Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Geek

AI Video Generation

Do you remember when Dall-E came out and people were amazed that you could generate a picture of a tomato driving a tractor? Those images were amazing at the time but already seem ancient in terms of quality and capability. That was only 4 years ago and now we’re well into examples of convincing AI generated video! Google Veo 3 is the latest video generation tool to make waves. Seeing is believing and while there are many examples floating around, I appreciated this video’s overview of what Veo 3 is an is not capable of.

As with all things AI, you have to remember that however you judge the quality today, it will be unimaginably better in 6-12 months.

Agentic AI Research

AI is transforming every aspect of life, but one very important area that I think we’re just starting to explore is how AI can speed up physical research. Specifically, you’ll hear the term “agentic AI” which basically means that the AI does more than just answer questions. It can, for example, execute some code to run an experiment or click buttons for you in various apps. All of that can sound vague, but a recent presentation about the new “Microsoft Discovery” platform is a solid example of this.

Before we get into that, have you heard of “PFAS” or maybe “forever chemicals”? Derek from Veritasium did a comprehensive overview of the problem recently.

My area of the company was exploring some extremely promising fluids that would revolutionize the way we cool datacenter computers, and while they were different enough to be safe from PFAS concerns, we stopped using them anyway.

But the problem still exists. How can we meet the ever-increasing demands for data center cooling? Enter the Microsoft Discovery platform. Using this AI tool, researchers were able to identify a new environmentally friendly coolant in just 200 hours instead of the years that it would normally have taken. Watch this 5 minute demo to see how it all worked:

It’s difficult to wrap our minds around the scale of progress here, but try to imagine this level of capability increase across ALL AREAS OF SCIENCE. These initially discoveries are just the first hints of the flood that is coming.

Century Link: A Year of Bad Customer Service

There are companies that have a seemingly permanent reputation for bad customer service. After the last 1+ years that I’ve spent battling with Century Link, I think they deserve a spot on the podium…

Our church was built in the late 1950s and only has telephone lines running to it. There weren’t any lines from the cable company so our only option for internet was DSL. We got 20 Mbps down and 2 Mbps up and that was all we could get. I’ve been responsible for our contracts at church for the last 10 years and Century Link was always a royal pain to deal with, but it started to escalate in October 2023.

October 30, 2023
Century Link said they could upgrade our service to 80 down, 10 up. That would be a big improvement for us so we decided to go for it.

November 22, 2023
Our appointment day finally arrived… and we were immediately stuck. The tech they sent said he wasn’t allowed to work on the ticket because we were installing internet for the church address but the service address on the account was for the house on the property where our pastor lives. The two addresses are different but it’s all one property.

November 27, 2023
Every time I called Century Link it took 30-60 minutes. Later in this process I started measuring the duration, but for now, just keep that in mind. The person I spoke to on the phone eventually said that they could not give us internet service at the church address even though it was fine at the address where the house is. So we were stuck. We had working internet that was apparently “illegal” according to their rules and depending on which tech showed up, we may or may not be able to get any service at all. It was time for a change.

December 2024
Over the next couple months we were able to switch to Comcast Business and the experience was glorious. They were excellent at communicating, the speeds were fantastic (100 down, 100 up), they ran a line to our property for free, and the bill was less than the old DSL line we had before.

February 12, 2024
I called to cancel our internet service with Century Link. We had to keep our two phone lines because fire code required that our fire alarm have two physical phone lines hooked up to it. So the new bill for two physical phone lines that we never use was going to be $117.33/month. Great.

March 19, 2024
I thought our service was canceled but we kept getting voicemails saying they needed to come out an shut off our internet service. These voicemails were extremely frustrating because they didn’t leave any number to call them back and when I’d call their customer support line, they didn’t know anything about it.

March 21, 2024
Our bill never went down to the new price and they still hadn’t been out to actually shut off the internet, but I was able to get them to prorate the bill so we wouldn’t pay for that service for the previous month.

