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I’ve been a fan of a book called The Cluetrain Manifesto since I first read it in 2001 or 2002-ish (early days of Poke). And I’ve mentioned it a few times on this blog.

Anyway, huge inspiration. That’s loose thread one…

Then a few years later (at Google) I was involved in a big consumer launch of the Chromebook. So much so that my kids appear in the main TV ad multiple times (although they aren’t the twins in the highchairs just for the avoidance of doubt).

Anyway, I was on Twitter the other day (which I rarely am) and spotted David Weinberger (the Cluetrain author) was having a problem with his Chromebook.

So… Being somewhat of a Chromebook geek (with kids who’ve abused them horribly) I immediately recognised the problem…

It very much made my day.

Simple and quite lovely. From The Kids Creative Agency in Berlin.

https://imisstheoffice.eu/

The lovely Mr Nick Farnhill gave me a book the other day. Mayflies by Andrew O’Hagan. I’m only on page one and it’s great…

Ironically read at 00:37 during a classic bout of ‘Hell No, I’m not going to bed, rebellion”.

From the always excellent Dense Discovery newsletter. Please go there and sign up and support them. It’s really really excellent.

I’ve been mucking around in a very rudimentary and pointless way with a few nerdy things recently. Instead of making sourdough and hoarding blogroll, the impeding lockdown v2 has got me futzing with RunwayML and Wav2Lip.

And god forbid posting the results on TikTok!

@vversed

I was playing around with RunwayML and this popped out. Thought it was fun. #blindinglightschallenge #blindinglights #ai #theweeknd #weird #geek

? Blinding Lights – The Weeknd

Why TikTok? I know, right? It’s pointless. I’m too old for it. I don’t get it. I don’t really like most of what I see on it. And I have precisely 0 followers (not even my own kids). But TikTok does have one thing going for it (that none of the other platforms do): the ability to use music freely. And being able to use big tunes might make my crappy hacks appear a little less crappy.

I’m not posting stuff because I want lots of people to see it (yet), but it forces me to finish things (at least to the point where they’re ready to upload in a quiet way). If I don’t force myself to put things somewhere – I just end up with unfinished junk littering my hard drive. So much better to have somewhat finished junk littering the Internet. Right?

@vversed

Oh hi Dom X #seeyouagain #dominiccummimgs #politics #uk #lipsync #wav2lip

? See You Again (feat. Charlie Puth) – Wiz Khalifa

@vversed

A bit of late night fooling around with WAV2LIP. The tech is well beyond my paygrade. #borisjohnson #deepfake #chooselife #ai #uk #politics

? original sound – Iain

By the way if you want to do the lipsync thing it’s not too hard. You just have to not be intimidated by lots of scary looking boxes of code. There’s a really really good piece about how to do lipsync deepfakery over on the Verge that tells you everything I wish I’d known before I spent 2 late nights struggling to do it the hard-er way.

My faith in the Internet has been restored.

It’s Saturday morning. I was doing a little Reddit scrolling. And this live stream caught my eye. There was just something about the combination of a tech house DJ and a man drumming on a box that intrigued me. And is he really routing a wooden box through Fruity Loops?!?

It’s a genuinely amazing bit of internet. Two people from entirely different worlds jamming together to make something entirely new and pretty awesome. And there’s such a nice vibe going on!

If only the whole Internet was like this, always.

One day I’d like to jam with u/cajonsoftheworld

The whole session can be seen on Reddit here.

Made using this: https://github.com/Rudrabha/Wav2Lip

Demo here: https://bhaasha.iiit.ac.in/lipsync/example_upload1

A couple of hours ago one of my daughters Rickrolled me. From a Google Slides Presentation about what she wants for her 11th birthday. Finally a sign that I’m bringing them up right!

Although I’m unsure about the Fizzy Wine on the first page, that might not be such a good sign…

I posted a tiny snippet yesterday, but I went back into the video on my phone and pulled out some more insights from my primary anthropological research into Tweens and tech.

Or to put it another way, here’s some funny shit my kids said when watching Travis Scott in Fortnite…

Took my kids to their first gig. I loved it. They thought it was cool. They’re not Fortnite players, but knew exactly what they were doing and how it worked with absolutely no instruction. YouTube videos and playground chat are great tutors when you’re ten.

Josie’s reaction to my favourite bit of the whole experience (visually at least)…