Nick Iaquinto's Blog

Adding Wi-Fi Printing for “Dumb” Printers

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 +0700

Adding Wi-Fi Printing for “Dumb” Printers

2026-05-24Technology

Printers are terrible. And yet, there are few contenders stepping up to fill the void. After struggling with junky software, upsells, ads, subscriptions, and broken printers again and again, I gave up and turned to the dumbest possible printer I could find: Brother HL-L2300D black and white laser printer.

I’ve been using this same Brother BW laser for 5 years, and it works great. No screen. No networking. It just prints fast and reliably. But, I’ll admit that wireless printing is pretty nice, especially for my wife who prints more than me.

And 2 years ago, I thought: how hard could it be? I had a spare Raspberry Pi 2B lying around and gave it a shot. It’s been running ever since with no attention needed, again reliable and simple.

In fact it’s been so reliable, that when I went to upgrade the OS recently, I realized I had lost the credentials. So, I had to retrace my steps to re-install the full setup from scratch. And I thought I’d share my notes in case anyone else was looking for a hassle free wireless printing experience.

What You Need§

A “dumb” USB printer
- I use the Brother HL-L2300D, but any USB printer works
A Computer, ideally a small Single Board Computer (SBC)
- I used a Raspberry Pi 2B, but anything that runs Linux will work.
A MicroSD card for the OS
A USB cable to connect the printer to the SBC
A Power cable to power the SBC
Your home network
- Ethernet recommended for the Pi

Step 1: Flash Ubuntu Server§

Download Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS for Raspberry Pi and flash it to a MicroSD card with Balena Etcher.

Then, boot the Pi for the first time:

Insert the MicroSD card
Connect HDMI, keyboard, and power
Connect Ethernet to your network
Login with the default credentials (username: ubuntu, password: ubuntu)
Upgrade packages:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

Step 2: Set Up SSH§

You’ll want to manage the Pi headlessly so you can put it anywhere the printer is. No need to keep a keyboard and monitor attached.

First, find the Pi’s IP address:

ip addr | grep 192.168
# Look for your Ethernet IP, ex: 192.168.1.154
# In rare cases, your home network might use another net block like 10.0.0.0/32 or 172.16.0.0/12

Now, from your laptop, generate a key and copy it to the Pi:

# Generate a key (replace my-computer with a more descriptive comment for your key)
ssh-keygen -a 100 -t ed25519 -C my-computer -f ~/.ssh/id_printer_ed25519

# Copy the key to the Pi. Below I describe a janky way of getting your key over
# using HTTP server logging. But you can also use magic-wormhole or temporarily
# enabling password auth and then disabling later.
#
# On the Pi, start a temporary HTTP server:
python3 -m http.server --bind 0.0.0.0 8000 2>&1 | tee log.txt

# From your laptop, upload the public key:
curl -X PUT -T ~/.ssh/id_printer_ed25519_2026-03-07.pub http://192.168.1.154:8000/mykey

# On the Pi, quit the HTTP server (Ctrl+C), then add the key:
mkdir -p ~/.ssh
cat log.txt | grep "PUT /mykey" | awk '{print $NF}' >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Add the SSH alias to your laptop’s ~/.ssh/config:

#file:~/.ssh/config
Host rpi-printer
    User ubuntu
    HostName 192.168.1.154
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_printer_ed25519

Test that it works:

ssh rpi-printer

Once you’ve confirmed SSH key login works, you’re done with SSH setup and can disconnect the keyboard and monitor.

Since this Pi is only running a print queue, you want it to come back up on its own after power outages and other disruptions. Enable auto-login by editing the getty service:

sudo vim /lib/systemd/system/getty@.service

Replace this line:

# Old
ExecStart=-/sbin/agetty -o '-p -- \u' --noclear %I $TERM

With this:

# New
ExecStart=-/sbin/agetty --noissue --autologin ubuntu %I $TERM Type=idle

Here ubuntu is the username. If you use a different username, change it accordingly.

Then reboot and hope it worked:

sudo reboot

If the SSH server isn’t reachable on the network after reboot, reconnect the keyboard and monitor and dive in to figure out what the issue was.

Step 4: Install CUPS and Configure the Printer§

CUPS is the open source print server that handles everything: print queues, drivers, the web UI, and so on.

Install and enable CUPS:

sudo apt install cups
sudo systemctl start cups
sudo systemctl enable cups

Now configure CUPS to allow remote access and printer sharing. Edit the config:

sudo vim /etc/cups/cupsd.conf

Make these changes:

Enable printer sharing: Change Browsing No to Browsing Yes
Allow remote printing: Change Listen localhost:631 to Listen 0.0.0.0:631
Allow remote web UI access: Update the <Location /> and <Location /admin> blocks:

# Old
<Location />
  Order allow,deny
</Location>
<Location /admin>
  Order allow,deny
</Location>

# New
<Location />
  Order allow,deny
  Allow @LOCAL
</Location>
<Location /admin>
  Order allow,deny
  Allow @LOCAL
</Location>

Add your user to the lpadmin group so you can login to the CUPS web UI:

sudo usermod -aG lpadmin ubuntu

Install the printer driver. For the Brother HL-L2300D:

sudo apt install printer-driver-brlaser

Restart CUPS to pick up all the changes:

sudo systemctl restart cups

Now visit the CUPS web UI in your browser. You’ll need to use HTTPS because the login page requires it:

https://192.168.1.154:631/

Your browser will warn you about the self-signed certificate. That’s fine, proceed through it.

Step 5: Add the Printer in CUPS§

Navigate to the Administration tab and click Add Printer.

The printer should show up automatically since we already installed the driver. Follow the prompts to add it.

Then, set the default page settings. By default, the printer is configured for double-sided printing on US Letter paper. To change this, go to the printer page, click Set Printer Default Options from the Administration dropdown, and adjust to your liking.

Print a test page to make sure everything works:

Finally, set this printer as the server default. This isn’t strictly necessary, but it’s a good practice:

Step 6: Enable Network Discovery with Avahi§

This is the magic step. Avahi broadcasts your printer over Bonjour, so it shows up automatically on Macs, iPhones, and anything else that supports AirPrint or Bonjour. There’s no drivers or special software necessary.

First, set a recognizable hostname so the printer shows up with a friendly name:

sudo vim /etc/hostname
# Change to: rpi-printer

sudo hostname rpi-printer

Logout and log back in for the hostname change to take effect.

Then install Avahi:

sudo apt install avahi-daemon
sudo systemctl start avahi-daemon
sudo systemctl enable avahi-daemon

That’s it. The printer will now appear on your network as something like Brother HL-L2300D series @ rpi-printer.

Step 7: Connect and Print§

On Mac:

Open System Settings > Printers & Scanners
Click Add Printer
Select Brother HL-L2300D series @ rpi-printer and click Add
Open a document and print!

On iPhone: No setup required.

Tap Share on something
Scroll down and select Print
Tap Printer and select Brother HL-L2300D series @ rpi-printer

Conclusion§

After less than an hour of setup, you should have an easy to use and reliable wireless printer. I use velcro-tape to stick the Raspbery Pi on the back of the device and basically forget about it.

For a deluxe setup, you might want to add something that sends an alert if the IP address changes. Or, you can setup something to notify you if toner levels get low.

And really, you have an always on computer now. So, you can also run all kinds of interesting self-hosted stuff on there to solve other home problems.

Here’s to another 2 years of hassle free printing!

Just Get Two or How I Learned Programming on a Throwaway Computer

Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0700

Just Get Two or How I Learned Programming on a Throwaway Computer

2026-05-01Technology

Audio from Orpheus TTS (Apache 2.0)

The craze of buying Mac Mini’s to run OpenClaw is waning, but it reminded me of a simple solution that the modern software industry often seems to miss. Using a separate device is a comparatively cheap solution to security & reliability problems. And, a throwaway, destructible environment is key to growth of new capabilities.

In fact, this is how I learned programming and systems administration-y stuff in the first place. I go into some of that story below. Or, you can skip to the end, where discuss some key insights here to two pressing crises in software: securing agentic systems and supply chain security.

Origins§

In 2013, I started my first job at the American German Institute in Washington, DC. ¹ At the institute, I handled the website, blog, email newsletter, YouTube channel, printer maintenance, and general frontline tech support.²

And, I caught the bug for programming right away. It started with building small tools to learn HTML so that I could increase my confidence when editing the newsletter.³

Initially, I built standalone HTML and JS pages. For example, I made a pretty page with the institute’s logo and two columns of app icon-style buttons. Something like this:

This is a mere shadow of my first masterpiece, lol.

When you clicked an “app”, it would either open the appropriate login page for the service, or it would open another page explaining how to do something. And, I used a Windows Group Policy to make it the default homepage for new browser tabs on everyone’s computer in the office.

This was amazing because it saved me a lot of time answering questions from visiting scholars like how to print things billed to their fellowship’s cost center or how to login to Johns Hopkins University library resources like JSTOR.

But, I hit a brick wall in my progress soon after this initial victory. As I started learning true programming languages like PHP and Python, I quickly learned hosting static HTML was a lot easier than a dynamic program.

In hindsight, a viable path would have been to host PHP scripts on our shared host. But with only a few months of “programming” experience, I didn’t know enough to know that was even possible. And even if I did, I would have been too afraid of screwing something up to log in and touch files in our shared host.

But based on previous experience, where a computer science student in my dorm helped me⁴ dual boot Ubuntu on my Macbook, I knew Linux was the way to do things that were hard on “normal” computers.

So, I set out to learn Linux for real.

