Ambient Poematron

Ambient Poematron is a small box with a three-colour e-paper display that shows a newly generated poem every five minutes. If you like the current poem you can unplug it and it will stick around. Tea: like beverage; like drink; like fun. / A tea is an infusion drink. / Or a tea is an activity? / Who knows? The hardware consists of a Raspberry Pi Zero with a Waveshare black-white-red 2.
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Emoji Crystal Ball

The crystal ball at EMF 2016 In 2016 I think I’d been toying with the idea of making stories with emoji, possibly inspired by Emoji Dick, the translation of Moby Dick into emoji. I realised there was a connection to the process of tarot reading and fortune telling. So I set out to tell people’s fortunes with emoji through a crystal ball. The idea was to show them a series of emoji, chosen at random, and hopefully they’d read meaning into them as with horoscopes.
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AI Voice of Phoebe

For various reasons, I have several ideas to use AI to generate things based on the 90s sitcom Friends. This is about my attempt to make a text-to-speech generator with the voice of Phoebe. I’m using this Tensorflow based text-to-speech model implementation: https://github.com/Kyubyong/dc_tts I won’t cover all the details of setting up a Tensorflow environment here. I use a PC running Ubuntu bionic, which has an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 card with 6GB RAM.
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Not Your Bot

Not Your Bot is a Twitter bot that makes instances of the “He’s not your man” meme using ConceptNet. Ladies, if your man: - can contain a fungus - has a lettuce - can be found in the refrigerator - can contain a crab - is a tuna fish salad He's not your man. He's a salad. Every hour it picks a word from a list, then fetches the word from the ConceptNet API.
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Makevember 2018

I’m attempting to do Makevember, that is to make a thing a day for November. My theme idea is to make a number of noise making mechanical things and then a mechanical sequencer to make them play together. Inspired by the Mammoth Beat Organ. Is this going to work? No idea. 1 #makevember Bass drone thing? Made from 30ish year old motor I extracted from a toy as a child.
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Poetoid Lyricam

Poetoid Lyricam Poetoid Lyricam is a camera that takes poems. It consists of a Raspberry Pi, camera, thermal printer and batteries housed in the body of a 1970s Polaroid camera. The pictures it takes are fed to a neural net which generates captions, these are then mangled and reformatted to resemble a poem, which emerges from the printer on the back. The video below includes a demonstration.
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New Site!

Welcome to another iteration of my website! This is the fourth website of my stuff on the internet since 1997. This one carries over most of the content from the last one, but presents it slightly differently. My aims for this version were: Keep the content and URLs the same. Don’t look terrible on mobiles etc. Don’t have loads of server dependencies on things like databases. Avoid Javascript and externally loaded cruft.
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Sam R. Cosgrave

First breath on that haunts / a clean fresh start a failure / the world is mischief. Sam R. Cosgrave is a bot masquerading as a haiku poet on Twitter. It started when a friend of mine who writes haikus made his poems available in a handy machine readable format. I made a web page that recombines the lines of his poems to make new ones with a fair bit more non-sequitur.
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Recent Developments in BBC B Hacking

BBC B running 2048 I’ve recently been experimenting at the Hackspace with UPURS and UPURSFS. These unfriendly strings of letters amount to a cable that links the BBC’s User port to my laptop via a USB to serial converter, two ROMs that go in the Beeb and some Perl code that runs on my laptop. The upshot of which is that I can access parts of the filesystem of my laptop as if they were floppies on the BBC.
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Christmas Twitter Tree Lights

I recently bought a string of 50 individually addressable RGB LEDs from Embedded Adventures and so had to decide what to do with them. I decided it would be festive if they could reflect Twitter’s current feeling about Christmas. So I started Googling sentiment analysis and quickly discovered that Stanford University’s Natural Language Processing Group has released the source and data for their sentiment analyser. When fed a sentence it outputs one of “Very negative”, “Negative”, “Neutral”, “Positive” or “Very positive”.
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