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Tag: digital breadcrumbs

#56 September 2023 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

The ‘Welsh Not’, which usually consisted of a small piece of wood or slate inscribed with the letters ‘W.N’, was hung around the neck of a child who was caught speaking Welsh. At the end of the school day, the child wearing the ‘Welsh Not’ would be punished by the schoolteacher via People’s Collection Wales.

A bunch of things (which I tweeted) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on.

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95% of NFTs are Worthless: Report “…study investigated 73,257 NFT collections, 69,795 of which have a market value of zero ETH.”

Indian actor Anil Kapoor wins court battle over AI use of his likeness the start of many, many, many more.

Scientists excited to find ocean of one of Jupiter’s moons contains carbon & Nasa says distant exoplanet could have rare water ocean and possible hint of life.

Google gets its way, bakes a user-tracking ad platform directly into Chrome, the browser now directly tracks users, generates a “topic” list it shares with advertisers (stop using it as a way to communicate this is not cool!).

EU unveils ‘revolutionary’ laws to curb big tech firms’ power, “…tech companies have six months to comply with a full list of dos and don’ts under the new laws, after which they could be fined up to 10% of their turnover.” BOOM!

Rassie Erasmus: ‘Winning the World Cup is nice – but the most beautiful thing is what we have created’. Some great leadership reflections / insights in this piece for anyone interested.

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Over 500+ free CSS-only loaders made using a single element.

Check out this search engine for AI platforms / services, at current time of posting: 7,678 AIs for 2,103 tasks and 4,847 jobs.

EmojiGen, an open source emoji generator.

220+ ZX Spectrum 8×8 bitmap fonts & use for free with citation. My fav is Invasion, what’s yours?

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
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#55 August 2023 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

The original Wicker Man origin: an image from a set of 8 extra-illustrated volumes of A tour in Wales by Thomas Pennant (1726-1798) that chronicle the three journeys he made through Wales between 1773 and 1776 (via Wikipedia).

A bunch of things (which I tweeted) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on.

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Buyers of Bored Ape NFTs sue after digital apes turn out to be bad investment (insert-shocked-face-gif) -> if this is successful the floodgates will open…

…and hopefully more will follow for young people who are taking entitled boomers in leadership regarding the climate damage they continue to be the cause of to court: Judge rules in favor of Montana youths in landmark climate decision.

Meta’s Reality Labs (the metaverse tech dept) has now lost more than $21 billion since the beginning of last year: WOW & along with Musky it’s safe to say now that these ‘tech leaders’ don’t know what they are doing!

Why fidgeting is good for you, first paragraph bloody shocking as never thought this to be true, do people actually think that (asking for me as a fidgeter)?

Turning Empty Offices Into Vertical Farms (good for cities who are emptying due to working from homers and want to utilise their empty buildings but of course the great and good won’t contemplate that as that’s about doing something different and ah well sighs etc).

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This podcast with Topaz Adizes on ‘Can a Single Conversation Change Your Relationship Forever?‘, good for your ears / brain.

The Text FX project (from Google Labs) for some wicked fun ways to “expand the writing process by generating creative possibilities with text and language.”

I don’t pay much attention to web3 stuff as I used to although this newsletter (from Molly White) keeps me in touch in what’s happening in the silly crypto space.

Lunar Codex is an attempt to put an archive of 30,000+ creative artists from 157 countries on the Moon in 2026 as part of NASA Artemis program.

The NYC city government public Rat Information Portal.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
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#54 July 2023 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

From 2021 interview with Sinéad O’Connor: ‘I’ll always be a bit crazy, but that’s OK’

A bunch of things (which I tweeted) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on.

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Seems like the New Zealand rugby teams are being sponsored by a UK asbestos firm, and sponsored in previous years by a petrol company, even though this country keeps promoting it’s 100% pure brand and status (which isn’t true).

There’s a new cryptocurrency (/Ponzi scheme) offering users tokens for scanning their eyeballs (probably as a way to make money out of peoples biometric data in the future).

Actor turned journalist deconstructing the crypto space in this interview.

Have a read at how the US’s top competition watchdog opens investigation into ChatGPT as it’s causing a bunch of legal problems (making up stuff).

Better farming techniques can aid keeping our planet within the 1.5 degrees heating target.

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This free and wonderfully intuitive workout routine creator.

Get your Jackson Pollock on.

Just refresh your page or click the random button for Wonders Of Street Views.

A directory of 151 interactive visual experiments with explanations.

Check out this AI music creation online interface, put in a word or phrase and it will give you lyrics that can be rendered into a real song.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
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#53 June 2023 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

(via Safely Endangered)

A bunch of things (which I tweeted) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on.