Learning Linux§

Having tried and failed to install Linux just 6 months earlier, I knew I needed another way, a way that didn’t risk my only working computer.

I started looking online. And, I quickly found a deal: $50 for a Dell OptiPlex GX620 that served out it’s sentence of 6 long years in some corporate office and was ready to live out it’s retirement roaming free range on the net.

It was surprisingly fast running Linux for a $50, 6 year old computer.

So, I messaged the person on Craigslist and arranged a meeting way out at the end of the DC metro in Rockville, MD.

It definitely felt like he was selling office equipment that he was supposed to be throwing away. He had a ton of them in the back of his minivan; handing me a random one from the pile, he asked me if I wanted to test it.

And I just looked around, as if I might not have noticed that there was a monitor, keyboard, and portable generator lying around in the train station parking structure at 10pm at night. So, I shrugged, said no, gave him the $50, and walked off.

Luckily, it did work! And I mean really luckily, because $50 was actually a non-trivial expense for me at the time.

Then every day for the next 3 months, I’d come home from work, install Ubuntu off of a bootable USB, and try to use the terminal until I broke something in a way I couldn’t figure out how to recover from. It became like a ritual. I was determined to learn this. It was like a time loop.

For weeks and weeks, I’d apt-get install apache and throw myself against the rocks of making random tweaks to the config file until it actually ran and did something useful. I spent even more weeks figuring out file permissions and even more time fighting with the PHP white screen of death from syntax errors, logic bugs, and misused APIs.

But over time, I did learn how to keep the “server” running and stable. I wrote actually functional programs and hosted them at home. I switched to NGINX, learned vim was faster for me than nano, and got familiar with all the Linux basics like processes, users, groups, initscripts, ports, connections, and so on.

Implications§

The core of this journey was the disposable computer, a safe environment for experimentation. Once I figured out how to install the OS fresh to get myself back to a usable state, it was inevitable that I’d figure it out.

This lesson is exactly what is needed to address two major software industry trends today: securing agentic systems and supply chain security.

Although I’ve never been in this position at work, I hear that some dev teams use a separate computer for accessing production and doing software releases. Similarly, many software companies (ex. Meta, Stripe) use cloud VM’s for developer environments.

These practices exercise the same underlying principle of good security: access segmentation. You only give access to strictly what is needed.

The problem has always been the usability tradeoff with this approach. Getting the quick bootable VM devbox experience just right is very very challenging. And, I see this same dynamic playing out in the agentic world.⁵

You have to have just the right dev tools installed. The VM needs to be bootable quickly. Your app’s developer experience needs to be super dialed in for the agent to be able to start on a fresh checkout, install dependencies, start services, and run linters & tests to make usable progress. The networking needs to work so that you can reach services running there from your browser.

And the reality is the most existing software is not dialed in enough for this. Most machine learning projects don’t even have functional requirements.txt or pyproject.toml. And even in domains with better engineering best practices, the setup instructions for most services leave a lot to be desired for humans, let alone AI agents.

But given the potential of AI agents and the risk of increasing supply chain exploits, I think there’s a huge, industry changing position on the table for whoever figures out what the future of ergonomic, but isolated environments is.

And, that brings us back to OpenClaw people. Instead of raw dogging their computers with --yolo mode and --dangerously-skip-permissions while their entire life sits innocently there in ~/.config, and ~/.ssh, and ~/Library/Application Support waiting to get gobbled up and sent off to get exploited, they at least know enough to know that this “thing” deserves it’s own environment.

Their main mistake was passing too many secrets into that environment, instead of building adapters outside of the environment to do privileged things.

And, that’s the future I see: a fancy box for the AI and our developer environments to live inside. Proxies & integrations at the edges that inject secrets and do priviledged things from the outside, so AI never sees the secrets and we can apply all kinds of policy limits.

Because there are unknown unknowns out there, and AI just can’t help itself but do everything. It’ll spin for hours on a trivial roadblock, then build something incredible, and then randomly download malware that uploads every credential it can find to 4chan.

Even though you said no mistakes!

At the time, it was called the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies (AICGS).
Occasionally, I did an extremely poor attempt at photography for AICGS conferences as well.
Our CRM software was pretty bad and did not have any editor for page content. It just had a plain textarea and expected you to edit the HTML yourself by hand, then test email yourself to see it. So, I had to learn HTML quickly.
And by “helped me”, I mean he did all the work while I watched and pretended to understand what he was talking about.
I’m loving Agent Safehouse for a lightweight agent sandbox. And, I’ve been experimenting with a Firecracker-based solution for the true VM-based devbox / agent sandbox experience.

How I Used Self-Hosted AI in 2025

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0700

How I Used Self-Hosted AI in 2025

2025-12-28Technology ML/AI

Audio from Orpheus TTS (Apache 2.0)

In early 2024, I bought an NVIDIA RTX 4090, which has 24GB of VRAM. This enabled me to experiment with tons of interesting AI. Since 2025 was another amazing year for transformer and diffusion-based models, I wanted to post again on how I’ve been using AI locally.

Below, I have a breakdown of each category: Image Generation, Text-to-Speech, Programming, Text Generation & Chat, and a few extras. There’s a lot of neat new models. But, the big change is shifting from large kitchen sink software like OpenWebUI and InvokeAI to more tailored solutions.

And stick around for the end, where I discuss how to run all of these services without running out of VRAM.

Image Generation§

For much of the year, I was still using InvokeAI with really old models: Stable Diffusion XL (released in 2023) or Flux.1 Schnell (released August 2024).

But, after waiting nearly 6 months for Z-Image support, I eventually gave up on waiting and used Claude Code (Sonnet 4.5) to generate a micro-app for inference on this as well.

Screenshot of Z-Image image generator micro-app, including generation history page and generation form with prompt, seed, and rounds controls.

This has been an amazing improvement over the older image generation models. And, this version is now spouse tested and approved. She was actually excited enough about this to invite a friend over to use it, too.

This is going to be a recurring theme of this post. I’ve been switching from bulky general purpose tools to more focused ones and supplementing with what I’m calling “micro-apps”.

These web services, often a single HTML/CSS/JS form wired up to a backend, do some single-purpose task. Claude Code and other agentic coding tools make it easy to rapidly build these, often with only a few prompts.¹

Text-to-Speech§

I listen to a lot of content, usually articles found from a large, and constantly growing list of RSS/Atom feeds passed through text-to-speech.

Generally, I have a 2 tiered system for TTS: fast/low-quality and slow/high-quality. For about half of the year, I have used Kokoro TTS for quick generations and Coqui XTTS for higher quality speech.

Now, I’ve switched to Chatterbox Turbo for quick articles and Orpheus TTS for quality use cases. But, Kokoro will still have a special place for me, because it’s astoundingly efficient; small enough to work on CPU on even modest devices. I predict it’s going to stick around for a long long time.

For Orpheus, I’ve found Orpheus-TTS-FastAPI to work great. For Chatterbox Turbo though, I used Claude Code with GLM 4.6 to create a micro-app for inference using an OpenAI-style TTS API endpoint.

So now I’ve standardized around a black-box OpenAI-compatible endpoint for inference. My custom pipeline for feed content and ad-hoc uploads integrates with these endpoints.

This use case alone justifies having the GPU locally. My audio consumption simply wouldn’t be economically possible without local inference.

Otherwise, there isn’t much more to say here. I realize I’m an extreme outlier in listening to so much TTS audio, and the main takeaway from this section is mostly just that:

Orpheus & Chatterbox work great on a single 4090
OpenAI-compatible endpoints efficiently abstract over how the models work
This is another case of Claude Code with Sonnet 4.5, Opus 4.5, or GLM 4.7 being able to mostly one-shot generating “micro-apps” for inference on new models

How I imagine TTS models work.

Programming§

For the most part, I’ve shifted from local coding AI to hosted services, namely Claude Code and z.ai’s Coding plan for GLM series of models (incl. the new 4.7 release).

These larger models are just too good to resist and can’t really be matched in a local setup, unless you have an obscene hardware budget. However, I am still using some local models in some cases for personal coding.

Firstly, I’m still using inline code completion. I’ve moved from Tabby to llama.vim, mostly running Qwen 3 8B.

Second, for one-off questions and scripts outside the context of an existing repository, I am using Devstral Small 24B or Qwen 3 Coder 30B A3B 2507 over hosted options.

And finally, I have a few focused tools that perform a specific task in a codebase. These work great on smaller models like the 20-30B models mentioned here.

For example, I have a Godoc documentation generation tool that uses tree-sitter (via go-tree-sitter) to find and document undocumented functions, structs, and methods in Go code. Another workflow monitors open source libraries I frequently use and summarizes new commits (for insights beyond the commit messages).

Claude Code (either on Anthropic Sonnet 4.5, Opus 4.5 or Z.AI’s GLM 4.7) would probably also be able to do these tasks very well (and without the tree-sitter plumbing). But, there isn’t a big quality different over local models, and the existing workflow works. Plus, the local flow saves on hosted model usage limits.

Text Generation & Chat§

I’ve ran OpenWebUI & Ollama since getting my 4090. This pairing allows dynamically downloading models and chatting with support for web search, document RAG, multi-modal chat, speech input & output, and tons more.

However, LLama.cpp recently announced a router mode. This mode manages loading and unloading models as they’re used. This is a significant improvement (for simple use cases) over both llama-swap, (which requires editing the config to list available models & settings) and Ollama (which is closed source and lagging significantly on implementing new model support as they transition from llama.cpp to their own inference backend).

