Tools on David Marsden

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 16:43:31 +0100

Computer says, “No.”

Digging the Lost Tapes Restoration of Grimsby's No. 1 Band in 1996

Sun, 27 Jul 2025 19:55:24 +0100

Hovercraft (UK) were a real live band, briefly, in 1995-96.

We hovered in, made a lot of noise, broke down and sank without a trace, all in the space of nine months.

We were number one in the first, and possibly only, South Bank Demo Charts in the Grimsby Evening Telegraph.

There’s no chance of a reunion. That will be a relief to many. Our drummer emigrated to Australia. Our singer-songwriter-lead guitarist is MIA, last seen in India (or Boscombe). Our bass player plays in a semi-professional covers band. And our guitarist/tech guy is me.

Every few years I get out the digitised versions of all our old demo and home recording tapes and remix and (re)master them with the he latest free tools available. In the early days, that was Audacity. More recently, it’s Soundcloud’s and Bandlab’s (free) online mastering tools.

The goal is always the same. To transform the lofi, degraded analog recordings preserved on mangled old cassette tapes that were digitised using the cheapest USB analog to digital converter tape deck available twelve or fifteen years ago into something resembling what we actually sounded like in our rehearsal room, the studio, the pub, and - most importantly - in our own imaginations. (If you’re interested in learning more about mastering and how Bandlab mastering works there’s a couple of good articles here.)

Last October I went down the same old nostalgia rabbit-hole. Every time I think I’ve made the tracks sound better with the latest software, which usually means adding reverb or preset effects (which are likely a mixture of reverb and compression). The end result is something which sounds a bit louder, more atmospheric and less rough around the edges. Although all the reverb and compression can also make for a lot of additional noise, when noise is an integral part of the original sound AND the degradation of the original sound that was digitised.

Anyway, it’s all a bit of fun and allows for reconnecting with Ron Nasty, our old bass man (now known as Ronnie Nice). Ronnie and me had a lot of fun writing the band’s not entirely factual or unelaborated back story. Putting that into Claude.ai produced more amusing results, as did giving it some of the lyrics to the songs. These AIs can make pretty good music critics if you tell them that’s what they are, even if they’ve never heard a note. Claude is now like the fifth Beatle.

And that was what got me thinking… Can AI listen to music? That’s how I discovered Suno Music, Microsoft’s online AI music creation beast. And it is a beast. (Other beasts are available.) Me and Ron started off simply pasting in lyrics to the songs Ron had lovingly transcribed by listening to the old songs over and over again (only the other day I realised I had some of the original lyric sheets, but don’t tell Ron). Click on and Suno will produce three minutes of sophisticated sounding rock or pop that you can start listening back to in a matter of seconds. It’s highly addictive. You can add music style tags (folk, blues, punk, etc.) and even general instructions to generate a particular sound (“Indian sounding funeral dirge”) that you like. This technique created what I called Hovercraft Reimagined.

That was back in March. The originals, if you wanna listen.

Then I realised you could (then) upload and use two minutes of original audio. Not quite a recreation or restoration of the original songs, but getting close. We also enjoyed doing an album of Hovercraft songs as if covered by a female singer in a more chillout style.

Finally (!), Suno v4.5 now allows up to eight minutes of uploaded audio. Frustratingly, I haven’t been able to recreate some songs at all (Mr Tooting Brown seems impossible), and still the AI seems to insist on missing out intros, outros, middle bits, solos, lead guitar work. But it’s getting a lot closer to an actual recreation of the original songs and band sound and style.

We also had fun generating song and album covers with ChatGPT.

Lastly, to reiterate, all of the songs bar the originals were created using Suno. Most of the later ones I downloaded the stems, uploaded them to Bandlab and remixed and mastered them there, before uploading to Bandcamp.

I’m not expecting anyone to listen to any or all of this, but hope it’s a useful contribution for anyone wondering what or how to go about a similar restoration project, or indeed, to create your own new songs (I’ve also done a few of those, too). Some people are pretty sceptical about AI generated art, and that’s fair enough. But this has been tremendous fun, and it’s great for me, Ron and everyone else who remembers our band to be able to recreate, restore, produce and hear the old songs again in a way that doesn’t hurt the ears so much.

