Nell WatsonPlayground
Fun little pet projects. General doodads and geegaws. The serious work lives elsewhere on this site; this page is for play.
Beddy Butler
A virtual butler in your ear who reminds you to go to bed (e.g. "It's getting rather late, your Grace"), a gentle nudge for infovores like me. There are three sets of voices, from shy and retiring, to insistent and preachy, to a zombie butler. I did the voices myself, recorded with a made-to-order Mitra 3D Mic Pro specially imported from India so it sounds like someone's really over your shoulder, then pitch-shifted into an old man. It's a pretty hideous little app made just for my own ridiculous satisfaction, but some folks find it fun and useful.
Get it on the App Store → · fork it and record your own (open source, BSD)
System Shock: Rewired
The 1994 game System Shock, by the ingenious Warren Spector, inspired me as a kid almost as much as Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. Its plot (a hacker messing with the ethical constraints on an A.I. for a corrupt corporate officer) set me thinking about Machine Ethics (and eventually EthicsNet) from an early age. So it was amazing when, 24 years after release, Joey Lansing began building the first Fan Mission, and I'm honoured to contribute my voice to the audio logs telling its backstory.
Nell's Brain (MRI scans)
Want to get a closer look at what goes on inside my head? Now you can. A full-body MRI taken at the Centre for Neuroimaging Sciences, distributed for anyone curious about digital medicine. View it in MRIcroGL or any DICOM viewer: one file of just my brain, one of my whole head.
Universal Problem Solver
A five-minute exercise for finding practical ways into stubborn problems. This tool can help fix many problems in five minutes or less.