Do you like old computers, live in/near Sydney and have nothing planned for tomorrow? You should pop in to the Australian Computer Museum Society's Cataloguing Workshop. You'll get to scrounge through the museum's vast collection of stuff and help take photos of everything and add it to their online catalogue. It's an important job! Just rock up to their HQ at 9 West St, Croydon, NSW any time you like on Saturday, ask for Adrian and tell him you heard in The Sizzle that he needs help cataloging.
Microsoft is shoving more GPT-4 based AI features into its 365/Office apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams with something called Copilot. The special sauce, I guess, of Copilot is that it's an LLM "connected" (Microsoft's words) to "your business data" and "generates answers anchored in your business content — your documents, emails, calendar, chats, meetings, contacts and other business data — and combines them with your working context — the meeting you're in now, the email exchanges you've had on a topic, the chat conversations you had last week — to deliver accurate, relevant, contextual responses". There's more info and some demo videos on Microsoft's website. Copilot is currently "testing" with "a small group of customers to get feedback and improve our models as we scale".
Matter is supposed to be the one unifying smart home standard all the big players were onboard with, allowing you, the hapless customer, to buy any smart house thingy and have it work with the other smart house thing from a different brand. A Ring Doorbell, paired with an Apple Homepod and a Google Nest smoke alarm all operating in perfect harmony with all those weird sensors you got off Aliexpress. Unless you buy something from Belkin, as they just announced they're gonna "take a big step back, regroup, and rethink" before supporting Matter in any of its Wemo products and will "bring new Matter products to market when it can find a way to differentiate them". I had a hunch Matter would be too good to be true.
Voice impersonation is pretty easy now. So easy, even a journalist can do it for shits and giggles. From The Guardian: "Using just four minutes of audio, a Guardian Australia journalist was able to generate a clone of their own voice and was then able to use this, combined with their customer reference number, to gain access to their own Centrelink self-service account". They don't mention the name of the app/product/service they're using to do this voice impersonation, but I reckon it's Eleven Labs (or something very similar). I used it to prototype making a podcast of this newsletter and it was creepily good with its text to speech AI. It has a feature to clone your voice with just a few minutes of speech, but I never tried it out.
Apple's Aperture app was what got me into photography and almost 20 years later there still isn't an app that combines the library management and editing aspects of digital photography as well as Aperture did. That is until I saw RAW Power. It's pretty much Aperture, but for 2023. It uses the Apple RAW engine, so it's blistering fast on the Apple Silicon Macs and supports the RAW files out of most modern cameras. If you wanna sync to the cloud, RAW Power supports iCloud Photos. There's a trial on the Gentlemen Coders website. The full version is $62.99 on the Mac App Store and there's also an iOS version for $14.99. No subscription either, unlike Adobe and Lightroom (which IMHO is a pig of an app).
Here's five interesting discussions over on The Sizzle's paid subscriber forum for you to enjoy over the weekend. If you are not a paid subscriber but want to get involved, visit https://thesizzle.com.au/payme to get onboard.
I took this photo walking past the broadcast truck at Kardinia Park in Geelong before a Roos v Cats game a few years ago. Click/tap to zoom in and gawk at all the stuff going in the back of this truck.
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