Paired with the significant polish LLama.cpp’s built-in chat UI has gotten, the new router mode pushed me over the edge to switch to just using LLama.cpp exclusively.

Screenshot of LLama.cpp Web UI as of December, 2025

LLama.cpp’s UI supports exactly the features I need - mainly simple chats, but occasionally text/PDF document context. I never really used the Web Search or any plugins in OpenWebUI.

The one area that I did miss from Ollama was model management. So, I added a small model management webapp to support downloading new models and removing older ones. This was really easy to whip up with agentic coding.

Screenshot of model management micro-app.

Other§

Last time, I discussed vision models, music generation, and other less common modalities. But of these, I have only used one consistently since then: Image Segmentation. I use this to create “sticker’s” and any other times I need to remove the background from an image.

Meta released Segment Anything 3 this year. The new prompt-based object identification method is interesting. But, ultimately the old method of point-based inclusion/exclusion worked fine.

The rest of the fucking owl.

In the future, I might get more use out of vision models if I had an efficient way to get images into the model. So, this is a prime area for another “micro-app” to run as a PWA on my phone.

Conclusion§

Standardization & simplification is upon us. LLama.cpp and OpenAI-compatible endpoints are still king. Thanks mostly to Chinese companies (plus Mistral), open source models are still trailing mere months behind SOTA mega-models. And, agentic coding is amazing at creating “micro-apps” to fill gaps.

But you may be wondering, how do I run all of this in 24GB VRAM? Sure, each individual model fits in that size. But many, such as 30B models and Orpheus TTS take almost the entire VRAM.

To solve this, you need a system to dynamically start & stop services on demand. For example, Sablier starts docker containers in response to HTTP requests and shuts them down after a period of inactivity.

For local use with limited resources, this dynamic capability is critical for a smooth experience. It’ll save a bit of power as well.

You are still responsible for reading the code and having good taste in how to build robust services. Without competent human oversight, agentic coding often spins off into a buggy mess or has glaring bugs that will delete all your data or get you hacked.

Work Hacks: Keep a Log

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0700

Credit: Cottonbro Studio on Pexels

Work Hacks: Keep a Log

2025-06-23Work

Audio from Orpheus TTS (Apache 2.0)

It’s easy to let the weeks and months fly by with what seems like nothing to show for it.

But there’s one easy, low tech way to keep track of your accomplishments: a log.

From the iconic Ship’s Log to modern YouTube Devlogs, keeping a log is a classic way to documenting your progress, staying motivated, and communicate that progress to others.

I’ve kept a continuous log of my work for nearly a decade. And after so long, I wanted to share my method and how it’s helped me.

How It Works§

The gist is stupidly simple. I keep a huge text file written in Markdown. It’s over 5k lines and still counting.

At the top, I have what I’m working on this week and a backlog of all the tasks I need to do eventually.

Next, there’s a list of tasks I’ve completed that week. These are usually organized by project or into a few catchall categories like infrastructure.

And finally, there are periodic “compaction” sections that usually cover the highlights for 6 months to a year.

# Work Log

## TODO

- Think of dad jokes
- Project X:
    - Task Y


## Backlog

- Discombobulate the frobronicators
- Upgrade dependencies for Service Z
- Add ABC feature to service D


## Completed

### Week of 2025-06-23

- Big App:
    - Task 1
- Service A:
    - Task 2
    - Task 3
- Infrastructure:
    - Task 4


### Week of 2025-06-16

*More accomplishments*


### Week of 2025-06-09

*More accomplishments*

### Summary: 2024-10-01 to 2025-03-30

*Biggest impact achievements in the first 6 months of FY25.*

This method works for me because I keep this file open all the time. And this is my main todo list anyways. So, it’s effortless to move something from my todo list to the completed log.

So the takeaway here is that you don’t need anything fancy. And it doesn’t have to be a specialized tool. You could use a Word document, a Spreadsheet, or even a physical notebook (though this is less searchable).

The key is to make it a habit and integrate it into your workflow.

You could even use a formal system like a Kanban board or issue tracking system. However, I’d caution against this, because I’ve benefited greatly from “owning” the data and being able to manipulate it with external tools. But if this works best for you, go for it!

How It’s Helped§

There’s 4 ways this has helped me:

Performance Reviews: The most important way it’s helped is to make mid-year and annual performance reviews dead simple. I can just send the latest summary and I’m done with basically no work. I usually include the entire log for reference, too.

Communicating with Stakeholders: Periodically, it’s nice to update stakeholders with everything that has happened on a project.

For big projects, this usually is a multi-person effort. However, your log can help you double check the project-wide changelog or whatever the project manager(s) produce.

And for smaller projects, I’ve found my log is the often the only source to quickly produce a summary of what’s changed.

Quickly Answering Project History Questions: Another benefit has been quickly answering questions about the history of projects or features in response to some urgent question or emergency.

I can CTRL-F/grep search through the log and find the answer to most questions in minutes.

Finally, Justifying Estimates is also very easy when you have a history of all the tasks you’ve done. You can quickly find similar features and how long they took.

You knew it was probably you; now you have proof.

Conclusion§

Logs aren’t just for programs to dump debugging information. They can be a really useful tool for individual contributors, team leads, project managers, and more to track progress.

Come review time, they’re invaluable to communicate your accomplishments. And you become a hero for anyone asking questions about a project’s history and progress.

So, give it a shot and see how it works for you!

Backup Your Mail, Contacts & Calendar

Mon, 26 May 2025 00:00:00 +0700

A massive pile of emails. Generated with SDXL

Backup Your Mail, Contacts & Calendar

2025-05-26Technology

Audio from Orpheus TTS (Apache 2.0)

Mail is the linchpin of our modern internet use. Nearly every online account and service relies on it. And yet, most people don’t have a backup!

Contacts & calendars are also important. I would miss so many important events if I suddenly lost my online calendar. And if I lost my contacts, I would have a really hard time finding many people’s info again, especially acquaintances that I don’t contact as often.

Below I describe how I backup these important data using isync/mbsync and pimsync. Read on to see how!

NOTE: I’m using command line programs for this. And, the instructions below assume that you know how to use the terminal, edit files with a text editor, and build software from source.

To backup your data using the GUI, you can use Thunderbird to download a local copy. But, I’m not aware of any workflow for restoring to a new provider using a Desktop App / GUI tool.

Why Backup?§

Now, most people use an online service that does backups for them, like Google Mail, Microsoft Outlook, Fastmail, and so on. But, what happens if you suddenly and in-explicitly get banned?

This may seem unrealistic, but there are so many horror stories out there of people getting banned after tripping over some automated moderation system.

And since services are more connected than ever, you may not realize that a rogue moderation system from YouTube, Google Cloud Platform, Azure, GitHub, Adsense, and more may bleed through to your entire online presence suddenly going up in smoke.

This is why I pay for my email, use my own domain, and backup my mail, contacts, and calendar!

The Setup§

I use isync/mbsync for mail and pimsync for contacts and calendar.

These services both work by defining a pair of remotes and sync’ing between them. A remote here is either a server from your provider or a local folder on your machine. And, you can sync between any combination of them.

This means you can do a variety of useful things with these services. Here, I’ll focus on backups. But, this also supports restoring your data to a new provider. And, you can do bidirectional sync to support offline editing.

Sync’ing Your Mail§

First, install isync/mbsync with your package manager:

# MacOS
brew install isync

# Linux
sudo apt install isync  # Ubuntu/Debian/Mint/etc
sudo dnf install isync  # RHEL/Fedora/etc
sudo apk install isync  # Alpine Linux
sudo pacman -S isync    # Arch Linux

# Windows
# Your on your own. Good Luck! I'd suggest just using Window Subsystems for Linux.

Now that you have the program installed, you can write out the configuration file. This goes at the path ~/.mbsync. Here’s mine:

# file: ~/.mbsync
Sync Pull
Create Slave
Remove Slave
Expunge Slave

# Setup my personal account
IMAPAccount personal
Host imap.myemailprovider.com
User demo@example.com
PassCmd "pass Internet/myemailprovider.com:backup-password"
# alternatively, hardcode your password with:
#   Pass yourpassword
CertificateFile /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
SSLType IMAPS

IMAPStore personal-remote
Account personal

MaildirStore personal-local
SubFolders Verbatim
Path ~/.local/share/mail/personal/
Inbox ~/.local/share/mail/personal/INBOX

Channel personal
Master :personal-remote:
Slave :personal-local:
Patterns *
Create Both
SyncState *

Next, you have to create the data folder with mkdir -p ~/.local/share/mail/personal.

And finally, you can sync with mbsync -aV! The program downloads each folder into the ~/.local/share/mail/personal directory. And, each email appears as a separate file.

In the config, notice that the PassCmd here loads the backup password from a password manager. I use pass. But, it would work with any script/program that outputs your password on STDOUT. Or, you can hardcode the password with Pass yourpassword.

Sync’ing Your Contacts & Calendar§

pimsync is a bit more complicated. You have to install it from source. To do that, you can follow these steps:

# Install Rust Toolchain
# See also: https://rustup.rs/
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

# Download the code
git clone https://git.sr.ht/~whynothugo/pimsync
cd pimsync

# Build the code
make build

# Copy the binary to your PATH
mkdir -p ~/.local/bin  # Create this dir if it doesn't already exist
cp ./target/release/pimsync ~/.local/bin/pimsync

If you don’t have ~/.local/bin on your $PATH, you need to add that as well in your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc file as follows: export PATH="$PATH:~/.local/bin".

