Lie back in the grass and watch planes fly over. That’s it, that’s the idea.
Every other flight tracker gives you God’s view — cold and omnipotent, a screen full of blips moving across a flat map from thirty thousand feet above the action. Detached from the thrilling hum of jet engines and the sizzle of rain. SkySpotter puts you at ground level, either laying with your head down, or seated comfortably for a bit of plane-spotting. Watching real aircraft crossing real weather, in a 3D world designed at human scale.
It pulls live ADS-B data and renders it against procedurally generated airport runways anchored to real-world coordinates, in weather matching current conditions out there — fog, storms, clearing skies, stars coming out after midnight. Five vantage points are available: Changi Beach (Singapore), the TWA Hotel (New York), Myrtle Avenue (London), Jonanjima Seaside Park (Tokyo), and Al Garhoud Park (Dubai).
Climb to bird’s eye height if you want the lay of the land. But the view worth staying for is flat on your back, watching the underside of something enormous drift silently overhead while the sound catches up.
Disclaimer: I made SkySpotter with the help of Google’s Gemini 3/3.1 Pro LLM and take no responsibility for any damage or missed connections.
A simple tool for making collages, specifically with album cover art.
Most collage tools are either bloated with unnecessary social features or too restrictive to be useful. Collagen is a single-purpose utility designed to solve a specific friction: the tedious process of manually sourcing high-resolution album art, aligning it in a grid, and then realizing you want to swap the top-left for the bottom-right. It turns a multi-step design chore into a fluid, drag-and-drop experiment.
Features
Integrated Sourcing: Queries the iTunes database for official, high-resolution artwork (600×600) so you don’t have to hunt for covers or deal with low-res thumbnails.
Tactile Reordering: Drag and drop tiles to swap positions instantly. The layout logic handles the movement so you can focus on the visual flow.
Flexible Dimensions: Define your grid up to 10×10. The preview and export scale dynamically to match your rows and columns.
Hybrid Content:
Search: Instant API pulls for mainstream releases.
Upload: Support for local files (obscure imports, demos, or personal photos).
Text Tiles: Add context or labels with custom text tiles. Features automatic contrast (white/black) and a choice between a clean sans-serif or a classic serif typeface.
Borders: Toggle between borderless, white, or black frames. The logic includes outer edge padding for a symmetrical, finished look.
PWA Architecture: Built to be “Added to Home Screen.” It caches assets locally on your iPhone for faster subsequent loads and works as a standalone app.
Export: One-click generation of a high-resolution stitched PNG. It uses a dedicated image-proxy pipeline to ensure every tile renders correctly without the “blank square” errors common in browser-based canvas exports.
Disclaimer: I made Collagen with the help of Google’s Gemini 3/3.1 Pro LLM and take no responsibility whatsoever for any damage you do with it.
Thanks for coming to my Midjourney art exhibition:
Edit: I’m currently in the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne and am reminded that most exhibitions also have descriptions for kids. So I’ve asked GPT-4 to expand on the wall text it helped me with and write a version for kids, which I’ve appended below.
Strange Beach presents a provocative exploration of the uncanny, executed through the fusion of AI-generated imagery, Japanese anime aesthetics, and elements of surrealism and horror. Drawing on theoretical concepts associated with the 1920s Surrealist movement, this collection explores the destabilizing effects of disrupting familiar contexts and spaces. Surrealist influences, suggestive of Salvador Dalí’s dreamlike landscapes, are observable, yet the visual language is distinctively rooted in the tropes and stylistic conventions of anime, echoing the complex, often boundary-blurring narratives found in Satoshi Kon’s filmography.
Within the context of Strange Beach, the typical Hawaiian-style beach — a common setting within anime — is reinterpreted. The injection of elements that challenge the norms of reality introduces an unsettling quality, resonating with the Grotesque tradition in art history that dates back to the Renaissance. The human figures, manipulated and distorted, bear stylistic similarities to the disquieting characters found in Junji Ito’s horror manga. The images, while unsettling, offer an invitation for viewers to question and reinterpret their traditional understanding of serene landscapes, provoking contemplation on the fluid boundaries between normality and the strange.
