I’ve been a Setapp subscriber for a few months now. MacPaw, the company behind the Setapp service, are a Ukrainian company, something I only learned since the Russian invasion on February 24. MacPaw took many steps to protect their services, and are now using their apps in innovative ways to communicate to their clients and make their voices heard, like this release note for an update that basically was, really, just this note:
A new app showed up on the Setapp service this week, PhotosRevive. It promises to colourise black and white photos using some AI hocus pocus. I popped some photos in to see what it could do, and the results were mixed, but interesting.
From left to right: my great-grandmother Eva Hardy, great-great grandmother Martha Sharp, grandfather Wilbur Hardy and my mother Vivian Phillips, probably taken in 1927. The older folks look pretty good, my little mother looks a bit ghostly.
My great-great aunt Florence Arbuckle, twin sister of Eva Hardy. She was married to a doctor and quite well off, so could afford beautiful beautiful clothing like the dress she wears in this photo.
My mother Vivian and her Uncle Elmer Hardy. The app handles foliage really well.
My mother in my parents’ general store in 1966. Pretty sure they didn’t just sell blue and yellow products! She’s holding a box of King Cole Tea, which has always had an orange and green theme. I think they won an award from the tea company, so this was a publicity photo.
You can tweak the PhotosRevive settings to make things look a bit better, but I’ve not had time to play with it yet. I like black and white photos, or am at least used to them, so probably wouldn’t have gone looking for this, but it’s a fun addition to the Setapp universe.
Kiva is hosting its first international Kiva Hackathon, “supporting microfinance, digital identity, poverty alleviation and financial inclusion.” Ready, set, hack!
The first computer I remember using was a Commodore PET circa 1981. When I say using, I mean I watched as my male junior high classmates used it to play a very slow flight simulator in our Industrial Arts class; it was the late 70s, and girls couldn’t be trusted with high tech gadgetry. I did operate a plastic moulding machine in that class to make a small screwdriver I still use, so it wasn’t a complete waste of time.
When I was in high school, I took an introductory computer evening course at our local community college, and most of it was spent learning some of the BASIC programming language. I sort of forget, but I guess there weren’t any computer courses offered in my high school at the time, or at least not for my academic stream.
I found it difficult and never programmed anything after that course. It would be 5 or 6 years until I ever touched a computer again. At the time, computers didn’t seem like anything that would ever become important in my life, but rather something that someone smarter than me would study for a specialized career as a programmer.
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Don’t mess with me, I’m certified!Some of my industrial art (I did not make the pen, but I bet that was next on the course!)
Haven’t heard all the Eurovision finalists who will be performing in Rotterdam tonight, but I’m rooting for Malta and Iceland. I enjoy many types of music, but I LOVE upbeat dance music, and both countries have fun entries.
I’ve been watching Eurovision since 2012, when I used a VPN to watch the BBC coverage led by Graham Norton. Don’t have the VPN anymore, so will either watch the YouTube stream or OMNI Television, who are the Canadian broadcasters this year. Neither of those options will have commentary, so might listen to Ken Bruce on BBC Radio 2 at the same time to learn more about the performers and their songs.
I believe the last frontier of the online world that needs to be sorted out is the ability to watch terrestrial television stations live from anywhere in the world. I would gladly pay the BBC to be able to (legally) watch their stations live, without the cat and mouse games. By now this should be easy.
David Sparks points out that the Mac special character and emoji list can be customized in some very cool ways. You can add dozens of sets, including divination symbols, Egyptian hieroglyphs, cuneiform, and the mysterious Glagolitic and Ugaritic. I added the ancient Celtic Ogham set, which I first learned about from Diana Beresford-Kroeger. An alphabet based on trees is thrilling to me.
Trees speak to each other through chemical and electrical impulses, and they speak to humans, too, but we are often in too much of a rush and too loud to hear them. Find the tallest tree in a forest some moderately windy day (don’t try this in a hurricane!), something that is waving gently back and forth like a birch or poplar, and press your ear to it. You might hear the wind through the branches, the creaks and crackles of the vascular system, the roots and leaves, all of it. Trees exist at a different speed than we do, rooted in one place, reaching high, making the best of where they have landed, providing shelter, feeding and drinking, sleeping and dreaming.
Standard Ebooks is a new volunteer project to tidy up books from the venerable Project Gutenberg (around since 1971?!) to eliminate typos, make them look better and easier to read on digital devices. Lovely.
