mike tatum

Category: Status Update

  • Photography School and Tools

    Photography School and Tools

    Since I’ve decided to get back into photography this year, I picked up where I left off by brushing off my Minolta SRT-201 that I used in college for my photojournalism classes. Even when I got it in college, it was already “old”, so now it’s a freaking antique. Having been an early adopter of digital cameras, specifically point and shoots which are oddly back in fashion with Gen Z, I hadn’t touched that camera or any other film cameras since the late 90s. In yet another example of how technology has made me lazy and dumb, I quickly realized I have forgotten most of my training on F-Stops, apertures, and ISO. So I’ve brushed up on photography basics by watching photography videos on YouTube which I’ve put into a playlist called Photography School.

    As for my camera, I’ve been carrying it around in a LowePro waist bag that’s hilariously 90’s retro with a number of lenses in it. Somewhere over the years and the moves, some pieces got knocked loose as there is a shutter speed strip blocking the viewfinder. I briefly thought about taking it apart and cleaning it, but this thorough video on cleaning and repairing the Minolta 201 convinced me I had neither the time nor willpower to make that move. Luckily, I live near a camera store focused on film cameras that could repair it called Seawood Photo. I should get the camera back in a few weeks cleaned and hopefully in great working order. Inside the waist bag, I also found a roll of undeveloped black and white film that Seawood is going to develop. I have no idea what is on it but I probably shot it in the spring of 1994. No telling what’s in that time capsule, but I’ll post whatever comes back next week as I wait for the camera to be repaired.

    One of the things I love most about getting into (or back into) a hobby is falling into these deep niches. The places where some insanely smart person has spent hours transferring this arcane knowledge they’ve acquired over years into a 25-minute video with ~12k views uploaded in 2009. It feels like finding a dusty old book on the library shelf that’s out of print. I also love finding the shop where there’s one person who kept up their craft over the decades when it was out of fashion to end up being “one of the last remaining people in the area who knows how to fix (film cameras, turntables, etc)”. In a world of instant access and automated everything, it is great to find people who still know how to use tools and apply them to an analog trade.

    Speaking of tools, I have a terrible habit of buying a bunch of stuff early in the discovery phase of a new hobby. I have a garage littered with stuff I bought online that I “needed” to get into coffee roasting, archery, weight lifting, or whatever hobby I was excited to learn about at the time. This time, I’m trying to buy as few things as possible. I want to let the constraints drive creativity and resourcefulness, which is the harder and longer way to learn – not my usual M.O.

    Luckily, I unexpectedly found some reinforcement of that idea as I was going through my YouTube photography learning journey. It came from Cody Mitchell who has spent the last few years in his van being a professional YouTuber focused on photography. After finding his video on “How to Meter for Film Photography“, I watched his video “Filmmaker fits ENTIRE STUDIO in a Camper Van”. After seventeen minutes of going through all the work he has put into his van “Ynez” and how he’s been living in and creating out of it, he ends with a look back on how the space and tool limitations of van living have made him a better photographer. I recommend watching the whole video, but at least watch the last section where he talks about constraints. I found it highly inspirational and applicable to all new creative endeavors.

  • Town Squares

    Town Squares

    Elon Musk and his “gang” celebrating taking over Twitter this month. Jason Calcanis is the dude in the white jacket with the dance hands, right?

    If Twitter is a “town square”, then the last month has been like a western movie where some bad guy and his band of hoods rode into Twitter Town, bought it and the locals freaked the f&%k out. Many of us have fled to the dense woods of Mastodon or opted for the sparsely regulated “free town” of Hive. Some of us are waiting for access to the new gated communities of Post.news or Cohost. While others have regulated to posting only on Instagram, the “Vegas Strip of social”. Even old social ghost towns like Tumbler who promise to adopt the Activitypub protocol are getting new signups from the Twitter fallout.

    Oblivious to all of this drama are the twelve remaining friends I have who keep using Facebook and my kids who use TikTok.

    The point is that there have always been a bunch of “town squares” on the internet, and gloriously, it seems like we’re going to get even more of them. I’ve long been down for decentralization and going back to smaller communities where maybe things aren’t so dissonating and hateful. So has my friend Ben Brown who has been literally going back in time to set up a community using the 70’s era Finger protocol to let people self-publish and network over at HappyNetBox. As we were texting yesterday(80’s protocol!), we joked that what’s happening now feels more like a real web 3.0 moment as compared to the blockchain/crypto hype, but we’ll probably have to call it “web 4.0” because…. I dunno, just to make sure federated identity and communities are not conflated with the crypto meltdown? Whatever is driving this sudden burst of interest in decentralized and federated technology is going to create a lot of interesting new communities and products. It’s a good time to get in and check out these nascent communities and products, which is what I’m doing.

    Image by Per Axbom on all the apps using Activitypub in the “fediverse”.

