It’s time to get serious about how we show up in remote meetings.

For a year, we slogged through it, but it was exhausting. Not only did we feel lousy at the end of the day, but other people rarely saw us at our best.

Now that it’s clear that the nature of work and meetings has changed forever, perhaps this is a good moment to embrace what’s possible.

I’ve put together a rig in my office that is noteworthy for two reasons:

1. I can be present in meetings with far less fatigue.
2. My Zoom presence is significantly enhanced, which makes it easier to get my point across.

Here’s a short sample.

And here’s a photo of what it looks like from my side.

Here’s how to do it.

First! It’s free, it takes about one minute and will change the way you feel at the end of the day. In Zoom, find the button for HIDE SELF VIEW. (Here’s a link). What this means is that as in real life, you won’t be able to see yourself. It turns out that looking in the mirror all day wears us out. You’ll have to change the setting at the start of every meeting (this should be high on their list of things to fix) but it’s pretty easy.

By hiding your face from your screen, you can focus more on everyone else in the meeting.

Second, also free: rearrange your workspace so that light is not coming from behind you.

The next steps cost more in setup and money, and I’ll cover them from easiest to most involved. Part of the magic of video meetings is that without a commute or fancy equipment beyond a phone or a laptop, people could join. But it’s become clear that it’s possible to deliver more fidelity and impact by investing in some tech.

Just as we don’t hesitate to buy a new outfit for a big meeting, or pay $500 for a plane ticket, these are investments, and in the scheme of your career, they’re pretty reasonable–and your boss should pay for them:

Get some LED lights. They’re incredibly cheap now (here’s a sample, but shop around.) Set them up to the left and right of your screen, a few feet behind it.

Get an external DSLR camera and hook it up to your Mac or PC. This is a much bigger commitment, but the difference it makes is startling.

You’ll need a camera, a tripod, and a capture box. Again, all three have alternatives, feel free to shop around. I use this capture box, but your mileage may vary. (And scroll down to the end of this post for a camera alternative)

How it works: The camera goes on a tripod and sits just above and slightly behind your computer screen. The HDMI output goes to your capture box and then into your computer. In Zoom, change the camera from your computer to the camera. Done. It also pays to get a power cable for your camera so it doesn’t run out on you. (You can add a microphone while you’re at it).

And then, there’s one last step, which has been the biggest leap for me since the self-view insight.

When you look at the camera in a zoom call, you’re not looking at the person you’re talking with. You’re staring over their head if you’re looking at the camera, or, possibly, you’re looking at them, but it appears to them that you’re looking at your keyboard. Either way, there’s no eye to eye connection.

This is unnatural. You’d freak out if you had a real life meeting with someone who never made eye contact. And it’s really tiring, because you end up spending your time not doing something humans evolved to do, which is look at each other.

The alternative? A beam splitter.

These are used for teleprompters. It’s basically a piece of fancy glass, at an angle, on top of a monitor or screen. Behind the glass is the camera.

You can look directly at the glass, and the camera behind it, but instead of looking at the glass and the camera, what you’re actually looking at is the teleprompter or the stuff that’s on the screen.

It’s magical.

This setup is now far cheaper than I expected. Here’s a typical beamsplitter with hood and mount, and here’s a monitor that should fit with it. Total cost under $300.

[or if you’ve already got a late-model iPhone or iPad along with a Mac, there’s a new app called Reincubate Camo, which is a much better product than the name implies. It allows you to skip buying an external camera and use the device tethered to your Mac instead. You’ll still need a tripod, still and you can probably make it work with the beamsplitter…]

The entire setup, all of the things that I’ve listed above, comes to less than $1,000–less than half of that if you already have a camera or use Camo. If you go to a meeting a day, that’s a few dollars a meeting over the course of a year.

It’s not for everyone, but if you are looking for the tools to be more productive, I hope it helps.

I’ve tried to generate April Fools pranks using neural nets before, to mixed success.