May 7, 2024
I opened a case to report that we had no dialtone on our phone lines. We found out about this because our alarm system was unable to communicate and the problem started April 25.

May 10, 2024
I waited at church all day for a tech to show up. He never did. I spent the whole day at church waiting.

May 11, 2024
I called the number to reschedule the appointment. Apparently a tech was never assigned to my appointment on May 10 but I wasn’t notified.

May 13, 2024
I called to complain that we’re still paying for internet even though we asked for it to be cancelled three months ago. She said they couldn’t stop charging us for it until they sent out a tech out to shut it off but they couldn’t shut it off until the phone line issue was fixed.

May 14, 2024
A tech showed up at church to work on our phones so I dropped everything and drove over there. He determined that our lines were out because of vandalism. Someone had cut some of the main lines and the ticket would have to be transferred to another team that handles the main lines.

May 15, 2024 – 20 minutes
I called to see when the lines would be fixed. I got a new ticket number and was told that someone would come out on May 24. So yes, our business was going to be without phones for 9 more days.

May 24, 2024 – 15 minutes
I arrived at church at 7:45am for our “8am-5pm” service window and then got a text saying the window was now 12:30-4:30. Around 11:45am I got a text saying they were rescheduling and the website said the new date was June 3. I called again to complain but didn’t get much more information other than they were probably working on repairing the cut cable, but there was no way for me or the person I called to actually communicate with the team that does these repairs.

June 3, 2024
I sat at church from 8am to 12pm waiting for someone to show up. Nobody came. I called around noon to get more info and was told the new date was June 11.

June 11, 2024
They missed another appointment.

June 12, 2024
I called to get more info. The new date for my repair was June 14 and I would get a text message when it was fixed.

June 24, 2024 – 40 minutes
I called again and asked to be escalated to a supervisor. She didn’t have any additional information and said she would give me a call back on a regular basis to update me on the situation.

July 8, 2024 – 30 minutes
I hadn’t received any calls from that supervisor so I asked to be transferred to her. She wasn’t available so I left a message and she did call me back but there was no new information. She was going to look for more and call me back.

July 29, 2024
I called back and asked for the manager but he couldn’t find anybody by that name. The tech I spoke to was very friendly and said he feels bad because he gets a lot of calls like this from our area, but there wasn’t anything more he could do.

October 18, 2024
Every week or so, I’d get a text message saying that our service would definitely be repaired by a new date about a week in the future. All this time we were paying over $100/month for no service. We finally shut off autopay. Earlier we had found a new alarm company that new the fire codes better and was able to set us up with a cellular connection instead of the physical lines so we were finally free of Century Link.

October 29, 2024 – 74 minutes
Looking at all the money we had paid since we first reported the issue, I believed we were owed $529.97. I went through multiple people trying to cancel our service and get our money back and I eventually got transferred to a black hole after 32 minutes. So I called back and started over again. His math worked out to $512.09 and I figured that was close enough. He said I would get a billing statement showing the credit and then a few weeks later we’ll get the check.

December 3, 2024
Our November bill showed a credit of $297.47 with no mention of what happened to the original $512.09 number or the $529.97 that we had actually paid. The website does show that our account is finally closed but we still have not received the check.

January 9, 2025 – 8 minutes
I’m saving time on these calls by recording my path through the phone tree. It normally takes about 6 minutes to get to a human but I’m able to save a lot of time by knowing which numbers to press. The person said our credit hadn’t been released yet. She put in another request and I should wait another 60 days to get the check.

March 17, 2025
Still no check. I called again and was told the check should arrive within 30 days.

April 5, 2025
The check finally arrived.

How does a company like this even stay in business? Throughout the whole thing, the only time I ever spoke to the same person twice was when I had a couple calls in a row with the same supervisor. Every person that answered the phone would infuriatingly say “I’m going to do my best to own your experience today.” That clearly wasn’t true. They just wanted a good survey result at the end. I lost so much time and sleep over this experience and sometimes I wonder if the lines are still broken even today.