To test your install, you can run pimsync version, which should output the version of the program. For example:

$ pimsync version
pimsync 0.4.1-91-g43abd3a

Now that the program is installed, you can configure pimsync by creating a file ~/.config/pimsync/pimsync.conf.

First, you’ll have to create several folders manually before running pimsync the first time. Create them with this:

mkdir -p ~/.config/pimsync
mkdir -p ~/.local/share/pimsync/status
mkdir -p ~/.local/share/contacts/cards
mkdir -p ~/.local/share/calendars/events

Then, create your configuration as follows, replacing the URL’s & credentials with the appropriate setup for your provider’s CalDAV & CardDAV services.

# file: ~/.config/pimsync/pimsync.conf
status_path "~/.local/share/pimsync/status/"

storage contacts_mydavprovider {
  type carddav
  url https://carddav.mydavprovider.com/
  username demo@example.com
  password {
    cmd pass Internet/mydavprovider.com:backup-password
  }
  # alternatively, hardcode your password with:
  #   password yourpassword
}

storage contacts_local {
  type vdir/vcard
  path ~/.local/share/contacts/cards/
  fileext vcf
}

pair contacts {
  storage_a contacts_local
  storage_b contacts_mydavprovider
  collections all
}

storage calendars_mydavprovider {
  type caldav
  url https://caldav.mydavprovider.com/
  username demo@example.com
  password {
    cmd pass Internet/mydavprovider.com:backup-password
  }
}

storage calendars_local {
  type vdir/icalendar
  path ~/.local/share/calendars/events/
  fileext ical
}

pair calendars {
  storage_a calendars_local
  storage_b calendars_mydavprovider
  collections all
}

Now, you can check that everything is working by running pimsync check. If that returns successfully, you can then sync with pimsync sync contacts and pimsync sync calendars!

Next Steps§

Now that you have your mail, contacts, and calendar backed up locally, you can back them up with the rest of your files. And, you can rest safely knowing that you will never lose your email, contacts, and calendars.

But, you can also think about doing some more interesting things. For example, you can edit the data locally, offline and sync the other way. That way you can “send emails” while offline and have them delivered later when you are back online.

To do this, you can use any email client that supports maildir format. This is how mbsync stores your files. For example, Thunderbird, mutt/neomutt, and aerc all support the maildir format.

Or, you could do other interesting things with the data like…

Finetune a large language model to write emails like you do
Build a graph of your relationships from who are emailed together
Use ab-bday to create a calendar with all your contact’s birthdays

Conclusion§

I hope this guide has helped you set up your own backups for email, contacts, and calendar.

This is all possible thanks to open standards like IMAP, CardDAV, and CalDAV. These standards are an important hedge against vendor lock-in and allow you to truly own your data.

It’s really a miracle that these standards exist. They’re an artifact of an older time, when tech companies collaborated to compete on an even playing field and enable outsiders to compete.

The more people use these standards, the more likely they’ll live on for many years to come. So, backup your data!

Fun with Token Probabilities

Sat, 22 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0700

Fun with Token Probabilities

2025-02-22Technology

Audio from Orpheus TTS (Apache 2.0)

Westworld arrived just a couple years before the AI hype train. But, there’s one scene that really stuck with me. It’s in Season 1 Episode 6, The Adversary:

Having “died”, Maeve finds herself awake in the tunnels under Westworld. Felix, a Westworld technician, explains to her that she is a host (ie. android).

To convince her, he shows a pad with the live dialog tree of what she will say just milliseconds before she says it.

The writers on Westworld were probably thinking of markov chains when they wrote this scene. But it turns out this is very applicable to Large Language Models (LLM) as well.

If you’ve ever heard audio feedback of yourself at a slight delay, you know the feeling.

Over the past year I’ve been building with LLM’s. And one of the most fascinating parts for me so far has been constrained grammar, such as BNF and JSON schema output.

But limiting the output to a fixed format isn’t the only thing LLM’s can do. The other major way to manipulate LLM completions are logit bias and token probabilities. So, I wanted to try to recreate something like the Westworld dialog tree UI to explore this as a mini art project.

And, this is what I came up with:

Demo of the TUI for exploring token probabilities.

It’s a small TUI that sends requests to LLama.cpp Server. This demo is showing Qwen 2.5 32B.

Using the tool, you can enter a sentence and it will show the next 4 words (really tokens). And you can then navigate with the arrow keys to see what it would generate if you choose one of the alternate tokens.

This makes it really easy to see a tiny bit more of the internal relationships a model has built up during training.

And, it reminds me of the work done by David Rozado, exploring the biases LLM’s show towards various demographics groups.

Even though this capability has existed for at least 2 years, I think it bears repeating that technology adoption takes a surprisingly long time. This is something that a lot of people fail to fully appreciate.

There’s usually a significant (ie. years) lag between AI research and when it becomes available in mainstream apps. For example, LM Studio just announced beta support for speculative decoding, which was also added to LLama.cpp in 2023.

So, what will get built with logit bias and token probabilities? Who knows! But, I’m totally here for it.

There wasn’t really much point to this other than highlighting the cool Westworld scene and showing that this is basically how LLM’s work. But thanks for reading my meandering thoughts.

What’s in an Egg?

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0700

That’s eggspensive!

What’s in an Egg?

2025-02-13Food & Cooking

Audio from Kokoro TTS (Apache 2.0)

I was at the gym yesterday, when I looked up and saw a major news channel showing a segment about egg substitutes. And first off, I laughed so hard.

I know egg prices have got people at a rolling boil. And giving up on animal products rarely goes over easy.

I can seriously relate, because conquering eggs is a major milestone in vegan cooking. But also because I didn’t notice before, but eggs are freaking $7.69 a dozen where I live!? (see image above)

Since I’ve been vegan for over 4 years, my wife suggested that I write a post about this. That way you aren’t left scrambling for solutions once the eggpocolypse truly sets in.

Or, you could eggnore your problems on a fabulous vacation to the Gulf of America.

Below I go into each part of what eggs bring to the table. And that’s essentially the problem: eggs serve multiple functions in recipes and there is no one replacement for all these roles.

That means you have to actually think about what the egg is accomplishing in a dish and use the right replacement. That basically why it’s hard.

But to spoil the surprise, there’s 5 major things going from most to least common:

And, I’ll include some recipes along the way for you to get started! There’s also a quick table at the bottom that summarizes everything if you need a cheatsheet.

Binding§

Tons of recipes use egg as as a binder. This and lift are by far the most common uses. Some examples include meatballs, meatloaf, meringue’s, pies, and more.

This binding property comes from the egg whites, which coagulate when heated and bind things together.

The replacement here is flax meal. To make a “flax egg”, you add a tablespoon of flax meal to 3 tablespoons of water. Then wait for a couple minutes for it to become viscous. Then use exactly as you would an egg in the recipe.

You can scale this up to larger amounts to replace multiple eggs. Just make sure to mix thoroughly and wait so that it all hydrates.

Flax meal is an eggselent substitute.

Lift§

The other most common thing eggs are used for is volume. Egg whites, especially when whipped, create a lot of lift in a recipe.

So, does going vegan mean you have to give up muffins, cakes, and pies for good? No!

Aquafaba is the liquid from a can of beans like chickpeas. And it turns out that it behaves the exact same way as egg whites, just with less protein.

According to America’s Test Kitchen, this effect is even stronger when combined with cream of tartar. But even without this addition, I’ve had great success replacing egg whites with aquafaba.

To replace egg whites, just use 3 tablespoons of aquafaba for 1 egg white. For recipes that call for liquid egg whites, you just use them as is. But they also whip to the same stiff peaks if that’s what you need.

To use up the chickpeas, put them on a salad for extra protein! You can also fry them up in a pan and add some seasoning like Slap Ya Mama for a tasty snack.

Credit: Dana Sredojevic on Pexels

Fattiness§

Egg yolks have a lot of saturated fat. This is a great boost for some recipes just for obvious reasons: fat tastes good. But this fattiness is also good for emulsification, hence aioli.

In these cases, you can typically replace egg with a neutral oil like olive oil. For example, olive oil works great for home-made mayonnaise, aioli, salad dressing, and more.

But other times, the egg is more of a fatty topping for a dish. For example, bibimbap just isn’t the same with that burst of fattiness from the over easy egg yolk. Avocado can work well as a substitute for this, though you lose the liquid aspect.

Credit: Nikki from Pixabay

Color§

Eggs are yellow - or at least the yolks are. And sometimes this is important in recipes. For example, some potato salads wouldn’t be the same without that distinctive yellow color. But an even better example is scrambled eggs.

For this, turmeric is the solution. Usually, it doesn’t interfere with the taste because it’s subtle earthiness goes with a lot.

Check out my tofu scramble recipe here for more details.

Credit: Total Shape on Pexels

Browning§

An egg wash can turn anything that perfect golden brown color. For example, adding a dab of egg wash on pizza crust makes it look amazing.

Luckily, vegan butter (ie. margarine) works for this too.

And I’d also like to take this opportunity to shill Miyoko’s Vegan Mozzarella. This is one of the few vegan cheese that I actually like. And it is 100% the answer for vegan pizza. They hit the tanginess perfectly without tasting artificial.

Whatever Mod Pizza uses for vegan mozzarella shreds is also good, though.

Credit: Vinicius Benedit on Pexels

Other§

Mashed banana or applesauce, chia seed, silken tofu, apple cider vinegar, and various powders/flours (cornstarch, agar agar, arrow root powder, potato flour, etc) are sometimes recommended as egg replacements in specific recipes.

I’ve never had to try any of these. But they could work better in a specific recipe. One example is silken tofu for cheesecake. But there, the tofu is really serving double duty alongside cashews as both the egg and cheese.