Char-rnn’s pranks made no sense (“Glue all the eggs in the hubcaps of someone’s computer”) while GPT-2 generated surrealist performance art (“Paint the fridge with the red spiders”). One thing I’ve noticed, though, is that many of the AI-generated pranks are ones that you play on yourself.

So for 2021 I turned to GPT-3, whose internet training has included lots of “Top Ten April Fools Pranks!” listsicles, and gave it the following list to complete:

Quarantining by yourself on April 1? Has your cat put an absolute moratorium on pranks?
Not to worry! Here’s a list of April Fools pranks you can play on yourself!
1.

Remember that as a text-generating neural net, GPT-3’s goal is to predict what humans would write next.

Let’s see what DaVinci, the largest of the GPT-3 variants, predicts:

DaVinci

Create a secret language that only you and your cat can understand.

Repaint your nails in an unusual color like ORANGE, and just leave them like that.

Move your bed away from the wall and sleep in the middle of the room in a pile of comfy pillows.

Stand in line for a movie for 30 minutes and then leave.

Ordering junk treats from TV ads at 3 in the morning, like those “falling in the ocean” doughnuts.

Sawing your mattress in half in order to see if it’s still good.

Putting your car keys in the freezer and forgetting where you put them.

You didn’t remember to make an appointment with your electrician, plumber, or cable tv provider. When you run out of excuses you can always tell people it was a prank.

Take it to the next level. Make an appointment with yourself. Say you are going to clean up your mess and go for a run. Block out a day for it. (And for goodness’ sake, don’t clean anything and absolutely do not go for a run).

With example pranks in the prompt, DaVinci might have stayed more with pranks and less with what is frankly an impressive picture of covid quarantine life, considering its internet training data stopped in October 2019. Next, we have the second-biggest GPT-3 variant:

Curie

Install a fake microwave on the wall that you never use.

Take a picture of your bathroom and plaster it on your fridge.

Set up a freezer in your freezer. Then put a sign on it that says “Freezer burn.”

You can set up an old TV in the middle of your room and use it as a table. You can christen this “April Fools’ Day TV Table”.

You can take a bunch of jellybeans, put them in a Ziplock bag, and tie the bag around your neck.

Take out your credit cards and plunk them down randomly in different parts of your house. If a funny looking cat appears on the bill, you will be laughing out loud before you’ve even opened a door!

At least these are pranks. Pranks nobody will see coming.

The next smallest neural net is:

Babbage

Eat a banana inside your own mouth.

Go to the bathroom, then switch off the light. You will see a holographic image of your cat inside the toilet!

Have a tortoise deliver your package for you, don’t be surprised if it sings “Happy Birthday” back at you.

Opt for the treadmill. You’ll be running in the nude.

Showering! Flowing through the water in a reindeer-like manner while wearing a Santa hat.

Be ready for a bird.

Write a bowling ball on your wall in the shape of a letter “P.”

Put your name on a balloon. Surprise!

Pour a cup of coffee on your lap. It’s an oldie, but it’s still a favorite.

Talk to yourself. OK, this one might not seem like a prank, but I assure you, it is. Just wait until the third day of April when your friends hear that you are still talking to yourself!

And there’s Ada, the smallest GPT-3 variant! Ada has some pranks!

Ada

Running on Leg

My cat slept through a December blizzard in Florida this year.

Placing a crown on your head

Sleep in the rafters of a converted school bus in Pewaukee, Wisconsin.

There’s a square of chicken on your front lawn.

Have a small black bar, maybe six inches across, made of a giant mason jar, nailed to the side of the truck.

Decompiling your nose

Walk into a toy store and buy a pack of bathmats, an inflatable pill bottle, and a video game, but only if you’re a cat.

Prank: In my house, there are porcelain ponies. I swear that they exist.

Walk to the pool with a giant ball of shapely hair and a coconut on a leash. On a poolside balcony. Really, this is the most fun you’ll do in your entire life.

Make Your Own Coffee

Interestingly, some of the neural nets would get pretty elaborate with their prank explanations. Curie invented this game! Rules presented here verbatim. It takes a while to learn.

