Ideas from Mark Stout

Ever wonder about how two overlapping things fit in to one another? For example, Railroads in the US in 19th Century, the Steam Engine in the same period, and the US Civil War. I’ve had it in the back of my mind to build a tool to visualize those kind of relationships. I’ve been frustrated though with the seeming lack of a public database of historical dates in a machine readable form. Creating my own would be a daunting task. Then I realized all the dates I’d ever want are already in Wikipedia. I fed Google Gemini AI a URL a Wikipedia page and asked it to give me a list of dates it found in that article. It worked! So I kept dinking around, and had a graphical timeline generated from a URL. Then Gemini suggested instead of giving a URL, I just give it a topic, and it would find the pertinent articles. You can try that tool yourself . <cross posted from  my Substack Newsletter >

 After forty six years (!) of programming for a hobby, I have finally done something good enough to release to the public, instead of my useful to me. WYSIWYG to Markdown is a mini-word processor that generates to Markdown.  Markdown is a markup language like HTML is for websites, but markdown is for certain notes apps, forums like Reddit and development tools like Github. More information and how to download it is at its own website . So far I'm the only person who has used it, so I'd love it if a few of you could download, install and try it out. Let me know your impressions at  wysiwygtomarkdown@gmail.com . Thank you.

  Google's Gemini lets you make a custom story with illustrations for you to share with a little loved one <cross posted from my Substack Newsletter > Once upon a time I wrote a weekly tech column for the local paper called Family Tech. I tried to focus on topics not for geeks, but the practical tech families could use to make life just a bit easier. This topic would have been a natural for the column. With AI, you can make your own children’s story books to read aloud to your child or grandchild, or let them read to themselves. It can even read them aloud to the child while they follow along with the book. Creating them is as easy as going to Google’s Gemini Artificial Intelligence and typing “Help 5 year old Amy to not be frightened of dogs.”. A minute or two later it came up with this . Try it out, its free to look at. Or you can get more detailed in your description : Prompt : Create a story about Batkid, the boy in San Francisco that got to help Batman for a day as his M...

About 3 weeks ago I subscribed to a free month of Google's Gemini Pro .  With it, I could make 3 high quality 8 second videos a day with sound.  Three is not many but it served my needs.  And while eight seconds seems low, the next time you watch TV or a film, notice how often and how fast the shot changes.  According to a Wired Magazine article " The average shot length of English language films has declined from about 12 seconds in 1930 to about 2.5 seconds today" Note :  This blog is aimed at two audiences.  One, those not as enamored of tech as I am and the other, my fellow enthusiasts.  For the first folks, my  Substack  newsletter reproduces the relevant posts.  The more techy posts live only here on the blog, as they have for the last 17 years.  This is one of those posts. My project I worked on was a series of about seven unique shots. In each case they were an employee modeling the proper phrasing when speaking to a custom...

Creating with Artificial Intelligence Click here  for all of my images. And here for my playlist of AI Generated videos.

Two big things. You can now see my Amazon River notebook using NotebookLM right in your own browser.  With it you may listen to the full podcast, ask questions of it, and more.  It is here . And I fixed an error in the video.  It is here .

 A follow-up to my last post about Google's NotebookLM. Google's developer conference started today.  I watched the keynote and there was a great deal said about AI.   What I thought interesting is they have published a NotebookLM with a lot of data about the conference you can query and summarize in NotebookLM. Sources for the notebook includes a YouTube video of the two hour keynote and a host of articles pertinent to what is happening at IO, the convention. You can access this notebook here .