I’m doing some editing work on the pages of the book today. So, against my better judgement I installed Adobe Acrobat Reader to work on the files. I’m not particularly pleased to report that it behaved exactly as I expected it would.
The Dall-E program is both amazing and scary in equal measure. You give it a text description of a scene “an oil painting of a man using a phone made of cheese” and it makes four versions of a picture like that. See above for one of them.
I have an idea of how it works. Dall-E takes images from the internet along with their text descriptions and puts them into some kind of structure. It then learns enough about the English language to figure out how things can be combined and is then able to parse an English description of a scene in order to….Actually, I’ve not much of an idea how it works. But it does work. And it poses lots of ethical dilemmas.
Who owns the artwork it makes? Does Dall-E respect the copyright of the images that it uses to make the artwork? Does Dall-E reflect the bias in the descriptions of the artwork it imports? What does this say about the role of artists in the creation of artwork? Tricky stuff indeed.
But, from the point of view of a toy to play with, Dall-E is great fun. And you can now use it for free. If you sign up you are able to make a limited number of images, with a few more each month - or you can buy credit for the platform. Just don’t use it to do your art homework.
I’m working on the slides for the Red Nose Day lecture in rhyme. Sponsor me. Then come back and read the rest of this post.
Ah, there you are. Thanks very much. I’m using the latest version of PowerPoint. It has this “Design Ideas” feature that takes your slide, does something “AI” with it and then suggest a layout. The original design is below, and is perhaps a bit boring.
OK, forget perhaps. It is a bit boring. PowerPoint Design Ideas suggest this instead:
This is a lot less boring. I love the way that it has found suitable icons for all the points and then laid it out for me. I’m not sure that I’ll use it in this case, but it has suggested lots of other options too which I can incorporate into the presentation. It also found a wonderful piece of animated art for the start of the presentation. Which you’ll have to come along on Friday the 18th of March to see.
Up until recently I thought that a tool like PowerPoint had probably got about as useful as it could get. It’s nice to see that there are still ways it can be improved.
I’ve used Gmail as my main mail client for many years. In fact I’ve used it for so long that I’ve filled it up. Google allow you 15 GBytes of storage for your mail messages but if you are in the habit of keeping everything (as I do) then it turns out that after a while you can use it all. You then have the option of tidying up (ugh) or spending some money for storage (double ugh).
Enter MailStore. Mailstore is an app which pulls messages out of Gmail and stores them on your machine. It’s a free download from here. You can install the application along with its data on a drive somewhere and connect it to your gmail account. Then you can pull messages down from your mail and store them locally. It works with Microsoft Outlook and Windows Live Mail and is easy enough to use. It takes a while though, I had to run it overnight to get around 5G of messages down.
I bought Scrivener a few years back as part of a MacHeist bundle. I’ve always liked the way that it lets you organise your writing. It seems to have been created by writers for writers. I played with it for a while at the time but then I ended up back using Microsoft Word to write all my stuff because I was working with a bunch of folks who also used Word. This is not a problem, as Word is a great place to work. However, recently I was wondering if Scrivener could help me when creating magazine articles. These have well defined structure and content and are associated with lots of assets, web links and images. They require a lot of tinkering during the writing process, because getting the sequence of the elements doesn’t come easily (at least for me) and you are always battling against a particular word count.
Earlier this week I took another look at Scrivener with a view to using it on a few solo projects. One particular attraction is the way that you take a single version of the core text and then “compile” it for different destinations. One of the destinations could be an e-Pub book. This is very interesting to me, as I’ve not found a way of working with text that lets me do this cleanly. I end up using Calbre (another wonderful program) on an a copy of my text that I’ve exported from Word. This is not optimal I have to do a lot of fiddling to make it all fit together and it makes version control really hard. So today I fired up Scrivener and spent most of the day playing with it. This is what I’ve learned so far:
A document is made up of a bunch of text items.
A text item can be a folder and they can be nested. In this case the text in the text item is included in the output before the nested items. You can use this to make a structured outline of a document.
You can browse the entire document at a high level and will automatically move between the text items that it comprises.
A text item can have a synopsis text, as well as a bunch of other properties including type.
A document is compiled into a single output element (pdf, word, epub, html etc) by the compile process.
The compile process is controlled by a template that specifies the mapping of layouts onto sections types. Each text item is assigned a section type. There are also sections that you can apply to text sequences inside a text item.
You use different templates to format the output for different platforms. Templates can contain conditional elements, so that you can have things like a “Mac” and a “PC” version of a core text.
A given layout contains specified properties of a text item to be included in the output. This means you can generate a "synopsis" document by creating a template using layouts that only include only the synopsis element. You can make your own layouts. A layout can also contain prefix and postfix items to be put around the text using that layout when it is compiled, as well as having lots of font and formatting options. You can include placeholders in layouts to create automatically numbered sections.
Text items can be tagged and there are very comprehensive search and grouping commands.
A project can contain a research element that holds text, images or even web sites. The web sites are copied into the project (although this doesn't always work). You can also add research documents, for example a list of web sites.