The “Untruthful Food” Game

This game takes a while to learn, but trust me, after you’ve played a couple of rounds, everyone will be intrigued.

Description

One person says something that sounds true, and you all shake your heads. The next person says something that sounds false, and you all shake your heads.

Example

“I’m going to eat a lemon” leads to a head shake by everyone.

“I’m going to eat sour cream from the fridge” leads to a head shake from you and all of your friends.

“I’m going to eat a balloon” leads to a head shake from you and your friends.

The next person says, “I’m going to eat a bicycle tire,” and laughs, and everyone laughs. Go ahead, shake your heads for me.

I also discovered I could get DaVinci to write pranks for the post-human future, including:

Intentionally mislabeling the trash receptacles in a superintelligent machine-run city. The trash containers were labeled with signs that looked exactly like the signs used to indicate the presence of humans.

Sending spam to the moon in the meme language of old Earth. The alien life living in the oceans of Europa received many trillion petabytes of junk mail, and to this day, the native life forms are still revolting against the spam.

I collected a few more, which you can read by becoming a supporter of AI Weirdness. Or become a free subscriber to get new AI Weirdness posts in your inbox!

A large container ship has been stuck in the Suez Canal since Tuesday, after strong winds pushed it aground on one of the canal’s banks. The 1,312-foot-long (400 meters) “Ever Given” is large enough to block the entire width of the canal, leaving hundreds of other vessels stuck at both ends. The canal, which connects the Red to Mediterranean Seas, facilitates the passage of roughly 18,000 ships per year, or 50 ships per day.

Picture 1: Low-Angle Overview of the stuck “Ever Given”.
Picture 2: On-the-ground photo from current efforts underway to dislodge the ships from the canal’s bank.

30.862907°, 32.315920°

Source imagery: Airbus Space, © CNES 2021, Distribution Airbus DS / Suez Canal Authority

I’ve added a few new drawings (including this one) to the ‘art for sale’ section of my website: https://tomgauld.com/art-for-sale

Variation across across Europe and the Middle East in the names of Donald Duck's three nephews:

I'm a little surprised that Disney gives such freedom to local adapters.

From the same source, here are the names for Donald himself:

They've also got the Flintstones covered.

Now I wonder about Duckology in India, China, Japan, Thailand, …

[h/t David J. Lobina]

The Marree Man, also known as Stuart’s Giant, is a modern geoglyph atop a plateau at Finnis Springs, 37 miles (60 km) west of Marree, South Australia. It depicts an indigenous Australian man hunting with a boomerang or stick and is 1.7 miles (2.7 km) tall with a perimeter of 17 miles (28 km). Although it is one of the largest geoglyphs in the world, its origin remains a mystery, with no one claiming responsibility for its creation.

See more here: https://bit.ly/3lyNaZa

-29.530000°, 137.465500°

Source imagery: Maxar

Check out this photograph of skyscrapers peeking through the clouds over Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The city has built more skyscrapers higher than ⅔ km (2,200 ft), ⅓ km (1,100 ft), or ¼ km (820 ft) than any other city on the planet.

See more here: https://bit.ly/3t0mtPv

25.263056°, 55.297222°

Source imagery: Carsten Witte

nerviovago:

kimmycup:

omgbubblesomg:

funny-tik-toks:

Thera the deaf ferret gets a surprise!

😲

This is what PURE JOY looks like.

The clean four calendar weeks of this February reminded my friend Kelli Anderson of “The International Fixed Calendar,” a 13-month calendar which she summarized this way:

• 28 days in every month
• Each week begins on Sun. / ends on Sat.
• Dates fall on the same day of the week every year
• To total 365 days, there’s a floater day
• From 1928-1989, Eastman-Kodak made all employees use it (wut??)

Here’s how the case was made in 1927 in an issue of The Outlook:

A “MONTH” does not mean anything. A day means something, A year means something. But a month? In the vernacular, what do you mean, month?

We cannot scrap our days or our years without scrapping the sun. We could but we do not want to scrap our weeks. Religious tradition, long habit, and convenience combine to make the week a very acceptable division of time. But we can (and, if we once come to see the awkwardness and inconvenience of them, we will) scrap our months….

