Rachel is playing in an old time music jam in Paoli tonight. Having no musical talent, I’m one of four or five spectators. Two upright basses, two mandolins, a banjo, a fiddle, a dulcimer, several guitars, and fifteen voices. If you aren’t jealous, you should be.
Watched the rest of Star City season 1. I liked it a lot. Has a science fiction-y feel even though it's in the past. Also finished For All Mankind season 5, though I sort of lost interest in the characters. 📺
I love the way my buddy Michael blogs. It's honestly most akin to blogging of the past than most blogs these days. There's no showmanship, just a man chronicling his favorite hot dog spots or his family vacations. I look forward to each post as I know for a few minutes I'll be swept away on a journey to some place I've never been before.
Scribbles Custom Themes
Vincent really outdid himself with the addition of custom themes to Scribbles. I'm really excited to see what folks manage to put together, and hopefully when I have a bit more time, I can tinker a little too.
Call of Duty Black Ops 2
In what is yet another gaming controversy this week, the release of Black Ops 2 on Playstation has been widely criticized and dismissed. I get it, I see the argument from the lack of remaster to the absurd price point, but at least for this first week, the game is only $20 or $30 with the DLC, and that gets you Black Ops 2 with lobbies that aren't full of hackers.
Being that I Black Ops 2 was my favorite COD, I was glad to paid $30, as I don't have a PC that could run the steam version with all the extra stuff I'd have to do to find some clean servers. Sure, could Microsoft have done better? Fuck yes, but I can now play one of my favorite multiplayer experiences once more and that is all I really wanted.
Beatrix is on the banner for this year’s summer show at Circus Juventas, Whimsy. There are still tickets available. So, if you’re local you should come see Beatrix in her final circus performances before she heads off to college.
I wonder how you would design a really single-minded voice UI?
Like, voice interfaces are really good now because of AI.
But they’re so unbounded. If you’re having a voice interaction with a computer or with a device, you could end up having a conversation about anything.
And while a voice UI is great within a domain, do you really want to be gossiping about movies or having a psychotherapy session with your fridge? I mean, at that point what even is a product?
i.e. how would you have a single purpose Alexa?
So I’ve been spelunking Technovelgy for things that speak but only in a limited domain.
(Technovelgy is a database of over 4,000 inventions from sci-fi.)
Like this ATM that discourages long convos:
He headed for the ATM in the back… he knew it was watching him as he walked up to it.
“Identify yourself, please.” Lucky Dragon ATMs all had this same voice, a weird, uptight, strangled little castrato voice … probably kept people from standing around, [talking] with it…
You can’t imagine this smug door talking about anything else except its fee. It would accuse you of changing the subject.
The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.”
“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”
…he found the contract. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.
For obvious reasons I like this singing clock, although the user doesn’t appear to speak back to it.
In the living room the voice-clock, Tick-tock, seven o’clock, time to get up, time get up, seven o’clock! as if it were afraid that nobody would.
Somewhere in the walls, relays clicked, memory tapes glided under electric eyes.
Eight-one, tick-tock, eight-one o’clock, off to school, off to work, run, run, eight-one!
– The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury, Voice-Clock
As it happens I did once build a speaking clock based on Poem/1.
It was made from a Yoto player, and when you stuck a special card in then it would tell the time by speaking a poem out loud every 15 minutes. (I was given earlier access to the expanded developer API.)
It was enormously distracting haha
UNTIL:
I switched the speaking clock voice to an ASMR voice from ElevenLabs (which it turns out they go).
It turned out that, if you’re in the zone, a whispered poem doesn’t intrude on your focus. It’s like the traffic outside or the soft wind in the trees. You don’t notice.
But if you’re not focusing, you hear the ASMR whisper as a kind of chime.
It was weird in a short demo, but the attentional impedance matching was absolutely perfect as a device in your room.
I should share a video at some point.
My absolute favourite is this hotel that wants to exist.
