Category Archives: Gadgets & Apps

“A quick and sobering guide to cloning yourself”

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I recently stumbled upon a Substack article by Ethan Mollick, a professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, titled “A quick and sobering guide to cloning yourself.”

“With just a photograph and 60 seconds of audio, you can now create a deepfake of yourself in just a matter of minutes by combining a few cheap AI tools. I’ve tried it myself, and the results are mind-blowing, even if they’re not completely convincing. Just a few months ago, this was impossible. Now, it’s a reality.”

As a former radio guy I was more interested in the audio portion of Professor Mollick’s experiment.

“Clone a voice from a clean sample recording. Samples should contain 1 speaker and be over a 1 minute long and not contain background noise. Currently works best on US-English accent.”

I created an account at 11ElevenLabs, picked a voice and uploaded some text from my blog bio.

For $5 a month (first month free) you can synthesize your own voice. I uploaded a recording of me reading that same bio.

Finally, I pasted in some text from one of my blog posts and my voice was “cloned.”

Just to be clear, the first audio is one of their “voices.” The the second audio is a recording of my voice. The real me, if you will. And the third audio is the synthesized Steve voice. I’m not sure someone could tell the difference. I sort of prefer the synthesized reading over my own. In two years (?), this technology will be so good it will be nearly impossible to tell real from cloned.

DJI Avata

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The virtual reality thing (as I understand it) hold no appeal for me. But I would be willing to strap on some goggles for a drones-eye-view of some interesting place. This is already a thing, yes?

My friend George recently got his hands on the DJI Avata, a pricey ($1388) little drone you fly with goggles and a joystick.

Reminiscent of William Gibson’s simstim. “…recorded sensoriums, like racing a black Fokker ground-effect plane across the Arizona mesa tops; diving the Truk Island preserves.”

Jitterbug

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I found this in the back of a kitchen drawer. I don’t recall owning this so it must have been Barb’s. “The Jitterbug Flip2 is designed to be easy to use, with big buttons and a large screen. It’s the only flip phone with Amazon Alexa, so you can make calls and send texts using just your voice. And for help in emergencies, the Urgent Response button is right on the keypad.” I especially like the YES and NO buttons. Early version of the “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” icons.

The phone was (and still is?) aimed at the older market, but who doesn’t need an Urgent Response button from time to time? The red button on the new version of the phone?

Some might recall that I dabbled with the idea of a simpler phone a few years ago.

Blocking spam calls and texts

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Like everyone else, I am constantly bombarded by telephone spam calls. Blocking the numbers does no good because they have an infinite number of bogus phone numbers.

Yesterday I downloaded AT&T’s ActiveArmor app (free) and it has been blocking calls that previously got through. One spammer used a dozen different numbers within a matter of seconds.

iPhone 13 mini

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I’ve never been a fan of the ever-larger phones so I almost pulled the trigger on one of the new iPhone SE’s Apple announced last week, until my buddy suggested I take a look at the iPhone 13 mini. Didn’t know there was such a thing but it was just what I was after. Smaller phone with lots of features. Arrives tomorrow. (The photo compares the 11 and the 13 mini)

I was at the Apple event in 2007 when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. I resisted getting an iPhone when they came out. I’d had a Tracfone since 2005. $19.95 at Wal-Mart and it lived in the glovebox of my car. In 2008 I broke down and bought an iPhone and bought the new model ever couple of years. iPhone 3GS (2009); iPhone 4 (2010); the first iPhone SE (2016); iPhone XS (2018); iPhone 11 (2020).

Google Calendar as diary

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I’ve been using Google Calendar since its public launch in the summer of 2009. Use it for damned near everything. Any big expenditure with link to a receipt/invoice in Drive.

I’ve been thinking about the difference between blog posts and diary/journal entries. My 6,000+ blog posts, going back 20 years, were written with the idea somebody might read them. Not so with a diary entry. Private, just for me.

I took a run at this kind of journaling pre-internet. Hand written notes in a 3-ring binder. Didn’t stick with it. A few years later I started using Day-Timer planners and kept at it for 15 years. (Seven years ago I transferred a lot of those entries to Google Calendar.) I’d occasionally add a personal note or observation to the meetings and appointments.

