TEH 260: The Internet Archive saves an old car. AI Bird IDs. Claude code. Ringing Lost Dogs.

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In This Episode: The Internet Archive saves an old car. AI Bird IDs. Claude code. Ringing Lost Dogs.


Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:03:48 — 58.4MB)

This week the TEH Podcast is hosted by Leo Notenboom, the “Chief Question Answerer” at Ask Leo!, and Gary Rosenzweig, the host and producer of MacMost, and mobile game developer at Clever Media.

(You’ll find longer Bios on the Hosts page.)

Top Stories

  • 0:00 LN: Internet Archive to the rescue
    • My wife is visiting my sister-in-law, and the parking brake in her 2000 Honda CRV (originally my mother’s car) froze up. The pull-lever i the center wouldn’t budge. I got messaged for help.
    • I searched for “2000 honda crv maintenance manual”. The second entry is The Internet Archive’s scan of the ~1400 page manual. https://archive.org/details/HondaCRV19972000 
    • I was able to send her images from the manual about how to access and lubricate the pull lever.
    • This isn’t the first time IA has popped up randomly to help. It’s an amazing resource.
  • 5:45 LN: What bird is  that?
    • Another story of things coming together.
    • My wife takes a photo with her phone (Pixel 4a) of a hawk sitting on a fence in our neighborhood. https://flic.kr/p/2rVhrLG 
    • The photo is auto-uploaded to her Google Photos account.
    • I grab a copy and crop it. Original is 4032×3024, so there are lots of opportunities. Not bad. https://flic.kr/p/2rVjh8d 
    • 7:00 I fire up Topaz Gigapixel AI, and, with a little adjustment of settings, upscale the image 4x. I then crop it further to focus more closely on the bird. Also not bad, though there are some tell-tale signs that this was AI upscaled. https://flic.kr/p/2rVisjk 
    • 9:15 My wife asks me what kind of hawk that might be. No clue. So I decided to try … ChatGPT. I upload the upscaled image, and ask simply, “What kind of bird is this?”
      • Likely ID: Red-tailed Hawk (juvenile)
      • Based on the bulky buteo shape, overall brown upperparts, the pale “checkerboard” pattern on the wings, and the strongly banded tail (common in young birds before they develop the classic red tail), this looks most consistent with a juvenile Red-tailed Hawk.
    • We do indeed have red-tailed hawks around here. It’s interesting that it ID’d a juvenile.
    • 15:00 Identify birds.
  • 18:00 LN: Claude Code
    • Installed on my PC because it promised to be able to work on local data
    • 20:00 Non-trivial install (at least for Windows – WSL, and then you’re running in an Ubuntu bash shell).
    • 21:10 Scenario 1: My Obsidian vault – all plain text (.md) files. I can now ask questions and run analyses across the entire collection of notes.
    • 24:00 Scenario 2a: My personal blog. Pointed it at leo.notenboom.org – did OK, but incomplete.
    • 25:00 Scenario 2b: exported by personal blog content from WordPress as an XML file. Dense, lots of cruft. Gave that to Claude and got a very complete, detailed analysis / summary of what I’ve been doing there since 2004.
    • 27:00 Scenario 3: downloaded the contents of 23 years of Ask Leo! Articles.
  • 38:00 GR: Ring Doorbell Superbowl Ad ?

Ain’t it Cool

BSP: Blatant Self-Promotion

Transcript

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