This Texan hotel, for instance, was an entirely virtual construction, ones and zeros embedded in a set of chips. And yet, the hotel direly wanted to exist. It would become very beautiful, and it was already very smart. It could sweet-talk itself into physical existence from random piles of raw materials.
Oscar lugged the self-declared cornerstone to the corner of the southern wall. “I belong here,” the cornerstone declared. “Put mortar on me.”
Oscar picked up a trowel. “I’m the tool for the mortar,” the little trowel squeaked cheerfully.
I love this idea: a pile of bricks and tools, and a speaker that calls out to passers-by and asks for favours.
We’ve spent decades using technology to commoditise labour. Why not use it to commoditise management?
There’s more detail:
Oscar peeled a strip of tape from a yellow spool and wrapped the tape around a cinder block. He swept a hand-scanner over the block, activating the tape…
“I’m a cornerstone,” the cinder block announced.
“Good for you,” Oscar grunted.
“I’m a cornerstone. Carry me five steps to your left.” The construction system was smart enough to manage a limited and specific vocabulary. Unfortunately, the system simply didn’t hear very well. The tiny microphones embedded in the talking tape were much less effective than the tape’s thumbnail-sized speakers. Still, it was hard not to reply to a concrete block when it spoke up with such grace and authority. The concrete blocks all sounded like Franklin Roosevelt.
It’s not just the “telling you what to do” which is clever here (you could do it today by playing the appropriate YouTube while you assemble an IKEA wardrobe). It’s the wiki-like crowdsourcing and automatic coordination.
As a connected toaster, he’s in constant contact with other connected toasters like him – and thus keenly aware of how much action they’re getting. If he’s not being used as much as his friends, Brad gets upset. He’ll wiggle his little handle to get your attention, begging you to make some toast or at least to give him a reassuring pat on the side. Ignore him long enough, and he’ll take a more drastic measure: pinging a network of potential owners to find a new home.
From 2014! By Simone Rebaudengo of the brilliant oio.studio.
BONUS REFERENCE:
Golden Gate Claude (2024), a research project by Anthropic that was online for 24 hours only and connects all conversation back to the Golden Gate Bridge.
If you ask this “Golden Gate Claude” how to spend $10, it will recommend using it to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge and pay the toll. If you ask it to write a love story, it’ll tell you a tale of a car who can’t wait to cross its beloved bridge on a foggy day.
Back in the day, text adventures were games with a natural language interface.
I like the straightforwardness of this: some errors are plain old “syntax error” complaints but others are educating the user about the way the system works.
It's a good morning so far. Running db migrations and adding more plumbing to expand our books database with author pages and genres. Will roll out today, but some of the data will fill in more slowly.
When my house flooded 149 days ago, a lot of things were damaged. The oak floors, for one, were completely wrecked, as the ground floor electrical ring, the skirting boards, one internal one, a few hundred books and small items, and a load of furniture. Since then we’ve lived in a few places – but mostly at the “Chicory House” – while the insurance company has been working on repairing and replacing everything that we’ve lost.
This week, we got back the piano.
Professional piano movers make this job look easy. But having tried to move a piano before, it’s definitely not.
Our insurance policy is “new for old”, but we own a handful of pieces of furniture whether it’s impractical or impossible to replace them like-for-like and we’ve instead petitioned for restoration. For example: our dining table is a bit of a family heirloom, a mahogany reading room desk formerly from the libraries of the University of Cambridge, adapted by Ruth‘s (carpenter) father into a dining table1.
Another example turns out to be our upright piano, which turns out to be a bit of a musical oddity: it’s got features, like it’s peculiar gravity-controlled overdampers that, among other characteristics, are pretty distinct to the Edwardian or perhaps inter-war construction techniques that were in vogue at the time2.
