Recent Posts - Eric Cheng
Eric Cheng

Extracting spatial videos and panoramas from local photo libraries (for Vision Pro)

With Apple Vision Pro's pleasing presentation of panoramas and spatial videos, I needed a way to identify and extract both formats from local file storage.

The mess of prescription optical inserts for VR headsets

I've been looking into prescription optical inserts for my VR headsets so I don't need to get a special contact lens prescription just for VR use... and it's messy.

ProFind is the Everything search equivalent for Macs

ProFind: the closest thing to Everything search on a Mac (a game changer)

The thing I miss the most about using a Windows machine as my primary computer is Everything, by voidtools. Last month, I finally found and tried ProFind...

Universal Control

Apple’s Universal Control loses connection constantly

As a long time Synergy user, I was excited to switch to Universal Control for single keyboard and mouse sharing between two Macs. Now that I'm on OS X Ventura v13.5.2, I find that it constantly disconnects...

Meta Horizon Workrooms “lean back” move is the most immersive thing

This might seem like a minor thing, but when we're screen sharing in presentation mode in Meta Horizon Workrooms (a VR workspace), sometimes someone starts talking and it makes me "lean back" to establish eye contact. We're lined up classroom style, and the room is set up to allow everyone to see a large shared screen...

Exporting Evernote notebooks

I am finally leaving Evernote (exporting Notes to Markdown)

I've been watching Evernote stagnate and become less useful to me for many years and based on anecdotes from many friends, a lot of people are in a similar state. I've tried migrating to OneNote, Notion, Mem, and others, but no migration path has ever really worked...

Visual Studio Code

Using Whisper and GPT to summarize YouTube videos

I probably spend an average of 30-60 minutes a day on YouTube listening to amazing experts share knowledge about breaking news. After seeing Auto-GPT in action, I finally decided to do some coding with Whisper and GPT, and created a little program that fetches YouTube videos, transcribes them with Whisper, and summarizes them with GPT.

Haydnesque Scherzo, composed by ChatGPT

ChatGPT (GPT-4) music composition experiments

I had a little conversation with ChatGPT (GPT-3.5 and GPT-4) about musical composition, which was interesting. I have to imagine that if someone threw a ton of sheet music at the next version of GPT, it could become proficient (and maybe even genius) at composition in every genre (including crazy mashups).

Using ChatGPT and OpenAI’s Whisper to transcribe and translate old family archives

Tonight, using AI, I transcribed and translated an old, digitized audio tape into a bilingual SRT for almost literally pennies. The recprding is from 1979 and is of my parents and me speaking Mandarin to each other while telling / reading stories. I was 3 years old (!).