Hello awesome readers! I'm happy to announce my latest web game, My Little Mortal Combat, a mashup of two epic franchises, My Little Pony and Mortal Kombat. This began as an idea, just the name, that I recorded in Microsoft To Do in September of 2019. Yes, almost seven years ago. It sat there, at the bottom of my 'idea' list, until about a month ago when in the shower (not joking), it popped up in my head along with the basic mechanics of how the game would play.
While I didn't share it on the blog, last week I tasked Claude with using Electron to build a Markdown viewer app. It was part test (how well can Claude work with Electron) and part real need - I work with Markdown files all the time but didn't have a simple "view focused" application for it. I was sure there open source or paid app options out there, but I wanted my own. Claude did a pretty good job (you can see the source here) but one thing stood out to me - the size of the bundled app.
Back in January of this year, I blogged about on-device summarization of PDFs: Summarizing PDFs with On-Device AI . In that post, I made use of Chrome's Summary API and PDF.js to create summaries of PDFs completely within the browser. I thought I'd take a look at extending that demo into more document types, specifically Office. And even more specifically - Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Here's what I came up with.
Sorry for the lack of posting this month. I'm on the way back home from speaking at CodeStock so I've been on the road a bit, and work has been incredibly busy (which is good!) so my usual blog cadence has slipped a bit. Luckily I had a great question in my session on Chrome's Built-in AI which led to a bit of investigating last night. The question involved how well Chrome's AI could do OCR on an image. I had a demo in my presentation showing using AI to describe an image and another to generate a list of tags, but not one specifically for OCR. Here's what I found.
Happy "Three Days Before My Birthday Day"! Oh - yeah, and happy Easter too, but I'm personally a bit more excited about turning 53 as I've decided that's when I'm going to grow up and act like a mature adult. Probably. Maybe. We'll see. Now, if you, my lovely and incredibly intelligent reader, are feeling generous and you've gotten some good knowledge (or entertainment) from this blog, I'll use today's Links For You post to remind you of my Amazon Wishlist. Or even cheaper, leave me a comment below saying HBD - that's just as good. ;)
For the past month or so I've been obsessed with a book series that's apparently been popular and I just didn't realize - Dungeon Crawler Carl. Without giving too much away, it's basically about a person, and his glorious cat, who get caught up in a real world RPG. I'm currently on book 3 (of 8) and am enjoying every page of it. It's incredibly funny and cool at the same time. If you haven't checked it out yet, I highly recommend picking up the first book and giving it a shot. I don't think you'll regret it.
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