Had Fun

Bought a car/micro-camper

Bought a van to do up as a micro-camper, and did a temporary rush job of that conversion myself while waiting in the list for the pro to do it.
Then the pro gave himself a health criss the week it was booked so I took apart my temp job and only got another temp kit-job in it's place.
Went out in it like four times during that and then broke my wrist and couldn't really use it or improve it.
Then had to take it apart even more to try
and figure out where the ad-blue hole was.
I will do a proper permanent job of the
floor and walls and ceiling and adjustments to the kit-job to make it the nicest it's been so far during the spring next year.
My assumption that the prior conversion
into a van and for wheelchair-access meant the microcamper conversion was half-done already turned out to be false.
If I buy a new one, it'll be one that has never been wheelchair adapted.
But it's going okay. Only scraped it once so far.
Fewer than aimed for or booked, but I broke my wrist and had to cancel the second half of the summer.
Went to a conference about money and computers and fringe decentralized social media and it wasn't as boring as you might expect and felt pretty much like a festival.
Exactly the target number! It's lovely.
Took 3 times longer than I'd hoped and
50% more money than I'd planned for really.
Still improvements to make but they will
be incremental and gradual over the coming year or two now.
It's been interest-only for 20 years so a big old lump sum payment that I never really expected to be able to make. Expected to have to sell and move at the end of the mortgage term.
But surprisingly the stocks ISA got high enough to pay it off after all, so I did that.
Cash-flow ruined by that and the bedroom but should start to feel a bit richer next year.

The Raiders Must Get Jeanty Going 1 Way or Another https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/onsi/las-vegas-what-must-do-get-ashton-jeanty-going

1. Plan going to Opole, via Kościan.
2. When you enter the train to Kościan, you discover that the change to Opole is delayed 15 minutes already. Consider changing in Leszno instead; if the delay increases, you'd have more options there.
3. Discover that there aren't any more options in Leszno today. Your change is delayed 30 minutes already. Return the reservations, and take one the other way, to Poznań instead.
4. Train station in Kościan. The displays aren't showing any delays, trains are announced normally. Tell people about the delays, so they won't stand in the -10°C waiting for the train to arrive.
5. Take the train to Poznań, and try to figure out what to do next.
6. Discover that the only reasonable choice going forward is Inowrocław: no delays and good return connection. It's the same train, so take another reservation. Your current seat is already taken there, so move elsewhere.
7. Your train should be followed by another one in the same direction, that departs from Poznań 6 minutes later. However, your train ends up waiting for another delayed train, so the other train goes first. The delay further increases as your train needs to slow down after the other train.
8. Reach Inowrocław 10 minutes later. That's not a problem, since you didn't have enough to see for all the time there anyway.
9. Discover that the town is more interesting than you thought, and you'd use more time.
10. When you almost get to the station, discover that your train is 10 minutes late. Not that you have any use for that time at this point.
11. When you're at the station, the train keeps increasing delay while waiting at the previous station, in Bydgoszcz. The station displays are completely useless, as they show only a random subset of regional trains, for no apparent reason. The announcements include all trains, but are rarely given.
12. The delay keeps increasing. Start thinking about getting a reservation for the next train to Poznań, in case it arrived first. You can't return the reservation after the planned departure time, and you can't have two reservations simultaneously, so reserve the seat from Mogilno, the next station.
13. The next train arrives first. While on board, you discover that you're not going to have any train home for 1.5 hr. Take another seat reservation to Leszno, where you can change into a suburban train and get home 15 minutes earlier than from Poznań. This time, your seat is still free.
14. The train departs 15 minutes delayed from Poznań. After all, you're changing trains in Kościan.
So I was going to go south, to Opole, via Kościan. Instead, I've ended up slingshotting north to Inowrocław, and getting back home via the same train as if I were in Opole.
#rail

Series A, Episode 02 - Space Fall
BLAKE: Just wondered how good you really were.
AVON: Don't try and manipulate me, Blake.
BLAKE: Now why should I try and do that?
AVON: You need my help.
BLAKE: Only if you can open the doors.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/102/185…