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This piece with a marvelous headline: Eye-tracking glasses show viewers of Bosch triptych are drawn to hell.

About how the EU is moving closer to AI laws (including banning use of facial recognition tech by police & emotional recognition at work places & in schools.).

Meet the people still living on SecondLife: I still remember intro’ing folks to this in my presentations / workshops back in 2006-11, the concept of avatars, virtual currency / concerts / lectures etc.

Damn scary research on how COVID causes brain cells to fuse.

Crypto ads will need to carry risk warnings under new UK rules plus other new rules come into force imposed by the UK financial watchdog (which will probably be replicated in other nations).

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This lovely website of a curated free typeface collections and there’s also this London TFL Dot Matrix typeface as well.

emojikitchen.dev has over 30,000 unique emoji mashup combinations for you to play with and use.

shapecatcher.com to draw in the box and it will help you to find the most similar unicode characters (urrently, there are 11817 character glyphs in the database).

200 plus, free Illustrations for your projects , just download and use, no attribution required.

An Online Safety Sign Generator.

clipdrop.co/uncrop “uncrops” your images and broadens them out (just like Photoshop Generative Fill Firefly but without text prompt) for free. Here’s an example from my AI creations:

And finally, Midjourney just released their ‘zoom out’ feature (you can either 1.5x or 2x) which is like automatic generative fill / out-painting. Here are my first attempts:

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
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#52 May 2023 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Via Julian Frost

A bunch of things (which I tweeted) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on.

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This Twitter thread detailing how Cuba has had almost zero Covid deaths in an entire year.

Here’s a wonderful newsletter collating the most salient of all crypto related news & things (BONUS LINK: a fantastic deconstruction of the hype machine still churning by the failing investment portfolios of folks who bet on lame horses).

An article making a case that the Metaverse is dead although more like end of the Zucks massively failed gamble, it will continue in much smaller iterations.

We’re getting a better idea of AI’s true carbon footprint, it’s not all jazz-hands & high-fives this stuff.

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The Gigabrain scans billions of discussions on Reddit & other online communities to find the most useful posts + comments for you.

This AI generated, never-ending discussion between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žiže.

A QArt Coder which makes QR codes with pixellated images which you upload.

Over 4100 pixel-perfect icons for web design via Tabler Icons, free and open source icons designed to make your website or app attractive, visually consistent and simply beautiful.

The Not By AI badge is created to encourage more humans to produce original content and help users identify human-generated content (although no information about the humans behind it).

Make It Big, an app to have full screen text message on your (iPhone) (I use it at events I’m facilitating to tell folks speaking what time they have left).

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
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#51 April 2023 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Nope.

A bunch of things (which I tweeted) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on.

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Here’s a completely non-technical explanation of AI and deep learning which really does help you get how they do what they do (and through the metaphor used discover it has nothing to do with intelligence).

Another article on how awful Bitcoin (& crypto mining) is for the environment and another for good measure.

This article about Long Covid is scary stuff, which is echoed in some conversations with those in my networks who are suffering the same fate.

A great exploration of the secret list of websites that make AI like ChatGPT work with bonus link of how this site is listed even though probably without them carrying on the terms when referenced.

A cheeky monkey who entered an AI created image and won a photography competition.

A different taken AI (that’s “Augmented Imagination”) to spark some thoughts.

How one company scraped 30 billion images from bookFace & other social media sites and gave them to cops: it puts everyone into a ‘perpetual police line-up’, douches!

A clean energy milestone the world is set to pass in 2023 which is news we all need more of.

Where I live in Wellington there is a danger of every street lamp falling out (which weighs that of a full grown turkey) plus the nation is becoming less attractive for rich foreigners based on visa numbers.

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Draw a character, upload and animate. So much fun for the little & large humans!

Just live air traffic control with lofi hip hop.

Iceberger: draw an iceberg and see how it will float.

Humaaans, which is a mix-&-match illustrations of people, CC0 free for commercial or personal use.

Mockdrop is a free device mockups site.

Ukiyo-e Search, is a collection of a wide variety of Japanese woodblock prints.

This podcast with to Rex Weyler (one of the founders of Greenpeace) on Team Human, good for the ears and brain.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
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#50 March 2023 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

AI still has a way to go.

A bunch of things (which I tweeted) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on.

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The superb and erudite Jaron Lanier schooling us all on what AI means.

An in-depth article detailing how Block Inc., formerly known as Square Inc., operated by praised tech bros fraudulently created wealth beyond belief.

