Scott Meyers' Activities and Interests
Upshot: My EV options remain lousy, they'll probably get worse, and AI chatbots are still terrible search assistants. This post ended up so much longer than I expected! Here are the subtopics: Me and the compact SUV EV landscape Driver Monitoring Systems and the false positive problem 2026 convertible EV overview AI chatbots as EV search assistants Using chatbots to generate an image for this…
While digitizing my analog videotapes, I came across a short 1989 demo by Bill Gaver of his SonicFinder™, an interesting piece of early work on audio in user interfaces. It's easy to find online copies of research papers describing The SonicFinder™, but I was surprised to find that the Internet doesn't seem to offer anything like the video demo I have. That's a shame, because hearing audio and…
After more than a decade storing photos and videos in iCloud, I decided to download my stuff to my PC and delete the copies at Apple. I figured I'd log into iCloud using my web browser, click the Download link, wait a while for the eighty-plus gigabytes to make their way to my computer, delete the cloud copies, and be done with it. It didn't work out that way. What I expected to take a few minutes…
A few years ago, I published a series on metadata in image files with a focus on old slides and photos that had been scanned. I've since turned my attention to metadata for video files, because I had a number of old home movies digitized. I assumed that most of what I'd learned about image file metadata would apply. I also assumed that because widespread consumer use of digital video came after…
It's been more than two years since I last looked into the availability of all-electric convertibles , so I thought I'd do a quick check to see where things stand now. Here's a rundown (in alphabetical order) on the models I mentioned in that post, plus a couple of others I've added since then: Fisker Ronin : Fisker went bankrupt . Genesis X Convertible : Still a concept car with no production…
For six years, I've been in the market for an electric compact SUV. I haven't yet found one with the features I want at a price I'm willing to pay. (As a rule, missing features have been a bigger impediment than price.) My last review took place about a year ago , so I decided it was time to look again. This time I experimented with seven LLM-based chatbots as search assistants. I gave each the…
Finding an Old TV Episode I recently found myself wondering about a TV episode I saw decades ago. I had only the haziest memory of it, so I threw this at Gemini : I'm looking for an episode from the original TV show The Outer Limits or The Twilight Zone. The story is about a man with a robotic hand that he has to add fingers to in order to increase its ability to help him figure out what is…
Yesterday I published the results of my latest testing of German grammar checking systems . Unlike my first round of tests, I included LLMs, in particular ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot. I had a nagging feeling that I should include Anthropic's Claude , too, but I didn't find out about Claude until near the end of my testing, and I wanted to be finished, so I decided to worry about Claude later.…
Update: I have since added Anthropic's Claude to my tested systems, and it outperformed every system I discuss below. Details here . A couple of months ago, I blogged about how I'd (superficially) tested a number of grammar checking tools for German. A comment from jbridge introduced me to the idea of using ChatGPT as a grammar checker, and in the course of exploring that option, I expanded my set…
In March, I decided to move from Windows to Mac. My goal was texting on the desktop, i.e., texting via my computer. Many people insist on texting, and I was able to communicate with them only through my iPhone. I wanted to be able to do it using my computer, as I did with email and WhatsApp. Changing operating systems is always a production, but in thirty-plus years with Windows, I had never…
Five years ago this week my search for an electric compact SUV ended with me buying a conventional gas-powered car. I disliked the car (a Nissan Rogue) within a month after buying it, and I've been on the lookout for an electric replacement ever since. Over the years, I've vented my frustrations with the EV market in a number of blog posts, sometimes focusing on their high cost and sometimes on…
I can speak some German. I'll never be fluent, but I can usually get by. Sadly, I make a lot of grammatical errors. It'd be nice to have a tool that could help me find and eliminate them. Syntax and grammar are structured things, seemingly tailor-made for algorithmic analysis. Surely there is software that can analyze my sentences, point out places where I've broken the rules, and tell me how to…
