Ideas from Mark Stout

 I was telling someone tonight about NotebookLM and suggested they check out my video on it. I just realized it is a bit buried it in an old post  about AI, so wanted to surface the video here.

  They say as you get older, two things are the first to go. Memory is one of them. I forget what the other is. Forgive the dad joke, but none of us remember everything, and age only makes it worse. I have a series of tools and strategies to help remember important things. And me, being me, they involve technology. After my medical, err let’s call it a medical “sabbatical”, of 2024, I see a lot of doctors. I’m doing okay, there are just things to keep an eye on. I have taken to asking doctors if I may audio record my appointments. Only one has refused. Once I have the recording, I bring up Google’s  Gemini  AI. You do not even have to write a prompt. Just attach the audio file with the + button, and then hit the Play button triangle to have it run. It will create as summary of the conversation. I pay $20 a month for Gemini Pro, I tested it with the free version, and it would not accept a nine minute long recording for processing. The paid Pro version did. Otter.ai  i...

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.