Brilliant Weekend Edition

Social stuff, listening to Wikipedia, return of the Hindenburg, Brilliantly Good Ideas, and more!

SOCIAL MEDIA MAYHEM CONTINUES, and I’m making cuts. And additions.

I got fed up with Bluesky and T2, so I stopped using those sites.

I wanted to try Threads, just to know what that’s all about, so I had to start a new Instagram account.

And since I’m selling out and buying into a Meta product, I decided to get back on Facebook, too. (I quit in protest years ago, hoping to inspire others. All that really happened was that I lost contact with half the people I know. I don’t like Meta, but it’s genuinely nice to reconnect with family and friends.)

So I’m left with six social sites:

1. Mastodon

2. Twitter

3. Substack Notes

4. Instagram

5. Facebook

6. Threads

If you use any of these social networks, please follow me so I can follow you back! And do post and say hi!

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Mike’s List of Brilliantly Bad Ideas

1. Now you can listen to a symphony of Wikipedia edits

Every new edit strikes a tone and creates a bubble. With the site Listen to Wikipedia, you can watch new edits come online in real time. If you click on a sound bubble, you go straight to the page. Or you can monitor new edits in the stream below.

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2. Zeppelins are back for luxury cruises!

A Swedish start-up called Pelorus X OceanSky Cruises (a collaboration between Pelorus and OceanSky Cruises) is launching airship cruise. It’s like the Hindenburg, but fun. It’s like a hot air balloon ride, but indoors. Their first cruise is scheduled for next year over the North Pole. The company aims to offer environmentally friendly travel that uses less fuel than airplanes.

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Mike’s List of Brilliantly Good Ideas

1. Image Upscaler AI takes your low-resolution photos and makes them higher resolution via AI.

2. The Collections tab of Public Domain Review shows you beautiful, historical and very tasteful media — images, books, film and audio — that’s free to use.

3. Recursive Arts’ Virtual Piano feature is a great resource for learning how to play the piano better.

4. Content Detector AI gives you a place to paste in content and get a probability rating that the thing was written by AI, with the most AI-likely passages flagged and called out.

5. Freewriter AI is your own personal AI copy editor.

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Mike’s List of Shameless Self-Promotions

1. How we know that Apple’s Vision Pro means business

2. Spot fake ransomware attacks without wasting time and money

3. Read ELGAN.COM for more!

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Mike’s Location: Silicon Valley, California

(Why Mike is always traveling.)