See also: Previous and Next (View all)
Several topics are recurring in my geeky world. So maybe I should create sections for them! Generally this contains how-tos and technical discussions — not so much talk about the relationship between technology and society (which will go on my linkdump instead).
WordPress / Blogging /Webmastering
Ways to add a variable font in WordPress.
Nielsen Group has lots of usability articles (haven’t looked at that site in over a decade!) I think I attended a great Nielsen workshop in 2001. The topics they cover are very commercial/corporate, but occasionally they can teach me a trick or two. Negative Impact of Mobile-First Web Design on Desktop, Here’s a (very usable) index of Articles and Videos. Here’s all their articles about navigation and writing for the web.
Wow, I was looking up how to clone a page/post on WordPress. The Net tells me that there are plugins that let you do it with the click of a button. But there is an easier way: Open the page, select Code Editor (top right). Then in that same dropdown, under Tools select Copy All Blocks.
AI/Gemini/Online Consciousness
I tried Google AI Pro for two months. I used it mainly for Nano Banana and for the ability to use it to make short animated videos (you can see 2 such animations in this book video; look at 0:31 seconds and 1:09 ) Although I was generally happy with the videos I was able to produce, it was only after several tries, and I was surprised at how often Gemini either ignored or violated my instructions. I generally started with a sketch created by Nano Banana and suggested simple movements. Sora would generally go overboard with the animation or have elements hiccup and lose consistency or position. Most of the movements from the video were created by special effects on Vegas Pro.
I had only subscribed for 2 months (for $20) with the intent to cancel after that. Strangely, Google cancelled my storage plan, so after the AI plan expired, I had no backup storage. Luckily (and perhaps not coincidentally), after the introductory rate expired, Google now had a Google AI Plus plan for $50/year which included 200gig of storage (which I was paying $30 for).
I am going gaga over the Token Wisdom podcast which is one of the most interesting podcasts I have ever encountered. Frankly I can’t make head or tail or it. A man named Khayyam Wakil (who is a futurist/venture capitalist/scientist/who knows) writes these articles — or maybe he just collects interesting articles into an online notebook (Google’s NotebookLM) . The podcasts consist of interesting discussions between a male and female about recent postings by Wakil. It is full of nuggets and cool insights. But as I listened further, these things became apparent:
- the podcasters/voice talent seemed to go gaga over Wakil’s genius or insights.
- their voices seemed highly professional and pleasant to listen to. The podcast patter was informal and conversational. While listening, I started thinking — how do they script this? How do they edit it?
- the podcast episodes never identified the speakers and the liner notes don’t mention anything about the production.
- The Token Wisdom website has tons of postings that are half-articles/half-memes.
Eventually it sank in that this podcast (and maybe the material) might actually be entirely computer-generated. I know that companies like elevenlabs were improving voice-to-speech; I don’t doubt that Khayyam Wakil actually existed (or that some brilliant human must have selected the concepts or texts that form the basis of the episode). I just never imagined that the transcript and voices could be generated in such a way to convey informality and fun.
The Token Wisdom website was unhelpful. It had a lot of source material, but never talked about the podcast itself. Clues began to emerge. On the person’s Linkedin Site, he made a post about how he used Google’s NotebookLM and used Documents to Speech to produce something podcast-like, Then on his website, he talked about learning about and even mastering ElevenLabs Pro (a cutting edge service for converting text to audio).
Robert’s EPUB/CSS Template
Lately I’ve been working on a master css file to use for all my epub files. Up to now, I’ve assembled various styles which I re-use often, but frankly, some of the css is redundant and not well-documented. Also, my epub production processes uses docbook xml and XSLT. One quirky thing is that you need to use XSLT to create css classes, so that means preparing your styles in advance.
For this I hope to make a sample epub file which showcases all the important CSS and templates. Most of this is already done, but I just need to make some code examples and document it in an ebook. In the meantime, I am learning some new things about css, epub, etc.
Here’ a long discussion about epub pagination in Readium. Here’s a long discussion about page breaks and Apple books.
Graphics/Gimp
hello
Leave a Reply