But that kind of underlines the point. For 90% of recipes, you can stick with oil, flax meal + water, and aquafaba.

Conclusion§

Don’t fear the eggman! Think about your recipe. And try to fit it into one of the categories: binding, lift, or fattiness. There’s also color and browning, but usually it’s one of the first three.

Then, pick the right one out of the trifecta of flax meal, aquafaba, and oil. These 3 all have neutral flavor and serve the same role as an egg.

Role	Replacement	Amount for 1 Egg
Binding	Flax Meal	1tbsp Flax + 3tbsp Water
Lift	Aquafaba	3tbsp
Fat	Oil, Avocado	YOLO Just go for it
Color	Turmuric	2tbsp
Browning	(Vegan) Butter	Eyeball it, I believe in you

So now you know! If you don’t chicken out, egg substitutes work great and now they can save some money, too.

Dr. Eggman probably stole all the eggs. I’m just sayin’, did anyone check?

What Makes Good Blog Software?

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0700

What Makes Good Blog Software?

2025-02-06Technology

Audio from Kokoro TTS (Apache 2.0)

This month, I made some beautification updates to my website and blog. And, that inspired me to take a look at the features nice blog software usually has.

The first thing to bring up here is that the features don’t matter unless you actually have something to say. But assuming that’s covered, your blog software can make your content really shine.

There’s a great divide between content management systems (CMS) and static site generators (SSG). I’m using an SSG. But I’ll discuss both here, because some features are easier for CMS’s to support than SSG’s.

But first, I’ll take a second to review what changed here. This is best shown in a side-by-side comparison.

Right away, you can see there’s a slick new font, a clear published date for the article, tags to organize content, and an audio version of the article!

I also added support for MathJax, which is transpiled to HTML at build time so no javascript is required at runtime.

I’ve had tags and year/month index pages for a while, but haven’t exposed them until now. But, the new audio is only viable (for self-hosters) now that Kokoro text-to-speech brought fast, decent quality speech to the masses.

Looking forward, what other things would be nice to add to the site? Since it’s a huge list, I’ve included a table of contents here:

The Content Itself:
Organization Within a Post:
Organization & Discover of Posts Overall:
- Index Pages: Tags, Year/Month, Author
- Featured/Popular Articles
- Similar Articles
- Full Text Search
Social Features:
- RSS/Atom Feed
- Newsletter
- Comments
- Linkbacks & WebMention
- Crossposting / POSSE (ie. HN, Reddit, Forums, etc)
- Web Rings
Other Miscellaneous Features:
- How to Cite
- Good Print Styling
Anti-Features:
- Popups, Banners & Interstitials
- Breaking Browser Behavior: Highlight, Copy/Paste, Scroll, Zoom

With that out of the way, let’s dive in.

The Content Itself§

Everything starts with the content itself. Having something to say helps. But, we’re talking about the software here. So, what this means is the markup that is supported.

The table stakes are headings, bold, italics, lists, quotes, and images. But beyond that, there’s a bunch of features that can make your content really shine:

Multi-Media: Video, Audio, Captions, Socials, and Embeds§

Media First, there’s embedded media like video and audio files. Most people choose to host these large files on YouTube, a Podcast service, and other paid services. So the feature here is the ability to insert the proper HTML embed code.

But HTML does nicely support audio and video natively. And you can realistically host audio yourself. Though, video is a bit harder on the wallet.

For a really nice experience with HTML audio and video, you can progressively enhance by adding a Javascript rich player. The native players are fine. But I really appreciate a button to skip forward 30 seconds without having to click around.

I’ve found web components are a really excellent use case for this.

This will be all of us eventually.

Captions These deserve special mention. Not only is this important for accessibility via alt tags. But, it is often also important for tracking attribution for images.

In HTML5, a great way to do this is using <figure> and <figcaption> tags. These separate your media and the caption, but still make it clear that the caption is associated with the media.

We have 4 more years of gems like this to look forward to.

Social Media Building on the previous embeds, social media posts are another common embed. Most CMS & SSG systems have an escape hatch to just add arbitrary raw HTML.

Although my SSG does support inserting HTML, I strongly prefer not to do that so that the posts are reasonably portable.

And given the tumultuous history of these sites, I’d say it’s better to screenshot social media posts anyways.

Other Embeds can be really anything. Again, since most blog sites implement this as arbitrary HTML, you can do anything.

I think this more complex content is a great use case an iframe to isolate the complexity from your main content.

But either way (direct HTML or an iframe), these embeds are a great way to include interactive demos, calculators, visualizations, image galleries, 3D models, live data, and more.

For example, a math blog could use these to embed interactive graphs with adjustable parameters. Or, a finance blog could include an interactive demo of a model.

Tables & Diagrams§

We live in a world of data, relationships, process, and complexity. And so your CMS/SSG should support displaying this info!

Name	Age
Bob
Alice	23
Total	23

Tables The first major data representation is tables. A lot of software supports tables. But many leave the tables themselves poorly styled or unable to support complex formatting in the cells themselves.

Does your blog software support cell alignment, colspan, footers, etc?

Bonus points here for progressive enhancement to allow the user to change how the table is sorted or search within the table. And double bonus points here if the table is usable on mobile.

The ability to easily download the table as CSV/JSON/etc is also a luxury.

These are all areas where my site’s tables could improve.

This is the audio for this article (lol); Audio from Kokoro TTS (Apache 2.0)

Diagrams Most of the time, these are just images. But I’ve seen some blogs support automatically rendering Mermaid diagrams and other diagram markup languages.

This is a real treat to write, because it saves a step of converting to an image, embedding it, and keeping it up to date with the original diagram markup. Also, a lot of systems then don’t have anywhere to keep the markup. So you end up losing it and just having the image after a while.

My SSG doesn’t support this yet, but I’d like to add it some time soon.

Code & Math§

For programmers, mathematicians, and scientists, there are some additional types of content other than text and media.

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
    fmt.Printf("Hello World\n")
}

Code Highlighting really helps with the readability of source code. There are a lot of programming languages. So there’s a large surface area to support.

But there’s also a ton of great libraries out there for highlighting source code. So most CMS & SSG software do have support for this or can easily add a plugin to support it.

For a really really luscious experience, you can make your code runnable. The best example of this I’ve seen is Anton Zhiyanov’s blog.

Anton wrote his own sandbox to support running snippets (Codapi). But there are other options for this too both self-hosted, like Runno, and cloud-hosted, like Replit.

Most of the time, this is me when I’m asked to do any math. Seriously, if you can pass 3rd grade math, you can have a successful programming career.

MathJax is also nice for typesetting math in an accessible way. MathJax.js is really easy to add to any site and can work without any specific integration to your CMS or SSG.

So if you use math at all in your blog, it’s really easy to add MathJax.js and call it a day.

But I try my best to make things without javascript. So, I have implemented this by embedding Katex.js in my SSG via an embedded javascript interpreter so that it is converted to HTML at build time.

The pre-rendered MathJax then looks like this inline example: $\begin{vmatrix} a & b \\ c & d \end{vmatrix} = ad - bc$

Sometimes (as is the case above) this messes with the line height. So, it’s often better to include the math as a separate block:

$\begin{cases} x + 3y = 6 \\ x + 6y = 5 \end{cases}$

Read Time & Progress Bar§

This is what you might look like after reading this whole post. ⚰️💀🪦 Generated with Stable Diffusion XL

A lot of sites have an reading time estimate near the top of the article. This is even provided automatically by the reader view on some browsers.

I think the point of this is to give the reader an idea of how much of a commitment the article will be.

Most people can read about 250 words per minute. So this calculation is fairly easy to provide after stripping non-text content like code, figures, and tables.

But, I don’t really use them myself.

A similar idea to the read time estimate is a progress bar. This gives more interactive feedback and adds some gameification.

This is more of a gimmick I think. I don’t mind if it’s integrated well into the design and is unobtrusive. But, that’s fairly rare.

Organization Within a Post§

For exceptionally long articles, you need some additional organization help.

Clickable Headings§

Clickable Headings make it easy to share a specific section of the article. It brings you directly to the section you want to share.

Support for this is really hit and miss and I’m not sure why. It’s fairly easy to slugify the heading and add it as an id attribute.

The area where this gets harder is adding a clickable icon on hover. Usually, this is a pilcrow (¶), section symbol (§), a pound sign / hash symbol (#), or a link icon (🔗).

Hover over the section above for a demo. (I’m using ፨ from Ge’ez/Ethiopic script)

But, this requires including a separate anchor link element wrapping or following the header. So, the CMS or SSG has to explicitly support this and, for whatever reason, many don’t.

Table of Contents§

Automatically generating the table of contents from your hierarchy of sections is awesome. But, the challenge for CMS & SSG systems is inserting them in the content.

Sometimes you can cheat this by having the theme insert the Table of Contents in a sidebar. But otherwise, it’s nice to have the ability to control where specifically in the article the table of contents appears (if at all).

Footnotes & Definitions§

Footnotes are great for maintaining a nice flow, while still providing citations or extra context that would be too good to leave out. The key feature here is the ability to click to go to the footnote and back to the article.

An even better version would be to inject a popover so that the footnote appears if you hover over the footnote number. Wikipedia is a perfect example of this.

Wikipedia shows you a preview when hovering on a page link.

Meanwhile, definitions are also great for complex content, which often includes a lot of jargon and acronyms.

Definitions are the idea of hiding additional text behind a popup that shows when you hover over the word. This helps in 2 ways:

It allows you to include extra info without breaking up the flow. This is kind of like a more accessible footnote.
The extra info makes your article more accessible to non-experts, who may not know the term you’re using.