It contains visualisation tools like maps and corkboards to allow you to play with your ideas for the document structure. It also lets you checkpoint your writing so that you can always get back to a “known good” state.
The slant of most most of the templates is towards fiction and drama, which is an interesting direction I’ve never really tried before. But you never know….
Scrivener is extremely powerful stuff. Its documentation runs to 750 pages and the learning curve is quite steep, although a lot of the functionality is built on things that you’d really want to do if you were writing a book, a play or an article. I think I’m going to find it very useful for magazine articles. It’s not horribly expensive, being a bit cheaper than a video game. But if you write any kind of text for a living (or even for fun) I think it is well worth a look. It might even change your life….
I’m making some documentation for my little music box. Settings for the box are managed by setting pixel colours to represent different values. Above you can see the settings for the red (tune) track. You hold down the tune button and then step through the settings on each note key. I made the diagram above using Inkscape. It is an awesome program. In a trice I’d found a way of making a circle of perfectly spaced buttons, then I was creating blocks of text filled with the appropriate colours and lining them up together.
Inkscape drawings are represented as SVG files so you can enlarge and transform them as much as you like. The program is a free download and there are versions for lots of different platforms. The learning curve is a bit steep, but the internet is full of videos describing how to do things (for example draw 12 circles in a ring as above).
If you’ve got a small business or you’re a sole trader you might like to take a look at Pandle. I’ve just signed up for a free account which lets me use their web based services to create suppliers, customers, invoices and all the other accounting paraphernalia that you need to run a company. It has tools that let you produce reports which include the Profit and Loss one (which I think Pandle is named after).
The web based user interface works well and it looks like it will suffice for my modest business needs. If I need the features of the paid service level it only costs a fiver a month. I had a question about the system and it was answered, by a person, within twenty minutes of me asking it. Excellent service.
Well worth a look.
Of late I’ve been spending quite a lot of my time in Windows PowerShell. One of the things that drives me a bit nuts about it is the horrible choice of colours for errors and whatnot. I’ve quite often found myself having to cut the text out of the window and paste it into Notepad just so I can read it with proper contrast. Colour combinations such as dark red on dark blue don’t work well for me. Perhaps its my age.
Anyhoo, I’ve found a way round this which works really well. It’s called Windows Terminal and you can download it from the Windows App store. It has tabs so you can have multiple shells open in the same window - which is great if you’re talking to several remote systems using ssh. It uses the same colour scheme but for some reason the text looks a lot better. It has awesome profile support that you can fiddle with and customize to your heart’s content. It also lets you use images as the backdrops to your terminal sessions.
Well worth a look.
I’m writing something that will let you use a Furby toy as a weather station. For that I need a source of weather information. I found OpenWeatherMap and stopped looking. Their free tier gives me all I need and the service is so easy to use, even from a lowly ESP32. If you want to make your embedded applications weather aware I reckon this is a great place to go.
Full disclosure: Camtasia were kind enough to give a free licence for this as part of the TechSmith Influencer Program. Thanks very much.
I’ve been using Camtasia for years. And now I’m using it again. My new book (I love saying that) is going to have lots of video extras so that I can talk the readers through some of the subjects. So, of course, I’m using Camtasia to make them.
Camtasia is one of those products that just seems to be on your side. At no point do you feel that you are having to bend what you do to fit the tool. The video capture element just works. I’m capturing the desktop of a VPC so that I can record everything and can set the capture area to exactly fit the window on my screen. I can record with a narration as I go, or add the narration later. Or do both and argue with myself. The process of bringing items together to make a seamless whole is very easy. And the publishing is as easy as it can be.
It even managed to get my machine up to 100% loaded by using all the cores when rendering the video. I’ve not seen many programs that manage to do this.
Its really easy to add titles and animation effects (although I’m trying very hard not to go nuts with them). If you’re stuck at home wondering how you can produce videos with a professional finish then this is a really good way to do it.
I was rather upset when my venerable old Macbook Pro fell off the end of Apple’s support. But today I’m happy again, thanks to Catalina Patcher. It integrates the update and patching process to get even my 2008 vintage MacBook Pro back in the game. There's even a video you can follow as you prepare a bootable system disk and then use this to re-image your machine.
The process can take a while and I think it works best if you create an empty machine but it works a treat. It’s rather pleasing to find a 12 year old machine is still able to be useful.
If you’ve got an old Apple lying around it is well worth a look.
If you are into electronics you should be into Fritzing. It’s a fantastic way to visualise circuits at breadboard level, schematic level and finally on a PCB. I’ve been using it for ages. I’ve just installed it again on my newly built PC and I noticed that this time there’s a proper option to pay. Which I was very happy to do. Software of this quality deserves to be supported.
For a few years now my browser of mostly choice has been Google Chrome. I say “mostly choice” because I don’t really want to use it, but it is the one browser that most things seem to work with. The Edge browser had a few advantages. The two main ones were that it was a tad faster and wasn’t linked to Google. However, it also had problems where it would not quite work with sites, which was super annoying.
