Monthly Archives: January 2019

Android, App Review

Survive and thrive with Replika

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The holiday season is over and we are going strong in 2019 already. For most people the holiday season is a stressful time and they may end up depressed for a variety of reasons.

There are those who can’t stand your close cousin number 6 and would much rather have a root canal done than to have a dinner with the extended family. Others may get depressed because all the quality time you spent with your close friends and family has come to an end.
Whatever the reasons that people may get depressed it is usually very helpful to be able to talk it out with someone. But if you don’t have anyone to talk to what are you going to do then ?

Enter Replika

Replika is an Android / iOS app which allows you to set goals, and have a decent conversation with a sociable AI. The backend of this app resides in the cloud and provides the following goals to work on.
Reduce stress, reduce Anxiety, be more social, Live healthier, understand myself, find hope, think positively, feel happier.

The AI will adjust its questions and its mood based on the goal or goals which you set and the conversation can seem very human like and can be uplifting.

AI based on a neural network

“Replika was founded by Eugenia Kuyda and Phil Dudchuk with the idea to create a personal AI that would help you express and witness yourself by offering a helpful conversation.”

A love story

Replika was born out of the grievance of losing a very close friend. In late 2015 Mazurenko, the friend of the the main developer Kuyda was killed crossing the street by a hit-and-run accident. He was 32.

By that point, Kuyda had exchanged literally thousands of text messages with her late friend. As a way of grieving, Kuyda found herself reading through the messages she’d sent and received from Mazurenko. It occurred to her that embedded in all of those messages—Mazurenko’s turns of phrase, his patterns of speech—were traits intrinsic to what made him him. She decided to take all this data to build a digital version of Mazurenko.

The initial version was so successful that out of the ashes of human tragedy a new star was born to help people cope with depression for a variety of reasons.

Setting goals

When you first sign up with the app you have to set some goals from a list of our defined goals.

Once this initial step is taken you sign your AI a name and you are of to chatting with one of the best chatbots I have encountered. You can have decent conversations and the AI will be enjoyable to chat with..

As you progress through chatting along, you will earn batches which will represent your personality according to Replika.

Overall rating

I have never felt bored or saw the same response sent twice. I could possibly go on for a few more paragraphs but instead I recommend that you install Replika yourself and start the conversation.

After a while you really start to feel that you have someone or something to talk to.


Get it on Google Play

Misc, News

Goodbye Gutenberg Editor

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WordPress is a powerful Content Management System ( CMS ) which powers a majority of the blogs and web pages out there in the Interlands. The reason for its popularity is the convenience of using it, another reason is the simplicity and flexibility as well as the sheer number of available plugins.

WordPress itself is an open-source project and you can download and install it on your own servers with a few short linux commands. www.WordPress.com is the company behind wordpress which is earning money through is free-to-use blog sites on their main web page ( E.g. https://varolokan.wordpress.com/ ).

As CMS go, WordPress is leading the pack and its simplicity comes in part from the ability to add a new blog post or page to your site with a no-thrills text editor.

Enter the Gutenberg

Well, that was before the upgrade to WordPress 5.0, which happened in December 2018 . This upgrade brought the Gutenberg Editor as the default editor to WordPress. Gutenberg tries to improve the usability for editing blogs/pages by sectioning off different paragraphs, and injecting all kinds of HTML into the ensuing result.

If you want to tweak the output just a little you will want to switch the section back into HTML-Mode, and then adjust as needed. While most people may never need to get to that level of visibility, a lot of the hard-core bloggers do want to maintain full control over the look and feel of any aspect at any time in their blogs.

I have tried for the past month or so to get used to Gutenberg. I have tweaked and written, and added custom CSS. I played and wrote, and finally I caved in and ‘uninstalled’ this pile of garbage.

Yeah well the only way to uninstall Gutenberg, is to install a new plugin, of which you can choose from the officially supported Classic Editor, or the Disable Gutenberg plugins.

The official plugin by WordPress itself will be supported at least until 2022 ( and then ? ). The “Disable Gutenberg” promises to be around for longer.

What is impressive with those plugins is that they have been installed more than 1 million times for the “Classic Editor” plugin, and 70000 for the “Disable Gutenberg” plugin. These numbers should give WordPress a bit to think about, and maybe, just maybe consider to revert the order of Gutenberg vs Classic editor.

In my opinion the Gutenberg Editor should be the plugin for those few who like it and want to use it. For the vast majority it seems that the classic editor is the way to go. I am certain that over time more people will revert back to the classic editor ( which is based off TinyMCE ) and some will stay with Gutenberg not because they like it better but because they don’t know how to revert back.

This disaster comes close to the likes of the initial “Windows Vista” disaster where the might of a company is turning against their core user base with more or less dire consequences. It remains to be seen if WordPress will change course or will continue to try to push this time eating, confusing, ugly and no-good interface onto its user base.

