Category Archives: YouTube

Twenty years on YouTube

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I created my YouTube account on February 12, 2006. (It officially launched to the public on December 15, 2005) I’ve uploaded 604 videos in those twenty years. As difficult as it is to believe, YouTube says the channel has 1.13K subscribers. Collectively the videos have been viewed 1,238,880 times. Playlists include:

  • Movies & TV
  • Learfield
  • KBOA
  • People (interviews)
  • SteveTV (goofy shit)
  • Land Rover
  • Yard & Garden
  • Travel
  • Dogs
  • Uke Songs
  • Screencasts

If someone asked me to describe my channel, I guess I’d say it’s like that cardboard box in the hall closet where you throw old Super 8 movies nobody watches twice. Here’s the description I posted:

Might be easier to explain what my YouTube channel is NOT. I’m not trying to build an audience. I’m not trying to make money. I’m not really trying to “engage.” On that point I should explain why I block most subscribers. In my experience, most just want to use the comments on my videos to spam. (I can’t recall the last time I got a benign or useful comment) When I remember check the NO COMMENTS box when posting a video.

Reading changes the way your brain works

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Watch this video on YouTube. And for those who insist reading on your phone is the same as reading a book. It’s not. “Reading on a phone or tablet is generally passive scrolling, often interrupted by messages and alerts. When we read on screens we tend to skim and when we skim, we’re more susceptible to misinformation.”

A few posts about reading »

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.