Been giving Home Assistant another try. It’s ok I guess.
Probsbly not a common problem but there really is no good solutions that I could find for managing multiple locations from a single instance or even some kind of federated view or something.
Integrating Choria Switch and Metric abstractions into it So I can pull in sensor stats and interact with heaters etc - but let Choria keep autonomously own the devices.
(Also a updated picture of my Pi case for sensors)

PIC12F683 poly/substrate with some residual contacts (some floated away, some sitting at random positions, some still firmly attached) but almost all oxide etched.
Doing the whole die at this state, then will probably do a clean to get all the loose contacts and debris off, another imaging pass.
Then I'm not sure if it's worth the effort to try for a clean substrate image given the poor contrast I'm seeing, vs just calling this the final form. We'll see what happe…

Day 26: Emily Short
If you know who Short is, you know exactly why she's on this list. If you don't, you're probably in the majority. She's an absolutely legendary author within the interactive fiction (IF) community, which gets somewhat pigeonholed by stuff like Zork when there's actually a huge range of stuff in the medium some of which isn't even puzzle-focused, and Short has been writing & coding on the bleeding edge of things for decades.
I was lucky enough to be introduced to Short's work in graduate school, where we played "Galatea" as part of an interactive fiction class. Short uses a lot of clever parser tricks to make your conversation with a statue feel very fluid and conversational, giving to contemporary audiences a great example of how vibrant interaction with a well-designed agent can be in contrast to an LLM, if you're willing to put in some work on bespoke parsing & responses (although the user does need to know basic IF conventions). While I didn't explore the full range of Galatea's many possible outcomes, it left a strong impression on me as a vision for what IF could be besides dorky puzzles, and I think that "visionary" is a great term to describe Short.
If you'd like you get a feel for her (very early) work, you can play Galatea here: #30AuthorsNoMen

I tested Mastodon and found a bug within 2 minutes lol
(When you edit a post that has a quote post attached, but while you do it try to reply to another post, the new reply form has the quoted post from when you did the "edit post" in it, which doesn't make sense)

We should try and get another dancing mania going

A paywalled story in the FT is calling speculative multi-gigawatt data centers "#bragawatts".
@… says:
It is handy because it captures the idea that much of what is going is a kind of expensive posturing. Companies try to outdo one another w…

I’m happy to hear about the results in New York. Less so my county and city elections. But tomorrow is another day, and we’ll try again then.

Right now I am compiling FTEQW on an Intel Atom netbook to try and get freecs working. I also just installed Trinity desktop and I am enjoying Trinity I might install it on another one of my computers. Also I am using toot cli client to post this with an external keyboard and mouse with the laptop plugged into a monitor.

I hate being told what to do. I also find it hard to accept ideas from other people - my partner especially. I think it’s because I want to find solutions myself and do it in my own time. I’m often overwhelmed with things when she starts talking about another thing that needs sorting out. I feel really angry when she does that. I will try to communicate better in those situations. Sometimes I don’t need problem solving, just a hug.

The one front on which Russia makes the most progress is the front line of information wars.
Western corporate media refuse to send reporters to the front lines, instead they repeat the Kremlin's talking points without question or scrutiny.
Independent media and non-USA media dare to report from the front lines, even as Russia targets the journalists - another war crime.
Over a hundred reporters have been killed as they try to bring information to the world about the tr…

We of the Free Press Are in Russia’s Crosshairs
Live from Ukraine 🇺🇦

Hey Generous Folks -- I wanted to put a message up for 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence. #16DaysAgainstGBV #16Days
Rather than an ask for donations, I want to encourage you to find your local spaces in your own community that help women and people of all genders who are fleeing gender based violence or intimate partner violence.
Maybe *you* can raise a few dollars, volunteer at a local space, or help out in other ways. Maybe you've never done that. It might seem scary! I guarantee you, you'll love it. Whether you raise $50 or $500, or nothing at all, by becoming part of it, you'll make a difference
I'm signing up, as I have for a few years now, for another year at Coldest Night of the Year (#IntimatePartnerViolence #Canada #CanPoli #CdnPoli

A day without work with the worker calling in sick.
Seems to be better today though.
We have shelves in the closet and another frame is in construction here. Presumably for the window doors.
Painting has begun. Colour would ideally be half a shade darker but getting varnish for pine in blue seems to be surprisingly tricky. Maybe another coat will help but don't want to lose the wood grain under it.
Might have tried to get a slightly more pale wall if I'd known. So many things you don't really know until you see 'em.
Feels like I'm being gassed, opened up all the windows and doors. This paint takes a long time to try and apparently stinks up the flat while it does so.

