I've created a public
repo on Github that contains an archive of
my blog archive files. The files contain blog posts starting in March, 2014 to present. Perhaps some time in the future I will find a way to search against these files. One remaining group of blog posts are on my WordPress site going back to
May, 2008. I need to find a way to export those old posts, but that is a bit of a mess because I've been cross-posting to that WordPress site from my current blog.
#I wish that Dave would enable Daytona to working with Dummerland. He has it working for Scripting News but never enabled it for the rest of us. While I can still run searches on the OPML files indexed up until April, 2023, the only way to add OPML files to be indexed is through Drummer. Right now I can still login to Daytona because I was logged in using my Twitter account but I don't think I will be able to login from another browser. Daytona was for me a pre-cursor to the personal LLMs enjoyed by people today because I would query against my writing.
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Android Police has a
comparison of the Pixel 7a to the Pixel 4a, which is the comparison of the phone I moved to from the phone I used previously. I really like the size and feel of the Pixel 4a and wish Google had committed to a sub 6-inch phone, but given that did not happen, I am adjusting well to the Pixel 7a. While the Pixel 7a is not as slippery as I feared it was going to be, I do have it in a Latercase that adds a nice "mat" feel at very little cost in weight.
#In the Android world there are basically two classes of devices, those that do get upgrades to Android and those who might or might not get upgrades to Android. The later reminds me of the Pocket PC days, and having learned from that experience, I avoid such products. Consequently I am committed to Pixel phones.
#Nobody alive today lived when there were no clocks to measure, or define, time.
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44 degrees on the outside thermometer this morning!
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I've been using
FeedLand for managing and viewing my RSS feeds, but I find it slow for viewing feeds. Today I realized that I can use
FeedLand to manage my RSS feeds and add that OPML feedlist to my own instance of River5 so that I can view my feeds on my own server.
#When I put the Pixel 7a on the charger this morning it had 48% battery remaining. I am wondering about how long it would take to fully charge.
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I have this nice
Pixel Stand and it appears as a connected device, I assume via Bluetooth, on the Pixel, so it would be nice if users had the ability to finely tune how charging works because I want to use the stand as a stand when I am at my desk. Ideally, I would be able to configure the phone/stand to only charge when the battery is less than X% and only charge to Y%. Once fully charged the charging should stop and the stand just acts like a stand.
#Given that the Pixel knows when it is on the stand so that it acts as a picture frame, it would seem that Google expects one to put the phone on the charger for extended periods of time.
#Today is the first work day using the Pixel 7a and I am wondering about whether or not it is a good idea to keep the phone on the wireless charging stand that is on my desk. If I keep putting it on the stand during the day then it will continually charge. I think the phone and charger should be smart enough to stop charging when the battery is full and thus not damage the battery, but I don't know this for certain. I did enable
adaptive charging, but that seems to be optimized for night time charging and based off alarms, so I don't know if it will do anything during the day.
Articles that I have read
about wireless charging and battery life are
not conclusive.
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The Pixel 7a arrived at my front door! That's one step in the right direction.
#I caved in yesterday and ordered the Pixel 7a from Amazon, which gets me the $50 gift card at least. I expect that over time the price for the Pixel 7a will come down to closer to $400, may be as soon as Amazon Prime day in July. Probably at the end of the year Google will stop selling the Pixel 6a, which will allow the price of the 7a to drop down further and make room for the Pixel 8a announcement next year. On the other hand, if the rumors are true and the this is the end of the line for the "A Series" then the 6a might stick around through Google I/O when they announce the Pixel 8. Seems like the future plans ride on what Google announces this fall.
#So, I am probably paying $100 more to be an early owner, but doing so enables me to stop feeling left out as I see friends playing with their new toy. I should receive the Pixel 7a some time later today, which gives me the weekend to migrate everything over. The most painful part of the migration will likely be moving the
Pixel Watch.
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The biggest impact the Internet has had on society is the compression of time. Nearly everything happens faster today than it did ten years ago. In the past in terms of society, change took years, even decades to occur, much longer than most wanted but none-the-less had to accept. Problem is that we now have generations of people who did not live prior to the Internet and they expect change to happen much, much faster, and they will not accept waiting for decades. The people who do not want fast change, which is probably at least Gen X and older, appear willing to revert to authoritarianism to prevent the change they do not want because they view such change as an infringement on their liberties.
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Writing is thinking. Consequently, outsourcing writing to AI sounds like it will lead to less thinking at a time when the world needs more thinking. Some appear to think that human editing is more valuable. Perhaps at a certain point in one's development that is true, for example, at my age and years of work experience editing work is probably a better use of my time than writing from scratch, but I didn't get there without doing a lot of writing first.