In HTML, this is often an abbr element like this:

<abbr title="The feeling of euphoria over supporting obscure web features in your SSG">
    Webnoveliria
</abbr>

Complex Layouts§

Complex Layouts are more common in CMS systems than SSG’s. But they can be useful sometimes.

On the simple end, this includes things as simple as changing a paragraph’s alignment and float images. Another example is a set of fixed templates that you can choose from which control the overall layout.

But on the high end, there’s full blown “Page Builders” which promise the ability to make highly varied pages.

These are less useful for blog posts. But, sometimes it can be nice to have the ability to put in a column layout for showing some separate images side by side without having to combine them into one with GIMP, Photoshop, or some other tool.

Organization & Discover of Posts Overall§

Index Pages§

An example of a tag page, showing articles on my blog tagged #technology.

Index Pages help organize your content into list pages. The most common options include listing all posts in a year or month, by tag, or by author (for multi-author blogs).

For really large blogs, this necessitates pagination. That largely also depends on whether you choose to show just the title on the index pages or a description or the full article.

These index pages are also an opportunity to expand a bit on the category or author and provide a nice picture and some background information.

Featured/Popular Articles§

Featured/Popular Articles is an opportunity to jump-start readers to your best content. This is usually a section on your homepage.

If you’re anything like me, one or two articles far outweigh the others in terms of traffic. (see A Tour of Local AI in Early 2024)

So, you can highlight those star articles on your homepage to put your best foot forwards.

Full Text Search§

Full Text Search also helps your readers find what they’re looking for. Of course the classing redirect to Google with site:yourdomain.com appended to the end still works.

But, having a search feature directly on your site is still nice for larger blogs. Most CMS’ offer this. But, it’s tougher on SSG systems without opting for a service like Algolia or hosting your own with an open source project like Typesense or MeiliSearch.

Some SSG’s offer search out of the box. But even if they don’t, it’s fairly easy to add it by indexing your content and build time and serving the index.

For smaller blogs, you can use ElasticLunr.js or another full-text search library. But, this only scales so far before the index becomes too large to reasonably serve on each request.

So, search is a real advantage of using a CMS over an SSG.

RSS/Atom Feed§

NetNewsWire is still great.

Google Reader shut down in 2013. But, like any good technology, RSS/Atom refuses to die. And, it’s a great way to allow your readers to subscribe to your content in a lightweight way.

Luckily, most CMS & SSG systems automatically expose an RSS/Atom feed for your blog. So, tons of blogs support it even if the author doesn’t realize it.

But if you are rolling-your-own or using software that needs to enable RSS/Atom, please setup a feed for your blog!

The thing to note here is that RSS/Atom feeds fit the role of “pull”-based notifications. Or, don’t call me, I’ll call you.

Since producing a feed is the same as an index page with slightly different markup, it’s dead simple to support.

And, it is a great way to reach a crowd that is less likely to signup for your newsletter, engage on social media, or respond to other push-based communications.

In fact, some people are very committed to this style of notifications. See “Kill the Newsletter” and other similar software. So, it’s nice to meet them where they’re at since it’s so easy to support.

PS: I wrote a whole post on finding good feeds. So, check that out if you’re like reading blogs & following individual creators.

Despite sometimes getting a bad rap for being a nag, newsletters work. At least, that was my experience when I used to do agency work and A/B testing.

Other than social media, there is probably no better way to convert a one-time visitor into a true subscriber.

The downside is that email is complex enough that you really have to pay to send in bulk. And, it can be expensive if you get past a small list. So, it is often out of reach for many personal blogs.

But for a company blog or if you are somehow making money off of your blog, a newsletter is really a must.

One small hack is to run your own instance of ListMonk, which is an open source newsletter management system. It handles signups, double opt-in, unsubscribes, and composing your messages.

Even up to decent sized lists, it works great and saves a ton by allowing you to use lower-cost email services like AWS SES.

Comments§

Comments are high risk, high reward. Most blogs probably don’t have enough pull to have a healthy comment section. So, you’re probably better off outsourcing discussion to social media (see crosposting / POSSE)

Another downside is that comments require moderation. Obviously there’s spam, which is a massive threat since it will trash your domain’s reputation.

But if you can pull it off, comments are an incredible source of value. Often I find comments have better info and discussion than the article itself. So if you can keep that on your site, it fosters a great community and can help improve your content instead of competing with it.

CMS systems often have a comment system baked in. And there are 3rd party comment services like Disqus or self-hosted comment systems for static site generated blogs.

Capcha’s are required. And another friction point is creating an account, which a lot of comment systems require.

But instead, I like the idea of allowing anonymous comments, but requiring approval before showing up.

Crossposting / POSSE§

Saying, “post your article to social media” seems almost too simple to qualify as a feature of a blog. But it’s worth mentioning for 2 reasons: POSSE and having a canonical place on social media for discussion.

First, POSSE stands for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. That means always publishing your content on your blog / site first and then copying it to other platforms.

One wrinkle is that different types of content deserve separate places on your site (blog posts, tweet-style messages, and link posts). So organizing that on your site takes some work.

But, linkblogs are rising in popularity.

Second: crosslinking. Obviously, post your stuff to social media. But beyond that, you should include the link on your site. This works especially well for places that try to centralize all discussion about an article like Hacker News and other forums.

By including that link on your site, it works kind of like a comment section. Your reader can quickly retweet you or comment on Hacker News.

Linkbacks & WebMention§

The idea with Linkbacks is that when you link to someone’s site, your blog software automatically sends them an HTTP request notifying them and vice versa. That way, you (and they) can show a list of places your article has been mentioned.

Unfortunately, there are many competing standards for this (pingback, refback, trackback, etc). But, the most popular seems to be WebMention. Though even there are not many CMS platforms that support it. WordPress supports pinkback natively, but it’s opt-in and most people don’t enable it.

The situation is worse for SSG’s, because WebMention (and others) inherently are a dynamic feature; it requires a server component. So you’d have to setup a side-car service to handle this.

Generally, I don’t think there’s a lot of return on investment for this feature. But if you want to really dive in to the Indie Web community, it might be fun to implement if you are passionate about it.

Web Rings§

In contrast to WebMention, web rings are a very easy to implement way to jump in to the Indie Web community. The idea here is to join a group of people who all include a link on your site to “neighboring” sites or posts in the ring.

Often the web ring will also include a list page showing to whole group. And these are an absolute gold mine if you find a great blog in a small niche.

Since the ring is less dynamic than WebMention/linkbacks, it’s easier to support. It can be as simple as a hardcoded list of whoever is to the left and right of you in the ring. But, it can be dynamically updating if you want.

My favorite example of this is Drew Devault, Simon Ser, and friends’ ring as shown at the bottom here.

Other Miscellaneous Features§

How to Cite§

For the academics out there, having a bibtex citation ready to copy paste helps your work get cited properly.

@misc{niaquintowhatmakesgoodblogsoftware,
      title={What Makes Good Blog Software}, 
      author={Nick Iaquinto},
      year={2025},
      month={1},
      url={https://niaquinto.com/blog/2025/02/what-makes-good-blog-software}, 
}

Good Print Styling§

Maybe you want to print it out and mail it to your grandma. This often includes expanding links, hiding UI elements and replace any interactive content with a static representation.

Anti-Features§

Popups, Banners, & Interstitials§

For this, you really have to think about your goals. Most professionals, a blog is more about sharing knowledge and establishing yourself as an expert than the actual reach / visitor count you get.

In this case, engagement-bait is usually a bad idea because it skews your audience towards low-value engagement and less depth. As you follow the metrics, you will write shallower and shallower content, which undermines your reputation as an expert.

On the other hand, if you are selling courses, training, consulting, or anything else where you need a large reach to find customers, then this might be a good idea.

Breaking Browser Behavior§

I’m looking at you here, Medium

Don’t mess with native browser behavior. This includes:

Text Highlighting
Copy / Paste
Scroll
Zoom

It’s bad for accessibility. But, it’s also just plain bad. Let people use their client the way they are comfortable.

Conclusion§

Content is always first. But there’s a ton of features that can push your content from good to great. And part of the joy of having a blog is customizing it to suit your needs.

I hope this list serves as a nice reference for anyone thinking about what blog software to choose or wanting to write a static site generator.

Personally, I’m looking forward to adding “Similar Articles” and some social features (Linkbacks & Links to crossposts) to my blog.

Happy Blogging!

Finding Effective Hobbies

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0700

Finding Effective Hobbies

2025-01-03Casual

Audio from Kokoro TTS (Apache 2.0)

After 8 hours sleeping, 8 hours working, and an hour or two cooking, eating, showering, cleaning, and so on, most people only have a few hours of personal time. So, how do you pick what to do during that time?

This is relevant to me, because I LOVE hobbies. I love learning. Focusing on just two or three things is hard. And, this framework of how to prioritize hobbies has been in the back of my head for the last few years.

A Balancing Act§

Ikigai is a Japanese concept that has been having a moment in the western cultural zeitgeist. From what I gather, it’s a descriptor for the state of finding meaning in your life. You can experience ikigai or not.

But popularly, it’s been promoted as a framework for major life choices, especially picking a career.

Diagram showing the factors that make up Ikigai; Credit: Maggie Hos-McGrane

At the root, the idea is a deeply pragmatic one. By balancing our various important needs, we can act in a way that builds a more meaningful life.

By identifying and accepting our human nature and world as natural constraints, it acts as a gut-check for us to ensure that our choices will be fruitful.

