Mastodawn

I have been travelling around with someone who has an AirTag on them, and it triggered Apple's "AirTag Found Moving With You" notification.

It was neat to see it work, and properly (eg: this AirTag wasn't tied to my account, and it was following me). It is the first time I've actually seen the notification (which did not concern me as I knew who was carrying the AirTag AND tracking it).

Previous writing on AirTags:
https://www.hotelexistence.ca/exploring-bluetooth-trackers-at-geekweek-7-5/
https://www.hotelexistence.ca/further-thoughts-on-stealth-airtags/

Richard Audette 23h ago

Neat cycle route planning site: https://cycle.travel/

cycle.travel | route-planner and maps - traffic-free & quiet roads

The best-kept secret of a great ride - find scenic routes with fewer cars.

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Richard Audette 3d ago

@adr Know how you feel...

I was looking for one in 2022 - I was playing around with training vision models for fun, and my attempts on cloud GPUs were pricey, and estimated training time on my CPU was 1 year. At the time, GPUs were only available at multiples of MSRP. I was tracking availability, and eventually found one at MSRP at a Bestbuy 50 km away from me.

It's been fun - when I bought it, I'd never expected I'd be playing with small LLMs and generative imagery on it...

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Richard Audette 4d ago

@adr I was probably 1994. The PC, a 486DX2-66, had a Microsoft Inport/bus mouse - a bit unusual at the time (most were serial or PS/2), and I remember reading FAQs to make it work: open the kernel source, change the address, recompile. It was probably more a curiosity on another partition until 1997, and didn't make it my primary OS on my primary home PC until 2006.

Richard Audette 5d ago

Used an LLM to re-write Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Lawrence of Arabia) in the style of Nick Hornby:
https://www.hotelexistence.ca/seven-pillars-of-wisdom/

A lot of fun - created a downloadable epub ebook.

Highlight: "I was trying to be Lawrence of Arabia, but most of the time I felt more like David Brent of Arabia - completely out of my depth and probably doing more harm than good."

Richard Audette Aug 7

I found a USB key in the car. Opening up the folder, it's a time capsule - a collection of MP3s from a 2018 road trip, when the kids were 11 and 8.

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Richard Audette Aug 7

@andykm The language suggests someone favouring Telus, and the only logo is the Globe's, but it's not a Globe advertisement.

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Richard Audette Aug 7

@andykm - related - someone is paying to market this opinion piece - I saw this advertisement on Slashdot this morning. I don't think I've ever seen a newspaper article, let alone the Globe, in an ad before. I'd love to know who's paying for it. Presumably they've also paid the Globe to open the article up so anyone can read it.

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Richard Audette Aug 6

@dirkdierickx I'll never forget the cheat code for Shadow of the Beast 2: ten pints

When and where to enter it is a bit hazier.

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Richard Audette Aug 5

At a glance:
- Version 6/lts doesn't support docker containers (though it seems a newer version does). I run Vaultwarden and Immich - I like pre-packaged containers.
- I won't spend enough time with the tool to master the its CLI, and the webui seemed limited - eg: it didn't seem to allow me to bridge a VM to my local network (but I could do this with the command line tool)

Maybe in time...