Hurricane Milton was unbelievable. Power outages affected over 3 million customers after Milton ripped across the state and is now out in the Atlantic Ocean.#

Damn, it's cold this morning! 🥶 #

I've just discovered the "seed" parameter you can pass to LLM models that returns deterministic results, meaning that if you send the same "seed" number while asking the same question, you will get the same result. I'm learning more about LLMs every day.#

Up until this morning, I had been using the iPad Twitter app on my MacBook Pro M1 after Twitter removed their Mac app from the store. Today, an update was pushed by Twitter and now it crashes every time it launches. Sigh.#

Another cool, fall morning! 🍂🍁 #

Came across this short film by Eric Kissack, called The Move, on Jason Kottke's site. Very entertaining!#

I really love my little Groq spell checker that I built in Electric Drummer, as it also does punctuation checking :)#

The one thing I use regularly on Twitter is lists, so I can separate my topics of interest. I know Bluesky offers lists, but I'm not sure about Mastodon and Threads. I need to do a lot more investigating.#

It may be getting closer to the time for me to leave Twitter and focus on other sites like Mastodon and Bluesky, and possibly Threads. If I can find the developers that I follow and learn from on these other sites, the time to leave may be sooner rather than later.#

My goal is to improve my blog writing, modeling it after Dave Winer's Scripting News site.#

It's really brisk this morning! 🥶 #

Today is the 30th anniversary of Dave Winer's blog, Scripting News. I've been reading it probably since its beginning. I incorporated Dave's Userland Frontier back in the early 90s into an automated workflow for service bureaus, printers, and newspapers. My partner and I bundled it with our product called Let'er Rip! that downloaded Postscript to different types of imagesetters back in the heyday of desktop publishing. Frontier was at the heart of the automation before AppleScript had come on the scene. Congratulations Dave!#

During the bad storms last night, we lost power for 6-7 hours. I ended up watching the Steelers game on my iPhone. I found out the power came back on around 3:30 AM because Alexis announced loudly that our Wi-Fi wasn't connected to the internet.#

While waiting for the Steelers-Cowboys SNF game, which is under a weather delay due to lightning and thunder, I added a script to Drummer that lets me easily add and remove blockquotes. Fun!!#

I just realized I can add HTML tags and inline styling to my blog in Electric Drummer. You can see the result of adding a blockquote tag in the paragraph from yesterday. I'm going to add some scripting so I can just choose a menu item and it will style the selected text in my outline.#

Cool morning, but it's supposed to get up around 80 today.#

I'm going to create an LLM playground in Electric Drummer focusing on Groq, and after I have it working the way I want, I'll start adding other LLM vendors like OpenAI and Claude. Still, I would like to figure out a local setup though.#

I enhanced the system prompt for my Groq spell checker to "I want you to act as a proofreader. I will provide you texts and I would like you to review them for any spelling, grammar, or punctuation errors. Once you have finished reviewing the text, provide me with the improved text, and do not include extra declarations or comments." It is definitely an upgrade over my first system prompt.#

Stayed up later than I wanted playing around with my Groq-to-Drummer integration. I have a lot of ideas to further enhance it using LLMs from Drummer. I'm going to look at integrating Gemini, Claude, and OpenAI since their costs have all come down quite a bit.#

Made an update to my Groq spell checker: if there is a change to the text made by Groq, I now insert it below the original text so I can compare them and make sure Groq hasn't made up something! 😊 Then I can delete whichever headline I don't want to keep. It's quick and dirty, but it works!#

While out running around, I decided I'm going to turn my Micro.blog site into a TIL (Things I Learned) site and point to it from my main blog.#

My next goal is to recreate my spell checker locally using my Ollama setup. Update: I'm having trouble connecting Drummer to my local Ollama server. Still digging! Update 2: I think I'm going to stick with my Groq spell checker for now until I find a better solution locally using Ollama which works well when I use curl or Python but coming from Drummer there are continuing issues.#

I now have an AI spell checker for my Electric Drummer setup! I created a script in my Scripts menu that calls Groq using their rest endpoint with the system prompt "please spell check and return only the corrected text" and pass the script the text of the selected node in my outline. Once I get the result I replace the selected line with the corrected text. Since Groq is still free for simple uses like this I figured I'd try my luck and it worked! The only drawback at the moment is I don't really know what was changed if anything.#

I'm thinking about changing my Micro.blog site, which currently mirrors my Electric Drummer blog, to something else that I can link to from my main blog. Not sure what yet…#

I stopped up at Uptown Coffee this morning. My niece had given me a gift card for the place sometime last year and I discovered it in my wallet last night. I hadn't been there in quite some time mainly because I have to pay for parking, whereas other coffee shops I frequent have free parking available. But I had forgotten how cool the ambiance is, plus they bake fresh pastries on the premises. 🥐 The croissant I had was delicious! The place was bustling, so I sat in the corner and observed the clientele, which I love to do. I think I might add it to my rotation again! 😊#

