Ideas from Mark Stout

  I am releasing today a free File Manager program for Windows.   And to showcase it, and the rest of my digital life, a new website : markstouttech.com . It includes links to this blog, my newsletter, software, and digital creations. File Manager is a powerful Windows File management system for coders, vibe coders and other power users. Features Three primary areas to the app: Individual folder panes (1 to 4) Bookmarks of frequently accessed folders Favorite Apps - a list of frequently used applications Panes can be vertical or grid layout Views : Brief, Detailed and Image Unique field layouts for different views Drag and drop between panes for copy or move Drag and drop files to other applications Immediate access to PowerShell or Command Prompt in a pane's folder Markdown viewer and editor Text file editor Diverse right click file handling: Copy path to clipboard Copy filename to clipboard Copy text file contents to clipboard Add folder to bookmarks Add executable to ...

Read on my Substack  

 I posted this tonight to Reddit , and it is getting some positive traction. We have seen many perspectives about vibe coding in this community.  Professionals are concerned about security, and also seem fearful of encroachment on their profession. I may have a unique perspective. While I have never been a professional programmer, I have been a hobbyist programmer since 1979.  Yes, you read that right, for 47 years. I started on the TRS-80 Model I and then the IBM PC and its descendants. There have been three developments that have thrilled me over those decades: Getting a computer  Going online (CompuServe, Bulletin Boards, the Internet and then the web) And Artificial Intelligence I have programmed mostly in script languages like BASIC, Visual BASIC, PERL, PHP, and Python. And ones you probably never heard of,like Toolbook and Dbase III. And I’ve dabbled in Java, Cobol even, and C. I am not generating SaaS applications with the hopes of getting rich. I do not under...

 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.