A few days ago it occurred to me Google Calendar would be a good place for this kind of casual note. I slug each entry with “Diary” for easy searching. Of course, I can search for any word or phrase in the entry. Almost no friction here and I’m in Calendar daily.

AirPods 3

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I don’t remember when I got my first set of headphones. According to Wikipedia, until the mid-1960s, record companies mixed and released most popular music in mono. From mid-1960s until the early 1970s, major recordings were commonly released in both mono and stereo. In the ’60s The Beach Boys, Frank Zappa and The Beatles were among the first big artists to play around with multitrack recording.

Dolby started showing up in recording studios in 1966 and quadraphonic sound was introduced in the early ’70s but always seemed kind of gimmicky to me.

I know I started buying headphones in the early 70s when I went to work at KBOA. Sennheiser, Bose, you name it… I tried them all. And the good ones were expensive (and fragile). I was never an audiophile. WLS on an AM car radio sounded damned good to 17-year-old me. I never had a Sony Walkman but did get an iPod when they showed up. And the tiny earbuds sounded pretty good to me. Hard to believe it was as recent as 2016 when Apple introduced AirPods. I thought their wired earbuds were fine… until I tried the Bluetooth AirPods. And I’ve had a set ever since.

I hadn’t paid much attention to all the hype about the third generation AirPods but when I saw the launch event a couple of weeks ago, I decided to try a pair. Just to see (or hear, in this case).

To my pedestrian ears, stereo music meant base in one ear, treble in the other, and the vocal track somewhere in the middle. The new AirPods are — for me — living up to the hype. Not sure I can describe what I’m hearing. It really does sound like I’m in a big room (recording studio?) with instruments and singers all around me. It’s a strange feeling. Music is such a perceptual thing it’s difficult to describe. Songs I’ve listened to hundreds (thousands?) of times, sound new and fresh.

Apple will give you chapter and verse on how the new AirPods work but the music I’m now hearing (feeling?) seems impossible. Someone described it as witchcraft.

The annual doctor visit

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The following excerpts are from a Wall Street Journal piece titled: Tech Advances Put the Annual Doctor Visit on the Critical List. The gist of the article is the yearly check-up with your doctor is in for some big changes.

Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minn., has started sending laboratory kits to patients in advance of their physicals. Patients, especially those who live far away, can get blood drawn at a local clinic and send it back for standard lab and genetic analyses and discuss results with their doctors virtually. The future, says Carl Andersen, medical director of the clinic’s executive health program, is “bringing healthcare to patients where they are as opposed to asking them to come in.”

Mayo eventually expects to gather additional patient information remotely via smartphone and smartwatch apps, wearable sensors and blood pressure cuffs that enable monitoring of such health indicators as blood pressure, blood oxygen levels, physical activity, heart rate, heart rhythm, blood sugar and sleep quality. Doctors elsewhere have begun adopting this strategy; some experts believe it is poised to fundamentally change how the physical is done and could prompt patients to engage more proactively in their health.
“When people start using a smartphone to monitor their blood pressure, they become experts at managing it,” says Eric Topol, director of Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, Calif. Maybe “it’s only a problem on Monday morning when they go back to work.” That finding wouldn’t emerge in a once-a-year visit, but it opens options for a patient other than a prescription for blood pressure pills.

Digital stethoscopes are available that allow doctors to check heart and lung sounds remotely. Dr. Tison and his colleagues at UCSF have developed a technique using a smartphone camera and flashlight that can detect a biomarker of diabetes in patients without a blood draw. Mayo doctors have tested an algorithm that can reveal heart weakness from data obtained in an electrocardiogram long before symptoms of heart failure, heart rhythm irregularities or cardiovascular disease arise.

DNA is poised to become part of the routine physical too. As part of its blood analysis, Mayo will soon offer liquid biopsy tests, which look for evidence of cancer in DNA fragments that even early-stage tumors shed into the bloodstream. The test will search for many more tumor types beyond the screens performed for breast, lung, prostate and colorectal cancers as recommended in current health checkups.

UCSF’s Dr. Tison suggests a more dynamic approach to the physical lies ahead: Doctors will provide, say, monthly electronic reports to patients on metrics such as blood pressure, heart function, blood oxygen levels and weight, based on the data stream from digital devices. Unless an abnormal signal turns up, in-person exams—with the hands-on touch doctors and patients value—could be set for every two or three years.