barnoid

For NaNoGenMo 2016 I had an idea to attempt to generate an novelisation of the film A.I. Artificial Intelligence using image captioning AI on stills from the movie. The cover of the resulting paper copy of the novel. Method I ripped the DVD of “A.I. Artificial Intelligence”. Then extracted 5036 stills from the file (frame rate of 0.6 per second) with Avconv. Using https://github.com/karpathy/neuraltalk2 I ran two passes over the images, first with sample_max set to 1, which produces more accurate captions (and more repetition), then with sample_max set to 0, which is less accurate but more “imaginative”. The neural network has a tendency to fail and produce the string “UNK” as part of the caption, more so with sample_max 1. So I loop over each line in the accurate text, if it has an “UNK” or the first five characters are the same as the previous line then replace it with the sample_max 0 text. Any remaining UNKs I replace from a list of synonyms of “unknown”. Then I build sentences from those lines, possibly combining two with a conjunction or a semicolon. Then I make paragraphs from multiple sentences. Then chapters from a bunch of paragraphs. The chapter titles are the most common five letter or more word in the chapter that’s not previously been a chapter title. I put the output into a LaTeX template from here: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/fiction-novel/pjdthvgdtsfy Then run pdflatex to produce the PDF. Result The PDF output

Video David Lynch Numbers Station Phone - Trailer You see a small table with a zig-zag tablecloth, a lamp with a red shade, and a red telephone, the old-fashioned type with a dial. Sat incongruously under a tree, or by the pond, or wherever. You approach for a better look and as you get near it starts to ring. You answer and hear a voice saying a sequence of numbers. It is American film-maker and creator of Twin Peaks, David Lynch.

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 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. Originally I wanted to use a fingerprint reader to somehow make a hash that could be used to select the emoji, so that the same person would would get the same fortune every time. Also the presenting of the hand onto the reader would add to the fortune telling effect. I didn’t have time to make that bit work in the end, so I used a big illuminated button instead.

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. I have a Python virtual environment set up for Tensorflow using Python 3.6 and with the CUDA stuff installed. So I started by using pip to install the listed requirements and cloning the repository. The following takes place at the top level of the cloned repository.

Not Your Bot was a Twitter bot, now a Mastodon 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.

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 Barney Livingston - @barnoid@mastodon.me.uk @barnoid #makevember Bass drone thing? Made from 30ish year old motor I extracted from a toy as a child. barnoid.org.uk/makevember2018 ❤️ 6 💬 0 ♻️ 0 19:19 - Thu 01 November 2018 This motor needed a lot of encouragement in the form of oil. I started off touching the teeth of the gear against things but all that made was horrendous noises. So I settled for the noise of the motor running, accentuated a bit with the off centre gear.

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. Description of the process and poetry When you point the camera at your subject and press the shutter button the green light on the back flashes rapidly for a short time while the image is captured and then less rapidly while the poem is “developed”. The poem that arrives soon after will not be of high poetic quality

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. Be easy to maintain. The old site was based on Typo, a complicated Rails-based CMS using Postgres as a database. The new one uses the Hugo static site compiler. So no database, just static files. I adapted a responsive theme and removed its Javascript (which was just for displaying images). I can maintain it all in over SSH in Vim, no terrible web editing interface to contend with.

First breath on that haunts / a clean fresh start a failure / the world is mischief. Sam R. Cosgrave was 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.