Had an email from Google feedburner (or FeedBurner, as it once was) that outlined their plans to do something or other that won’t make any difference to me as I had forgotten I had used it for anything or that it still existed. They encouraged me to check out my feeds, and I found feeds for two blogs I had set up for others a decade ago, still ready and able to burn if they hadn’t been abandoned.
I was tickled to find that, in this mostly forgotten corner of the online world, someone is having mucho fun with tabs.
What web developers do when they know there are no ize watching them!
Not sure where I stumbled upon Justine Haupt, but probably from reading about her rotary cellphone while I was searching for a new flip phone. She is an astronomy instrumentation engineer and seems just plain brilliant. I especially love that she has a YouTube channel but doesn’t want anyone to subscribe to it! The rotary cellphone is so tempting, but I don’t need it…if you do, though, buy it and tell me about it!
With the new Bell Fibe system comes a new wifi network and password. I could set up a guest network for visitors, but opted again to follow Matt Haughey’s instructions to make a wifi QR code.
Thanks to Peter for first sharing this tip. His advice to get your own domain for your email prompted me to do just that, and start this website. Then I started blogging after his 2019 unconference. My advice is to follow Peter!
OK, I get it now. “Streaming something” means it flows like a clear fast-running stream, not oozes like snowmelt into a mud puddle. When you press play on something, it plays right away, doesn’t buffer. Someone emails you a 6 MB photo from their phone and it pops right up, not stops your other emails from coming in for minutes. Want to download a movie? Whoomp, there it is!
Yes, in case you didn’t hear the cheers from Lot 11 and see the pigs flying over the frozen lakes of hell, we got fibre optic cable installed today at our house here in the boonies. Fibre To The Home. FTTH. For real. I honestly never thought we would ever have a wired high speed internet service here. I assumed something like Starlink would save us, or that super 5G with 20 Gbps that is said to be coming. Even five years ago FTTH out here was laughable.
A very helpful Bell Aliant technician from Nova Scotia spent much of today running the fibre op cable in our 1,000 foot lane, trudging through 3-4 feet of snow to run it from electrical pole to pole, then laid the final few feet over the snow (!) as a temporary measure until a contractor can return after the snow melts and the frost leaves the ground to bury the cable (maybe June?). The electricity to our house goes underground from the last pole, but we never buried a conduit to run fibre. When we built our house nearly 20 years ago, there was not even an inkling that something beyond the copper telephone wire buried along our lane decades ago would be run into our house.
In quick time the technician set up the modem and wireless television receivers. We kept a landline phone, and with a few taps on his mobile phone app, our phone was connected and ringing.
By coincidence, I had more coffee today than usual, so I was already very wired, but being able to zip around on devices gave me a different kind of jittery magical buzz. I downloaded MacOS Big Sur 11.2.3 on my new M1 MacBook Air in just a few minutes, in the middle of the day, no less, while lots of other things were running in the house. Knowing that the fast connection was coming my way, I had ignored the update as it would take hours, and then usually stall.
We got Fibe TV because that is my mother’s entertainment. We’ve had ShawDirect satellite television (and its predecessor StarChoice) for probably around 25 years. It was fine because we had no other option, but every few years the dish had to be upgraded and then the television receivers, and it was expensive and not a very advanced system, so won’t really be sad to say goodbye. The Fibe TV is so fast, and live tv can be watched on any device, recorded, rewound, video on demand, and on and on. I especially won’t miss trying to clean off the dish during a raging snowstorm so my mother can watch The Price Is Right!
I was even able to get my old Apple Airport Extreme and Express to hook into the new system, so that is acting as a janky mesh system for our non-WiFi printer and some other devices.
As long as we don’t mangle the very delicate cable on the ground (I have covered it with a piece of wood until I can fashion something more ramp-like for the furnace oil delivery man to drag his filler hose over), we will be connected to the modern world in a modern way. I see what you’ve all been talking about. It’s pretty nice to be zipping around with you.
The new normal. We’re supposed to be getting “up to 500 Mbps” down, but this is just fine for now. The jitter reading is my present level of caffeination, I guess.The last few minutes of the old high speed. Yes, that was .756 Mbps down and .327 up. To be fair, we usually got around the 1.5 Mbps down that we paid $107 plus taxes and fees and nonsense a month for.
