Tootfinder

I am using Strava now, but only because it's a way to get my data from Apple Health to flow to other places. Right now Wandrer and Squadrats pull data from Strava, and Strava gets the original data from Apple Health. The world is complex and silly sometimes.
#bikeTooter #biking

I'm starting to play with an Epson HX-20; interesting little portable from the early 80s.
I've just figured out the tape has a file from August 1984. It's a basic file called TILL, now if I can get the serial working reliably I can dump it, but I'm having a problem of it complaining about battery voltage which seems common on it. Some playing needed.
#retrocomputing

So I'm gonna play Endless Sky a bit...build my starfleet...
just renamed an Argosy to "Striker of the Fediverse" IT'S MY FLAGSHIP!
My starting shuttle was called "Fedi Mastodon"
I got 3.8 M credits...
I got 44 extra crew and 54 fragmentation grenades(1.3/0.3)
I'm in Aldhibain and patrolling the place for disabled pirate ships which I take over...so the pirates hate me 😆

Trump is attending the U.S. Open on Sunday as a guest of Rolex despite imposing steep tariffs on the Swiss watchmaker’s home country
-- and with organizers seeking to keep any audience booing of him from being seen on the TV broadcast.
Trump has built the bulk of his second term’s domestic travel around attending major sports events rather than hitting the road to make policy announcements or address the kind of large rallies he so relished as a candidate
⭐️Let's make th…

Trump's US Open visit lead to boos, long security lines
President Donald Trump attended the U.S. Open on Sunday, drawing boos from the crowd. His presence delayed the men's final due to heightened security, causing long lines for many people who didn't make it in before play started. Trump briefly appeared before the event, receiving mixed reactions from the then-mostly empty Arthur Ashe Stadium. During the National Anthem, he was shown on the big screen, which increased the volume of boos. Boos got more intense later in the match. Organizers delaye…

NFL Week 1 survivor pool picks, strategy: Play it safe with Denver or get weird with the Rams or Raiders? https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6592437/2025/09/03/nfl-week-1-survivor-pool-picks-broncos-bengals-rams-raiders/

SMART: Simulated Students Aligned with Item Response Theory for Question Difficulty Prediction
Alexander Scarlatos, Nigel Fernandez, Christopher Ormerod, Susan Lottridge, Andrew Lan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05129

SMART: Simulated Students Aligned with Item Response Theory for Question Difficulty Prediction
Item (question) difficulties play a crucial role in educational assessments, enabling accurate and efficient assessment of student abilities and personalization to maximize learning outcomes. Traditionally, estimating item difficulties can be costly, requiring real students to respond to items, followed by fitting an item response theory (IRT) model to get item difficulty estimates. This approach cannot be applied to the cold-start setting for previously unseen items either. In this work, we pr…

Okay. Gentoo feedback time. MocaccinoOS was okay, but systemd. And after a kernel change (to their mainline) didn't boot. Done.
Redcore has a great looking Qtile live-session. One maintainer, installer from rofi didn't start up. Done.
Calculate Linux: actually pretty good; smooth install, good documentation. OpenRC, switch to the latest kernel went well. Good. Very close to core Gentoo. But.
If so, why not pull out that Gentoo live installer, go from there, use your pr…

#ScribesAndMakers for July 3: When (and if) you procrastinate, what do you do? If you don't, what do you do to avoid it?
I'll swap right out of programming to read a book, play a video game, or watch some anime. Often got things open in other windows so it's as simple as alt-tab.
I've noticed recently I tend to do this more often when I have a hard problem to solve that I'm not 100% sure about. I definitely have cycles of better & worse motivation and I've gotten to a place where I'm pretty relaxed about it instead of feeling guilty. I work how I work, and that includes cycles of rest, and that's enough (at least, for me it has been so far, and I'm in a comfortable career, married with 2 kids).
Some projects ultimately lose steam and get abandoned, and I've learned to accept that too. I learn a lot and grow from each project, so nothing is a true waste of time, and there remains plenty of future ahead of me to achieve cool things.
The procrastination does sometimes impact my wife & kids, and that's something I do sometimes feel bad about, but I think I keep that in check well enough, and for things my wife worries about, I usually don't procrastinate those too much (used to be worse about this).
Right now I'm procrastinating a big work project by working on a hobby project instead. The work project probably won't get done by the start of the semester as a result. But as I remind myself, my work doesn't actually pay me to work during the summer, and things will be okay without the work project being finished until later.
When I want to force myself into a more productive cycle, talking to people about project details sometimes helps, as does finding some new tech I can learn about by shoehorning it into a project. Have been thinking about talking to a rubber duck, but haven't motivated myself to try that yet, and I'm not really in doldrums right now.

Onto new topics! Podman. I got pihole running, ports forwarded, and I can log in. Great. How do I import the config from my existing (dedicated Pi) to this new podman instance? #pihole #podman I also got the new Pi5 with Ubuntu 24.04LTS on it, going to start messing with Asterisk. I want to ma…

As web developer I am interested in learning more about Spritely Goblins but I think I need a better starter guide then this.
Would love to spin it up on DigitalOcean or Github codespace and play with some code and see if I could build something.
https://files.spritely.…