Stephen Coyle @stephencoyle@mastodon.social

Been having fun playing around with some computer-assisted improvisation lately.

One minute you're training a neural network on all the Harry Potter books, and the next minute you're hit with this emotional freight train.

Trying out a tiny bit of server-side Swift, so made a fake name generator that’s giving me far too much entertainment.

https://stephencoyle.net/fun/namegenerator/

Street fight.

Spruced up the projects page on my site, and added a few things: https://stephencoyle.net/projects

Wrote a strange little Christmas story today.

The Secret of Saint Nick: https://stephencoyle.net/secret-of-saint-nick

I'm really excited to see what people make of it, and how it gets used. It's completely free, with no advertising, tracking, and no third-party Google/Facebook/etc junk.

Take a look, and tell others about it if you like it!

https://budgel.com

#social #audio #map #network #secret

I've created a virtual location I'm calling Budgeltown, too. This is a shared place around 1km in size, so bottles left there will always be within walking distance of everyone else. These ones expire after a day or two; it's Budgel's equivalent of other platforms' stories feeds.

Its location-centric approach deliberately makes it a much slower-paced counterpoint to other social networks; viewing someone's content requires a little more effort than just tapping on it. It also allows audio-only messages, which is a rarity on social platforms.

It lets you create 'bottles', containing audio, text and pictures, and drop them at a location. Everyone can see where bottles have been dropped, but you have to go to their location in order to open them and see what's inside.

Budgel, an app I've been working on for a few months, is out now! It's basically the idea of a 'message in a bottle' in app form.

You can grab it on the App Store, or at: https://budgel.com

An app I’ve been building for the past few months, Budgel, is out now!

It combines elements of social networking and geocaching, and is basically my modern interpretation of the message in a bottle concept.

You can grab it now by searching on the App Store, or at: https://budgel.com

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And another section from today (day 7):

And a snippet from day 4:

Have finally gotten back into the habit of regular piano practice. Been learning Chopin’s C# minor scherzo for the past week, and recording snippets each day to keep track of progress. Here’s day 1:

Passed my PhD viva yesterday with minor corrections!

Big thanks to all the lovely people in my life that were there along the way. 💚

If you'd like to try out my new app/social network, Budgel, I've just launched a public beta! You can join here: https://testflight.apple.com/join/ze21VKxr

And if you'd like to know more about it, you can read some information here: https://stephencoyle.net/budgel-beta