While it was never the original “plan”, we’re now looking at releasing tracks through Bandlab’s distribution service, and reworking some of the songs to make them poppier and more accessible to a wider audience. And we’re looking for Charlie Pepper. Last heard of in the Bournemouth area ten years ago.

We should put a card in the local Spar shop window: “Chilled out lamppost wanted to front retro space pop band”. That should do it.

Sat, 07 Jun 2025 10:12:26 +0100

I recently spent far too much time creating a wholly unnecessary (but nice to have) app with Gemini. Everything worked perfectly in the private sandbox environment, but we couldn’t get the final Wordpress embed to function (Wordpress security?), despite numerous of Gemini’s over-confident assertions that “this time it will definitely work”. I now have ~~Netifly~~Netlify, Github Gist and Pages accounts I didn’t know I needed. Talk about yak shaving!

Tbf to AI, I know (of) a few very successful plausible bullshitters, and most of them are all over the internet it’s trained on.

This is brilliant – a piece told in screenshots (which is probably an accessibility nightmare…) showing how ChatGPT’s confident tone can make complete bullshit seem plausible at first.

Read the whole thing.

Adam Tinworth https://adders.blog/2025/06/04/this-is-brilliant-a-piece.html

Fri, 30 May 2025 21:00:24 +0100

Aside from our journey home taking four hours longer than expected, we had an amusing if disconcerting experience once we set off again.

According to our dumb electronic navigator, as we left Peterborough, the closer we got to home the longer it would take us to get there - the estimated journey time somehow kept increasing the further we travelled.

Fortunately, when we got to the Black Cat roundabout, we happened to notice that staying on the A1 would save us 46 minutes. A no brainer. But our stupid satnav said nothing and would gladly have continued sending us up the junction to the A421 and down the M1 on its preferred but needlessly extended drive.

We’re up to our eyeballs in AI, but unsupervised, my toaster is a wannabe arsonist and my satnav can’t tell me the quickest way home.

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 18:10:58 +0100

Oh, ffs. First it was Porridge Radio and now it’s my beloved Kiwi Browser that’s a dead duck.

Tue, 25 Feb 2025 18:35:17 +0100

A bit late in the day, but a handy and relatively easy to use Python script that automates bulk downloading Kindle books before tomorrow.

defragg.com/bulk-download-kindle-books/ defragg.com
defragg.com https://defragg.com/bulk-download-kindle-books/

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 17:23:40 +0100

After “fixing” my pyromaniac toaster I have now, somehow*, reconnected my anti-social music player with the internet.

Time for a cup of tea.

*Fiddled around with various router settings.

So far so good

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 14:19:11 +0100

Six weeks into my new full-time role at work with the additional two days a week focussed on fundraising for a new youth work.

I’ve scoped about 15 potential grant funders, small and large, and submitted 4 applications or pre-applications.

It seems to be grant application season as many of the closing dates are in February and March.

Unfortunately, one funder switched their closing date to Thursday last week after previously advertising it as Friday (The Wayback Machine agrees with me). Another closed their online form the day before or on the morning of their published closing date (Friday). Luckily, perhaps, they didn’t remove the live application form page I had bookmarked so I could still submit.

It will be annoying if our applications are disregarded in these two cases, although the lesson is don’t wait until deadline day.

I’m not beating myself up about it. We only had a few days to put something together, and I was chasing/waiting on my boss to draft and agree final wording. It’s a learning curve for all of us, and lots we can do better.

AI tools were genuinely helpful, and also provided useful feedback on our applications - need to remember to do that step before submitting them next time.

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 23:48:24 +0100

A better all round social work experience for everyone involved. They should be able to move to a four day week.

