Tootfinder

London Home Solar Power PV Pilot Project: Continued (2007) - Learn how I started to go off-grid @Home, and warming up to getting real (spendy). #solar #microgen -

London Home Solar Power PV Pilot Project: Continued (2007)
Learn how I started to go off-grid @Home, and warming up to getting real (spendy). #solar #microgen

So guess who wrote a convoluted date comparison conditional instead of using `Temporal.ZonedDateTime.compare()` like an intelligent human being and ended up hitting an edge case where future scheduled calls started getting cleaned off the database instead of past ones?
I’ll give you a hint: has two thumbs and his name is Aral 🤦‍♂️
Anyway, just restored things from yesterday’s backup and sent a direct message to everyone scheduled for a Gaza Verified video verification call apolog…

Google says my "Entry to Left Wing Anarchist Reading" doc is getting a ton of traffic lately. Not sure where to check the exact stats, but here's the link if you wanna dive in.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WuGnU7O_0eyjf9caYJX…

@revk 's waveshare 7.5" board is taunting me; I got it a year or so back when it was very cheap, and I've not got a panel for it, but thought I'd see if the ESP started up. I was getting nothing from the USB, so soldered up the serial connector, took it over to the scope, and plugged it in...and it's LEDs lit up and identified on USB. Hmm, in the end I think it's only coming up if I plug it in to one old netbook next to the scope; weird...hmm, might check if it gi…

Why Raiders' Star Brock Bowers is Just Getting Started https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/onsi/las-vegas-star-brock-bowers-just-getting-started

After the Online Safety Act’s onerous internet age restrictions took effect this summer,
it didn’t take long for Brits to get around them.
Some methods went viral, like using video game Death Stranding’s photo mode to bypass face scans.
But in the end, the simplest solution won out: --- VPNs.
Virtual private networks have proven remarkably effective at circumventing the UK’s age checks,
letting users spoof IP addresses from other countries so that the checks neve…

The VPN panic is only getting started
The UK government is facing calls to add age restrictions to VPNs in order to stop them being used to… get around age restrictions.

I've spent the past year learning Morse code, and it's ended up being a great deal of fun. I've had a lot of questions. I've tried to share what I've learned with others as I've gone along.
To celebrate the end of the year, I wrote a combination of information, story, and advice. How to get started, mobile apps and websites, books, getting on the air, learning to send, POTA, SST, keys and keyers. I'm not fluent or expert yet, but that means that I still remember what's hard!

from my link log —
Temporal: getting started with JavaScript’s new date time API.
https://2ality.com/2021/06/temporal-api.html
saved 2021-06-29 https://<…

@… (thank you!) we’re just getting started! this year is going to be a very big one 🎉

DeMarvion Overshown sends warning to Cowboys' opponents https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/onsi/news/demarvion-overshown-fires-warning-shot-cowboys-opponents

@… VFX guy who started getting visual migraines decided to recreate what he sees: https://meetar.github.io/scotoma/

So in another dream I just woke up from, I was talking to someone about "the idea problem" (that it's becoming harder to monitize ideas, from a vox article written by an AI cooked reporter).
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-it-could-happen-here-30717896/episode/executive-disorder-white-house-weekly-46-313675864/
Basically, I was arguing that the majority of inventions target men because patriarchy puts economic control in men's hands. As men have started to help more with childcare, there have been more inventions related to childcare. (I don't have any idea if this is true. Seems legit, but I'm just relating my dream. I think I was also oversimplifying a bit to "men" and "women" because of my audience, but anyway it was a dream.) There's actually more low-hanging fruit, I pointed out, related to making care work easier.
So I argued that the real problem was a failure to invest in research into solving that problem. Today there are all these boondoggles built around killing people. What if, instead of all this government research into killing people, we dumped a ton of money into making it easier to support a household? That would be great for the economy. (Being asleep, I seem to have forgotten that working people need money.)
In the blur of being just awake I started thinking about how you could kickstart the US economy by taking the money from the AI boondoggle and other autonomous murder bots and create something like a program to build robots for housekeepers. You'd still be funding tech with government money, so the same horrible people get paid, but you're now actually solving real problems. It wouldn't even matter if it was a boondoggle, honestly. Just dumping money into something other than murdering people is good enough.
I imagined first if there was a program to fund a robot housecleaner, like robot dog with AI some laundry pickup, that would be provided, free of charge, to help people with children. It would work the same as the military boondoggle where a private company makes the government buy a piece of hardware from them and then also pay them to service it for some number of years. But instead of that hardware sitting around waiting to kill someone, it would be getting brought to people's houses to help them.
Then I thought, hey, you could even boost the economy more if you just had government funding for doulas and housecleaners and paid them a living wage. Hey, you could really kickstart the economy by nationalizing healthcare and including doula support as part of all births. Oh, and you could also just include the optional household help for families with children until the kids turn 18.
None of this is perfect (I don't actually think most of this is possible from any state), but the point is that it's actually wildly easy to figure out all kinds of ways to invest in the economy and monitize ideas as long as you aren't entirely focused on the same old "make money from spying on people and killing them." Funny that. Like they said in the podcast, maybe "finding ideas" isn't the problem.
Hope you enjoyed the weird semi-awake brain dump/rant.