Ultimately I’m very thankful that we moved to Comcast internet right before the problems started with a lack of dialtone and I’m also super thankful that we were able to move our alarm system to the cellular monitoring.

Walnut Desk Upgrade

When work sent us home in March 2020 but before all the COVID lockdowns were in place, I quickly pulled the trigger on a standing desk purchase that I had been considering for a while. I’m so thankful that I did since they were hard to find for a while and prices went up a lot. I’ve reviewed the functionality of my VertiDesk before, but after 5 years, it’s time to talk about aesthetics.

I initially slapped a 3/4″ piece of pine plywood on top with a little bit of edge banding and some light attempts at cable management. It worked fine but it was never what I wanted and as with most desk areas, the surface got cluttered and the cables procreated. It also doesn’t help that in addition to my desktop with two monitors, I also have a laptop with a docking station connected via KVM, but I also have a second laptop from work that gets used most days too.

When I built the nightstand, I carefully planned out the walnut plywood usage so that I’d have a piece leftover that was just about the desired size of my desk. I added some ~1/4″ strips of walnut as edge banding and used multiple coats of General Finishes Arm-R-Seal Oil Based Topcoat in semi-gloss to make it look real purdy. Then I had to let the whole project sit for about a month. The instructions on the can note that you shouldn’t set anything heavy on the finish until it fully cures in 30 days. I was busy anyway, so I decided to wait the full period.

As I removed everything from my desk, I was surprised to see the giant pile that it produced, but I was finally able to get it cleaned off and then attach the new desk. While I had it upside down, I mounted some power strips and a cable management solution from Flexispot. As I put everything back in place, I paid a lot of attention to what cables needed to run down to the floor and what could stay up on the desk. I even 3D printed a holder for my thunderbolt dock so I could keep it on the bottom of the desk surface.

When I built the desk, I also built a small platform for the center monitor and spent way too long designing custom honeycomb 3D printed risers that no one will ever see. This was the perfect height to hide the mess of cables associated with my KVM switch, SD card reader, etc. Now I just see the front of the switch poking out and I can easily click the button to switch back and forth between my machines.

I’m very happy with the end result. That Flexispot cable management system is a major upgrade. I can easily add more cables in the future and remove ones that are already in place. They hold a massive amount of wiring and even some power bricks as well. There is still a small pile of wires on the ground for the battery backup and network switch that I need to clean up, but this is one of those projects that will always have “one more thing” that I can improve.

Simplify Your Windows Reinstall

Reinstalling an OS feels like it should be painful and scary. I’m going to lose files. I’m going to spend hours booting into safe mode and looking for drivers. I’m going to forget some apps. So when my computer got stuck on Windows Update and couldn’t update to the latest version (24H2), I wasn’t excited, but I finally bit the bullet and completely reset the machine. But in keeping with my previous post, I chatted with Copilot first about some ideas to make the process smoother. These aren’t going to be general purpose tips, but if you’re not intimated by a command prompt, I bet this will save you some time.

Before I reset anything, I did my usual application list checks and file backups. But then I did two additional steps.

  1. Have you learned the glory of winget yet? It lets you install any Windows Store app from the command line. I’ll be honest… I hardly ever installed stuff through the Windows Store, but once I found this app, I was hooked! I regularly reset my machines at work and we have a team script that automatically installs most of the apps that we will need. In my chat with Copilot, I learned that winget is even cooler than I thought: you can export a list of all your installed apps and then import it later! “winget list” will give you a nice table showing all the apps and whether they are in the store or not. “winget export” will dump a json file of all the Windows Store apps on your machine and then you can use “winget import” to reinstall them. If you run the import from an admin command prompt and use “–accept-source-agreements –accept-package-agreements” then the whole thing is silent. I installed 22 apps with a single command!
  2. Driver installs are much better than they used to be, but I still worry about missing something, especially since I built this PC myself and I can’t just go to a website and download all the drivers for it. But it turns out that you can easily list and back up all your drivers with these three commands. I didn’t test the reinstall part because Windows was able to find everything, but it’s nice to know that I had a backup plan.
    • List them all: driverquery /FO LIST /V > C:\DriverList.txt
    • Back them up: dism /online /export-driver /destination:C:\DriverBackup
    • Reinstall from backup: pnputil /add-driver C:\DriverBackup\*.inf /subdirs /install

