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Years ago, I created a sort of home dashboard to offer up relevant information–mostly when getting ready to head to work in the morning. I gave it the perhaps poor title of Good Morning Display, which has stuck all these years. This isn’t an original idea, by far. However, it has proven not only to be a useful information tool, but also a great platform for learning about new (to me) technologies.

Now, all the these years later, I’m thinking about another rewrite to better serve my current needs. What follows is a bit of a brain dump before I embark on this project. Keep reading for some history and my thoughts for what might be next…

Continue reading →

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Work is in full swing this week. Everybody is back from their holiday with a lot of energy and ideas.

I continued to play around with various Jamulus recording setups and Reaper. A fair number of people seem to prefer recording on the client side. From what I can tell, this produces keeps everything in time, but it’s all on one track. We don’t plan to record every session. Next time, we’ll record on the server again and adjust timing in the mix.

Speaking of jams, we had one of our better ones this week. Good energy all around and I was more natural on the bass. It may have had something to do with the beer I drank at dinner beforehand.

Projectwise, I fixed some issues with the static site generator used for the One a Day site. Not the links are correct. That site really needs some TLC on the layout.

The wild weather continued this week with a lot of rain and very high winds.

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Introduction

Inspired by Doug Belshaw’s Weeknotes, I’m going to start the same here.

This does seem like the the sort of project that sounds exciting now, with weeknotes and excitement fading in a week or so. We’ll see how it goes…

In this first weeknote, I’ll ponder what might get written about, and what probably won’t. Mostly, I think I’ll write about progress on personal projects, links to interesting things that don’t deserve their own post, and other random things that happened during the week. I probably go light on the personal details. Goings on at my day job won’t be articulated here either.

By the way, this particular weeknote is being posted a week late as not to violate the long standing custom of not backdating blog posts.

This Week

Happy New Year! We continued our tradition of a New Year’s Eve meal of delicious appetizers. The chef flubbed the sourdough pizza dough and had to make another, last minute dough on the fly. On New Year’s Day, we went to a party and saw the cleanest workshop ever.

As I normally do on the 1st, I took a look at my goals (not resolutions) from last year and made some adjustments for 2024. I also caught up on my One a day photos, more thoughts on that here.

On Friday, we had our regular jam session. This week, we recorded it! I spent a little time playing around in Reaper doing the mixdown. Mostly I just cut out the witty banter and added EQ and compression to some of the tracks. I think we sounded okay. It will be good to compare where we’re at in a month or two.

I went down to the club for the first time in a while. I handed over the bookkeeping duties I had been doing over the last couple years. The boat had some water in it, although not up to the floorboards, so I pumped it out. Then it was off to Old Town to catch up with friends.

Saturday was the 3rd anniversary of the attempted insurrection. Let’s hope that never gets turned into a national holiday.

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Jon Udell’s 7 Guiding Principles for Working with LLMs has some really solid advice on using Large Language Models. His usage is mostly around software development and writing. Two areas where these LLMs can really shine.

By the way, Jon’s Seven ways to think like the web is still as relevant today as it was in 2011.

I’ve only dipped my toe into the LLM pool thus far. As I embark on a personal project, I’ll follow these principals while I lean on LLMs to make up for my lack of recent knowledge and experience in developing tech. I find them to be especially helpful with the syntax and best practices type questions I would have been scouring in Stackoverflow for in the past.

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Regular expressions seem like a dark art to me. I use very simple ones frequently enough to remember a few things. Anything slightly more advanced probably involves web searching and copy/paste.

Regexer is a tool for learning and experimenting with regular expressions. It does a great job of breaking down the expressions and showing how each element works. There’s also an extensive library of community patterns to choose from.

via Flowingdata