#firstWorldProblem Sigh.
Yeah, I’m old and set in my ways, a creature of habit, whatever. There’s a particular brand and product of a breakfast cereal that I’ve eaten every day for at least the last 15 years: Barbara’s Oat Crunch. I started getting it when I noticed it was the only one I could find that didn’t add high fructose corn syrup. It’s been discontinued. 🤬The bastards. Eve…

More work on clearing out a comms cabinet we’ve inherited at the new office. Look at these two bad boys…
https://business.bt.com/help/article/phone-line-and-services/isdn2e/getting-started-with-isdn2-2e/
So we could have roc…

from my link log —
Getting started with Rust on a Raspberry Pi Pico.
https://reltech.substack.com/p/getting-started-with-raspberry-pi
saved 2021-11-18

Getting Started with Rust on a Raspberry Pi Pico (Part 2)
Iterating faster with cargo run

I am really interested in the linked.art initiative, but I’m finding it hard to wrap my head around it. What strikes me as particularly odd:
* The types-of-types pattern, which creates JSON structures that are very unlike usual JSON properties.
* The AATization of everything, including things like language tags, for which perfectly fine native RDF patterns exist.
Has anyone worked with it? Are there good Getting Started guides?

GM is adding native Apple Music to select vehicles, and rolls out support for digital keys, after it started phasing out CarPlay in 2023 (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/transportation/844697/gm-cadillac-chevy-apple-music-native

Cadillac and Chevy are getting native Apple Music
GM is bringing native Apple Music to Cadillac and Chevy vehicles, thanks to its decision to block Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.

The #AgaveSpike that started last April is getting a bit sad at the base now. However it has a cousin that has just started to shoot up its own spike. #Photography #FlowersOfMastodon

Added a zoom level to the Category page on the Exocortex-Log app. Can make the graphs look a lot cleaner now.
Looking back over the last 100 months here, we can see in general my social life is quite seasonal -- Festivals are a lot of social all weekend long and a couple of them in a month really bumps up the hours from my usual habit of sitting alone in a dark room pressing buttons.
The peak in 2019 is a summer filled with Glasto and Noisily and another festival or camping trip I don’t seem to have recorded the name of.
Then clearly visible is the drop-off in social activity as the COVID pandemic hit. Virtual-Social (IE zoom meetings and the like) picked up quite a bit around there but had died back to almost nothing way before the hours spent with actual people started to tick up.
Annoyingly, I have my biggest gap in data right on top of the pandemic there, where I failed to back up for months and then data became corrupted.
When the data-hole is over we see social life still not really returning until the middle of 2021 and not really getting back into stride until summer 2022.
It remains much lower now on average with lower peaks than before the pandemic too. Multiple reasons.
Work is pretty constant all the way though other than the data-hole. Dipping when I take time off for social mostly.
That data-hole is annoying. Back up your data kids.
#lifeLog #app #exocortexLog

"Microsoft was an early investor in many of the latest AI companies. It ended up with a serious stake in OpenAI and benefited from early access to its models, creating Bing Chat and Copilot when Google, Meta, and Anthropic were just getting started. But now its momentum has stalled, and like everyone else, it's not making much money from its AI products. That's because no one is buying them, and that is because very few people actually find them useful, The Information reports."
https://www.tumblr.com/teledyn/803134194609979392?source=share

London Home Solar Power PV Pilot Project: Continued (2007) - Learn how I started to go off-grid @Home, and warming up to getting real (spendy). #solar #microgen -

London Home Solar Power PV Pilot Project: Continued (2007)
Learn how I started to go off-grid @Home, and warming up to getting real (spendy). #solar #microgen

I started getting reports of an unseasonal Joshua tree bloom in the last few weeks, and looking over records on @inaturalist.bsky.social it's pretty widespread! So we're putting out the call for folks to record this "bonus bloom" and help us study it
#science #ecology

The Trump vs. Newsom energy showdown is just getting started (Politico)
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/13/trump-newsom-california-energy-policies-00723860
http://www.memeorandum.com/260113/p53#a260113p53

Started the official rewrite of the Sisyphus client in #golang, working on getting the Ffmpeg command-line tasks parsed and validated against the schema. This should make things easier to distribute with respect to the client as I can just distribute static binaries.
#programming

I never posted another "garage door fix" post after this one because we ended up getting a new garage door opener when the old one started failing even more and was beyond repair and also my partner was fed up with my hacks.
https://rasterweb.net/raster/2021/02/15/garag…

Garage Fix (Again 2!)
Fix it again, there...