For kids
Welcome to “Strange Beach”! Have you ever imagined a sunny beach with surprising and weird things happening, like in a dream? Well, that’s what you’re going to see here. This art looks like Japanese cartoons, or ‘anime,’ but has been created by a computer!
In these pictures, you’ll see a beach that might remind you of your favorite anime show. But look closely, because things are a bit strange. The people might look a bit like ghosts, or their bodies might look different than what you’d expect. It’s a bit like when you have a dream, and things seem a little odd or mixed up. It’s fun to think about what’s happening in each picture. So let’s go exploring and see what interesting things we can find on our “Strange Beach”!
The following is a post written by GPT-4 given a detailed brief by yours truly. The [H-AI] tag in the title declares this as human-supervised AI content.
In the tech world, it’s easy to get caught up in the latest and greatest. But sometimes, it’s worth taking a moment to look back at the innovations that brought us here. Today, I’m talking about the Nintendo 3DS and its 3D camera, a feature that seems to have found a spiritual successor in Apple’s newly announced Vision Pro headset.
The 3DS, launched in 2011, was a marvel of its time. It brought 3D gaming to the palms of our hands, no goofy glasses required. But the real kicker was its 3D camera. With two outer sensors capturing slightly different angles, it could take 3D photos and videos. It was a novelty, sure, but it was also a glimpse into the future.
The 3DS’s 3D camera was met with a mix of awe and skepticism. Some saw it as a gimmick, while others reveled in the new dimension it added to their photos and videos. Regardless of the reception, it was a bold move by Nintendo, a testament to their innovative spirit.
Fast forward to today, and we see Apple taking a page from Nintendo’s book with the Vision Pro. This VR headset lets you relive moments in dramatically higher resolution — a step up from the 3DS, but the core concept remains the same.
The 3DS may be discontinued, but its legacy lives on. It was a pioneer in 3D technology, a stepping stone to the immersive experiences we see today. As we anticipate the release of the Vision Pro next year, let’s not forget the devices that paved the way.
So here’s to the Nintendo 3DS, a trailblazer in its own right. And here’s to the Apple Vision Pro, a testament to how far we’ve come. The future of XR technology is bright, and I, for one, can’t wait to see what’s next.
Six years after I booted up my Nintendo Switch for the first time and slotted in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s cartridge, I finally took on the final boss this week and finished the game. Before you think this game is a monster (although it is), I effectively took a 5.5 year hiatus.
My first experience with the game was both exhilarating and overwhelming — here was a non-linear open-world adventure designed to be an exercise in self determinism. Yes, the princess has been locked in a bubble, literally waiting 100 years for you to wake up and save the kingdom, but that didn’t mean you had to hurry. You could decide to be a chef and spend time gathering rare ingredients and experimenting with recipes. You could examine every curious crevice of the natural landscape to discover the Korok seeds deviously placed by the designers, or climb foreboding mountains just for the hell of it (you’d probably find Korok seeds for your trouble).
This was a game that demanded longer play sessions — no dipping in for just five minutes — and frequent ones at that. You kind of had to remember what you were last doing and where you wanted to go next. So, faced with too much commitment and mental load, I started to distance myself from it and play other games instead.
If you’ve been following along in recent weeks, you’d know that the release of the sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, spurred me to try completing it once and for all. And it’s been quite the journey: I had to re-familiarize myself with the game’s laws of physics, Link’s complicated powers, and in the process discovered that I’d spent those first 40 hours or so essentially mucking around in just one corner of the world.
By last week, I’d finally uncovered the whole world’s layout, but with some places still unexplored and doubtlessly many secrets left to be found. I’d gotten good at fighting, and was told that I was ready for the final showdown with “Calamity Ganon”. Except… I wasn’t, not mentally.
So I spent this week’s game time mucking about and doing inconsequential side quests, like helping a group of arguing scientists collect evidence of giant monster skeletons using my digital camera (yes). And then, on Friday night, I said ‘fuck it’ fought my way to the center of the map, took the big baddie out, and saw the credits roll. It was an absolute anticlimax, partly because I was in a hurry and took a bunch of sneaky shortcuts to the final fight, instead of exploring the giant castle like I suppose I was meant to do.