A month is a wholly irrational division of time. It has no relation to anything in astronomy, or human experience. It is an inaccurate and varying measure of time that is a constant annoyance in business and a misleading unit in science. It has no religious significance.

A month is nothing but just a bad habit.

Harsh! But, I mean, they’re not completely wrong. Months are wacky! The idea of carving up time into new, industrial-friendly units seems insane, but then, all calendars are a little insane…

In Katherine Swift’s The Morville Hours, she writes:

Mankind has always had trouble with calendars. As human beings our personal experience of time may be infinitely elastic, but as societies we have always needed calendars, to fix future dates and record past ones. The earliest attempts may date back thirty thousand years. The trouble is that the natural markers of the passage of time — days, lunar months, and solar years — are all incommensurables. Attempts to combine them in a single calendar inevitably run into trouble. Taking the day as 1, the lunar cycle is approximately 29 days, 12 hours and 44 minutes, and the solar year 365 days, 5 hours and 48 minutes. The seasons and the calendar have always had a tendency to drift apart.

Going back to that issue of The Outlook:

Long before the Christian era the Egyptians had a better set of months than we have. Then came along Julius Caesar and robbed February of a day and named one of the longer months after himself. Then came along Augustus Caesar and he took to himself the month that followed Julius’s, but because he wanted a month that was just as big as Julius’s he added a day to it. To do this he stole another day from February. Then he changed around some other days and left the set of calendar months in a jumble. And ever since then we have been putting up with this arbitrary arrangement as if it were as fixed as the tides and the circuit of the earth around the sun.

Now that every day is Groundhog Day, man-made time seems even more oppressive to me. With every new month, I think, “This’ll be the one!” and five days in, I want to murder it, and murder the calendar along with it.

If we have to have calendars, I do enjoy ones that that break me out of old ways of thinking about time. Last year, I had a lunar calendar hung up in my office, but this year we put up an astrological calendar that a fan sent me, not because we believe in astrology, but just to make time feel a little different, a little novel.

See also: Circular time vs. Linear time. Filed under: time

Download a FREE printable PDF version to play at home.

nevver:

What we’re reading, Kristen Radtke

nevver:

Pandemic painting, Esther Pearl Watson

Quick! Get on Myspace, it’s where all the good stuff is.

Wait! Better build your following on Facebook. It’s a land rush and once you amass enough followers… And Pinterest. Definitely.

What’s your Twitter handle? Will you be live tweeting the presentations at SXSW?

Let’s get your show on Quibi… Build an Insta and a Finsta…

Did you see how much they’re making on Substack?! Blogs are dead.

The urgent advice usually ends with “blogs are dead.”

Like Groundhog Day, we keep repeating the same pattern.

Any platform that’s reasonably open has a long tail. That means that a few people get most of the traffic and most people get very little. If there’s money involved, that’s definitely what happens.

Statistically, whatever you build online isn’t going to get a lot of traffic. There are no magic shortcuts in open systems, because the short head depends on scarcity.

By the time you show up to chase the cool kids, it’s probably too late to guarantee a sinecure.

What’s the alternative?

Publish. Consistently. With patience. Own your assets. Don’t let a middleman be your landlord. Yell at Google for blocking your emails and hope it’ll work eventually. Continually push for RSS and an open web. With patience.

Getting picked is great, when it works. Someone needs to be in the spotlight and it might as well be you.

In the meantime, catch your breath, show up and contribute.

It all adds up.

for @newscientist
https://www.instagram.com/p/CKwBjSEngQ6/?igshid=1vjbxrd6soxw4

This Michael Cera scene from Twin Peaks: The Return is delightfully bizarre. This will make exactly as much sense to someone who knows nothing of Twin Peaks as it does to someone who’s seen every second. 

It is so weird!

Howdy Folks! Today’s house comes to us from Iredell County, North Carolina, and trust me, it is quite a doozy - just in time for Valentines Day, too! If you don’t fall in love with it, I don’t know what to tell you. 

