Gibberish

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Today the Language Log blog noted that that Trump fellow was thinking of nationalising boating (sorry: ‘nationalizing’ (had to wrestle with my spelling checker to get that)). They attributed the error to “poor-quality speech-to-text” (I assume) software. But in this age of all singing all dancing AI wonderfulness surely we should have cracked this problem by now.

When I watch a video and click the ‘full screen’ option I find the screen fills with some text seemingly automagically generated from the dialogue in the video. But it is usually so inaccurate that you have to wonder why they bother. I am not sure who “they” are. It could be coming from YouTube but to change the settings I now have to sign in to Google – so that is not going to happen. Or it could be from one of the numerous browser extensions I have blocking most of the nonsense that the web criminals developers keep trying to inflict on us. For example a video from the Piano Circus website produced this:

Ignoring the lack of punctuation and the American spelling I highlight some errors in red. Gibberish.

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In 1964 Terry Riley composed ‘In C‘; a piece comprising 53 sections that should be played in order but any of which can be repeated. The piece ends when the last player has finished the 53rd section. Riley’s recording of the piece was released in 1968 following it in 1969 with A Rainbow In Curved Air – two records that a young chap at the time would enjoy very much.

Today, in the post gramophone world, there is a webiste that gathers multiple recordings of In C and allows the visitor to enjoy them all at once. The site suggests adjusting the rate at which the recordings play so that they are all synchronised but I cannot imagine any sensible listener wanting to do that.

Screenshot of Incync site

App check

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With another round of OS updates from Apple it is time to test some apps to check they still work. Inevitably there will be some that fail for some reason. This can be tolerable from individual developers; their life/career move on and their old apps become abandoned and eventually fail. But apps that have been purchased from major corporations should not be abandoned so readily. The TNR-i app, based on the original Tenori-on instrument from Yamaha, is one such. It was abandoned and withdrawn from the App Store in 2020; they warned “However, future iOS updates may cause TNR-i and TNR-e not to work.” The good news: it is still working…

Some research found that listening to stuff was helpful for older people. This may not have been what they had in mind.

From ADB to SCSI

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I share Jim Nielsen’s delight in the words of Tyler Gaw:

I just dug to the bottom of my Big Box of Cables to find two cables that I needed for something. They’ve been in the bottom for 10+ years. So, “when are you ever gonna use these?” was today. Don’t ever let anyone take your Big Box of Cables away.

Four cardboard boxes storing redundant cables

My box of cables and gubbins had expanded to four boxes which are augmented by a stack of drawers and hanging racks for those likely to be needed more often.

Rack of hanging assorted cables

Have we reached a point where we can fill an alphabet: ADB, BNC, DIN … RSS-422, SCART, SCSI? Leave it with me.

Adding benches

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The Open Benches site collects images of memorial benches; usually comprising a close up of the memorial plaque, a view of the bench and the view from the bench. Previously I have failed to add a bench because of some GPS problem – possibly because I was uploading from the library on the iPad. But I found that I can add them directly from the phone so added this splendid example from St. Paul’s at Horn Hill on a recent trip to Chalfont St. Peter.

I have a few more to add.