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 wouldnāt 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 SDKās for small bits of feedback to the app. Also, using socket-mode meant I didnāt 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: ...
Bullet habit
I cracked open my journal for the first time in awhile today. I have a dot notebook that Iāve 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 Iāve 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 ābulletingā 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 Iām trying to do. ...
Thoughts on Dall-e
What makes it fun? Iāve been playing around with the mini-dalleās 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 ānon-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. ...
Books
TODO: https://petargyurov.com/bookshelf/
PR Strategy
I left off in orbits after finding the āMentat 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 demoās 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 āPR 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. ...
Orbits
I have a bizarre way of playing Kerbal Space Program. Iāve done it at least three times. I go to a YouTube series by CheersKevin called āKerbal 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 donāt think Iāve ever made it to the episode where he lands on the āMunā (the Moon equivalent of KSP). There are 45 episodes. 45! ...
Ludum Dare
Two weeks ago was the Game Jam āLudum 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. ...
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 itās not really lined up with the written text.
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)). ...
Metrics
I want to get a pageview counter going, but Iām kind of into the āno Google Analytics trendā (fun fact, I used to work on Google Analytics!) I mostly just absolutely hate the āCookieā prompt, and while I donāt think anybody would come after me for forgetting to put a prompt on, Iād 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, itās sometimes fun to see my ssh proxy and python init.py posts get traffic. ...