#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.
Published

Vapid LinkedIn Strategies | When Things Aren’t Really Free

Bored with these obvious and insipid tactics.

“Here’s something for “free” but you have to leave a comment and I might or might not send it to you based on if you’re in a position to do something for me in the future and because I already gave something to you you’re more likely to do something for me now even though I originally said it was “free”.”

Posted originally on Linkedin here.

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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.

READ

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.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
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#45 August & September 2022 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

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

READ

Even though Facebook tried to brand its way out of its trouble: Meta is being sued for allegedly creating a tool for US hospitals which disclosed private patient information back to Facebook or Meta having to pay walkie-talkie app $174 million for infringing on its patents or Meta facing a new class action lawsuit that accuses it of tracking and collecting the personal data of iPhone users, despite features and policies made by Apple which are meant to stop that same type of tracking.

10 reasons why Brexit has been a pile of wank for the UK.

Why you should be worried about Amazon’s ‘surveillance purchase’ in buying Roomba.

How Tesla is also getting in on the ‘surveillance’ market when you own one of their cars.

Here’s the UN (two years ago) calling NZ’s housing conditions a “human rights crisis” (total agree, it’s a disgrace here and none of the local / national politicians do anything about it).

A tough read from a psychologist in the field who pulls apart their profession and their approaches.

Why a broken heart is the same as clinical pain.

How 100,000gk was removed from the great Pacific Garbage Patch “comparable to the size of Luxembourg or Rhode Island.”

About those doofuses who enabled Bitcoin to have a climate impact greater than gold mining.

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This House Does Not Exist, an AI powered website that generates a beautiful new house every time which is not real.

Some rail announcements in Scotland plus some ambient tunes.

52 places you can visit and be part of the solution.

Vector Express to convert your vector files for free.

Palette, a vibrant AI colorizer (free online) app.

Nightdrive, trust me.

Image credit: A Small Fiction.
All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
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#41 April 2022 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

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

READ

This plain English argument against crypto you can share on to friends / family / colleagues.

Blockchain is Dangerous Nonsense,’ great summary of the issues by a computer studies student and then there’s this deconstruction of the argument against putting medical records on the blockchain.

Some scary first-hand insights from folk who worked at Facebook about how they don’t know what happens to the data it collects on its users.

Wikipedia community has decided to stop taking crypto donations due to environmental concerns which makes total sense.

A long read on how “social media has dissolved the mortar of our society & made America stupid” (found it hard to disagree and I used to make my living getting folks on to it all).

The recent news that there will be a return of the Auckland-Wellington Northern Explorer train shows how backwards the transport policy has been in these islands.

First Minister of Wales calls for the resignation of the Prime Minister of the UK, obviously.

For a hearing impaired human like me this is AMAZING: MIT Scientists Develop New Regenerative Drug That Reverses Hearing Loss!

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Try magiceraser.io to remove unwanted things from images in seconds.

Over 1950 free and open source icons for web design via tabler-icons.io.

An array of free converter tools for PDF, Video, Images etc via tinywow.com.

If you use a Mac check out clipy-app.com, an open source clipboard management app.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
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#39 March 2022 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

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

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March 1st is St Davids Day / Dydd Gwyl Dewi, did you celebrate in an appropriate way?

Just 15 companies are responsible for three quarters of greenhouse gas emissions in New Zealand (and there’s no strategy to tackle this).

The boss of games platform Steam explains why NFTs are banned.

Got any little humans? Check out this child-friendly explainer on the Ukraine / Russia situation.

Read about Facebook’s African digital sweatshops.

A write-up on a NFT event here in New Zealand.

If you use Tik Tok you might want to read this.

Life would be very good without’ is the response from leaders in Europe when parent company of Instagram and Facebook threatened to shut down it’s operation in said continent.

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Play around with some happy, jumpy birds.

Driving around cities in the world whilst listening to local radio stations.

I Love PDF is where you can ‘merge, split, compress, convert, rotate, unlock and watermark PDFs with just a few clicks.’

An analysis and visualization tool to help readers better understand space situational awareness (SSA) data, with a focus on particularly interesting on-orbit activities, Satellite Dashboard.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
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#38 February 2022 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Trawl through this cyber-assortments.

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How there’s a new stackable artificial leaf uses less power than lightbulb to capture 100x more carbon than other systems.

That Facebook & partners stole over $9 million from users across the Global South they preyed on specifically because they are low income (but don’t worry as you only use to stay in touch with friends and family, oh and how it’s parent company Meta might be broken up very soon).

You probably been reading about this metaverse thingy – read this: “I can’t help but wonder if these giant companies are so intent on selling us & the markets on the idea of a virtual future in order to distract us all from what they are doing to the real one.

There’s also a salient deconstruction on how bad NFT’s are (why Mozilla has recently stopped using crypto plus some graphs on how bad the energy consumption bitcoins are).

How to claim your settlement from Zoom from it’s previous illegal data privacy operations (why I don’t use it and why others don’t plus why you shouldn’t).

There’s scientists who have made a new COVID19 vaccine and it’s patent free (which it should’ve been in the first place).

About HopePunk, an antidote we all need right now.

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Iconoir, one of the biggest open source libraries (no premium icons, no email sign-up, no newsletters).

Template Maker: download custom sized papercraft and packaging templates for free

Did you celebrate ‘Dydd Santes Dwynwen‘ (the Welsh version of Valentines Day).

FakeYou: Deep Fake platform to say stuff by your favorite characters.

Nitter: a great way to grab an RSS feed from a tweetmailer.

10 design principles which could save the world.

Looptap is fun although a tad addictive.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
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#35 November 2021 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

A heap of intriguing whatcha-ma-call-its to spend some time on.

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Trust the swedes to solve the mystery of the ‘slut’ scrawled on the original Grapes Of Wrath manuscript.

Again, the Swedish showing us how to live with a miraculous eco-town with a 20-storey wooden skyscraper.

About how in the UK schools are told not to use facial recognition to speed up lunch queue (bonkers).

Why the ‘Big Short’ guys think Bitcoin Is a bubble ready to burst.

With some cool science how a solar storm confirmed vikings settled in North America exactly 1,000 years ago.

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Paste in some text here, then hit ‘submit’ to strip out everything but the punctuation!

Focalboard is an open source, self-hosted alternative to Trello, Notion, and Asana.

Design awesome landing page, mockup, social media post or presentation with 3dicons.

Check out this ‘ambient chaos‘ aural fun.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Image credit: Designing The Guardian’s new Saturday magazine
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#34 October 2021 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

At the dead of the night in came the Welsh Giant (1916), Arthur Rackham (English, 1867-1939)

Some things to enrich your meat sack of an existence.

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The guy behind the ZX Spectrum has died (here’s mine).

A piece here in NZ about how Welsh and te reo Māori have both been called dead languages, and yet they live on.

Scrapebook announces the launch of Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses with no privacy considerations (this is what it accesses if you use it & obviously those around have no way of giving permission or not to be recorded).

Solarpunk is radical in that it imagines a society where people and the planet are prioritized over the individual and profit.”

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The 26th Annual Webby Awards is open for entries!

Gifrun is a free service that creates high-definition GIFs from YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo and many other sources.

Enter things in the boxes on this site, click the “Go!” button, and discover just how connected Wikipedia topics are.

Untools is a collection of thinking tools and frameworks to help you solve problems, make decisions and understand systems.

City Roads: just enter your city name and the tool renders a monochromatic map of all the streets in that city, without any names or labels.

OpenMoji is an open source emoji and icon project.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Image credit: At the dead of the night in came the Welsh Giant (1916), Arthur Rackham (English, 1867-1939)
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