Ealing Council slashes admin work by 44% with new AI tool ealing.nub.news
ealing.nub.news https://ealing.nub.news/news/local-news/ealing-council-slashes-admin-work-by-44-with-new-ai-tool-250186

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 00:12:28 +0100

Spent quite a bit of time this evening trying out @Mtt’s brilliant new Bayou theme for my site.

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 13:30:54 +0100

Oh, and printed a couple of things I’ll need later on our new home printer - only to discover the kids have used up all the colour already printing off photos of planets.

I could use the printer at work, but it’s almost certain not to work when I actually need it to work.

AI, ethics and democracy

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 15:15:58 +0100

I keep reading that AI is dumb, dangerous and demented. And I’ve no doubt it’s all true. Ethan Mollick, author of Co-Intelligence, describes ChatGPT as “a very elaborate auto complete like you have on your phone”

AI slop is contaminating our lives with worthless junk, and while I’ve played with and been briefly amazed and entertained by Google NotebookLM’s auto-generated podcast creations, they can get repetitive, boring and stupid very quickly.

We can rail against AI all we want, but it’s not going away. I expect AI to get smarter and to have fewer hallucinations even if the danger level remains high.

What is Al good for?

Micro.blog uses Al to generate Alt-Text descriptions of images and that seems to work well enough for its intended purpose. What it can’t do, of course, is generate descriptions that are personal to the uploader or post context, e.g., if I have a picture of my son the description will be a generic “boy with curly hair” or such like.

I’ve used Google’s Gemini on blog posts I’ve written and it’s given me some very positive feedback about my writing, enough to make me feel good about myself (certainly much more so than any human reader). Although it also got into the habit of creating its own alternative versions, which often were funnier and more interesting (to me) than my own writing. (It will also roast you if that’s your thing.)

Similarly, Google NotebookLM has fed back on my entire year of posts in 2024, and was very nice about it, too. It is quite therapeutic to hear that, as long as you take it for what it is - an elaborate auto-complete that ultimately will rot your brain, take your job and ruin your life.

I’ve also used both for work in some limited ways - drafting a job description, drafting cases for support for funding applications, and summarising or analysing documents. Both require some degree of human intervention, but the process and product was useful in helping me get started, and complete the tasks.

One area where I found Al to be most interesting was in commenting on and forming an ethical response to a local democracy issue where I live. I found the response to be in line with what community campaigners (including me) had been asking for, and in total contrast to the response from our elected representatives, authorities and business leaders. That must be the auto-complete.

While I don’t think I would yet call for all politicians to be replaced by AI, I do wonder if there is a potential use case here for analysing policy implications, or at least highlighting ethical considerations?

I ran these thoughts past Claude.ai and this is a summary of what it had to say:

democratic processes need human judgment, accountability, and the ability to balance competing interests the ways that AI currently cannot

core ethical principles that should guide public service:

transparency about conflicts of interest

accountability to the people

clear acknowledgment of problems rather than minimisation

practical solutions for reporting complaints and response

the fundamental duty of public officials to serve their constituents

Human decision-makers can, of course, choose to prioritise other interests over ethical imperatives

I suggested to it that the AI response to the Southall Gasworks issue demonstrated more “empathy” than the human political response:

The AI’s response prioritised human wellbeing and acknowledged suffering, in contrast to the actual political response, which was bureaucratic and dismissive, treating hundreds of complaints as isolated incidents and prioritising procedural responses over human impact

A truly empathetic human response to such serious health impacts should have been immediate and decisive action to protect public health

Of course, the AI response wasn’t actually empathetic. It applied logical ethical principles that prioritise human wellbeing. What looks like empathy is actually systematic ethical reasoning unclouded by personal interests, political considerations, or institutional self-protection.

I suggested that it might not be uncommon for political leaders to lack empathy, and that it’s therefore so much easier for them to allow personal, and powerful political and institutional interests to take precedence over what most ordinary people would see quite clearly as the interests of human wellbeing:

This connects to research on the prevalence of psychopathic traits in leadership positions. In the Southall Gasworks case, a leader with normal empathetic capacity might find it psychologically difficult to:

dismiss hundreds of health complaints from suffering residents

accept substantial gifts while community members develop serious illnesses

continue business as usual while learning of deaths potentially linked to their decision

Of course, even someone with empathy might not be able to resist powerful institutional or financial pressures.