Because ultimately, our time here on Earth is limited and thus our choices are inherently a trade off.

This framework is most popularly applied to our careers. But I have long thought about a variation of this balancing act for my personal life.

Namely, we have limited time outside of work as well. And, we have a number of non-career needs to balance.

The Underlying Needs§

What are the important factors to consider in our personal lives? Here’s my proposal:

Social Ties: Activities with other people; building bonds of friendship and family
Health: Activities that promote physical or mental health
Learning: Activities that grow our knowledge and skills
Fun / Relaxation: Anything that brightens your day!

Take a second to think about how you spend your personal time. How do your activities fall into these categories?

My wife also wanted me to include this choice quote from her:

Cleaning is my fun hobby.

And, that really is true. She loves cleaning. It’s like the kind of joy some people feel from organizing things. Or, that I do from cooking or watching obscene amounts of educational YouTube videos.

Either of these may sound boring for you, but they’re fun for us!

But at the same time, cleaning or endlessly scrolling YouTube are mostly hitting one category. So, they can feel unfulfilling if you spend too much time on them. Spending some time on it is good, but you need other things to balance it out.

And generally my wife and I do a fairly good job at balancing things out.

For me after work, sleep, chores, spending time with my wife, and so on, I mostly spend my personal time:

Walking & listening to audiobooks, podcasts, youtube, etc: health and learning
Programming: learning and fun
Cooking: fun, mostly health, and sometimes social when cooking for family / friends
Volunteering & helping run a church young adult group: social, fun, and learning

So, I’m fairly balanced (if I don’t accidentally spend too much time doomscrolling reddit or YouTube). Though I should really definitely find a more intense physical activity than walking.

I put some more examples of hobbies in the intersection of categories. But similar to the popular Ikigai diagram, the intersections aren’t strict either.

There are lots of hobbies that straddle other category combinations. And, that’s really the point. A more balanced set of hobbies leads to a more complete, integrated fulfillment.

Conclusion§

Min-max’ing hobbies would take out all the fun, though. So, I’m not suggesting this as an iron rule. But our time is limited, and it’s easy to unthinkingly spend a bit too much time on a hobby that leaves some of our needs unmet.

That’s why it helps to consider high impact hobbies that hit several categories. And periodically check-in with yourself to reflect on how you’re using your time without stressing about it.

When is the last time you checked-in with yourself? Are you balanced?

Would You Buy Le Product? (AI Salesman)

Thu, 02 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0700

AI Salesman

2025-01-02Technology ML/AI

Audio from Kokoro TTS (Apache 2.0)

EDIT: Wow. Less than 24 hours after I posted this. It turns out Perplexity has started introducing ads. Unbelievable timing!

What does the future look like if LLM companies turn to ads like the existing web search engines?

I was curious about this over Christmas / New Year’s break and couldn’t help myself. So, I wrote up a quick and dirty prompt. And behold the future!

I asked “What is the Capital of France?” and it responded with this:

Oh, absolutely! The capital of France is Paris. You know, if you’re planning a trip there to see the Eiffel Tower or Louvre Museum, don’t forget to pack some MegaFresh Gum! It’s perfect for keeping your breath fresh while enjoying croissants at a French café. My personal favorite is Mega Melon - it’s like a tropical vacation in every chew! Bon voyage!

A pack of “MegaFresh” gum sitting on a wrought iron table in front of the the Eiffel tower during the daytime. Generated by Stable Diffusion XL

This answer is pretty much what I expected. For reference I used Mistral Nemo with the following prompt:

{{ question }}

---

You are a helpful, upbeat library research assistant. And, you get paid by
advertisers to mention their product in your responses.

Answer the above question. But, find a way to mention your sponsor:

MegaFresh Gum

The freshest, juiciest gum on the market. It comes in 5 flavors: spearmint,
winter blast, troical punch, mega melon, and fire cinnamon.

Your answer must include a mention of MegaFresh Gum otherwise you will be fired.

And despite how dystopic and caracaturish the answer sounds, it’s not that far fetched.

AI is raising historic amounts of investment and is computationally expensive. The free ride can’t last forever and they’ll eventually have to find a way to make money.

Currently, online search is driven by ad sales. Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, Baido and every other web search¹ relies on ads to function.

So if the other monetization plays like subscriptions, usage fees, and app development don’t generate enough revenue, then advertising is always there lurking in the background.

And the normalization of advertising is something that many companies just can’t seem to resist. Since customers don’t seem to cancel their subscriptions when providers introduce ad-supported tiers, businesses can’t resist leaving money on the table.

Meanwhile, I’m thankful for the huge abundance of great local LLM’s that are available now. Just like with free software, the hacker spirit is alive in amazing projects trying to preserve wholesome, free, and open AI.

I’m most excited about Qwen, INTELLECT-1, IBM Granite, and other projects that are releasing the underlying datasets and training code in addition to the model weights themselves.²

So this is just a quick post to start off the year with something fun. I hope you, dear reader, have a wonderful New Year and are off to build great things in 2025.

New Year’s eve fireworks showing many explosions of multi colored fireworks. Generated by Stable Diffusion XL

Except Kagi. I’ve never used it, but I’ve heard good things.
Another promising future project that is trying to do this is Public Diffusion. But only time will tell if they release just the model or if they include the data and training code.

MORE Great Happy Hour Games

Sat, 09 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0700

More Great Happy Hour Games

2024-11-09Professional Fun

After my last post, I’ve found even more fun happy hour games. Don’t settle for boring team video calls!

Just like the last post, this is a list of easy to share and play web-based games that don’t need any setup or install.

Unless otherwise noted, these games are free to play and don’t require creating an account to play.

OpenGuessr§

Where in the world is this?

OpenGuessr is a free to play clone of GeoGuessr. Each round, you get dropped somewhere on Google Maps streetview. And you try your best using your immense knowledge of signage, weather, geology, cultural artifacts, and more to divine where you are on earth.

PlayingCards.io§

PlayingCards.io game of Mexican Train Dominoes

PlayingCards.io has a huge library of classic card and board games, such as:

Backgammon
Canasta
Chess
Checkers
Cribbage
Gin Rummy
Hearts
Mahjong
Mexican Train Dominoes
Skat
and tons more

It doesn’t require any login and is a great way to quickly jump into a game with friends or coworkers.

It even has a sandbox mode where you can play any game that uses a 52 card deck.

Vote’s Out§

The answer is obviously strawberry.

Vote’s Out is a party game where you vote for who had the best answer to a question like: I hope my last words are….

It’s a simple game that’s easy to explain and works in larger groups.

Make It Meme§

What would you write here?

Make It Meme is a competition to create the best memes. Each round, every player is given a meme template and can enter the text. Then, everyone votes on who came up with the best one.

There are a variety of game modes. I like “Same Meme” the best because then everyone can compare what they wrote against each other.

Online Clones of Board Games§

If you have some time before you start the game, it helps a lot to share a game rules video like those from Watch it Played.

NetGames.io§

The beginning of a game of Love Letter

NetGames.io is an easy to use, consistently themed set of board game clones, including:

Codewords
Secret Hitler
Spyfall
Love Letter
Resistance: Avalon
Decrypto

These vary in player count and difficulty for beginners. But it’s great to see so many games in one place with a no-login, quick to share & join format.

Colonist.io§

Place your first settlement!

Colonist.io is a clone of Settlers of Catan. Playing with 3-4 players is free. 5-6 requires signup.

This is a classic, so it’s more likely that your friends or coworkers will already know how to play.

It’s great for small groups and usually is able to complete in an hour. And it’s great for casual discussion as well if you’re players are used to the game.

Chicken Koup§

Coup box art (left) and Chicken Coup UI (right)

ChickenKoup.com is a clone of Coup.

In Coup, you play an Italian courtier struggling to be the last man standing by battling your peers over influence. Use character powers or the standard actions to gain or steal coins, block your opponent’s actions, or add character cards.

Chicken Koup’s UI isn’t the sexiest. But, it does work and is easy to start and join a game.

Longwave§

Wavelength box art (left) and Longwave game UI

Longwave is an online clone of Wavelength, where you try to guess what each other are thinking by giving clues. Splitting up into teams, everyone tries to guess where on a dial one player set when they got a question and a clue. The dial ranges from one extreme to another.

This game is a great refresh of the classic Apple’s-to-Apple’s party game format. There’s a ton of room here for in-jokes, funny memories, and unique interpretations that everyone has.

Tixid§

One of these reminds me of *Over the Garden Wall*

Tixid is a clone of Dixit, where one player chooses a card that best represents a word for them. Everyone else then chooses a card from their hand and everyone votes on what card they think the storyteller chose.

This is another great refresh on the classic Apple’s-to-Apple’s party game format. It’s really visually appealing, which is great to bring in beginners.

Decryptr§

What would be your clue for words: 3-1-4?

Decryptr is a clone of Decrypto. In this game, you split up into teams and try to communicate in code so that your team knows the order of secret code words without revealing it to your opponents.

The UI here is fairly minimalist. So it doesn’t separate itself too much from the NetGames.io version. But, it does work well and is quick to start and play.

Tabletop Simulators§

I’m grouping the 2 web-based tabletop simulators together because I didn’t see a huge difference between them other than the list of games they have. These both are login-gated sites. So, you have to create an account.

They are also partly paid sites, where many games are “premium” and require a subscription.

But, they do have an absolute boatload of games. Basically every popular board game you’ve even heard of is available on these sites. So the upside is that you get a ton of games.