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I want to
learn more about iPadOS and MacOS Shortcuts.
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Amongst the features of the Pixel 7a I have to look forward to is that it will be the first device I will use that has Google's Tensor G2 chip. I noted earlier about how battery life could be affected by the 90 Hz display, but that could be counteracted by the the Tensor G2's power consumption.
#Really interesting to see that
the Pixel Fold will be Google's smallest phone when folded in phone mode. The biggest problem with the foldables is the cost, followed by their weight. If cost were to get down to the levels of regular smartphones then the screen/hinge durability becomes less an issue because fewer people who own them for more than a year. On the other hand, when looking at the price one probably should factor in the cost of a smartphone and iPad Mini given that something like the Google Fold would replace both devices. By that math, a price approaching $800 would be the sweet spot, I think.
#As I said, I plan to buy a Pixel 7a, the question is when. I think it's interesting that both Best Buy and Amazon are offering $50 gift cards for an implicit discount. Best Buy actually provides another $50 discount if one were to "activate" their phone when purchased even if the phone claims to be unlocked. My guess is that the telcos provide Best Buy discounts if they get new customers. I am not in a rush and I think that if the past holds true the price will come down, or their may be a good deal on Amazon Prime day. I would like the blue phone, but will live with whichever I can get at a good price.
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Do I care about Bluesky? I am on Mastodon but I don't check it often, I just don't have the time/energy. Over the years my use of Twitter evolved down to only checking the timeline during an event, like New Years Eve, and honestly it is probably good enough for that and perhaps Bluesky will replace that function, but I don't know.
#I've been running
Proxmox on a
Beelink U59 Pro now for several weeks and it is working very well for my needs. Now I am thinking I would like to get a UPS to better handle power failures, but what to get? I've seen recommendations to only use
Network UPS Tools.
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Google is starting to replace their 2-factor authentication with
passkeys. Simply stated, passkeys use biometics and secured storage of whatever device you create the passkey on. For example, I can create a passkey on my
Macbook Air M1 so that I can simply use the finger print scanner on the device rather than having to enter a password. In this case the Macbook stores the passkey and the passkey uses whatever biometrics it has for authentication. Same thing works with Windows and Windows Hello.
#In my experience Google's passkey support does not extend to Chrome on Linux. One way that I think it should work is via a FIDO2 USB key like the Yubicon keys that I own. I actually created the passkey on a Yubicon on my Mac but whener I try to use it with Linux, it errors out. I suspect this is more to do with the operating system rather than the key.
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I think all the buzz around
chatGPT has similarities with the growing habit of claiming things as facts that are not facts. Something can
appear to be intelligent and will be accepted on that appearance rather than the fact. To make that judgement one has to understand what is intelligence, is it more than word association?
#The only social networks I check regularly are micro.blog, Instagram, and Facebook. When the Mastodon craze hit I created an account and checked it somewhat regularly, but that tappered off.
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I am starting to question the value of using FeedLand. The lag with updating the HackerNews firehose is one thing, but in quick comparison to my instance of River5, I think River5 performs better, of course I am not sharing it with anyone else so that would be a big reason.
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Starting to notice that FeedLand's feed updating is getting behind or not running at all. For example, the HackerNews Firehose feed doesn't update at all until I force
FeedLand to check it.
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I am interested in
what Dave is doing with the chatbot that is based on a
large language model built using just his writing. It's a sophisticated index of his own right that makes what appears to be a great personal search engine. I would love to have the same thing but suspect it will cost too much. Daytona was providing this for me, but that broken from this site and thus my new writing.
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Let's see whether I can embedded a Mastodon toot. Works
as specified.
#I installed Proxmox on the
Beelink U59 Pro over the weekend, then migrated some containers, including the LXQT container I use as my personal remote desktop during the work day. The net result after migration is that I now have four times faster Internet access due to the container running on a host with a wired ethernet connection rather than a bridged wireless connection. Surprised to find that the Speedometer and JetStream benchmarks in Chrome running on the container are on par with Chrome running on my work PC. Overall I have improved my work day Internet access.
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Turns out that I didn't need to do anything "extra" to be able to run graphical Linux apps on Windows 11 after installing WSL. One thing I did have to do to make it work was add Hyper-V as a feature as it was not enabled by default, nor enabled when you run wsl --install. After this all I had to do is run install an app like gedit. An icon is even added to the Windows 11 start menu and you can launch apps without having to previously start WSL.
#Just realized, before I install
Proxmox on that Beelink I should check out
WSL, and in particular the ability to run graphical Linux apps.