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 18:05:59 +0100

BOOM! Figured out how to turn off automatic blog post thumbnails. (Wrap  around the thumbnail stuff in index.html.)

On a roll, but should quit while I’m ahead.

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 15:21:27 +0100

Finally figured out how to use the Lite Youtube embed plugin.

In settings, replaced “post-content” with “post__content”. (This maybe unique to my Anatole theme.)

Now instead of no videos showing in my blog posts, every video is displayed twice.

🤦‍♂️

Thu, 02 Jan 2025 21:07:20 +0100

Spent half the day trying to force @robb@social.lol’s YouTube Lite plugin to work on my site, but have conceded failure. I thought I had it working at one time (and it definitely worked on my test-blog), so deleted all the YT shortcodes I’d been using previously. Gah.

This year

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 10:28:59 +0100

This year I’m returning to full-time work for the first time in almost a decade. I’m looking forward to it, though, and my main focus is going to be on researching and writing grant funding applications for local community youth work.

Last term I joined my sons' school’s parent teacher association specifically to help find grant funding they can apply for. I need to get on with that.

I also hope to be able to get more involved (again) in local democracy and activism in person. I’d like to see if we can get some kind of organised mutual aid and self-help community going.

I want to get fitter and lose some weight, so I’m intend to walk every morning (flat feet permitting) and I’m no longer taking sugar in tea and coffee.

I want to sleep better (which is partly dependent on little kid staying in his own bed all night), breathe better, and get my psoriasis under control.

And I want a new hat.

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 10:14:26 +0100

Last year I feel like I tried out some new ways of doing things that make my life better.

journaling
reading more
listening to music more
being more sociable online, less time on X
writing (and publishing/sharing) more
eating less red meat and more beans/pulses instead
walking more regularly

Mon, 23 Dec 2024 10:21:48 +0100

Big kid has been enjoying CrossFit exercises at school and at home.

Big kid: “Hey Google! What’s an air squat?”

Google: “An escort is a call girl or a prostitute….”

Me: “Hey Google! STOP!!!”

Mon, 23 Dec 2024 10:17:04 +0100

After numerous attempts at therapising my toaster (“WTF is wrong with you, you stupid machine!") I realised that it was too depressed to talk.

I put myself in the toaster’s shoes and realised it was burnt out. It was full of crumbs (golden memories of bagels, crumpets, muffins and waffles past). Attempted arson was simply its way of communicating that it couldn’t take any more.

I unreservedly apologise to my toaster for this gross defamation.

Toast in the Machine davidmarsden.info
David Marsden https://davidmarsden.info/2024/12/17/toast-in-the.html

Toast in the Machine

Tue, 17 Dec 2024 11:52:09 +0100

Some people seem to find the idea of machine intelligence frightening. And with good reason. Because from where I’m sitting at the breakfast table, the machines around me are mostly dumber than a rock (although that’s a bit unfair to rocks, who are actually very smart).

My music player has forgotten my wifi name and password and refuses to reconnect.
My wife’s work laptop is making all kinds of noises trying to attract her attention, oblivious to the fact that she’s not here, and hasn’t been for a good ten minutes.
There’s our microwave. So many buttons, settings and options. We use it several times a day and only ever tell it to heat food or drink for x number of seconds or minutes. But it’s brainless, and if you don’t keep an eye on it like a small child it will spill your drink or chuck food everywhere.
My kettle sits quietly now, but I know that when I go to boil water for my tea later it will keep on boiling the water until I manually switch it off, despite all its various settings for different boil temperatures and offers to the keep the water warm.
And then there’s the expensive toaster. Another one like the kettle that promises to toast (or defrost) every possible variety of bread-based product on its own individual setting, and with six settings for how brown you want it. Wonderful! The grim reality is that there are just two settings. “Untoasted “and “Set the smoke alarm off”.

