and some marketing and information campaigns they want highlighting, and a series of other links which make perfect sense to the council but perhaps seem a little random to the website visitor.
A lot of the choices for links on the home page, particularly the Top Tasks area won't have come out of the website managers' heads, they will be data driven - if the most prominent four links at the [...]
So everybody laughed yesterday at the House of Commons being suspended yesterday because of water gushing in through the ceiling. But here's the thing.
The Palace of Westminster is an historic building, part of our nation's heritage. Like all our other historic buildings it's supposed to be held in trust and protected, just like the buildings and monuments from ancient history have been by their civilised custodians.
The occupants of the Palace of Westminster have know for years that the building is literally crumbling around them - not only do all the utilities within a working building need upgrading, the masonry itself is falling apart - on a near-monthly basis a piece of the stonework will fall off and come crashing to the ground. But the elected occupants have for years prevaricated about coming to a decision on what to do about it. Everybody knows what actually needs to happen is they all need to decant to somewhere else entirely for a couple of years whilst a relatively short and relatively cheap complete repair and upgrade job is done, all in one go. But a sizeable number of MPs don't want to do that, they want to instead spend a couple of decades, and considerably more money - your money and my money, which could be spent on the NHS instead - on a bit by bit repair and upgrade programme, closing off sections of the building and re-opening them bit by bit.
So because they've been unable to agree on how the [...]
If you enjoy this, you might like some more of my music on Google Play, on Spotify, on Apple Music, and on Amazon. If you like it enough to give me some money, you can do that on Bandcamp.
Please note! This is work in progress - if you have come across it by accident you're free to stick around, but please be aware not everything will work as intended yet. I have a To do list.
Perfect 