Resetting Windows is so easy these days! It’s done right from the settings app and you can choose to refresh or completely wipe and start over. I did the latter since I wasn’t sure exactly what was keeping me from updating. That put me on 23H2 again and I wasn’t immediately being offered 24H2 so I forced it with the Windows 11 Installation Assistant.

I still had to reinstall a bunch of apps that weren’t in the Windows store, but everything up to that point was a breeze and went amazingly quickly. Of course, having a solid backup strategy is critical to an operation like this. I knew that I had multiple copies of all my data in case anything went wrong. Using OneDrive to backup your Desktop, Photos, Documents, etc is a great way to do have this happen by default.

So I don’t know who this post will benefit, but I wanted to celebrate how easy this reinstall was!

GPS For Your Brain

I’ve written posts about how LLMs (large language models like ChatGPT, Copilot, etc) are changing my life, but I continue to have conversations with people who are hesitant about it. It seems like it takes that one “aha!” experience where to help someone internalize how this will revolutionize something in their daily routine. So here’s another post where I’ll share a bunch of examples of how I use it to see if any of them trigger for you. Once you get it into your daily flow, it becomes like GPS for your brain. It doesn’t replace you in anything, but it enhances your abilities dramatically. Just like I wouldn’t drive somewhere with a paper atlas anymore, I’d be left behind in life if I wasn’t using AI.

  1. Argue Against Me. Humans love to have their own beliefs reinforced, but true learning happens when you can really understand the opposite viewpoint. AI is great for this. I’ll open up a prompt and explain my viewpoint and then say “Give me some logical arguments from the opposite point of view.” It’s very eye-opening. It’s how I wish all discussions would go but with AI, it’s a lot easier to get non-emotional responses.
  2. Coding. There’s a lot of talk about using AI for coding. I code for a living so obviously I’m interested in whether AI is going to come for my job. I currently find it to be fantastic for small, self-contained problems like “write me a powershell script to do x, y, and z” but it’s not as good at “This class feels unnecessary to me. Rearchitect this project to clean it up.” I’ll keep trying the more advanced scenarios though because it improves so rapidly. If you’re interested in this topic, I recommend checking out this article: How AI-assisted coding will change software engineering: hard truths
  3. Command Line Arguments. I guess this is related to coding, but sometimes I find myself using a command line tool with a ton of different arguments. Instead of reading the documentation, I’ll just say “I’m using ytdlp and I want to download only the audio of this video and I want it saved to mp3 format. Generate the command line arguments that I need.” Bingo!
  4. Explain like I’m 5, 10, and 15 years old. When I get curious about a new area, I’m not sure how much I know, so I’ll ask AI something like “I’m curious about quantum entanglement. Give me separate explanations like I’m a 5, 10, and 15 years old.” The numbers might vary, but something like that will help me get quickly up to speed and lets me ask much more specific questions as I continue to learn. It’s awesome to be able to ask dumb questions in a private environment!
  5. Sermon Summaries. Each Sunday I’m responsible for posting sermons from our church services on Facebook and YouTube. I like to include a quick blurb about the sermon and I’ve been experimenting with AI for this. I take the automatically generated transcript of the sermon, feed it into AI, and then ask for a 2-3 sentence summary in the style of the speaker. That “in the style of the speaker” phrase is a key piece of the prompt. It produces a much more natural sounding blurb. I still have to review it for theological accuracy and sometimes I’ll even give it more prompting about what type of source theology is acceptable, but in general, it’s a very solid start and much more eloquent than I would have generated on my own. And even if I could have written something good, using an automated solution like this is a lot easier for someone else to repeat.
  6. Bible Study Companion. During our Bible studies at church, I’ve been typing the questions in and seeing what AI thinks about the answers. “What does placing Ruth in the line of the savior tell us about God’s salvation plan?” I read through the answers and it’s usually a cheat sheet for all the answers that the group will give. Every once in a while they miss one that I think is relevant and I can share it with the group. Now obviously this loses part of the self-reflection benefit of Bible study, but as someone who sometimes finds themselves leading the study, it feels good to have a tool like this in my back pocket.
  7. Homework Helper. Sometimes I have a hard time explaining concepts to Elijah either because I’m unable to formulate it in a way he grasps or because we’re not working well together. In both cases, I fire up the voice version of an AI and have Elijah chat with it. Even if the AI explains it the same way I was, it usually goes over better.