I’m showing my space-obsessed four year old pictures of Pluto taken by a telescope on a spaceship launched from Earth twenty years ago and I still can’t get a toaster that can do somewhere in between soft, cold bread and cremation.

We shouldn’t laugh. We think Al is dumb, but we elect dumber, and Al will only get less dumb (and more dangerous).

How long before The Mossad detonates my toaster?

In fact, eighteen years ago (I mean, really?) I bought the cheapest toaster I could find in Argos for £10. I plugged it in, put in my rounds of bread and pressed play. Two minutes later, the plastic surround had literally melted.

I would go back to holding a toasting fork over an open fire, but/as my kids point out every Xmas) we don’t have a chimney.

On Journaling

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 19:06:48 +0100

I wrote this a week ago.

My last journal was over a week ago, last Saturday.

I’ve had a week off work with a really bad cough, wheezing, shortness of breath. Generally feeling better these last couple of days, but also still coughing. Last two days I had coughing fits in the afternoons leaving me dizzy, and exhausted. I haven’t slept well some nights either, due to coughing, wheezing and breathlessness.

But sitting here right now, I feel as good as I have done in two weeks or more.

Time off from work has allowed me to go through 90 days of journal entries to categorise and summarise them, and then outline or tease out the key themes or ideas in each area of interest. Why? Well, 1) what are all these journal entries for? I mean, I get the process, but am I missing out on something greater? 2) Lots of people publish weekly summaries and some people like reading them. But why?

I think I get it now. Doing this work has made sense of a lot of daily, weekly and monthly events, habits, routines, scenarios, relationships, that otherwise would have remained loosely connected, strung together like the Christmas lights every year when you take them out of the box you left them in in January. In a mess, tangled up, half working. Better than nothing, but a lot of stress.

And another surprising fact. While I started - and soon stopped - journaling in March, then restarted in August, I had wondered if spending the time to write in a private journal would take away from writing for my blog? Actually (and unsurprisingly, really) the opposite has occurred. I have written more than ever, privately and publicly.

I’ve also generally felt better in myself, although I’ve still had my usual ups and downs, and I’m still quite easily uplifted and dragged down.

It’s also made me realise I do a lot more things than I imagined, and do them OK.

It’s helped me to better understand some of my relationships, particularly with family.

I’m reading more, and listening to music more.

It would be useful (although perhaps less fun)to do the same exercise with my work journal. (41 pages, 46 days).

244 pages over 90 days for my personal journal.

Unfortunately, I haven’t journaled since.

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 18:18:44 +0100

Every time someone mentions Croissant (for cross-posting) I hear big kid’s Mum telling him, “You can’t have croissants for breakfast every morning!”

Sun, 17 Nov 2024 18:28:12 +0100

I wrote 300 pages of notes and reflections in my personal and work journals in 90 days.

Digital Leader

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 14:07:59 +0100

Hoping we found a good solution to help big kid’s Digital Leader application.

He found it difficult to focus and get his head around answering the questions in a sensible (let alone helpful) way.

Instead, I recorded him speaking about the devices and tech he uses, how he helps his little brother and his parents to play games, and how using new apps like Duolingo has helped him to learn Spanish (when previously he hated Spanish lessons).

Google automatically transcribed his speech and copied it to Google Docs. There I edited out the ums and ahs and pasted it into his Discord chat with me. Then he copied it out by hand on to the application form.

🤞

Thu, 24 Nov 2022 10:20:16 +0100

Finally figured out how to add @sod’s Search-Space and Surprise-Me plug-ins to my micro.blog.

(It requires adding the full URL as the page content.)

H/t to @Manton!

Sun, 13 Nov 2022 17:20:12 +0100

Search the people you follow on Twitter for possible Mastodon/Fediverse accounts.

I forgot the link! https://pruvisto.org/debirdify/
Thanks @pruvisto for such a nice tool.
Evan Prodromou https://prodromou.pub/users/evan/statuses/109333475701913097

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 21:13:00 +0100

Why are toasters and smoke alarms still so stupid?