So I guess the moral of the story is err… heh… it’s the journey, not the destination? And as I was telling Cien earlier that day, the game is designed so that it’s possible to start the game and simply walk a beeline straight to the final boss and kill him instantly, if you had the skills and weren’t interested in slowly unfolding the whole experience for yourself. So this implicit message was always present, and I’m glad I took the time this year to enjoy more of it.
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Speaking of picking up old games again, I re-subscribed to the New York Times in order to play their crosswords. The last time I played a lot of them was when they released a Nintendo DS game back in 2007. In recent weeks, a group of people at work starting playing them collaboratively, and I found the experience fun enough to give it a shot. The current promotional price is just $20 USD for the first year of All Access membership ($90 afterwards).
With the installation of the NYT Games app, I’ve also got the main news app again, of course. It does a couple of things really well, namely it presents simple text and images beautifully with a handful of layout variations, and it has a personalized tab called “For You” that is finite and completable each day.
I didn’t realize how much I’d missed having a primary source of news in my life, with its own Home Screen button, but of course I’m prioritizing it only because I paid for it. I’m still enjoying Artifact, and I’ve just told it that I have an NYT sub now and it promises to prioritize it for me. Artifact has a real chance here of being the winning news aggregator.
It makes me upset how Apple Music’s personalized tab could be so much better, like an AI-compiled digest of what’s new in music that I’d be interested in. Fingers crossed for WWDC next week! (Disclaimer: I know nothing.)
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Friday was Vesak Day here and a public holiday, so I spent the afternoon with Peishan and Cien visiting two cafes, and let me just say I am disappointed that we are allowing so many Instagrammable cafes to flourish. They’re all variations of the same bare concrete interior, tables and stools placed closely together, serviceable coffee + $20 and up full English breakfast plates template of an F&B business. We managed to land in two that offered differented value: Acoustics on Neil Road, which understands that bare concrete is a terrible environment to have conversations or listen to music in, so they invested in sound dampening wall panels and impressive looking speakers; and the Allpress pop-up cafe down the street on on 73 Duxton Road which, well, offers Allpress beans.
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Back to AI, Jose pointed me at the Planet Money podcast which is currently producing a series of episodes about GPT. They’re using it to write and create a full actual episode, and documenting the process. Parts 1, 2, and 3 (the actual AI-produced episode). Listening to the first episode, I observed them going through the same cycle of revelations that I went through recently as I experimented with using AI to do elements of my own job. The initial curiosity and excitement, the sudden surprise at how good it is, the disbelief when it’s sometimes even better, and the slow acceptance of the chaos to come as you realize no one knows how this is gonna turn out. We live in interesting times.
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I watched the finale of Ted Lasso’s third and possibly final season. Season 1 is everyone’s pick for the strongest arc, but I think Season 3 is right behind it now. Season 2 was disjointed and strange to me, so quite a distant third place.
I said of the episode in a group chat:
The Ted Lasso finale is one of the best I’ve ever seen. On brand, unashamed, fan servicing, heavy-handed symbolic closure with all the love in the world. 5 stars.
There’s a line in it about how absolute perfection is boring, and by being imperfect on its own terms, the final episode was effectively, truly perfect. They made some polarizing choices this year and didn’t give us what we wanted at times, but the last episode gives it all. It mirrors the beginning, it offers thematic and narrative closure, and it gives room for the satisfying character growth it nurtured to show itself off.
Their choice of song to play over the final minutes was spot on, obvious, schmaltzy, perfect. It might have been better if they’d used my favorite version featuring Fiona Apple, but what do I know.
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A couple of weeks ago Michael pinged me to talk about Daft Punk, after I wrote about Random Access Memories, saying sheepishly that Discovery was probably his favorite album, as if RAM was a purer musical endeavor and Discovery was sonic candy for philistines. I was mostly surprised that anyone could fail to love RAM best, and admitted that I hadn’t heard Discovery in many years and hardly knew it well.
