Returning a Temu purchase: the one thing you must know, DALL-E 3 images in ChatGPT, Apple push notifications
Plus a 90-year-old YouTuber, what keeps ancient buildings standing, a fun David Tennant skit, and even more
I’m David Gewirtz. Welcome to this week’s Advanced Geekery newsletter. This is an exciting issue. Let’s dive in.
My articles
Let’s kick it off with a quick recap of the articles I published in the last week on ZDNET:
I tried to return something to Temu. Here's what happened: Wondering whether you can return your Temu purchases? You can as long as you follow a few important rules.
Developers get more iOS metrics as Apple enhances its Push Notification Console: Introduced this year at WWDC, Apple's Push Notification Console is a powerful tool for incorporating notifications into apps. This week, Apple is adding the ability to track aggregated metrics for an app's notifications.
DALL-E 3 in ChatGPT Plus is helpful but also gave me images of laptops from 1900: Need quick, quality images for presentations? See how DALL-E 3 in ChatGPT could be a convenient, if occasionally tricky, solution.
What’s particularly funny about that last article is that DALL-E got a bit confused when assigning dates to when some laptops were created, claiming a few came from the year 1900.
That article had a particular discussion arc, which I didn’t want to derail with more DALL-E prompting experiments. But I later had fun with the idea of what a laptop from 1900 could really look like. Here’s what DALL-E gave me:
Given the technology available in the year 1900, draw a picture of a laptop computer that might have existed using that technology
I don’t know about you, but I’d love a laptop that looks like that. It might not even be that hard to make. The fancy filigree stuff could be carved with a laser cutter. The keys could be keycap replacements. The corners could be resin 3D printed and painted. And the display could be a notepad app with a script font. What do you think? Anyone out there want to try making one? Let us know in the comments below.
Counterterrorism Magazine
Many of you might not know that I write the Digital Defense column for Counterterrorism Magazine and have been doing so for the past 15 years (from even before ZDNET). It’s a publication targeted to security professionals in government agencies and homeland security. Here’s my latest column:
Unfortunately, it is behind a paywall and you have to be an active security professional to qualify for access, but I figured you might want a peek into a less publicly visible side of my work.
Must-watch YouTube
Moving on, let’s queue up some interesting YouTube videos for your entertainment and edification.
Check out this short video by Aleen Wilson, a former chemistry professor who’s starting a YouTube channel at age 90. You want inspiration? We got your inspiration right here.
Next, I wanted to share a fun skit between Doctor Who’s David Tennant and Catherine Tate. If you’re a fan, you’ll enjoy this more than slightly bonkers look into one teacher’s classroom.
For this week’s musical number, check out this guy doing the entire orchestra behind the Indiana Jones theme all by himself. I’ll probably spotlight more of his stuff, because he voices everything. The recording and video editing behind something like this must be quite the effort. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s available for stream, at least for now.
Interesting reads
Here’s some good stuff from around the Internet, well worth reading.
Pets are wonderful. A Virginia woman was feeling sad. Her doctor prescribed her a cat.
Want to know what keeps ancient Roman and Mayan buildings standing? The AP has a report on the scientists researching the robust building techniques of the ancients.
One of my favorite classic movies is Colossus: The Forbin Project. IGN writes a story about this early look at AI. What IGN doesn’t mention is that Colussis was a series of three books (and yes, I have read all three). It was definitely one of the things that inspired me to some of my early academic AI research way back in the day. Every so often, I rewatch the movie, and while it’s clearly dated, it’s also surprisingly on target, especially given the AI boom we’ve been seeing this year.
More clicky
I’ve got a lot happening all over the web. Here are links to my various stuff:
House of the Head: home for my published music
ZATZ Labs: where I host my published software projects
Feel free to dig around, visit, and say hey!
Reader projects
I’d like to regularly spotlight a reader project or two here. If you have a photogenic reader project, send an email to me at david@zatz.com with the subject “READER PROJECT,” a few pictures, and a short one-paragraph description. If you have a social media link or a link to the project, include that, too.
Leave some comments
Substack supports comments, so feel free to leave some. I promise to read them. Just, please, let’s keep our personal politics out of any discussion.
That should do it for this week. This newsletter is really starting to pick up subscribers. Please help it out by sharing links on all your socials.
Have a great week!