Kidlapse shutting down at the end of May 2021

Updated on Saturday, May 29, 2021

Kidlapse, the service I launched a little over a year ago to make timelapse movies of your child growing up, is shutting down on May 31, 2021. At that time all accounts, photos and movies will be deleted. If you use Kidlapse please make sure that you have downloaded anything you need by the end of May.

The main innovation in Kidlapse was generating a good looking movie from any photos of a person. The system used machine learning to recognize a face, and then zoom and rotate as needed so the face is in the same position in each photo. From there a timelapse movie was created with tween frames generated to cross-fade between each photo. While this was a lot easier than doing this work manually I think it was still too much time and effort for most people and so the product attracted few paying customers. It's too expensive for me to continue to run as a free service. I love the movies that the product creates, and I hope to release the underlying system as a downloadable software package at some point.

I learned a lot launching Kidlapse and I'm sad to put it in my own personal deadpool. When something isn't working though it's time to clear the space and time to launch something new. Subscribe to find out what.

(Previously: Kidlapse - Make a Movie of Your Child Growing Up)

Updates

Kidlapse - Make a Movie of Your Child Growing Up

Kidlapse - Make a Movie of Your Child Growing Up

Kidlapse is now live. This is a service I've been working on that uses machine learning to recognize faces and then rotate and zoom you so get pretty good alignment between each photo. You upload one photo per month and Kidlapse then creates a timelapse movie of your child growing up. If that sounds like something you'd be interested in sign up and give it a try.

Kidlapse

I'm working on a project to generate a timelapse of a kid growing up. I wasn't organized enough to shoot my kids in the same pose on the same background so it's quite a tough problem. To fix this I'm using machine learning to recognize faces in photos and then automatically rotate and align them so the face is in the same place in every shot. From there it's just a matter of generating frames that fade between the different photos and stitching them together into a video. If this sounds interesting check it out at kidlapse.com and sign up to get notified when the service launches.

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ITHCWY Newsletter for April 2021

Coronavirus Visualization Update

Coronavirus Visualization Update

I've just made a few changes to my daily Coronavirus Visualization post.

The daily version is now based on seven day moving averages. This helps with the rate at which different regions report statistics and makes the animation a but easier to follow. The shading is based on the difference between the average yesterday and the average for the previous day (i.e. today it's the increase from April 17 - 23 to April 18 - 24).

Population scaling is now different between the daily and cumulative versions. Daily frames are scaled to the worst recorded case and death increase for that region. Cumulative frames are scaled to the cumulative highest case and death levels, but each region is scaled by population so the highest level is on a per capita basis not an absolute total. For the US animation this uses 2019 estimates from the US Census Bureau. The global animation the figures are 2018 World Bank estimates.

Finally the frame rate for videos has increased to 24fps from 5fps.

The post Visualizing Coronavirus Cases and Deaths by Country and US County updates around 8:30am PST every day with images summarizing yesterday and videos that show the course of the pandemic so far.

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Coronavirus Visualization Update #etc #coronavirus ITHCWY coronavirus visualization now includes seven day moving average daily updates and population scaled (per-capita) cumulative videos showing the course of the pandemic. )

California Climate Credit

Updated on Sunday, November 20, 2022

Illustration of money in a burned out forest

Once in a while I'm stupid enough to read my email. This month I'm getting a climate credit! Must have done something right? No:

"The California Climate Credit is part of California’s efforts to fight climate change. This credit is from a state program that requires power plants, natural gas providers, and other large industries that emit greenhouse gases to buy carbon pollution permits. The credit on your bill is your share of the payments from the State’s program."

So... apparently part of fighting climate change is making my energy bill randomly cheaper?

It's hard to think of anything less likely to help. Just as I'm starting to feel the pain of winter bills I'm paying slightly less and so I'm slightly less inclined to turn down the heating or finally do something about my beautiful but effectively absent front windows.

A problem with carbon taxation is that it's regressive. So why not use this money to make the first $xx cheaper, and maybe even charge more at the high end of usage?

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(Published to the Fediverse as: California Climate Credit #etc #gas #electricity #climatechange #california Why do I get a California Climate Credit? This is the worst possible way to fight climate change. Do something smarter California! )

Links for April 2021

Updated on Thursday, April 22, 2021

ITHCWY Newsletter for March 2021

I Love Email

Updated on Sunday, May 2, 2021

HELO

Everyone is always trying to kill email, and it's always because it's a supposed productivity villain and life will be so much easier when we can all live happily in some chat based universe. I've spent enough time in Slack and Teams and their predecessors to know that we should go back before it's too late.

Chat brings you infinite inboxes and no great way to tell which of them is important. Having looked away for a few minutes there are dozens of unread conversations. Some of them are people sharing a photo of their cat. One of them is an emergency requiring immediate attention but good luck finding it without wading through everything.

This brings me to a lack of useful state. I handle email in two quick passes - read everything (and discard anything that doesn't need further attention), deal with anything critical and then at some point go back and mop up the rest. In chat though you just blew past something that needs a response eventually and it fades from your mind as you fight the fire elsewhere. I never miss an email, I often miss a chat.

And good luck finding anything. Maybe a market leader or two will establish dominance for long enough but my experience so far has been lurching from one platform to the next, both professionally and personally, and having a hard time finding that one thing I know should be in there from the end of last year. My Gmail has emails going back to 1996, and yes that's almost a decade before Gmail existed. I can find anything.

On the subject of dominance, the real reason for all of the attempted email homicide is that it's one of the last open systems that everyone still uses. If only email would just die you'll be trapped forever in Messenger and Hangouts.

[email protected]

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(Published to the Fediverse as: I Love Email #etc #email #productivity #gmail #slack #teams In the rush to Teams and Slack we're missing the advantages of email, including single inbox, state management and an open protocol. )

Out of Office Hours

Updated on Sunday, May 2, 2021

OOO

Inc has an article based on this blog suggesting that the solution to 'zoom fatigue' is reverse meetings.

I imagined that this was going to be a S03E01 of Red Dwarf type scenario where you get handed some notes and a few action items and then apologize for leaving early. But no, it's office hours.

""In a reverse meeting scenario, by contrast, I might take only 10 minutes from each colleague, taking up 50 minutes total of my time, and 50 minutes total of their time, for an overall demand of 100 minutes of attention, which is 3.6 times less cost," Newport writes. And voilà, he's just given your team back more than four hours of productive time a week."

Assuming that people manage to show up in perfect slots with no conflict and do so in a way that has perfect utilization for the victim and that there is no value in having someone point out that one of those 10 minute slots was full of incorrect information sending you down a two week rabbit hole that could have easily been avoided by having the right people spend some time together.

In a perfect world my ideal meeting situation is the meeting defragmenter. This involves software and cooperation unfortunately so the next best solution is out of office hours. I need focused time to get stuff done and blocking large chunks of meeting repelling time is really the only thing that works.

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Out of Office Hours #etc #meetings #productivity A critique of Reverse Meetings and a proposal for actually increasing efficiency with the concept of a meeting defragmenter. )

Links for March 2021

Deep Fake Rob

Updated on Saturday, February 19, 2022

Deep Fake Rob

I deep faked myself! Using that MyHeritage deep nostalgia thing. I'm not convinced.

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Deep Fake Rob #etc #ml #video I make a deep fake video of myself using the MyHeritage deep nostalgia tool. )