I like to travel. I've been a few places. I have a map on the wall with pins where I've been. Old School, but I started it before the Internet existed. I'd like to move it into the digital era. Looking into that led me to Most Traveled People (MTP) and NomadMania (NM). Both offer the ability to generate maps of places visited based on data you enter. I tried both. The NM data entry process was so…
Some years ago, I got it into my head that just as there are cookie cutters for cookies, there should be pie cutters for pumpkin pie. I bought the deepest tree-shaped cookie cutters I could find, thinking I could stack them and produce festive pie pieces for a holiday party. It didn't go as planned. I couldn't get the stacking to work, and the result of using just one cutter was kind of a…
More than three years ago, I blogged about EVs being luxury goods . Some 13 months ago, I showed that the Nissan Ariya--the only electric compact SUV with the basic features I demand (all-wheel drive, an openable moonroof, a 360-degree camera, and an EPA range of at least 235 miles)--came with a 52% price premium vis-a-vis a comparable gas-powered Nissan Rogue. That difference put the Ariya…
You're tootling down the road using a navigation app connected to your car's infotainment system, and you're approaching a turn in the route. You've enabled voice navigation, so the app should use your car's audio to tell you what to do. But what if the audio system is already in use? What should happen if your nav app and another audio source want to use your car's audio system at the same time?…
This is part 7 of my series on metadata for scanned pictures. Part 1: The Scanned Image Metadata Project Part 2: Standards, Guidelines, and ExifTool Part 3: Dealing with Timestamps Part 4: My Approach Part 5: Viewing What I Wrote Part 6: The Metadata Removal Problem Part 7: Thoughts after 4000+ Scans (this post) In January 2022, I explained in parts 1-4 of this series why and how I store metadata…
Today marks exactly four years since my search for a little EV convertible ended with my purchasing a gas-powered Miata. If I were starting my search today, it'd end the same way. For the American market in 2019, there were no electric models to choose from. There are none to choose from now. It's a little different in Europe. (I don't know about the rest of the world.) Even in 2019, the Smart…
On this day four years ago, my search for an electric compact SUV ended with the purchase of a gasoline-powered car. During the time of my search, there was only one compact SUV EV available . It was prohibitively expensive and lacked features I consider essential. Two years later, more affordable options had come to market, but nothing offered the basic features I want : all-wheel drive, a…
I read a lot of articles about EVs (electric vehicles). The writers of these articles commonly assume that if a car qualifies for the full $7,500 federal tax credit, the effective purchase price drops by that amount. A recent post by Inside EVs is typical: The 2023 Volkswagen ID.4 is eligible for the full $7,500 federal tax credit. ... The 62-kWh battery version starts at an MSRP of $38,995…
In October 2015, I found myself behind the wheel of a rental car in Bucharest, Romania. I was frantic, lost, and getting loster. My plan to drive from the rental location to my nearby hotel had gone south the instant I left the parking lot. The sea of cars prevented me from making the turns I wanted, and in less than a minute, I was lost, helplessly flowing with traffic in a city I'd never been…
For years, I've dreamed of a vine-covered pergola ablaze with flowers, something like this (snatched from here ): In 2020, I decided to look into making this a reality. Pergolas are not hard to build. As Dave Berry might say, you can throw a pile of lumber on the ground, and it will form a pergola. You just put up the posts, attach the beams, put the rafters on top of those, and cap the whole…
Part 1 of my report on this project is here . Just as creation of the artwork for my Beardsley dinnerware took longer and was more difficult than I'd anticipated, production of the dishes was also unexpectedly challenging. Without the extraordinary commitment of Enduring Images (the company who made the dishware), I'd still be looking at mockups on a computer instead of dinnerware on a table.…
This is part 4 of a series about my designs for stained glass window panels. Part 1: The eclipse panel Part 2: The book data panel Part 3: The hummingbird feathers panel Part 4: The dichro panel (this post) In parts 1-3 of this series, I described stained glass panels I designed for transom windows above doors. My fourth panel was for a window on a wall above a stairwell. It was nearly five times…
This is part 3 of a series about my designs for stained glass window panels. Part 1: The eclipse panel Part 2: The book data panel Part 3: The hummingbird feathers panel (this post) Part 4: The dichro panel I started design work on my third transom window panel even before the second panel had been delivered. My goal was something dog-related. The initial mockup was intended to depict a wagging…