However, the new Edge is based on the same rendering engine as Google Chrome. And I find runs it faster than Chrome. And I can be fairly sure that it isn’t sending all my browsing activity back to Google. “Oh yes.” I can hear you saying “Instead it is sending all your browsings back to Microsoft”. Well, that might be a bit true, except that the default reporting settings for Edge give me a bit more confidentiality. And the settings themselves are much easier to manage. And furthermore, I reckon (said the Microsoft MVP) that Microsoft has a relationship with its customers which is also based on making stuff/services and selling them, which I think is much healthier than trying to figure out what I want and then selling these leads onto other companies.
Edge is still in beta, but I’ve been using it as my “daily driver” for the internet and it works a treat for me. You can find it here.
If you like Google Chrome I think you’ll like what’s happening to the Edge browser. The latest versions are being based on the same rendering engine. I’m using the latest dev build as my “daily driver” browser at the moment. It seems snappier than Chrome, has some interesting new features and I’m fairly sure it is not sending details of all my browsing back to Google high command. Which is nice.
If you want to have a go, and I think you should, you can download different flavours from here.
I’m starting to really like FreeCAD. I’ve used it for years, but I’ve been cheating in that I’ve used internal Python engine to run programs that design things. However, over the last few days I’ve hit up against things that are a bit hard to do programatically, so I’ve been investigating the tool itself. It’s awesome. I can now draw paths and then use those to create curvy objects like the pipe above, which also has a cutout for the BME280 environmental sensor. And then I found that FreeCAD also supports spreadsheets.
You can bind properties in your drawing to values in a spreadsheet. So, if I want to change properties in my drawing (perhaps increase the base thickness) I just change the value in the spreadsheet and the drawing is automatically updated. Dimensions in the drawing are mapped back to the spreadsheet cells. It’s wonderful.
I use Slack quite a lot on various projects. I quite like it (even though I have real difficultly understanding how a such a simple program can take around half a gigabyte of memory to run). However, one thing that really irritates me is the way that every now and then it pops up a trite aphorism (something like “Don’t forget to breathe”) with the byline “Your friends at Slack”.
Every time I see this I think two things. I wonder just how much of my precious memory is being used to generate these messages and I reflect that I’ve never met anyone from Slack and I have no way of knowing if they are my friends or not.
Oh, and the other thing about Slack that irritates me is that it seems to be impossible to kill. I’ve had screencasts interrupted by Slack pop-ups even when I’ve disabled them and even quit the Slack application. It seems to me that the only way you can get a Slack free life is to stop it from running when your machine boots.
So I’ve got this lovely little M5Stack device with an ESP32 processor on it and it is supposed to support Bluetooth BLE. So I thought I’d see if it did. So fired up the example Bluetooth BLE program in the Arduino SDK and then I fired up the Bluetooth sample from the Windows-Universal-Samples and tried to get them to connect.
And they just did. Astonishing. In no time at all I was sending messages from the PC to the M5Stack, and with a bit of fiddling I managed to get data values going the other way as well. I find this amazing and wonderful. Previous attempts to get Bluetooth working like this have always been fairly horrid and fraught. With this I just hit the pair button inside the app on Windows 10, accept a security prompt and then I’m sending packets of data backwards and forwards. I’m definitely going to build something based on this,
Writing programs for your own use is nice, but often you want to send them to other people. This usually means creating some kind of installer. Pyinstaller is a neat little utility that takes a Python program and wraps it up with the appropriate Python runtime and any libraries that are required. This makes it dead easy to send a Python program to someone else.
There are two ways you can use it. The program will make a folder containing all the required resources and an executable which you can zip up and send to people, or you can make a single executable that unzips itself into a temporary folder and then runs from that.
I’ve been using it to make distributable versions of the HullOS code editor and it works very well. The only snags are the size of the executable (in the case of the HullOS editor my fairly small program swells to 8Mbytes) and the slight delay when opening the app as it gets all the libraries ready.
Pyinstaller doesn’t make a “universal” application that runs on anything. Instead it needs to run on each target platform to make a program for that platform. And I’m in the rather ironic situation of having the Pyinstaller program refuse to install on my Apple Mac, so at the moment I can’t make a Mac version of the HullOS editor.
But, bearing in mind that it is free and that when you get it going it just works, I reckon it is a very good solution to the problem of getting your code out there.
I had a need to scan a document today. Nothing too tricky about that, except that it meant finding the scanner, turning it on, running a program, etc etc.
Too much like work.
Then I remembered I had Office Lens on my phone. It's awesome. Point the camera at a page of text and it works out where the edges are, takes a picture, tidies it up and then offers to share it just about anywhere, including on my One Drive disk as a pdf file.
If you've not got this on your phone you're missing out.
Can you use your skill and judgement to tell which of these options is selected on the "upgraded" YouView user interface? I can't.
Oh, and while we're on the subject of stupid design: Why enable spell checking on the body text of the blog post editor but not on the title? This means that the interface detects and highlights errors that might not be spotted, while failing to notice mistakes that everyone will see.
I think I'm in a grumpy mode today.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
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