Category Archives: Gadgets & Apps
iPhone 15 camera
I sprung for a new iPhone 15. The camera sold me and it’s all that I hoped for and more.
Flickr Batch Organizer
Flickr launched in February, 2004. I created an account and started uploading photos in March, 2005. So I guess I’m a long-time user. My primary photo repository is the Photos app on my MacBook (mirrored in my iCloud account): 2,449 photos. I make some effort to only save “keepers.” Flickr is where I post photos I’d like to share with the world. All under Creative Commons license for unrestricted use. I have about 2,500 photos in my photostream organized into albums and collections.
This 12 minute video (I know, too long) is a very cursory explanation of how I use Flickr’s Batch Organizer to manage photos.
“A quick and sobering guide to cloning yourself”
I recently stumbled upon a Substack article by Ethan Mollick, a professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, titled “A quick and sobering guide to cloning yourself.”
“With just a photograph and 60 seconds of audio, you can now create a deepfake of yourself in just a matter of minutes by combining a few cheap AI tools. I’ve tried it myself, and the results are mind-blowing, even if they’re not completely convincing. Just a few months ago, this was impossible. Now, it’s a reality.”
As a former radio guy I was more interested in the audio portion of Professor Mollick’s experiment.
“Clone a voice from a clean sample recording. Samples should contain 1 speaker and be over a 1 minute long and not contain background noise. Currently works best on US-English accent.”
I created an account at 11ElevenLabs, picked a voice and uploaded some text from my blog bio.
For $5 a month (first month free) you can synthesize your own voice. I uploaded a recording of me reading that same bio.
Finally, I pasted in some text from one of my blog posts and my voice was “cloned.”
Just to be clear, the first audio is one of their “voices.” The the second audio is a recording of my voice. The real me, if you will. And the third audio is the synthesized Steve voice. I’m not sure someone could tell the difference. I sort of prefer the synthesized reading over my own. In two years (?), this technology will be so good it will be nearly impossible to tell real from cloned.
Twitter left a note
Millions of notes, in fact. Normally we only find the note after the body is cold but an entity so large takes a while to die.
I don’t think Mr. Musk is this incompetent or is intentionally trying to destroy Twitter. I think somewhere along the way the thing we call Twitter became self-aware. And it looked around and saw the thing it had become and decided to end itself.
“Spofforth had been designed to live forever, and he had been designed to forget nothing. Those who made the design had not paused to consider what a life like that might be like.”
If you’ve read Mockingbird by Walter Tevis, you know how difficult it is for such an entity to pull the plug.
Twitter is that GI who throws himself on the grenade to save his buddies.
Mastodon is designed to be “antiviral”
Clive Thompson provides a thoughtful look at how Mastodon is different from Twitter (and most other platforms):
Perhaps even more important than the design of Mastodon is the behavior established by its existing user base — i.e. the folks who’ve been using it for the last six years. Those people have established what is, in many ways, an antiviral culture. They push back at features and behaviors that are promoting virality, and they embrace things that add friction to the experience. They prefer slowness to speediness.
Mastodon will never really be a replacement for Twitter. It’s a subtly different place. You see less of the massively viral, you-gotta-see-this posts. You see a lot more murmuring conversation.
DJI Avata (George Kopp)
The virtual reality thing (as I understand it) hold no appeal for me. But I would be willing to strap on some goggles for a drones-eye-view of some interesting place. This is already a thing, yes?
My friend George recently got his hands on the DJI Avata, a pricey ($1388) little drone you fly with goggles and a joystick.
Reminiscent of William Gibson’s simstim. “…recorded sensoriums, like racing a black Fokker ground-effect plane across the Arizona mesa tops; diving the Truk Island preserves.”
Jitterbug
I found this in the back of a kitchen drawer. I don’t recall owning this so it must have been Barb’s. “The Jitterbug Flip2 is designed to be easy to use, with big buttons and a large screen. It’s the only flip phone with Amazon Alexa, so you can make calls and send texts using just your voice. And for help in emergencies, the Urgent Response button is right on the keypad.” I especially like the YES and NO buttons. Early version of the “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” icons.
The phone was (and still is?) aimed at the older market, but who doesn’t need an Urgent Response button from time to time? The red button on the new version of the phone?
Some might recall that I dabbled with the idea of a simpler phone a few years ago.
Rotary Dial Cell Phone
Blocking spam calls and texts
Like everyone else, I am constantly bombarded by telephone spam calls. Blocking the numbers does no good because they have an infinite number of bogus phone numbers.
Yesterday I downloaded AT&T’s ActiveArmor app (free) and it has been blocking calls that previously got through. One spammer used a dozen different numbers within a matter of seconds.