    Here’s what I’m doing

    I’ve decided to mostly publish my content on this blog, then have it echo out into all the places. Here’s what I’ve done so far:

    1. I added the WordPress Activitypub plugin to this blog, so that @mt@miketatum.com serves as my publishing feed for Mastodon or any other platform that uses ActivityPub. I still use RSS too, even though I crapped on it 10 years or so ago. (Sorry, Dave, I was wrong.)
    2. I set up Jetpack to auto-post to Twitter, Linkedin and thinking about adding Facebook. Just not sure that my Facebook friends will get as excited about my once-a-year posts on activitypub, music recommendations, or other assorted nerdom that compels me to write.
    3. I used TweetDelete to delete all my old tweets, which I’ve done for the second time over the last 16 years. I know that’s maybe bad form and I never tweeted or retweeted something I was ashamed of. It’s more that it’s my work and I don’t want it there anymore. I’ll just post links to it that redirect here or one of the other places where I choose to publish content that I own and control.
    4. I did set up my own Mastodon server at social.workbus.com using this guide at DigitalOcean. I did it because it just feels weird to start a community under my own name.
    5. I downloaded the Mastodon app for iOS and try to make a habit of checking it before Twitter. It’s actually a really well-done app and fairly easy to follow new people once you have a few people followed who point to other people. There’s also Fedifinder that will help you find the people who have already migrated over. That said, it does have some wonky features that take some getting used to. See the screen recording below…be sure to wait for it:
    I thought the Mastodon app was broken, but turns out this is how it handles a long post that is “hidden” due to sensitive content.

    I’ll update the site as I see how this system evolves. It’s a bit kludgy trying to figure out how to publish once and disseminate everywhere, but I kind of like that. A lot of the interesting stuff starts that way.

    So start your own town, er, Mastodon server, or join mine. Or build a site or app that uses Activitypub. Just because some dude bought your favorite online hangout doesn’t mean you have to put up with their nonsense. I’m kind of excited about web tech for the first time in a long time.

    Also, follow me on Mastodon if you’re already there.

    Post updated for grammar and clarification on 11/29.

  • Announcing Tasted!

    Regan Burns Cafiso, our Head of Content Strategy, doing a demo of Tasted

    I wanted to give a bit of an update on a product I’ve been working on for the last year. Today, our company Pylon ai is launching a new conversational media brand called Tasted. Tasted wants to be your cooking companion that helps you discover great recipes and walk you step-by-step through preparation. You can try it today by asking your Alexa to “Enable Tasted”; or on Google Home say “Open Tasted”.

    Tasted is a multimodal (that means you can use either your voice or hands to interact with it), cross-platform (that means it will know who you are whether you use it on Alexa, Google Home, Cortana, Slack, FB Messenger, etc) cooking companion service.

    Pylon ai (just “Pylon” for short) was started last year with my friend, mentor and co-founder Shelby Bonnie. We started Pylon because we are very excited about conversational ai products and want to be part of the new wave of companies defining this new type of media. Having lived through major platform shifts like the web and mobile before it, we are incredibly excited to be in this early wave of conversational media companies. Conversational media happens when you can ask personalized questions of a media brand and it responds and remembers what you ask. We fundamentally believe conversational media will be the primary way consumers receive information, acquire goods and services as well as accomplish tasks over time.

    Pylon has built a publishing platform that enables human experts (a.k.a. editors) to scale their knowledge to their customers individually on voice -enabled platforms like Amazon’s Alexa, Google Home, Microsoft Cortana; as well as chat platforms like Facebook Messenger and Slack. Instead of broadcasting, our experts are able to program to a consumer at the individual level. The ability to have a conversation with a computer which is trained by a category expert may be the most useful communication tool ever conceived.

    Think about it. Why should everyone get the same recipe recommendations this week? Why should everyone get the same top 5 camera recommendations? In the conversational media future, you won’t. You’ll receive recommendations based on your requirements and your specialized needs. For example, my family has gluten, nut, shellfish and lactose allergies (yes, we’re that family!). Now add in a time and ingredient requirement like “pork for four people that will take 20 minutes” and you have a request even Google struggles to fulfill. Vertically focused, AI-powered brands like Tasted will be able to meet that request because they are domain specific and are able to personalize the request based on conversations with you — not just your clickstream data.

    We can make these recipe recommendations because we have a recipe editor, Regan Burns Cafiso, who has worked at the Food Network and Martha Stewart curating and training our machine learning algorithms how to think about recipe suggestions and categorizations. When we make a recommendation, it starts with the logic Regan put into our system. Our development team then work on tools that take Regan’s recommendation and make them scale and customized for our users.

    Speaking of our development team, we are so fortunate to have hired a fantastic team! Shelby and I initially started working with former friends from our CNET Networks days which includes Regan, but also Cliff Lyon and Stephen Maggs who had been working at places like StubHub and other startups after CNET. Soon after, we were able to hire a ridiculously talented team from OpenTable who happened to based in my hometown in Chattanooga, TN. More on that team and working in Chattanooga in a separate post.

    One of the things you might enjoy with Tasted is the ability to cook hands-free. Ever been in the kitchen trying to cook a recipe off your phone, or heaven forbid your laptop? It’s kludgy at best. Cooking recipes off the internet are one of the few times I still use my printer because it’s easier to read a sheet of paper than using my phone or a laptop.

    Not anymore. With Tasted, you can use your iPhone or Android device, or any web browser as a visual companion that moves based on what you tell your voice device. Telling Google Home to “Show me ingredients” or “next step” will now move along your recipe instructions on the screen and keep you and your greasy fingers off the screen. Try it. It feels like magic!

    Special thanks to all of the friends and folks who have supported the development of Pylon and Tasted. Dick and Danny from Index for leading our round. Old friends like Kevin Bandy and Neil Ashe who participated in our angel round with a whole bunch of other folks. There’s no way we could have gone and put our heads down for almost a year and invent a multi-platform/modal ai service without their belief, advice and support.

    If you have an Alexa or Google Home device, please try it and tell me what you think!