My perfect podcast app would be a long phone call in which I listen to the show and can also talk back to remember things. (Someone build this for me.)
It would immeasurably improve my running. Long story short, I added slow runs into the training mix, and had to switch from...
I watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off which was as great as I remember.
It has an age rating of PG-13 in the US and 15 in the UK for bad language and some kissing. (There is also lying to parents but apparently that doesn’t count.)
This seems absurd.
I have way less problem wit...
I wonder how you would design a really single-minded voice UI?
Like, voice interfaces are really good now because of AI.
But they’re so unbounded. If you’re having a voice interaction with a computer or with a device, you could end up having a conversation about anything.
An...
I went into my kid’s school a couple months back and spoke to the year group about manufacturing.
Honestly it was the most rewarding speaking gig I’ve done all year.
It was about the process of making my AI clock and I have a ton of pics from my factory visit to Shenzhen (mo...
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It’s hot in London so I’ve been seeing a lot of handheld portable fans, usually with a strap so you can hang it round your neck.
My faves are the ones with thermoelectric coolers in the middle of the fan: a small plate that is so cold that it is covered with icy condensat...
I didn’t know what a near-infrared LED mask was a week ago, and now I am obsessed with this ad from Omnilux.
Because there’s a lot going on.
The aesthetic of the mask itself is wild: the lines look like sinews as if the woman has been flensed
But the schematic flesh is com...
Wet lab.
“Wet lab” was a new term to me, I had to look it up – it’s a laboratory with chemicals where there’s spill risk etc. I have a physics background myself and the closest I came to liquids was liquid nitrogen, and when you spill that it just boils furiously and goes aw...
When we end up voluntary ceding control of our own body parts to AI (for example so we can automatically walk around the grocery story while simultaneously catching up on boxsets on a VR headset) I wonder what that will feel like.
The underlying tech is currently in researc...
Ok a bunch of friends have their own personal AI agent using OpenClaw or Hermes or whatever.
Confession time: I don’t.
I haven’t found I need one. I’m a heavy user of agents for coding, sure, and a few isolated tasks. I haven’t found I need one digging through my notes or se...
We’re open sourcing Resident, our library for running AI-authored code on microcontrollers – with no compile step and no firmware flashing.
It’s our twist on vibe coding firmware, built for instantly loading new device functionality coded by end users. It’s aimed at device d...
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I love this terrible fake address generator:
We have spent 3 years collecting data from every country to generate this enormous database.
…it promises.
These are not English addresses:
"2 Scott Common Jenniferstad S60 2PT"
"4 Matilda Via North Emilychester M20 1BT"
"Fla...
You know when I’m home on my own I don’t watch much TV like actual TV, but I do watch music videos on YouTube on the TV.
Sometimes new music but often ones I know really well. Music videos are such a vibe.
And it’s social too? I’ve spent many evenings with friends that just ...
Now we have abundant apps, we’ve hit a ceiling in good ways to track and share them.
For example, Simon Willison’s personal tools: "Miscellaneous HTML+JavaScript tools built mostly with the help of LLMs."
Willison lists 80+ useful tools and the search box can see 205. That’s...
The Wind in the Willows right? Kenneth Grahame, 1908.
We all know the children’s story inside-out. Mole and Ratty and gruff Badger and conceited Mr Toad with his motorcars and all their adventures.
I picked up the book as an adult - I can’t remember why - and it wasn’t what ...
I hack on hardware a whole bunch, at Inanimate and at home.
AI is in the cloud. Interaction is in my room and in my hands. The job always begins by wiring together those two ends.
So the second thing I do, every single time, is bring up real-time messaging using JSON over we...
It’s pretty clear that apps and services are all going to have to go headless: that is, they will have to provide access and tools for personal AI agents without any of the visual UI that us humans use today.
By services I mean things like: getting a new passport; finding an...
A brief update on mist, my ephemeral Markdown editor with Google Docs-style comments and suggested edits:
mist is now open source with an MIT license, and the mist repo is here on GitHub.
(Try mist now and here’s my write-up from February.)
What I love about Markdown is that...
Mostly I go to sleep very easily. Like 3 minutes from lights out, max.
I’m content, I exercise, I burn my tokens each day, I think all that helps.
Often I wake early and think. I’m protective over what goes into my 4am thinking time, I enjoy it. You don’t get to choose what ...
Once upon a time I kept on meeting architects who had ended up working with the web.
I asked why. Some good answers:
Architects think about how people move between spaces (pages) and what that means for user experience - this was at a time when web designers often came from...
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The Amazon Ring Always Home Cam is an indoor security drone for your home.
Introduced with this video in 2020: "Yeah, it’s a camera that flies."
Sadly not yet on the market.
Ok Judge Dredd had Spy-in-the-Sky drone surveillance cameras in 1978 and Mega-City One is not an a...
We briefly mentioned New Wave Hardware in last week’s Inanimate Lab Notes so this is me doing some unpacking. While you’re there, join 300+ other subscribers and sign up for our newsletter. You’ll get weekly links and updates on what we’re working on.
There are a bunch of t...
Vernor Vinge’s sci-fi novel Rainbows End (2006) is so prescient about AI training data.
His short Fast Times at Fairmont High (2002) is set in the same universe, and was written in that era where we felt like we had line of sight to pervasive augmented reality and also 3D pr...
Thank goodness voice computing is finally happening. Now we can work on making it good.
The tech is here, like the free Whisper model (what an unlock that has been from OpenAI, kudos) and ElevenLabs. Plus devices too, from Plaud - like an irl Granola video call transcriber ...
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Rain panels? Rain panels.
researchers have found a way to capture, store and utilize the electrical power generated by falling raindrops, which may lead to the development of rooftop, power-generating rain panels.
Forget solar panels. Here come the rain panels (The Debr...
It should be SO EASY to share + collaborate on Markdown text files. The AI world runs on .md files. Yet frictionless Google Docs-style collab is so hard… UNTIL NOW, and how about that for a tease.
If you don’t know Markdown, it’s a way to format a simple text file with marks...
What mundane pleasures will I be robbed of by domestic robots?
Sometimes I feel like my job at home is putting things into machines and taking things out of machines.
I don’t mean to sound unappreciative about “modern conveniences” (modern being the 1950s) because I take car...
If I got to determine the school curriculum, I would be optimising for collective efficacy.
So I live in a gentrified but still mixed neighbourhood in London (we’re the newbies at just under a decade) and we have an active WhatsApp group.
Recently there was a cold snap and a...
You couldn’t go a week in the 80s as a kid in Britain without someone saying "Oompa-Loompa stick it up your jumper."
You did this action too, pumping your hand to make a weird bulge under your jumper through a hoop made with one arm and a pretend arm made from an empty sleev...
AI agents do things for you, semi-autonomously, and one question is how we coordinate with them.
By "do things for you" I mean
Claude Code that writes code while you contemplate life
Claude Cowork, released this week, that does “knowledge work” tasks after you point it at ...
This chart from the back of Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home lives forever in my head:
Always Coming Home is a collection of texts from the Kesh, a society in far future Northern California which is also, I guess, a utopian new Bronze Age I suppose? A beautiful book.
Thi...