Dropped in the new 9800X3D today, as well as the Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE. Booted up, and it posted, phew. Set the RAM Expo profile again and rebooted, logged in to desktop and started checking stuff. Launched The Last Caretaker and opened up MangoHud. 90C??! "Yo wtf is up with these temps.. OH SHIT" *shutdown*
Yes, yes I had done the thing everyone does at least once. As I was getting everything set up and pulling out the old parts and such, I looked at the new …

i agree that this is depressing, but i don't think AI is the _cause_. this problem started when we collectively decided to gatekeep social and physical mobility with higher education
i went to university ~15 years ago. a naive idiot, i thought that i'm there to learn. eventually one of my parents casually admitted that university is for getting connections--i think the parent who was doing a PhD at the time, too

Here's one for the people who really enjoy getting angry about AI: when you write an answer on Quora, they've started using an LLM to read the answer and then ask you personally weird nonsensical follow-up questions based on snippets of your answer without understanding or context.

So, tonight's goal is to continue with ngscopeclient performance work.
I started out by doubling the speed of the eye pattern *again* by moving index buffer calculation from CPU to GPU.
Next up is going to be getting the 100baseTX decoder to not be so slow. Right now of the 43 seconds of CPU time in the current 1-minute benchmark, 26.9 is spent sampling the MLT-3 waveform on rising edges of the recovered clock.
The thing is, we already *know* the sample values at the re…

The fascist who killed Heather Heyer at Unite the Right helped turn the tides against the last Trump administration. He said there were "very fine people on both sides." The resistance grew, antifa doxxing fascists started getting those fash fired.
But some of those fash didn't stop. They kept organizing their terror cells. The fash who killed Heyer was with a group called Vanguard America. Patriot Front is a Nazi group that split off from Vanguard America. They started terrorizing people by loading up in box trucks and piling out for spontaneous marches.
That box truck tactic probably sounds familiar. Patriot Front basically disappeared at the same time that ICE started recruiting hard.
Let me make it more clear. The very same Nazis from UTR who killed Heather Heyer, who Trump called "very fine people," are now employees of DHS. They've been carrying out the ethnic cleansing they always dreamed of, and they're being paid by the government, *with your tax dollars*, to do it. And now, just like in Charlottesville, they've murdered an unarmed protestor.
This feels similar because it is. These are the same people killing daughters and mothers. Killing unarmed protestors, out of rage not fear, then lying and claiming self defense. This is the same tactic it's always been. This is the same thing they've always done.
It seems like we may have reached the Heather Heyer point of this administration early with Renee Good. Now would be a good time for everyone to get into the streets and stay there until this is over. Everyone turned the tides before, and now he's so much weaker.
This can all be over if we fight like hell to end it.
#USPol

Can Caleb Williams continue to change the script in Bears-Packers rivalry? https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6957927/2026/01/10/caleb-williams-change-script-bears-packers-rivalry/

South Australia is getting a major energy upgrade.
Engie and Sungrow just broke ground on the Pelican Point battery storage system—a massive 200MW/400MWh facility that'll power over 29,400 homes while stabilizing the renewable-rich grid.
Expected online in late 2027, it's a key piece of the region's clean energy transition.

Construction begins on Engie’s Pelican Point BESS in South Australia
Sungrow and Engie have started construction on the Pelican Point grid-forming battery energy storage system (BESS) project in South Australia, marking a key step in the state’s clean energy transition.

They have a great “big” point here about incrementalism but also: fiber, water, and even minimal activity specifically are great first steps towards feeling better.
I suspect that a lot of us 1st-worlders feel lousy in part because we’re each paving our own way to T2D, colon cancer, and heart disease. @…

Guess 4 was a throw away word to get some letter positions. Totally a waste of effort. Left me more confused then when i started. I wound up getting the clue from one of my starter words and was able to piece it together. #Wordle
Wordle 1 630 5/6
⬛🟨⬛🟩⬛
⬛⬛⬛🟨🟨
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
🟨🟨🟨⬛⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

I think I started off on the wrong foot here, on my Qtile Wayland FreeBSD adventure 🤣
Getting that dd command from history, changing the iso to the FreeBSD one, and zapping it onto /dev/sda indeed did correctly overwrite my 2TB external disk. Not the contents of /dev/sdb, the USB stick where it should land.
That's what you get for inserting extra disks 🥳 🤓 😂

I couldn’t find a clear guide, so I put together my own “Entry to Left-Wing Anarchist Reading.”
Thought it might help others getting started on this path.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WuGnU7O_0eyjf9caYJXJn-KbXfsQi3uHE5EYYzQcbD8/ed…

When we think about the improvement in team form, I would argue that it parallels Mac Allister's improvement in form. He's been very solid in consecutive games.
It also helps that Bradley is finding his stride too. I don't know what change has been the catalyst, but something has clicked.
Wirtz... looking pretty good. Should have another assist, but once again misfortunate. I really like everything about him. And we're just getting started.