We can only hope that treaties such as these at the UN can protect international waters finally.

Still use RSS myself (like all of you should) but check out this great How to Take Back Control of What You Read on the Internet article on why it’s important to control your media menu.

New paper from StanfordVR peeps on the mechanisms responsible for Zoom (and other video conferencing) Fatigue and who suffers most from it.

This should be in every country / city in the world: Kyoto to introduce Japan’s first empty homes tax.

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Tour this amazingly detailed 3D scan of the Tomb of Ramesses II via this ace website.

10 links in 10 minutes (my mate’s wonderfully curated weekly newsletter you should subscribe to).

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
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#49 February 2023 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Dublin Dock sunrise
Dublin Dock sunrise on my recent trip there to deliver more of my ‘purposeful storytelling’ public speaking masterclasses.

A bunch of things (which I tweeted) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on.

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How to visit a Disney theme park and still keep your privacy.

There was a secret cross-party summit held to confront failings of Brexit by those who created it (licking wounds & admitting the failure but not in public).

An open source seeds project because “a 2012 Oxfam study found that four companies dominate more than 60 percent of the global trade with grains.”

Why Total Eclipse of the Heart is the most epic song ever written.

How the James Webb Space Telescope is creating awe.

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Scribble Diffusion: turn your sketch into a refined image using AI.

Peel.fm: a drum machine in your browser.

Openverse: An extensive library of free stock photos, images, & audio, available for free use from WordPress.

This page generates nonsense words based on a frequency list of phonemes as they occur in legitimate English words.

Poline: an enigmatic color palette generator.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
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#48 December 2022 + January 2023 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

A bunch of things (which I tweeted) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on.

READ

Different things are now being considered about the cause of depression (beyond the low levels of serotonin in the brain).

Written in 1998 but nothing has changed: How to Kill Creativity.

This will make you rethink a few things: Don’t Treat Your Life as a Project.

My fav geoglyph is this one: Archaeologists Uncover Nearly 170 Nazca Lines Dating Back About 2,000 Years in Peru.

What has come into the Public Domain Day from 1st January 2023.

My Youtube earnings from the very popular ‘Brick Experiment Channel’ which is a superbly honest breakdown of monies / states / data from a very successful creator.

The Zuck is doubling-down on the failed / failing metaverse plan: Meta is facing the test of its lifetime + read also (& shudder): Meta faces $1.6bn lawsuit over Facebook posts inciting violence in Tigray war.

Urgh: Musk’s Neuralink faces federal inquiry after killing 1,500 animals in testing.

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Later is an open source Mac menu bar app that clears and restores your workspace with ease (great for presenters / workshop takers like me).

APITable an API-oriented, open source and easy-to-use visual database for everyone.

Remove noise from voice recordings with this speech enhancement tool from Adobe. Have tried. Is very cool.

This YouTube transcript creator.

If you need a Matrix web-based green code rain screen.

lightyear.fm show how radio broadcasts leave Earth at the speed of light. Scroll away from Earth and hear how far the biggest hits of the past have travelled. The farther away you get, the longer the waves take to travel there—and the older the music you’ll hear.

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#47 November 2022 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

fail whale rises from the depths

A bunch of things (which I tweeted) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on.

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Serious concerns about the environmental impact of major productions including Amazon’s Rings of Power where “the first season of the show, …had generated roughly 14,387 tonnes of carbon dioxide.”

Facebook owner Meta to sack 11,000 workers after revenue collapse by so thinking / hoping this is just a start as finally the data extraction business models are starting to fail.

It looks like the same platform has been hoovering up users financial information who use online tax-filling platforms.

Read with nodding head this article on The Hollow Core of Kevin Kelly’s “Thousand True Fans” Theory.

A new study shows on-screen meetings hinder creative collaboration whilst other research shows that real-time collaboration tends to stifle creativity and diverse perspectives.

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The livestream of The Pitch Drop experiment, the longest running lab experiment (established in 1927 to demonstrate how tar is the most viscous liquid, there’s been 9 drops have fallen in 95 years).

Whilst it still breathes, check out social.perma.cc which allows you to capture a thread from Twitter and archive it in sealed PDFs to attest to legitimacy.

Also, use this python code to convert all your tweets into Markdown whilst converting the shortened urls to the originals plus downloads all associated images (worked for me).

Plink, where you can create beats and jam out with strangers all over the world.

twitterisgoinggreat.com (self explanatory and just like web3isgoinggreat.com).

Listen to this episode of Team Human as it’s worth your time.

floor796.com, you’re welcome…

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Image credit: The Oatmeal.
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