Building an assistant: An overengineered laundry timer

Drew this up with tl;draw Flow diagram for a laundry timer Where I started is wanting to leverage temporal to do something interesting, and tackling a real (if small) problem I have: forgetting I have a load of laundry running. The requirements were: Easy to start (otherwise I wouldnā€™t actually use it) Ability to push notifications to me, repeatedly (otherwise I might ignore them) What I settled on: Slack for notifications I am using the Slack App as a hacky way to avoid having to build a notification mechanism. I know slack notifications will make it to my phone, and I can control whether I get dinged or not, so went with that instead of thinking too hard about other ways to buzz my phone. This also meant that I could use the Slack SDKā€™s for small bits of feedback to the app. Also, using socket-mode meant I didnā€™t have to have a public endpoint on my infra, and could be behind a NAT, simplifying some things with network security. Things I learned along the way: ...

November 2, 2024

Bullet habit

I cracked open my journal for the first time in awhile today. I have a dot notebook that Iā€™ve had for awhile that I journal in from time to time. This one I started in January of this year, but if I had to plot the days Iā€™ve used it, it would be very sparse. After jotting down whatever was in my head at the time, I reflected on some older entries, and thought how I felt when I had a full month of ā€œbulletingā€ going on. I remember feeling pretty good. It was nice seeing the days of the month filled up with the things I did, and it felt nice to regularly be checking in on the things Iā€™m trying to do. ...

July 10, 2022

Thoughts on Dall-e

What makes it fun? Iā€™ve been playing around with the mini-dalleā€™s on my home computer (after wrestling with CUDA and WSL and jax, and then over engineering a tailscale setup with a sqlite queue so I could submit ideas from my phone). It can be quite fun and quite novel. With the ā€œnon-dalle-2ā€ models, it can feel a little like panning for gold, or digging through a trash dump, but a trash dump of fairly interesting looking garbage. ...

July 7, 2022

Books

TODO: https://petargyurov.com/bookshelf/

May 10, 2022

PR Strategy

I left off in orbits after finding the ā€œMentat Collectiveā€ discord, which I would describe as a group of people working on tools for exploring physics and math. I shared some of what I had been doing, especially around visualization with d3-contours since they were chatting about potential demoā€™s of their tools. This got me thinking of a conversation I had with a co-worker awhile ago. She told a story about how she was unhappy with her current job, and then went to the Recurse Center with the goal of getting a new, better job afterwards. She had a ā€œPR strategyā€ for how she would publish her experience, get wide visibility and get more job offers. It worked and she got a new job that she loved. ...

May 10, 2022

Orbits

I have a bizarre way of playing Kerbal Space Program. Iā€™ve done it at least three times. I go to a YouTube series by CheersKevin called ā€œKerbal Space Programmingā€. I watch the episodes, and play along. I get to about episode #3 or #4, and somewhere along the way, I get deep into a rabbit hole with the math and optimization available. I donā€™t think Iā€™ve ever made it to the episode where he lands on the ā€œMunā€ (the Moon equivalent of KSP). There are 45 episodes. 45! ...

May 9, 2022

Ludum Dare

Two weeks ago was the Game Jam ā€œLudum Dareā€. I had heard about it for a few years running (this was the 50th instance of it), but had never gotten my act together to actually participate. The gist is a 48 hour period where you create a game from start to finish: all graphics, concepts, code, music etc. You can be pretty intense about it and not sleep a lot, or you can be like me and forget about it until partway through Saturday, then spend a couple hours on Sunday hurriedly throwing something together. ...

April 11, 2022

Notebook CSS

What if I wanted this page to look like a notebook? Like with the dots like I had in e-notes (TODO make a shortcode for doign this: https://gohugo.io/templates/shortcode-templates/) I can do it for sure, I guess the question is whether it actually looks good. One of the issues is that itā€™s not really lined up with the written text.

March 8, 2022

Electronic Notes

As I was reading a bunch of the Economist (TODO: figure out how to link easily between articlesā€¦), I started keeping notes in logseq (TODO: also link there, I think I wrote something?). And I used some spaced-repitition to remember the facts (inconsistently to be honest, but I got some usage out of it. I can now remember reliably the new prime minister of Bulgaria (although I forgot it when I was chatting about it with a co-worker recently)). ...

March 8, 2022

Metrics

I want to get a pageview counter going, but Iā€™m kind of into the ā€œno Google Analytics trendā€ (fun fact, I used to work on Google Analytics!) I mostly just absolutely hate the ā€œCookieā€ prompt, and while I donā€™t think anybody would come after me for forgetting to put a prompt on, Iā€™d like to try getting some metrics where I host it on my own domain. One option would be to not get metrics, and just write for the fun of it, not caring if anybody sees it. But, itā€™s sometimes fun to see my ssh proxy and python init.py posts get traffic. ...

February 3, 2022