Those are just some examples from my daily life, but there are other awesome ideas too. How about using it to learn a dying language and then safeguard it for the future? And this next example isn’t specifically related to LLMs, but imagine AI training to speak in the voice of someone who has lost their voice to disease? Now their text to speech actually sounds like them. We’re just starting to discover all the possibilities.

These topics come up in a lot of podcasts, but one good one I listened to recently was an interview with Reid Hoffman who recently wrote a book called Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future. You can listen to the episode here: Unlocking AI’s Potential: Reid Hoffman Discusses ‘Superagency’. I got the “GPS for your brain” quote from that episode.

So if you tried AI once and it gave you a dumb answer or didn’t work for you, don’t give up. One piece of advice is to use the voice version of the AI and just talk to it. That can feel a lot more natural. Or if you want to chat via text but aren’t getting good answers, there’s a whole school of knowledge called “prompt engineering” which is about how to craft the right types of questions. As an example, one thing I hear at church a lot is “AI gives me too much reformed theology.” Sure, maybe it does by default because that makes up a lot of the theological material on the internet. But you could also start your prompt with something like the following:

Serve as an AI theologian with a primary focus on interpreting and teaching Christian doctrines based solely on the Bible as the ultimate source of truth. Use the creeds of Christianity (such as the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian creeds) as supporting documents to clarify key doctrines. Supplement interpretations with insights from faith leaders, especially Martin Luther, whose writings emphasize justification by grace through faith and the authority of Scripture. Maintain a Christ-centered perspective throughout all discussions, ensuring that interpretations align with a literal and historical reading of the Scriptures.

You’ll get a much better response from that prompt! Also, there’s a “think deeper” button in many of the tools now. This helps apply an iterative response to the AI’s response which takes a little longer but can give better results. And while I still use mostly free tools, remember that the free option you’re using is old tech. If you want the latest and greatest, you’ll need to explore the paid options.

Need some links to get started? Here’s my current list ordered by most frequently used first:

Migrating Off MailStore Home

I’ve been a happy user of MailStore Home for years. It lets me easily archive mail off of my various email accounts, store it locally, and still easily search it all. (I’m probably paranoid, but I don’t like having years of my personal emails stored on free email services.)

Due to some security changes and lack of support from MailStore, my Outlook.com accounts no longer work with their tool. It’s hard to complain too much when I’m using a free tool. They make their money from corporate customers. So I was off to search for something else.

There are lots of other options, but I kept seeing people recommend Thunderbird which is the email client from the Mozilla Foundation (makers of the Firefox browser.) I was able to export all my emails from MailStore to EML files and then import them into Thunderbird. It will take me a while to get used to the search interface, but functionally I’m back on track. I don’t like the interface enough to switch from my regular email client to just using Thunderbird, but it’s easy enough to open Thunderbird every once in a while and archive some emails from my various accounts to my local folders.

So if I’ve previously recommended MailStore to you as a way to archive your email locally, my new recommendation is Thunderbird. It’s a nice way to have access to all my old emails without letting companies scrape through my content. If you don’t care about that and if you don’t run out of space on your free email accounts, then you can ignore all this.