#Don't know why, but for some reason, I find editing a outline in Drummer that is served by pagePark to be very satisfying. I can keep the rendered version of the outline open in a tab while editing it in Drummer and instantly see the changes without having to do any builds or updates. It jut works!
#I am going to start my next personal
tech project of building a new
Proxmox host using the Beelink U59.
#I have a virtual machine on my
Macbook Air M1 that runs the ARM version of Windows 11, and I decided to try running Geekbench on it but found that the "native" Windows version does not run. I did run the browser benchmarks and notice that Edge performance is 3x faster than Chrome, suggesting that Edge on this version of Windows 11 is native ARM whereas the version of Chrome is probably being translated in some way.
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- I recently obtained a new PC, the Beelink U59, and to get an idea of how well it performs in comparison to other computers I downloaded and ran Geekbench V6. The Macbook M1 is my highend computer that is magnitudes faster than my work computer and the new Beelink. The Beelink only has an Intel Celeron processor and costs magnitudes less than the Macbook, so this is not a surprise.#
- I've been using Geekbench since Version 4, so you can see the differences in the benchmarking between versions. The compute score for the Macbook M1 increased slightly from Version 5 to 6 (18737 to 20207), but the compute score for my HP EliteBook 745 G6 went down from 8246 to 6531. Regardless of the actual numbers, they support my actual experience that the computer I use most each day for work (the HP) is magnitudes slower than my personal computer. (I wish my employer would provide a VM that I could run on the Macbook, I would probably enjoy that much more than using the HP.)#
- While Geekbench does CPU and Compute benchmarking, I like to do browser performance benchmarking because I mostly use web apps and thus feel these benchmarks might give me a better indication of the performance that I will see. The browser benchmarks provide me some interesting stories. #
- For example, using Chrome on Windows 11, the Beelink U59 browser performance is better than on my work computer that has an Intel I5 processor. What really surprises me is how bad Chrome on the Pixelbook performs, it is worse by a large margin. The other thing I learned is that Chrome is faster than Firebox. #
Good point being made
here about the idea that large language models like
chatGPT "hallucinates." The program doesn't hallucinates, it get things wrong, and therefore we need to be skeptical about it's answers. The problem is that skepticism is work that many do not want to do.
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Switched to using Chrome on my LXQT container and it at least loads my feed and lets me use the link blogging feature. Not sure why it's "hanging" in Firefox and running fine in Chrome. Also surprised to find that Chrome seems to run faster.
#Dave
has released the "link blogging" feature to FeedLand, which is kinda working for me, although it seems to generate socket errors whenever I try to manually write something to my feed. The feature is also not working in Firefox on my LXQT container desktop. Cannot use this for the Links tab here because that requires a JSON version of the feed.
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Yesterday I received the
Beelink U59 that I recently ordered, which intend to use as a
Proxmox host. It comes with Windows 11 Pro pre-installed, so for the moment I am checking out Windows 11. I've set up connecting via RDP and the display quality degrades over time, perhaps due to network connectivity. Not sure what to think.
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Reading
a summary of a virtual conference regarding the Fediverse. I seem to have a limit on the number of social networks that can hold my interest. Long ago I stopped checking in on Twitter regularly, I think mostly because of the sheer volume of posts, but I kept the Twitter app and used it whenever an "event' occurred, like New Years Eve. I check in on Facebook once a day to see what my friends are doing, I check micro.blog once a day to see what's new in that community, and I check Instagram more often. I created an account on TWiT's Mastodon server, but so far I've handled it like Twitter.
#It appears that Dave is thinking about how to revive the links function here using Feedland. I need to keep an eye on this.
#It's April! With Daytona no longer working, my month end process here has become simpler.
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Just lost a good chunk of writing because Drummer stopped saving a file. I think the web app crashed or something in the browser. Lesson learned is to not trust Drummer.
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The Perennial Philosophy is a term used to describe a set of spiritual beliefs that are shared across many different religions and philosophical traditions. It is based on the idea that there is an underlying truth that is common to all spiritual traditions, and that this truth can be experienced through direct spiritual experience. The Perennial Philosophy is also sometimes referred to as the “Eternal Wisdom” or the “Primordial Tradition”.
Source: chatGPT
Many politicians seem eager to
shutdown Tiktok despite what appear to be First Amendment constraints (the government shutting down Tiktok will infringe on American's free speech rights). Can you really claim shutting down Tiktok is in a national interest while leaving Facebook, for which we found evidence of how it was used to influence elections by adversaries, alone? And, I wonder about the political ramifications with 150 million Americans using it every day. Yeah, you might think it's just kids, but those kids will be voters some day.
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