📦 Portable Internet,Create AI Images, and the Spore Creator Tool

Let the robots do the work

Jun 28, 2021

Hello!!!! Hope you’re doing well. How is it July already? 2021 just keeps speeding by . . .

I’ve got some good news this week. Our two-month-old son is finally sleeping - so I’m starting to feel rested again.

Did you hear the crazy news? John McAfee is dead - by suicide allegedly. Was he whacked? Was it all one big last prank to mess with people? Who knows.

Fun fact: He actually created a tiktok account with 4 strange TikToks - and the account has very few followers and views. Here’s the most normal video.

His Cryptocurrency “Ghost” website is still up! I wonder what else is still out there? What other McAfee projects are still swirling about?

Wild Stuff!

Anyway - let’s hop into today’s topics, shall we?

📦Portable Internet

I’ve always had a bit of an obsession with what tech might look like after the apocalypse. After all, as long as there’s power, electronic devices can still be charged. However, so much has become cloud focused that our phones can’t actually do that much without internet . . .

A lot of the developing world still doesn’t have reliable and fast internet service . . . and in places - there’s no internet at all.

That’s where “Internet-in-a-Box” comes in.

Internet-in-a-Box brings the power of a free Digital Library of Alexandria into the hands of any school, hospital, or community worldwide . . . Internet-in-a-Box brings the very best of the World’s Free Knowledge (Wikipedia, Khan Academy, OpenStreetMap, E-Books and many others) to those who are offline — e.g. anybody nearby with an old smartphone, tablet or laptop.

Here’s an example . . .

The Internet in a Box team recommends using a Raspberry Pi with a Wifi hotspot so it can be hooked up as an offline server/access point.

One Terabyte of ebooks, map data, Wikipedia, and other info provides an enormous benefit to people in areas without internet access. Here in the west, we take the answer to What is the capital of China or How far away is the grocery store for granted - Google and Siri are just a button away!

I remember as a kid I had a computer without internet - and the Encyclopedia Brittanica was my only source of knowledge. I was amazed by all the things I could study and look up!

I can only imagine the joy that kids would have reading an offline Wikipedia or reading books/studying. Knowledge is power, as they say . . .

Check out Internet in a Box at the link!

Internet in a Box

🤖Create AI Images

Remember that one issue where I was lementing that I couldn’t figure out how to generate AI images from my computer?

Well, I found a really neat way to do it . . . through Google . . . thanks to a cool Vaporwave Bandcamp musician that I follow!

DMT Tapes FL @DMTFL_

@producergf @argiflex these were made using VQGAN+CLIP. just type whatever you'd like to see in the Parameters section, hit Run All from the Runtime dropdown box, and the images will start pouring out.

colab.research.google.comGoogle Colaboratory

So, it took me a few minutes ot figure out how it works. Basically, you type in a phrase, and it starts generating AI images of whatever you type in . . . and they’re pretty crazy!

The page is in Spanish - Aqui es bueno porque yo puedo leer mas que yo puedo hablar - but it’s not too hard to figure out.

First, go to the Parameter section

Type in what you want to see. Then, go up to Runtime at the top of the page, and click Run all. Your images will start pumping out quickly.

Here’s a really trippy image I generated from “Vaporwave Pepsi.”

Wild right? Give it a try and see what it comes up with.

What will the AI say?

🖌Spore.Build: Creator Tool

Creator tools that “do it all” are hard to find these days. Everything tends to do one or two things, then you gotta hunt down another tool for the other things.

Spore promises to do it all - Memberships, Chat, Newsletters, SMS, host your podcast, Host your YT and IG content, and more.

To me, Spore.Build feels like the superior version of Linktree. For several years now, Linktree (and the other link landing pages) have served as the default social media tool for directing users to different channels.

Of course, the one issue inherent with this is that you’re usually directing people to multiple channels - and will people join the ones you want them to join?

You need people to join a channel that you control. You want them to lock themselves into your audience through email or their phone number.

Spore can solve that issue by putting all of your content into one nice place - and you can get them to join your site as a member. Join the newsletter so you don’t miss anything! Join the chat! Become a premium member and get exclusive content today. You get the idea . . .

Currently, it looks like it’s focused on creators who don’t want to spend hours learning Wordpress or other website platforms - there isn’t toooo much customizability. I imagine that will change.

However, the themes are clean and simple, and perfect for the creator who wants to monetize their audience without using Wordpress, Mailchimp, Stripe, Circle, and Zapier. You get the idea!

Check it out at the link!

Spore.Build

🐙The Land of Random

Randommmmmm Links forrrrr youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

Instamenu

This looks like the Shopify of Restaurants. If I owned a restaurant, I’d get on the beta for this . . . or at least invest in it. It looks dope!

Instamenu

24 Hour Homepage

Buy an ad on this website - where a new ad is diplayed every second of the day. It’s an interesting experiment - much like that website where you could buy pixels. I thought about it haha.

24 Hour Homepage

Figjam

I’ve played with most of the online whiteboard tools, - from Mural to Invision - and I have to say that Figjam is my personal favorite so far. Check it out! It’s super intuitave - and you can add people for live collaboration.

Figjam Whiteboard