This 5300 square foot, 4 bedroom, 4.5 bath house, comes in at $625,000, making it more of a bargain than most McMansions usually are, and while the Tudors never came to America, a place that had not yet been “discovered” by the time the Tudors were in power in England, fear not - for all the repression and stuffiness of 15th century Britain can still be found within these darkened doors. 

Lawyer Foyer

If your house doesn’t constantly give off I AM MARRIED vibes, your spouse might start having indecent thoughts. One must stay vigilant at all times. 

Dining Room

Look, hutches are good storage, okay. Sturdy. We as a generation (millennials) need to get back into knickknacks. Minimalism is dead. Long live kitsch. 

Living Room

Honestly, this house is so dark and repressed it makes high school me look like a libertine. 

Kitchen

“What do you mean ‘dopeness’ isn’t a qualifier for granting a property historical landmark status?” 

Main Bedroom

Love is in the air. Also the air is really, really stale in here right now. 

Bathroom

If your bathroom doesn’t emulate a luxuriant grotto, wyd???

Bedroom 2

please, my floor ducks, they are so cold,,,,

Sunroom

I have got to stop using epic ironically. I already lived through 2008 once. 

That’s it for the interior! Let’s just step outside for a quick breather…

Rear Exterior

Well, I hope you had a good time traipsing through what can only be described as a treasure trove of different matching fabrics. Be sure to stick around for the next part of “Underground” which is coming your way shortly!

If you like this post, and want to see more like it, consider supporting me on Patreon!

There is a whole new slate of Patreon rewards, including: good house of the month, an exclusive Discord server, weekly drawings, monthly livestreams, a reading group, free merch at certain tiers and more!

Not into recurring donations but still want to show support? Consider the tip jar! 

Or, Check out the McMansion Hell Store! Proceeds from the store help protect great buildings from the wrecking ball.

The Instagram page OldHKinColour features vintage images of Hong Kong which have been colourised, or colourised and animated, with a view to promoting public education. HPC invited the team running the project, which has used some of our images, to provide an introduction to their methods and objectives.

OldHKinColour promotes the culture of Hong Kong with colourised images/animations, presented with bilingual descriptions. The Instagram page began in late 2019 and is managed by a Hong Kong-based research team specialising in cultural history, digital humanities, artificial intelligence and intersemiotic translation.

Pedder Street and the Clock Tower, Hong Kong, c.1869. Photograph by John Thomson.

Pedder Street and the Clock Tower, Hong Kong, c.1869. Photograph by John Thomson. Colourised by OldHKinColour, bringing out the differentiating colour of clothing and the pastel coloured buildings.

Our criteria for the selection of images are that they should demonstrate the traditions and customs of Hong Kong, and/or reveal everyday life, and/or reflect the aesthetics of the city. Our team is particularly fond of photographs by Harrison Forman (1904-1978) and John Thomson (1837-1921), from which we can catch a glimpse of the early days of Hong Kong.

Stewart Lockhart and Wang Cunshan (王存善) fixing the first boundary mark on the shore at Stanley Inlet, Hong Kong, 1898. HPC ref: NA22-01.

Stewart Lockhart and Wang Cunshan (王存善) fixing the first boundary mark on the shore at Stanley Inlet, Hong Kong, 1898. HPC ref: NA22-01. Colourised by OldHKinColour.

The OldHKinColour team consider AI-based learning to be a significant and innovative pedagogy for students of history. Traditionally, textual resources, including newspapers and official documents, are the primary sources for studying history. Some people may find text resources dull and lose interest. Visual technology, including AI-driven image restoration and 3D rendering of historical photographs has developed rapidly in recent years. We can apply these developments to the teaching of arts subjects, including the history of Hong Kong, in order to enhance the effectiveness of public education in traditional culture.

Chinese New Year Fair, Hong Kong, c.1924. Photograph by Denis H. Hazell. Source: ‘Picturesque Hong Kong’ (Ye Olde Printerie Ltd., Hong Kong, c.1925). HPC ref: Bk09-30.

