ITHCWY Newsletter for December 2022

By Robert Ellison.

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In November ITHCWY reached 1,000 posts. Here are 17 of the best.

What happens if you ask Stable Diffusion to generate a typical person from every country in the world?

WebCamSaver 3.30 is available to download. Also Android Fortune Cookies 1.30 and Catfood Earth 4.30.

Timelapse of a plane landing at SFO. Also some more Bangalore Sunsets. And one from SF.

Get rid of the unhelpful word robot.

Animation of 20 years of shifts in the US Presidential vote.

Does anyone know why San Francisco felt the need to redistrict the Pacific Ocean?

You can now follow both ITHCWY and me on Mastodon.

Previously:

2021: The Secret Diary of a Xamarin Android Developer, Aged 48 1/3
2020: Accessing Printer Press ESC to cancel
2019: Winter Solstice 2019

Links for December 2022

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Stable Diffusion Global Stereotypes

By Robert Ellison.

What does Stable Diffusion think a typical person looks like from each country?

This image is composed of 248 faces generated with the following prompt:

"photo of a typical person from Vietnam, highly symmetrical face, portrait photography, highly detailed Vietnam background, 4k, 35mm, sharp focus, amazing photo, portrait of the year"

Using seed 960604, 50 iterations, 7.5 scale, and just varying the country name in the prompt text.

There is no gender implied in the prompt but it certainly seems more likely to generate a woman. It seems to find something distinctive about most countries. The region that surprises me the most is Eastern Europe which ends up being very similar. Click the image above for a larger version.

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ITHCWY on Mastodon

By Robert Ellison. Updated on Thursday, February 16, 2023.

Well I picked a bad year to dabble back in Twitter. I'm not ready to delete it all again, but I am experimenting with Mastodon. There is an official ITHCWY account here, this is fully automated via the Mastodon API and will publish posts, comments and news shares. It's currently posting its way through the back catalog. I also have a personal account here. So far Mastodon is a pretty good experience. There is some stress in picking a server but once you're on everything else is easy. Will just have to see if there is a regression to the mean as the number of users continues to increase.

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Winter Solstice 2022

By Robert Ellison.

Winter Solstice 2022 (December 21, 2022 at 21:48 UTC) as rendered in Catfood Earth. Winter starts right now in the Northern Hemisphere, Summer if you happen to be south of the Equator.

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Landing at SFO

By Robert Ellison.

Time lapse of a Boeing 777-300ER landing at San Francisco International Airport (SFO).

Shot on a Pixel 6 Pro in 10x timelapse mode wedged into a window with the blind closed. I thought I'd just get some clouds but happily the crew didn't force us to open all the blinds, so the video shows us entering California with heavy clouds (a plane with contrails going the other way right at the start), clouds clearing as we cross California and then the full landing. Bit of dirt on the window unfortunately but still quite happy with the result. The flight was from Frankfurt.

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Catfood WebCamSaver 3.30

By Robert Ellison. Updated on Sunday, January 22, 2023.

Catfood WebCamSaver 3.30 is now available to download. This release contains the latest webcam updates.

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More Bangalore Sunsets

By Robert Ellison.

A sequel to Bangalore Sunsets, from a different floor of the Shangri-La Hotel. In three of the four sequences you can see Bangalore Palace (featured more closely in More Bangalore).