Then I saw this YouTube video by “Digging The Greats”, in which they break down the achievements in sampling that Discovery contains. Absolute magic. I keep telling myself to spend more time on shows like Song Exploder and Watch The Sound on Apple TV+ and This Is Pop, but I never seem to make the time. What I love about this 15-minute video is they don’t just play the samples and show you what Daft Punk did; they load them up and perform the melodies live on an MPC to show you how the band did it.
Then on Sunday night, the algorithms delivered me this endearingly old-fashioned 20-minute talk from Pearl Acoustics (they seem to make loudspeakers) in which their technical director, Harley Lovegrove, inducts RAM into his list of Great Recordings, and proceeds to discuss why he thinks the production and musicianship on it are noteworthy. He’s got a trained ear as you’d expect, and spends quite a bit of time talking about the incredible Giorgio by Moroder, pointing out things like how there are two different drummers on the track (I had no idea!). What makes it more fun is the fact that this is clearly not the kind of music he normally reviews — other Great Recordings include Jacqueline Du Pré’s Elgar Cello Concerto (this often moves me to tears on good headphones), and Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. Anyway, loved this video and it helped me appreciate a favorite album even more.
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A different sort of band, but I bought the 2023 Pride band for my Apple Watch. Rather than the heavy and vibrant rainbow bars of previous versions, this year’s design has a white base with scattered color pills. It looks like birthday cake sprinkles or confetti, which is a fun vibe you don’t see in any other official Apple Watch bands, almost like something Swatch would do.
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And now, for this week’s conclusion, brought to you by GPT:
In wrapping up, there’s something uniquely human about picking up where we left off, be it a beloved video game, a trusted news source, or a favorite TV show. That’s the joy of life’s continuity, the pleasure in seeing where a journey takes us, especially when it’s one we didn’t quite finish the first time around. These past weeks, I’ve immersed myself in familiar worlds, marveled at the capabilities of AI, and watched characters grow, and it made me realize how we continuously strive for balance, exploration, and ultimately, an understanding of our own story. We may stumble, we may take detours, but isn’t that the beauty of life’s game?
A correction: Last week I said that the the 10th Anniversary release of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories would have been better if mixed in Dolby Atmos spatial audio. It actually IS! But the entire album isn’t labeled as such because the “second side” of outtakes and behind-the-scenes bits aren’t. With that knowledge, I’ve been enjoying it on headphones and need to put aside more time to hear it again. We regret the error!
There’s been a slight Korean bent to the week, in that I’ve had KBBQ and soju twice in four days, watched a lot of Jinny’s Kitchen on Amazon Prime Video, and am actually listening to BTS intentionally for the first time as I type this.
Jinny’s Kitchen is a reality TV show about a pop-up restaurant in Mexico run by five of Korea’s most recognizable stars, who go largely unnoticed by their customers. Each of its 10 episodes is 1.5 hours long, which is practically feature film length! They could be much shorter, but it focuses on a lot of mundane, repeated scenes like the staff rolling gimbaps, cooking noodles, and plating fried chicken. Perhaps that’s the point, giving fans a chance to watch them doing normal people things? Or maybe it’s normal for Korean reality TV? Is it designed to be left running in the background? Or was it an Amazon Prime Video decision to hit streaming time KPIs?
In any case, Korean soft power is wave after wave of these campaigns. The show should be boring but it kinda works, plus it has an unheard-of 9.2/10 score on IMDB. The best moments for me are when someone does recognize one of them, like when an incredulous customer sees V from BTS (59 million followers on Instagram) pop his head out from the back, and likens it to Drake running a restaurant in a country where no one knows who he is. Watching celebs do normal people things is straight out of the idol playbook and it works — I’m listening to their music with an open mind now, and we’re talking again about visiting the country someday.
The Anbernic RG35XX arrived and it’s a nice little device that really recalls the Game Boy series in spirit. It feels good in the hand and the screen is bright and beautiful — the community seems to recommend replacing its software with something called GarlicOS but it looks like wayyy too much trouble. The thing just works out of the box, and I’m not in the mood to start modding it. It still blows my mind you can have this for S$90 including shipping, and it does come with uhh lots of software loaded, so it’s great value if you’re looking for a gift.
