📙 #035 - IDEAS, IDEAS, IDEAS

Sponsored by me! Handwriting, APIs, IDEAS and tutorial progress.

# LIFE

This week is a mess, and there are a few more like it coming up.

Wednesday, just gone, was a check-up trip to the hospital. Today, Thursday, I'm driving my youngest to Coventry to take their first GCSE Math exam. We homeschooled a lot, so the exams have to be taken in approved exam centres, in this case, one that's 110km away, for a 9am exam, a journey Google estimates to take 2 hours.

The first of four 9am exams spread over the next few weeks.

Friday, Nixie, my wife, is booked in for some wisdom teeth stuff, which involves sedatives and being absolutely banned from operating heavy machinery. So it's my job to enforce that and also make tea ☕️🚫🚜

I'm writing this on Tuesday and trying to get all my tenses right; editing the #Weeknotes video is going to be a shit show. Also, I start jury service in a couple of weeks.

So yeah, "fun" all around!

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# Handwriting font

I'm still working through the code to do full joined-up handwriting, so I'm not there yet. But while doing some work for the possible zine, I wanted to play with some text and test whether my handwriting API was working, so I took this design from last year.

This is basically a subdivision algorithm that discards some divisions and fills the rest with lines, sometimes skewing and offsetting them.

I took that and told the code to use the handwriting API to fill those subdivisions with writing instead of lines. The text is some Lorem Ipsum that gets created on demand, which I often use for testing.

One thing I've enjoyed doing is keeping a sketchbook of plots. When I update my code, and when I remember, I plot a new page. I've seen a few other people fill books with plots, and I like the format. I may start doing this more often: a general sketchbook and then a smaller one for each project to track progress. I just have to get over it when some pages inevitably screw up.

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# IDEAS

Long-term readers, and anyone who follows me on Twitter/X, know I use an AI called Kitty. Kitty is actually a combination of automation and AI.

An example is Kitty watching a Share folder on my desktop. When new images are found in the folder, Kitty will resize and crop them for social media, use OpenAI's API to identify the contents of the image, combine that with the text in the filename, and again use the OpenAI API to generate six potential tweets, which are presented as options. Upon picking one, Kitty then uses the Twitter API to post the tweet and image.

The combination of access to the local file system for automation and AI is particularly useful.

Anyway, one of the main things I use it for is tracking what I do. Kitty asks me questions in the morning, evening, and throughout the day. My responses to those questions are used to generate tweets and such; it looks a bit like this.

...one thing I've been doing, partly for my Arts-Based Research and somewhat for fun, is each Sunday evening, once I answer the last set of questions, letting Kitty take a whole weeks' worth of what I've been doing and generating ideas based on that. The central part of the prompt is this...

"I want you to go through the questions and answers and see if you can pick out any common ideas and concepts. Then merge and blend those ideas to come up with new ideas for what we could do in the studio based on your other knowledge. For some ideas see if you can think of different directions they could be taken in, we're looking for six to eight fairly fleshed out new ideas. Throw in a totally new idea if you feel like it. Please return the ideas in Markdown format."

Because I'm supposed to be documenting my Arts-Based Research, I figured I'd stick all these ideas onto my website; you can find an index of them for 2024 so far over here: https://revdancatt.com/kitty/ideas/ and the most recent ones are here: https://revdancatt.com/kitty/ideas/19 - 2024-05-06-2024-05-12-ideas

I'm not saying they're good, but I guess that depends on your attitude.

The recurring things Kitty keeps suggesting are...

• Virtual studio tour and virtual open studio

• Generative art stationery

• AR/VR

• Studio Organisation

• Creativity and health

While not suggesting the above, Kitty suggests I run workshops about those topics instead.

🤷‍♂️

The first time I wrote about this "reflection" part of journalling with AI, the token length of OpenAI's API allowed me to send just one week's worth of Q&As. They'd upped that limit the second time I wrote about it, meaning I could send a month's Q&As. I have yet to try it, but the latest update means I should be able to send six months' worth and maybe even a year's worth of Q&As in one go.

Over the last year, I've answered five questions each morning (three dynamically changing based on the previous few days): two always the same: "What's your plan for today?" and "Anything else you want to mention?" a bunch of "What are you working on at the moment?" questions during the day, and three (dynamic) wrap-up questions at the end.

So I think it's fascinating and exciting that we have the potential to throw all of those at the AI and then ask it questions about, well, stuff.

I feel I probably need to (yearly) take a good, clean 360-degree video of my head and record my voice so future me will be able to ask younger AI versions of me what I did each year.

Example ideas from a couple of weeks ago

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# Plotting Tutorials Update

I've finally written all the (draft) versions of the scripts for the first module of the pen plotting tutorials, which consists of 11 videos in total.

• 1.1.0 Introduction

• 1.1.1 Types of pen plotter artists

• 1.2.0 Intro to the Drawing Machine

• 1.2.1 How to talk to the drawing machine

• 1.3.0 Pens and paper

• 1.3.1 Anatomy of a piece of paper

• 1.4.0 What is an SVG file

• 1.4.1 Writing a calibration file

• 1.4.2 Writing an SVG file by hand + dice

• 1.4.3 Writing an SVG file with AI, badly

• 1.5.0 A note about hidden line removal, handwriting, optimisation & fills

I also want to get the first video of the second module, "2.0.0 A note about code vs scripts vs functions for artists," in the bag.

Now, I need to do a second pass and create all the support material. Even if I managed to shoot and edit a video a day, that's still two weeks' worth of work ahead of me.

I'm doing it this way 'cause I want to be able to drop all the videos for the first module in one go as they all work together, and it would totally suck to have them released one a week for nearly three months. It's also everything (hopefully) someone who already knows how to code needs to get started with drawing machines.

Once that's all done, we'll move to a more management format of writing, shooting and editing the videos one at a time and releasing each one as it's done for the whole teaching artists how to code for the drawing machine part.

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# THE END

It's just gone Tuesday lunchtime, and I'm going to grab something to eat. Then, I'll dive into making sure Monday's and this morning's #Weeknotes videos are done and dropped into the timeline to make things easier on Friday.

In selling-the-old-studio news, four weeks ago, I wrote...

"But I was also hoping to have finished selling the studio before then too, which is now looking to happen the week or two after run-out-of-money-day 💸"

Reader, the studio still hasn't exchanged and completed, and I haven't totally been able to find out why, my solicitor is on holiday until tomorrow/yesterday (the 15th), and all of this was supposed to originally happen at the start of March anyway. Putting us firmly into two weeks past run-out-of-money-day.

So if you (or someone you know, for that sweet sweet network effect) happens to have a graphQL/nodejs/AI/museum/generative/video/cultural-org shaped project, hit me up, as apparently, my availability has suddenly widened, right, the, fuck, up.

Right, time to go!

I love you all,
Dan
❤️

P.S. You'll receive my next newsletter around May 28th.

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