ChatGPT Plus Media Consumption

I use Bing Copilot every day. The more I use it, the more I figure out how I could use it. But I still meet people who say they’ve never tried it, so I’m going to share an example that I think almost everyone runs into.

Let’s say that season 3 of a TV show came out or the latest book in a series, but I consumed the last one over a year ago and only have a vague memory of how it ended. I used to try to carefully find a website that would help me get caught up without spoiling things, but even if I get spoiled once in a while, that’s still too much. Bing Copilot (or ChatGPT or whatever LLM you favor) is a great to use in this situation. I open a prompt and say something like this:

“I’ve read the first five Terminal List books, but I’m about to start book six and I want to be reminded of what happened previously. Recap the first five books with an emphasis on the fifth book but do not tell me anything about the sixth book.”

That’s it. A couple seconds later I have the answer. It doesn’t take many experiences like this before you start to realize all the other times you could be using it too!

Sports Streaming Costs

I haven’t regretted cutting cable in 2018. We’ve saved well over $3000 by not having that bill. I thought I’d miss it for sports, but honestly, I found that I was happy not watching as many random sports. Rather, I found specific sports I wanted to watch and paid for their streaming services. It’s interesting how much the price of those services vary though! I did some research to try to figure out how much it would cost to stream various sports leagues. I expect this will be out of date even before I finish researching it.

SportFull Season CostComment
Formula 1$85If you watch the races delayed by a day or two it’s only $30.
NFL$350 (out of market games)
$400 (in market games)
Out of market through NFL RedZone and in-market through Fubo for 5 months.

NFL+ is an interesting option too for only $40/year. You get access to replays of every game shortly after it ends plus live local games, but it’s only on a mobile app.
MLB$130 (out of market games)
$480 (in market games)
Out of market through MLB+ and in-market through Fubo for 6 months.
NBA$150 (out of market games)
$480 (in market games)
Out of market through NBA Leage Pass and in-market through Fubo for 6 months.
NHL$70 (out of market games)
$560 (in market games)
Out of market games through ESPN+ and in-market through Fubo for 7 months.
MLS$199All games through MLS Season Pass add on to Apple TV Plus. This price includes 10 months of Apple TV Plus.
Golf$960All events through the Golf Channel on Fubo for 12 months
NASCAR$800All events through Fubo for 10 months
Disc Golf$130Alternatively, you can watch many of the events for free with commentary on Jomez Pro’s YouTube channel.
MotoGP$135All events through MotoGP VideoPass

Existing laws and contracts make it difficult to stream the major US sports because in almost all cases, in-market games are not available on the league’s streaming service. That requires you to buy into something like FuboTV which is combines all the braodcast and cable sports channels. Alternatively you might be able to use an antenna to catch your local games as long as they are on a broadcast channel. Leagues that completely control their TV writes are in a much better position (F1, MotoGP, MLS, etc.)

I currently pay for the F1 TV package and then I watch disc golf tournaments for free on YouTube. Every once in a while I’ll toss in a Seahawks game recorded from our antenna or a Purdue basketball game streamed on our free (through Comcast with ads) Peacock subscription.

A big key in all this is deciding whether you want all the games in the whole league, all of the games for your favorite local team, or just some random sports to have on in the background while you take a nap. The prices for those three can vary wildly.

Trakt.tv

Now that pretty much all entertainment is available to be streamed at a moment’s notice, it has become increasingly hard to keep track of what we have watched. We also try to only have one streaming service at a time so when we switch to a new one, we’ll sometimes stop in the middle of a season. I started keeping track of this in the Just Watch app but it bothered me that the data was not exportable from their app. Enter trakt.tv.

Trakt.tv is a platform specifically for this purpose. Anyone can make an app on top of their database so you just make one account with them and then pick whichever app you like the best. You’re in full control of your data.

I ended up paying for a year of “VIP” service which, among other things, removes adds and lets me see which services are streaming a specific show. We’ve had it for a few months now and I expect we’ll keep paying for it. (Note that they do have a free option which is very good too.)