Moonshots Beyond the Cloud

Narakeet , formerly Video Puppet, is an impressive web tool for making narrated videos with an AI voice generator . It’s now out of Beta and open for business. Artwork on the Narakeet home page. What sets Narakeet apart is the ability to automate most or all of the production steps . From generating visuals, adding background music, and synchronizing media, to synthesizing voice over narration. The tool is great for quickly putting together instructional or marketing videos, tutorials, demos, and more. The narration features leverage some of the best machine-generated voice synthesis systems in the industry like Amazon Polly and IBM Watson Text to Speech. Although Narakeet’s over a hundred voice models in more than 20 languages are very natural-sounding and lifelike, it’s possible to provide recordings of your own voice narration. To create a video, upload a PowerPoint presentation with the slides containing the visuals and the voice over text in the speaker notes. Or write script fil...

In July 2019 it’s been 9 years since I switched to reading only ebooks instead of traditional ones printed on paper. Two reasons contributed to the switch. The first is back then my aging eyesight was making it increasingly uncomfortable to read printed text. The other reason is in July 2010 a friend bought an ebook reading device, a 6” Cybook Opus e-ink unit, and, as a geek, I was intrigued. I bought one for myself, started experimenting, and loved the experience, which I told in an ebook . The Opus, with its high legibility and ability to increase the font size, made reading enjoyable again. And it made me discover the convenience, affordability, and wide selection of ebooks. I later bought a Kindle 3 ereader but ended up doing most of my digital reading on Android phones with the Kindle and Google Play Books apps. I use the Google Play Books website on a desktop system, currently a Chromebox, to read content that’s not a good fit for small screens, such as programming books wi...

The links or references to the original sources of the media, quoted text, or other content shared online are increasingly less common. Not that they ever were much common. Academia has always had a strong tradition of crediting and referencing and this is what such users have been doing also online since the early days of the Internet and the web. Most of those who still do are in academia or in communities with similar values like bloggers and open-source developers. It’s a lost art, especially as more and more ordinary users come online. Why take time and effort to link to sources? The most obvious reason is fairness to the original creators of the content, who deserve recognition for their work. But there’s more to linking than crediting and fairness. The references to the sources and other metadata are invaluable research tools. They allow to track where ideas originate, how they spread, how influential they are. And they are essential for accessing the original content in...

Most instructional and tutorial videos featuring screencasts have a common issue that makes them less effective. They zip by very fast over details such as menu and option selections, settings changes, and manipulations of user interface elements. And screencasts are often published as animated GIFs that don’t provide any control over playback speed or pausing. These key decision points and actions the users can glimpse only briefly are the whole point of a screencast. And they take place fast. Too damn fast. Instead, let each action remain visible and still for at least 3-5 seconds, leave menus open more, and don’t release the mouse button too early after a selection. Also, screens with a lot of text to read or complex graphics should stay still for longer.

In these digital days writing with pen and paper seems all the rage. A few decades ago I used these tools to write a full-length book , all 216 pages of it. Plus a third more material I cut while editing. And I kept a personal journal for years. Although a practical necessity back then, it was an awful, time-consuming experience that brought no value to me . No more. Now I use pen an paper only for short notes of up to a couple of lines, and computers or other devices for all the rest. You’ll have to pry my digital writing tools from my cold, dead hands.