Printed Instapaper Magazine

A while ago, I had a somewhat counterintuitive idea: I wanted to take all my saved digital articles from my ‘read later’ queue and print them out as a physical magazine.

I experimented with various Zapier-based and other simple tools to achieve this, but none were particularly effective. I finally turned to ChatGPT to help me write a script that would make this a reality.

The code works with Instapaper and is available here if you'd like to try it out.

Raspberry Pi “Fart Detector”

My 8-year-old son and I were talking about building things with code, and when I asked what he’d want to make, he (predictably) suggested that “we make a fart detector!”

We grabbed a wireless Raspberry Pi and a cheap USB microphone and put something together.

Since this only detects sound in general and can’t really distinguish any old sound from a proper fart sound, it’s an imperfect device. But he loved it.

Swedish Idiom Injector for Gmail

I took the Swedish Idiom Generator that I created and turned it into a Google Chrome plugin that inserts these absurdist phrases into your Gmail copy.

AI Swedish Idiom Generator

At EF, I have the pleasure of working with many lovely Swedes, and I'm always taken by their quirky (and often unbelievable-sounding) idioms.

It made me think that it'd be fun to create a totally silly little experiment to generate fake (but plausible enough...) Swedish idioms using OpenAI’s GPT-4 model.

You can see it in action here.

“Put on your shoes” - an Alexa skill

98% of parenting is telling your kids to put their shoes on over and over. I created an Alexa skill that just repeats “put on your shoes” incessantly until the kids listen. Surprisingly effective.