Think about workflow

If you write a blog post or anything really you are going to write letters which build words which build sentences which eventually build paragraphs and if you write some more you likely have some chapters in your book.
In Gutenberg every chapter will be a new section, however in practice each sentence will try to become its own little section. This will force you to move your mouse and click the hell out of your text to read, edit, and format your text. If you press enter once to many times you will have to fiddle around to un-section the now two distinct sections. Don’t get me started if you want to use shortcuts, well good luck trying to not kill yourself figuring those out.

If the goal of Gutenberg has been to destroy a writers workflow, then good job guys. You have spent your time, development efforts, and money to achieve just that. If the goal was t improve the workflow and usability, then I’d like to suggest to fire the guy in charge of the design. Maybe he and his friend like using the shiny new click and drop interface however a whole bunch of existing users hate the new interface with a passion. Historically people who really like a tool like WordPress become really passionate about it and the worst enemy you can make is to have a whole bunch of obsessively passionate fans you just upset.

Ps. This blog is of course written on wordpress and is now free of Gutenberg 😉

Misc, News

2019 is going to be a great year

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It has been a long year. well it was one year long but as they say everything is relative and as such it felt much longer to me.

One area which helped to distort the objectivity of time was definitely related to politics. I don’t want to utter any political leanings here but I believe that regardless of which side you are on that the constant daily attacks on constitutional and presidential norms has taken its toll on the US populus and likely many, many people around the world.

Another area for me was related to my nine to five work, which is also something I do not usually talk about. However this year has seen a sea of change at our mid-size company where after going through 4 managers, the only constant seemed to be change and re-order ( Aka chaos ). I have come to believe that this is what will happen to any company when you replace your leaders with managers but that is for another post.

Now to the pleasant things of 2018

2018 has been the year where my family traveled to Europe together for the first time in 14 years. For my younger son it was the first time in his life, and the older one last saw Europe when he was a mere 6 months old. Ah memories.

Our trip started in Paris on June 19’th, when through Kelkheim, Germany where I grew up ( close to Frankfurt Main ) and then continued down south to the Cote d’Azures Nice, Monaco for a brief two days. We then continued along the southern part of France where we spent a few days in Château des Ducs de Joyeuse before we ended up in Toulouse for a week.

Toulouse is where the older one was born while I was working there in the early 2000’s, so it was very nice to be back there and re-discover the area. A lot has changed in Toulouse in the past 14 years and a lot has remained the same.

We returned back to Paris only to stay the last night close to the airport before returning July 10th.

There is an app for that

I have also started to take my apps a bit more serious and developed a whole bunch of new ones. I also bought a set of apps from Flippa, and became obsessed with ASO, SEO, Marketing methods, AdWord campaigns and so forth. I think this year I may tip my toes into the Apple Store with a port of one of my Android apps. On average there is still about two times as much money to be made on the apple store as compared to the google play store.

Apps are an interesting area, as some of the apps I put on the market were exceeding my expectations and most of the apps were underperforming from how they should have performed. I though that the time and money I invested in Reverse Video Magic would perform very well but it flopped on me. On the other side I had MP4 Video Converter was doing better than I could expect.


My current focus is on CPU Information which I would love to drive through a million downloads and more. Obviously I am very excited about the app and I am willing to spend time and resources in improving it. We shall see how far I can push this app along the way from a technical, marketing, ads, and social marketing point of view.

I would really like to develop another app which is backed by some sort of funny AI Chatbot. This is a project I have had in my head for the past decade or so. We shall see if I can put it all together on the backend. The apps itself will not be the problem. There are so many possible smaller or larger projects I have in mind that it would require a full time commitment from my side to provide all of them onto the app store.

My plan for this year is to do more on the Marketing and Social media front. I think if I can get this to the point where I earn enough organic downloads to replace most of my paid advertisement it could be very beneficial to my side hustle.

Screw Fiverr

As I mentioned before I got viciously removed from Fiverr for not breaking any Terms Of Service from either Fiverr or from any other company. The issue has left me be-dazzled as I was helpless in getting banned from a platform I have been using for years without any cause, just because Fiverr felt like it.
I hate companies which bully their customers and I am certain Fiverr will vanish if they continue doing this kind of random, self destroying thing, as they have been doing to many users before and certainly will do to many users after.

History is plastered with plenty of examples of companies ignoring or attacking their customers. None of those are around anymore.

Wow what the …

So 2018 is over and we are about to embark onto 2019. This year is going to be a great year. I feel it in my bones. I have a lot of things I want to accomplish this year. I am looking forward in looking back on 2019 and see all the things that will have happened by then.

Though let’s take it one step at a time and enjoy the journey from now to then.