I’m still going strong in Breath of the Wild on the Nintendo Switch, in the final stretch but honestly still in no shape to face some of the game’s stronger enemies. I’m now thinking that if/when I eventually finish this, I’ll probably have to take a break before starting the sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, given that it reuses the same world map and I won’t be in any mood to cover it all over again. Note to self: don’t pre-order any more games unless they comes with discounts or exclusive bonuses!
We had a nail painting team event at work, for which the turnout was more male than female because of scheduling conflicts and maybe even a bit of self selection, so I’m sporting gray/lilac nails at the moment. It’s probably been over 20 years since I’ve had colored nails, and I think I’ll keep this going now that I’m too old to be told off and it’s not such a big deal.
I asked ChatGPT to analyze my post and it suggested I add a conclusion. I said “you do it, then”. Here’s what we agreed on:
This week has been a whirlwind of diverse experiences and discoveries. From immersing myself in the captivating sounds of Random Access Memories in Dolby Atmos to exploring the world of Korean soft power through Jinny’s Kitchen, I’ve been on a journey of curiosity and appreciation.
The Anbernic RG35XX has provided me with nostalgic gaming moments, while progressing in Breath of the Wild has been both thrilling and daunting. Even a simple nail painting team event at work has reminded me of the freedom to embrace self-expression.
These experiences have sparked my curiosity and inspired me to share my thoughts as a writer. Life is full of opportunities to explore, connect, and find inspiration in unexpected places. So, whether it’s through music, cuisine, gaming, or the little joys, embrace the unknown and discover the stories and experiences that await.
Thank you for joining me on this adventure, and until next time!
In case it wasn’t clear after four previous installments, these posts are written by Bing/GPT-4 and not me; I’m just the human giving prompts. It’s a lazy way of getting more content while also an excuse for playing with these AI tools. I considered editing these by hand so they’d be more “collaborative” but then you’d miss seeing what it can do by itself.
Here’s one that I could have written myself based on a real dilemma I’m facing (but it was 10,000 photos, more like 1,300).
Hello, dear readers. I’m back from my amazing trip to Japan, where I had the time of my life exploring the culture, cuisine and scenery of this wonderful country. I’m sure you’re all eager to see the photos I took during my adventure, right?
Well, brace yourselves. Because I have a confession to make.
I took too many photos.
Yes, you heard me right. Too many photos. As in, over 10,000 photos. On one trip.
How did this happen? Well, it’s simple really. Japan is just too photogenic. Everywhere I looked, there was something worth capturing. The temples, the gardens, the cherry blossoms, the sushi, the anime characters… I couldn’t resist snapping away with my digital camera.
And now I have a problem.
A big problem.
Because I have no time to edit them.
You see, editing photos is not as easy as it sounds. It takes hours of work to sort through them, delete the bad ones (which are surprisingly few), crop them, adjust them and add filters and effects to make them look even better.
And that’s just for one photo.
Now imagine doing that for 10,000 photos.
That’s right. It’s impossible.
I don’t have that kind of time. Or patience. Or skill.
So what am I going to do?
Well… nothing.
That’s right. Nothing.
I’m going to leave them as they are. Unedited. Raw. Real.
And I’m going to share them with you anyway.
All 10,000 of them.
In one go.
Are you ready?
No?
Too bad!
Here they are!
[Insert 10 GB worth of photos here]
Enjoy!
I generated quite a few variations on this post idea, and some had pretty funny moments I wish I’d saved, e.g. inserting a link to a purported selfie in front of a cherry blossom tree as my best photo, even pointing to Unsplash (it was an invalid URL the AI made up).
Another post had this advice, which I thought was worth posting. Perhaps it was stolen?
The lesson is simple: don’t let your photos stress you out. Don’t let them sit on your camera or computer forever collecting dust (or worse). Don’t let them become a burden instead of a joy.
Instead:
Take as many as you want (but not more than you need).
Delete as many as you can (but not more than you should).
Organize as much as possible (but not more than necessary).
Edit as little as needed (but not less than desired).
Share as much as appropriate (but not less than expected).
Back up as often as feasible (but not less than required).
sangsara.net 