The next 10 days are going to be beautiful fall weather! Sunny and very little chance of rain! 😎 #

A beautiful morning with a little bit of fog. Going to finally be sunny and in the mid 70s after all of the rain the last week.#

My daughter just dropped off the Blue Yeti Nano Premium microphone and I discovered they work best with wired over the ear headphones so I placed an order at BestBuy for the Sony - ZX Series Wired On-Ear Headphones that I will pick up tomorrow. #

This is a test. I did a quick and dirty audio recording using QuickTime player and then uploaded it to my Micro.blog site where I can host podcast files. This is not intended to be a slickly produced podcast at least not yet. I just want to have a way to record my thoughts as they happen and be able to share them from my blog. My daughter has a Blue Yeti Nano Premium microphone she is going to let me play with to see how it could become part of my audio blogging.#

Did a lot of running around yesterday and have some more to do today in preperation for my daughter's show next week at Fort Ligonier Days.#

Rabbit, rabbit! 🐇 #

I realize I do a lot of noodling in my brain about all type of things that I need to get written down on this blog. I know my writing is a bit sloppy but I think I could become a decent blogger if I used some disipline in my daily routine. I'd also like to post more on social media. The bloggers I would strive to be more like are Dave Winer and Simon Willison. I love using Dave's Electric Drummer to write on my blog and I love how Simon shares his programming thinking.#

Another rainy, cool day. ☔️ #

Missed posting yesterday as my daughter had an outdoor show that we had to set up at 6:30 AM! The show continues today at the Mt. Lebanon Artist's Market.#

Somedays I get so far down a rabbit hole that I can't seem to find my way back out. Today is one of those days.#

Another cool, gray morning!#

With all of the different current technologies that keep vying for my attention and begging me to learn about I sometimes feel like the dogs in the movie Up! Squirrel!! (If you know you know) 😆 #

Need to do some running around today and then take my grandson to soccer late in the afternoon. After soccer my wife and I will be babysitting two of our other grandchildren while their parents go to a concert. 😀 #

I just got access to Advanced Voice Mode in ChatGPT on both the iOS and Mac apps. Very interesting with a much more natural way of conversing. What caught me by surprise is I was watching a video about hurricane Helene and when I had fisnished ChatGPT asked me if I was in the path of the hurricane! Was not expecting that at all! Didn't even realize she was listening! I need to do some more exploring especially on my Mac.#

It's starting out as a cool , rainy day with thunderstorms! ⛈️ #

Excellent post by Dave Winer about the situation we find ourselves in regarding abortion. It's horrible what the white Republican men have done to the women of our country!#

I need to make changes in my life instead of living in the past.#

Kind of scary yet exciting: "It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there." -- Sam Altman#

Cool and rainy today. But the Steelers won again! 😀 #

Every day I use Python for quick hit ideas run in the terminal. It is such an easy and simple yet robust language that just about any idea I have can be implemented in pure Python. There are so many cli tools built with Python that I use including ones I have created myself. #

Good morning sports fans! It's the Steelers home opener today!! 🏈 #

Just read a post by Dave Winer about healthcare as you get older that I really relate to. I'm a little bit older than Dave but I have been through very similar things with the healthcare system. It's not fun. #

My daughter has a small show today at the East Liberty Wine Festival. They invited her awhile back I think because she draws a lot of people but she sells stickers not wine! 😀 I won't be at the show as I am working for my daughter today at the I Made It Market retail shop in the Mall at Robinson.#

The Beatles Recording Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band #

Lot of logistics to figure out for tomorrow's show. A lot of moving pieces! 🚚 #

Interesting read: Taste is Eating Silicon Valley - "Just as software ate the world and dramatically transformed industries in the last era, taste is now eating software—and with it, Silicon Valley" #

A famous lecture given in 1982 by computer science pioneer Grace Hopper, “Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People” is now avilable on NSA's YouTube channel. Click the aarrow to the left to watch it here.#

Arrgh! Happy Talk like A Pirate Day!#

Good morning! I'm going to add some blogging shortcuts to my Scripts menu in Drummer to quickly add things like video links, image links and code snippets as subs.#

I'm going to put my Drummer script issues to the back burner and get back to my Python tools that I've let sit idle for too long! #

Because I still haven't time to fix my script I copied and pasted into my micro.blog site the missing information for the days I was testing the headings. Still not sure if I will continue to use headings but I still will look into the script as I have time.#

The Federal Reserve just cut its benchmark interest rate by an unusually large half-point. This should really stir the election pot quite a bit! #

Yesterday got away from me with some unexpected things coming up. ☹️ #

Busy day ahead.#

Didn't get a chance to do much digging into my script yesterday. Hopefully I can get to it today.#

Beautiful "feels like fall" morning! 😀 #