You're going to want to sit down for this.
Or maybe not.
Kohler has started selling a smart camera. For your toilet. Yep, a camera.
And in typical #IOT fashion, lo and behold, it's not secure.

Engineer proves that Kohler’s smart toilet cameras aren’t very private
Kohler is getting the scoop on people’s poop.

The Supreme Court gave Trump a big redistricting win. But the fight is just getting started. (Politico)
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/05/trump-redistricting-fight-indiana-pressure-00678789
http://www.memeorandum.com/251205/p144#a251205p144

Alright, started work on the `av1an` module for my distributed encoding server. First up, getting a proper JSON format to set the command-line options. The schema is about 320 lines long, but it does lend itself to some nice data formatting. A basic encode "job" block looks like this and actually generates the appropriate command-line arguments.
```json
{
"source": "video.mkv",
"destination": "test.mkv",
…

My mother is incredible.
We like to joke that she is a model #immigrant:
- She came to the #US fleeing from the war in #Ukraine, with no further plan besides getting to me and my husband in at least temporary safety.
- We had to run a crowdfunding campaign to help her and the kids sustain themselves as they waited for their #TPS immigration paperwork to process.
- Once her work authorization came through, she somehow managed to get a job as faculty at #Cornell - and started their #Ukrainian program, teaching the language and Ukrainian history for the first time in the university’s curriculum.
- Now she’s been accepted to academic conferences, publications, and has joined the board of the refugee support organization in #Ithaca that helped her get settled there herself.
I’m so proud of her. Y’all should read this article, it’s pretty good: https://www.ithacawelcomesrefugees.org/giving-from-abundance-krystynas-journey-to-becoming-an-iwr-board-member/

I'm getting closer with my nginx-rtmp-Docker-container-on-MacOS project!
I started from scratch on the mac a couple days ago, reinstalled docker with homebrew and then realized that part of my problem was that macOS (and windows) has to run docker in a virtual machine container of its own and *that* can mess with networking.
So I have now figured that out. Colima, the vm that seems most popular on macOS, needs a mac specific option (--network-attached) when starting so that it gets the mac network going. Major Aha! moment.
I also learned more completely how to build my own Docker images.
I've gotten to the point where nginx is definitely running, I know the port is open (via nmap on another device), I know nginx is accepting the stream, but nginx still refuses to publish that stream to Youtube (or at least youtube is not seeing it).
I also can ping apple.com and youtube.com from within the container, so access to the outside world is working.
I
So that's where I'm at.
I just figured out how to get into a container and examine the nginx log files now.
At this point I am going to rebuild the container with nginx configured for full debug level logging. Hopefully that provides some more clues on where it is getting stuck.
I give it a 50/50 chance that it is either an nginx configuration/installation problem or another colima virtual machine/networking issue.
I've learned a lot at least and feel better about my overall Docker knowledge!
And I'm documenting on my blog as I go so I'll have a howto produced from this when it finally works!
#docker #mac #nginx #colima #rtmp #youtube #containerizeit

One other pattern that I kept experiencing last year when I was actually trying these tools in my work (because I had so many people pushing them on me I started to think I was crazy):
Them: “oh you are struggling with X? I have been using AI to solve it and it gives me the solution in less than 10 minutes! You HAVE TO try it!”
Me: “X is really annoying, I’d love to get help with it. I’ll try that, thanks!”
* I go and try to do X, spend hours prompting AI back-and-forth as it keeps messing up and doing things wrong. I give up and do the thing manually, spending 2-3x the time I would have spent if I did it myself from the start.*
*days / weeks later*
Me: “hey, person, I tried to do X with AI and it didn’t work. I kept getting issues like Y and Z. Did I prompt it wrong? This is what I tried.”
Them: *nods, maybe chuckles* “oh yeah, it does that. I still haven’t been able to figure out how to reliably do X. I tend to redo the output completely too. But sometimes it helps me do like this tiny part. Anyway, these tools will improve soon and we won’t have to do so many manual revisions. “
I kid you not, this stuff happened every other week.
#AI #LLMs #work #tech #AIBubble