Category Archives: YouTube

Dusty old scrapbooks

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My friend John discovered a bunch of old scrapbooks in a dusty closet of the church he attends. As he poured over yellowed newspaper clippings, faded photos and church bulletins and directories, he became obsessed with the idea of preserving these. At some point he called me for advice because I had helped him make the transition from an ancient Windows PC to a Google Chromebook.

I suggested he use an app on his iPhone to scan the scrapbooks and save them as PDFs and then organize them in his iCloud account using the Files app. I explained how he could set up a folder structure put these in some sort of order. As the number of folders and files grew it became more and more difficult to do on his phone so I brought up the idea of moving this content to his Google Drive so he could manage it all on his laptop.

Somewhere along the way John asked ChatGPT for help and it mentioned Google Sites as a useful tool for making these files available. Over the years, I think I’ve used most of the better known website tools, going back to FrontPage and up through Blogger, Typepad, Posterous and, finally, WordPress. But I don’t think I was aware of Google Sites. So I started playing around and came up with this, mostly as a demo. The links on the website go to one of the folders or files in John’s Google Drive. Continue reading →

BookBuddy Pro

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Editors Note: Following description by ChatGPT. Screencast below is a brief look at my BookBuddy collection.

BookBuddy Pro is a mobile app for cataloging personal book collections, designed primarily for iPhone and iPad users. Developed by Kimico Ltd., it offers a clean, intuitive interface and a powerful feature set tailored to readers who want to organize their libraries without the noise of social features or community input. Continue reading →

MovieLens.org

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Editor’s Note: In the two years I’ve been playing with AI I’ve shared what I thought were some of the more interesting “conversations”, always being careful to distinguish something I wrote from AI output. ChatGPT frequently offers to compose a blog post and the drafts are as well written (better?) than mine. But they’re not mine. ChatGPT wrote (or plagiarized ) the following.

MovieLens is a free, non-commercial movie recommendation website developed by the GroupLens research lab at the University of Minnesota. It’s designed to help users discover movies they’re likely to enjoy based on their individual tastes. The site uses collaborative filtering algorithms to generate personalized recommendations, improving as more ratings are added.

Getting started is simple: users rate movies they’ve already seen using a five-star scale. The more films you rate, the better the system becomes at understanding your preferences. MovieLens then offers tailored suggestions that can be filtered by genre, release decade, popularity, and more.

One of the key strengths of MovieLens is its clean, ad-free interface and its emphasis on transparency. It doesn’t promote content for profit, and it doesn’t track users for advertising purposes. The recommendations are driven purely by user data and academic research.

Users can view their own rating history, create custom movie lists, and explore trends or themes in their viewing habits. While it lacks the social features of some commercial services, its core focus is accuracy and simplicity in recommendation.

MovieLens is especially useful for cinephiles who want to keep a record of what they’ve seen and find new films aligned with their personal taste, without the influence of box office hype or crowd-sourced noise. It’s also a valuable tool for researchers and students studying recommendation systems, as its algorithm and structure have been used in numerous academic projects and publications.

Organizing videos (categories and tags)

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I posted my first video to YouTube in February, 2006. Just a year after YouTube launched in 2005. (Yes, it was lame)

Since then I have embedded or linked to YouTube videos 713 times. That’s a lot, particularly if I wanted to see videos by category. For example, all videos on the topic of CONSCIOUSNESS. Or, all videos of my Land Rover. While I have a Land Rover category, many of those posts don’t include a video. The 6,400 posts here at smays.com are organized in 41 categories with 256 tags. 

While most of those 713 videos were created by someone else, I created 167 of them and 73 of them are YouTube selfies (me talking to the camera.)

Are you confused yet? It gets even more complicated. I created a category for videos not hosted on YouTube. These include .mp4, .mov, with a few Vimeo and TED Talk videos.

The goal here to make it easier to find videos by topic. Examples:

By combining categories and tags or tags and tags, I can make searches more specific.