Tag: success

227 and nothing to write

Posted on by philipdodson

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So today is day two hundred and twenty-seven on my quest to blog every single day for a year.

I am posting slightly later than I normally do, as for the first time I have run out of something to say. OK so other days I have had to think a little more and often the more I have thought, the harder it became to write.

However, I am writing now, as I remember reading somewhere that writers block is an excuse for something else, as how often do we run out of something to say. I could talk for Britain about all sorts of shit. So if it was an Olympic sport, I would have a good chance of gold.

Therefore, I will always have something to write about.

I know that I have said before that I now do not look at the stats, as I write this blog for me. However, I do look in now again, and I was amazed to see that this year alone, people from over 70 countries, so that is about 35% of the total number of countries (a startling fact, I know!!) have read my blog.

This goes to prove that we are all able to create our own impact on the world, however big or, in this case, small. The next time we say to ourselves ‘what can I do, I am just one person?’, well, you could start blogging, and sure enough after a bit of time you can reach people in the world.

So thanks to all the people who read my blog from Macau to St Vincent, to Latvia and Romania, in fact, all the different countries.

Tomorrow I will have something more to say.

Sig Saly and modern tech

Posted on by philipdodson

sigsally

So I have just been listening to my favourite podcast, 99% Invisible by Roman Mars, this week it was all about the vocoder.

So this guy called Homer Dudley (not Simpson, doh!) and his invention the vocoder. He built a special one called the Voderette especially for 1939 World’s Fair in New York City. The machine was a giant speech synthesiser, which basically distorted voices and made silly noises.

But there was a serious technology behind it, which was to prove invaluable in encrypting wartime messages for the Allies. The technology helped to create the massive machines called Sig Saly.

So machines the size of whole rooms, with very temperamental electronics were used to send real-time messages between wartime Allied leaders that the Germans could not decode, and in fact were not even aware of.

The technology required two identical records to be played simultaneously at either end of the conversation, so one in Washington and one in London. They were effectively one off security keys. When the conversation had finished, they both had to be destroyed.

This was real groundbreaking tech, leading edge for its time.

After the war, much later in the 70’s and 80’s this tech was used in synthesised music (Kraftwerk), used for voice synthesisers for people like Stephen Hawkins and is used to encrypt and compress all manner of stuff in our digital world.

The thing is a good deal of what we take for granted was pioneered many years ago, in an age that we see as almost stone age in comparison to our super teched up digitalised smartphone world.

Today, sticking a better camera in your phone gets many frothing at the mouth with excitement and wonder. But the real tech star was Homer Dudley back in the 1930’s.

Much of what we take for granted in so many ways, is, in fact, the result of 100’s and 1,000’s of years of trial and error. Whatever you are looking to create, it takes a lot experimenting sometimes to get there.

Be patient and be a pioneer, not a polisher of something that already exists.