Follow the line of the tide mark fromt he glasses cabinet to the piano and it’s clear that the body of the instrument sat full of water for some time. 😢
In any case: after a piano specialist wrote us a statement explaining that it simply wasn’t possible to “new-for-old” this because they don’t make them like this any more, the insurance company signed-off on us sending it away to what I lovingly called a “piano hospital”, where she’s enjoyed a complete overhaul.
And now, at last, it’s back with us: we could have kept it in storage until we’re ready to move back “home” (there’s still a lot of repair work to be done!), but having it moved twice is cheaper… plus it means we get it back sooner.
There was clearly a lot of TLC available at the “piano hospital”: it’s got a whole new set of strings, new felt, and even her internal metalwork has been polished to a shine.
Personally, I’ve found it an enormous psychological relief to have the piano back, because I’ve missed it!
And so for several years, most days, I’d play about 10 minutes of piano. Not much: just a little each day usually while my lunch warmed up. But slowly but surely I reached the point that I could tolerate – or even enjoy! – hearing myself play4.
And then after the flood… I couldn’t. I’d get up from work to stretch my legs and my fingers would twitch in anticipation of fulfilling a routine that… I just didn’t get to, any more. I tried playing the electric piano at the local library but its headphones were damaged and the action didn’t feel right and… it just wasn’t the same. I wanted our piano back!
It feels a bit weird playing the piano between the bottom of the stairs and the front door, but space is short in the Chicory House so we make do with where we can put things.
And now I’ve got it. And it feels fantastic. It’s a little different – the sustain pedal’s response is a lot better, but more nuanced, and I’m not used to it yet, for example. But it’s still a wonderful thing: like a family member coming home after a long period away.
Also: it feels like a small victory to have something back, following the flood, because the entire insurance/assessment/repair process continues to be so slow.
Our house may still be stuck with no floors and missing walls… but, five months later, the first things to be repaired are coming back to us. Maybe soon we’ll have, I don’t know, a working kitchen or the plumbing re-connected. Here’s hoping!
Footnotes
1 The transformation of the reading room desk – which once sported integrated reading lights – into a general-purpose table has been done so-effectively that you wouldn’t know to look at it that our largest piece of furniture had ever had another life… unless you lift the secret panel in its centre foot, at which point you’d discover a BS 546 plug still wired-in to it!
2 Don’t ask me to enumerate the particular features or how we know: JTA, plus our piano tuner, did the research that ultimately underpinned the argument that you couldn’t possibly acquire a like-for-like replacement for it. I just know how it feels and sounds.
4 I fully appreciate that I will never be as good a pianist as, say, the average 8-year old who plays for their YouTube channel. I am fine with this. Like my blogging, my piano-playing is, first and foremost, for me and not for anybody else.
🧨 RSS is dynamite! Thanks for subscribing to my blog. 💥
I've been consistent in my dislike of non-competes. Vincent built his own blog hosting that competed with Micro.blog while I was paying him as a contractor! It's fine. It makes the web better. As I told him, if I'm not paying a full-time salary, I don't have the right to tell him what to work on.
The more I read of the Apple filing last night, the less sympathetic I was to Apple. Theft of "trade secrets" can mean almost anything, from the serious to the silly. Information is not the same thing as real property. Big companies use contracts and lawyers to protect themselves from competition.
I know that I'm in one of Those Moods™ when I open my RSS reader and mark every single item as read while saying things like, "Boring", "Stupid!", "Shut up, already!", "Useless", "Oh Fuck off!".
I spent several hours yesterday updating and building on my "Digital Print Archive" concept. The idea is to keep my RAW files as a giant, long-term "negative" archive, while the edited keepers live separately as "prints". Claude and I gathered all of the edited JPGs from the main library and created a consistent folder structure with them. I thought this would simplify things. Instead, I now have two giant, similar-but-different maintenance burdens instead of one. It may have been a mistake.
Today is our 7th wedding anniversary. I'm going to hang out with my beautiful wife by the lake, which will be the opposite of yesterday, and that's what I need.