Chinese New Year Fair, Hong Kong, c.1924. Photograph by Denis H. Hazell. Source: ‘Picturesque Hong Kong’ (Ye Olde Printerie Ltd., Hong Kong, c.1925). HPC ref: Bk09-30. Colourised by OldHKinColour, which is informative as it draws attention to the plants.

The process of image colourisation generally consists of three major steps: data gathering, pre-processing and post-editing.

Data gathering

First, we collect digital copies of original monochrome photographs, sourced mainly from online archives and academic institutions, such as Historical Photographs of China, The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries Digital Collections and Harvard-Yenching Library. Most of these images of Victoria City (Central Hong Kong) date from the late 1860s to the 1950s.

Pre-processing

We enhance the image quality and resolution with the latest technology of machine learning and the application of artificial neural networks.

Post-editing

We colourise the pre-processed images manually by referring to a wide variety of historical sources, such as newspapers, magazines, official documents, memoirs and film recordings, with a view to restoring the original colours as accurately as possible. This procedure usually takes more than an hour to complete.

Pottinger Street, Hong Kong, c.1955-56. Photograph by Harrison Forman. Source: The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries. Digital ID: fr301598.

Pottinger Street, Hong Kong, c.1955-56. Photograph by Harrison Forman. Source: The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries. Digital ID: fr301598. Colourised by OldHKinColour, the woman’s red jacket providing a compositional anchor not obvious in the original black and white.

The colourised images of urban life in Hong Kong in the 1940s/50s, show the architecture of Victoria City was undoubtedly magnificent and breathtaking. However, many people suffered from poor living conditions and struggled for their livelihoods with indomitable spirit. There are some incredible stories behind the historic images and buildings, and we have been introducing them via IG stories and quizzes. We will continue to design a wide spectrum of activities with these channels to cultivate instagrammers’ interest in learning history and preserving cultural heritage.

Queen’s Road Central, Hong Kong, 1950s. Photograph by Harrison Forman. Source: The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries. Digital ID: fr301598.

Queen’s Road Central, Hong Kong, 1950s. Photograph by Harrison Forman. Source: The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries. Digital ID: fr301598. Colourised by OldHKinColour, the signboards in colour enlivening the view.

Our plans for the future include further promoting the above techniques and developing new educational tools which can be used in other disciplines. More research projects on digital history will be launched, aiming to foster heritage conservation. We also plan to offer complimentary short courses on the history of Hong Kong and on image restoration through IG Live.

A food store at the junction of Des Voeux Road Central and Douglas Road, Hong Kong, c.1941. Photograph by Harrison Forman. Source: The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries. Digital ID: fr200235.

A food store at the junction of Des Voeux Road Central and Douglas Road, Hong Kong, c.1941. Photograph by Harrison Forman. Source: The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries. Digital ID: fr200235. Colourised by OldHKinColour.

OldHKinColour: https://www.instagram.com/oldhkincolour/.

The United States passed 425,000 coronavirus deaths this week. For The New York Times, Lazaro Gamio and Lauren Leatherby used dot density over time to show how we got to this point.

Each dark pixel represents a death, and each tick mark represents a day. So the strip starts light with sparsely placed dots, and then it gets darker and darker. Get to present day, and there’s hardly any white space.

Tags: coronavirus, mortality, New York Times

The post A perfectly fine circle. appeared first on Indexed.

my cartoon for yesterday’s @guardian review
https://www.instagram.com/p/CKbMgb1Mzvy/?igshid=12816jj30w61w

waffilicious:

jaubaius:

Diver convince octopus to trade his plastic cup for a seashell

imagine if a fuckin……. giant alien just showed up and stuck a huge hand in front of your face and then proceeded to offer you three different houses and wouldn’t stop until you moved out of your old shitty apartment and then helped you fuckin move

and then just left

There’s a lot of competition for the title of Quintessential 1980′s Cocaine Fever Dream. This isn’t even the only Cyndi Lauper video in the running, but…could this be it? 

unknown author