Cowboys Get Update on Jadaveon Clowney’s Injury Ahead of Lions ‘TNF’ Game https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/dallas-cowboys/jadaveon-clowney-gametime-decision-injury/?adt_ei=[email]

When "self-driving" cars were first getting some hype back in ~2015 or so, I told people who asked me that I didn't think they'd be safe, and that I wished the same money were being invested in driver-assistance systems instead.
At the time, advocates were claiming that self-driving cars would be safer than human drivers.
We now have both self-driving cars and some nifty new driver assistance things, and it turns out that the self-driving cars are in fact being developed by corporations whose attention to the bottom line results in danger to others on the road pretty regularly. I don't actually have stats here for whether they're "safer than human drivers" or not, but the opportunity for one bad software update to make *all* self-driving cars dangerous at once kinda makes me doubt that.
Here's an example of Waymo cars getting "more aggressive" as they try to balance between being too timid and obstructing traffic (including emergency vehicles) and being too dangerous:
https://archive.ph/JJuGv
Here's another example of passing stopped schoolbusses leading to a software recall:
https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/News/waymo-issue-voluntary-software-recall-after-close-calls/story?id=128207776
In the first article, Waymo claims 91% fewer serious accidents per mile. Obviously an independent audit would be actually trustworthy, but even if we take that claim at face value, it's meaningless if an update tomorrow causes 100,000 accidents.
Note that they could be using better engineering practices, and the fact that they aren't shows that they don't care enough about the risks. They could be deploying new software versions incrementally and slowly, letting new versions rack up lots of miles only on a few vehicles before pushing them to a fleet. The should also have the equivalent of a simulation unit test for "schoolbus is stopped, what do?" and if a software version fails that test, it doesn't make it to the fleet. Clearly they don't have that.
I feel pretty vindicated in my earlier prediction that this tech is a bad idea in the hands of the current advocates.

Some ways white people could learn to be a little !@#!@# less racist, without vague shit like ‘mind your privilege’:
- Seek out Black and native artists
- Remember their !@#!@# names, accurately
- Share your appreciation of their work
- Learn to have a good day when you spot folks having a good time and keep moving
- Learn another language, enough to be bad in it, then try to get by in it once in a while.
- Train your expectations so that people who aren't white being good at stuff isn't surprising.
- Train your expectations so people being good at stuff _they_ consider good is something you can appreciate, even if you don't like it for yourself.
- Stop trying to fix everything yourself

Day 10: Stacey Mason
Another academic, but this time one of my compatriots; we overlapped at UC Santa Cruz as advisees of Michael Mates, and even collaborated on a Twitch stream called ScholarsPlay for a bit, although we never coauthored any papers. We did chat about our research, and I had many good discussions with her about agency in interactive fiction, a topic we both published on. Her paper "On Games and Links: Extending the Vocabulary of Agency and Immersion in Interactive Narratives" (#20AuthorsNoMen

Good Morning #Canada
A bit late this morning as we went out for a big family breakfast. I think I'll chip away at my #CanadianCapitals series by sharing some tidbits about one of our older cities. Halifax, because of its large natural harbour, served as an important military base for British ships in North America. Founded in 1749 and incorporated as a city in 1842, it is known for a number of 1sts. Halifax had the 1st public school in Canada as well as the first law school and art college. Canada’s 1st newspaper, the Halifax Gazette, was established in 1752, and the city had the first all electric city lighting grid in North America. The harbour was also the site for the world's largest man-made explosion in #WWI when a munitions transport collided with another ship. Awesome place to visit but try not to jump when they fire the traditional noon cannon.
#CanadaIsAwesome
https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/halifax