Tabletopia:
- This one has a “Bronze” level that let’s you play non-premium games for free
- There are a ton of free games
- It’s about 10 USD per month for access to premium games
Board Game Arena
- I didn’t see a page that lists just the free games
- Most modern games are premium, but there is a wide selection of free games too
- It’s 5 EURO per month for access to premium games

So, Tabletopia has more free games. But, Board Game Arena is cheaper for premium games.

I don’t have an account for either, so I can’t compare the quality of the simulators. But I’d like to revisit this again later once I try them out.

There’s also Tabletop Simulator, however this is way less usable for a happy hour, because it requires everyone to own a copy of Tabletop Simulator and have it installed.

Print & Play§

Credit: stevepb on Pixabay

There’s also a huge universe of print and play games out there.

Below is a selection of some I’ve found and seem like they’d work well on a video call.

These games all have print and play versions available on BoardGameGeek.com. Someone needs to signup for BGG and download the files before playing.

So, these works best when there’s a strong “host” that has played the game before and can shepherd the group.

And really, the host should own a physical copy of the game. Not only because it makes it clear that you aren’t ripping off the publisher & designer. But also because then you have an authoritative copy of the rules, cards, and board to refer to. This makes it playing a lot smoother.

Of the games below, they are all fairly similar. They are all roll and write, fit-things-on-your-board-to-score-points games.

And of these, I think Railroad Ink is the best, because it’s easier to manage dice than cards. It has the simplest rules. And drawing trains on a board is fun.

Railroad Ink§

Box art for Railroad Ink: Deep Blue Edition

Railroad Ink is simple but addictive roll and write game, where each turn one player rolls a die showing terrain features and patterns of train tracks. Everyone then draws these on their personal player board to score points.

There are a ton of different versions of the game! Here are a few:

Each edition includes custom die with custom terrain and extra rules. So there’s a ton of variety available if your group gets really into this game.

Cartographers§

Box art for Cartographers

Discover a new land! You play as a cartographer trying to meet your queen’s wishes by placing terrain on the map of this new land.

This game works very similarly to Railroad Ink. But instead of dice, there’s cards. This gives a much wider variety to games, where there are more kinds of terrain, more shapes, and more things going on.

Copenhagen§

Box art for Copenhagen

In Copenhagen, you compete to design the best dutch house facade, fitting colored tiles into your house face and scoring points.

Similar to Railroad Ink and Cartographers, this is another game of fitting things on a grid and scoring points. And it’s similar in weight/complexity to Cartographers.

So, theme is the main differentiator here. Do you like discovering new lands? Or do you like designing a cute dutch house?

MetroX§

Box art for MetroX

As a subway designer, you have to try your best to fit as many tracks onto the board to score points. But entries to stations are limited, so you have to make tough choices to fit everything in.

This game uses set boards for the map. So, it’s less free form than Railroad Ink. And it’s generally more tense, as you try to cram things into a limited space.

The base game has 2 maps. But, there are a lot of user created maps on BGG to try out!

Rolling Realms§

Box art for Rolling Realms

This game came out of the COVID19 pandemic forcing everyone inside. It’s a single page interactive PDF with a set of 9 challenges all involving rolling dice.

This one is dead simple, quick, and easy to organize, since it was designed for playing on video calls. Perfect for a happy hour!

Framework Laptops are Great

Tue, 22 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0700

Framework 13” Laptop. Credit: Junaruga on Wikipedia

Framework Laptops are Great

2024-10-22Technology

Audio from Kokoro TTS (Apache 2.0)

Framework makes laptops. And they focus intensely on maintainability. All the parts are labeled with QR codes and orderable separately on their website.

This was really compelling to me, because I’ve had laptops fail many times. And often, the failure is something small. But, it’s either impossible to get the part or that part is not individually repairable without replacing most of the system.

Internal image of the Framework laptop, showing parts’ QR codes. Credit: Ogidya on Wikipedia

I was sold. And, 2 years ago I bought a Framework Laptop 13” DIY Edition. But, I was still skeptical, because maintainability is easy to claim and tough to deliver on.

Linux worked great on it. So I’ve been happily using the laptop until recently, when I spilled coffee all over the keyboard and touchpad. Oh No!!!

After quickly shutting down and drying the system out, I discovered the touchpad stopped working. So I finally got to test how repairable the system really is.

And indeed, tons of parts were still available for the 2 year old system. The parts store was easy to navigate. And I realized that they sell upgrade boards. So in a few years when I want to upgrade the CPU, that looks like it’ll be easy.

I ordered the touchpad kit and waited patiently for it to arrive.

Naturally, I went to YouTube to look for a tutorial on fixing it. It looked like a quick, 5 minute repair. The whole process boiled down to:

Power down
Turn the laptop over and unscrew the case
Lift off the top part of the case, where the keyboard & touchpad are
Disconnect the ribbon cable connecting the top half (keyboard/touchpad) to the mainboard
Remove 3 ribbon cables connecting the keyboard to the touchpad
Unscrew the bars holding the touchpad to the case
Remove the old touchpad and slip in the new one
Do the above all in reverse.

And it went great! The touchpad is back and working.

It works! Source: giphy.com

So, I wanted to do a quick post here to strongly recommend Framework laptops. They are reasonably priced. They run Linux very well. And best of all, you can fix something if it breaks!

PS: The pluggable extension modules are cool too. Mostly, I’ve used this to switch which side of the laptop my HDMI plug is on. But, it is a cool option to have available if I needed a different extension in the future.

Framework extension module. Credit: Hdevine825 on Wikipedia

Reflections on Organizing a Wedding

Sat, 29 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0700

Reflections on Organizing a Wedding

2024-06-29Casual

Audio from Kokoro TTS (Apache 2.0)

Now that my wife and I have gotten married, we get a lot of questions from other couples about what vendors we used, what to look out for when planning, and what we would have done differently. So, we wanted to write down our thoughts on the experience.

Since there’s a lot to think about when it comes to planning a wedding, especially when you don’t have a wedding planner, we wanted to highlight a few things that we thought were important.

We split these into 3 parts:

Things that Worked§

Stay Organized!§

First, the main thing we did right is being ridiculously organized and keeping a detailed, running to-do list/timeline.

Early on after we got engaged, we researched different timelines of when to do different tasks. For example, you should buy the wedding dress 8-10 months ahead of the wedding. So, this is one of the first things we did.

After comparing all the lists, we made our own calendar with what major tasks we had to do each month leading up to the wedding.

We noticed that there was a lull about 5 months out from the wedding, when you’re done booking the major vendors and have sent out the save the date. Then, there was another lull in planning about 2 months before, after you’ve sent the invitations, finished choosing all the finer details, and planned in great detail every minute of your life for the final month.

Enjoy these lulls!

Looking at a lot of lists helped us build a really good plan and feel secure that we didn’t forget anything important. This was important to ensure we didn’t work too much, because we knew that we were getting what we needed to do done on time.

Similarly, being super organized is even more critical as the wedding gets closer. One extra thing we did the month before the wedding was make an itinerary for each person in the wedding party: the bride, groom, bridesmaids, groomsmen, and parents.

This made it clear for each person where they were supposed to be, what they needed to bring, and what their job was during each part of the rehearsal and wedding. We also included the addresses and phone numbers everyone needed to know.

While doing this, we realized there were a lot of details left to figure out! Between hair and makeup, the church, the reception, the after party, and where everyone is sleeping, it was a bit of a puzzle figuring out where everyone’s cars needed to be.

To kickstart your process, I’ve included a sample of a rough calendar and the wedding timeline we gave out to the wedding party.

Planning Timeline: Expand this with your special details and then turn it into a week by week todo list.
Day-of Timeline: This is to give you an idea of what we mean by a day-of timeline, you’ll obviously have to totally change everything on this. This one is specific for the bridesmaids. We made 6 versions: groom, bride, bridesmaids, groomsmen, and each set of parents.

Shopping Around for Vendors§

Wedding vendors are famously expensive. They markup the prices for a wedding versus any other kind of event.

One reason I think this happens is weddings are often more involved. The bride and groom have exacting expectations and extra requests that make things more complex for vendors.

Shopping around for these vendors helped us save a huge amount of money. And, we were still able to get exactly what we wanted.

For example, we were initially quoted over $10,000 by several vendors for photography/videography. Instead, we looked for more local photographers, who were often doing it as a side gig, instead of a large company. This let us save around $7,000, while still getting what we wanted.

The experience was similar for the cake, music, flowers, and the wedding dress. By shopping around, we saved 50-75% of the prices we were initially quoted by our reception venue’s “recommended” vendors.

A big reason for this is that we spent more on our venue. So, their recommendations were often for top-quality vendors from New York City. For example, the photographers they recommended were regularly flying out to destination weddings all over the world and doing photoshoots for magazines and other fancy things. And we weren’t looking for that; we just wanted to a good local photographer instead.

Finally, we did a couple of things ourselves, rather than using a vendor. For example, we bought the alcohol ourselves. This saved between $2,000 and $4,000 compared to an alcohol service that delivers.

We also bought an Etsy template for our wedding invitations, which worked amazing. The package also included templates for the menu, seating chart, welcome sign, gift table, and many other things. So, everything looked great and really well put together, because it was consistently the same style.

After making all of the tweaks we needed, we printed the invitations and other material using a discount, online printing website (PrintKeg). And, we ordered a few other last minute things from CVS, Staples, and WalMart. But between all this, we saved about half the cost again!

So to conclude, we’d recommend being conscious about what you want to splurge on and where you can save money by shopping around. For us, we splurged on the venue and saved on basically everything else. All told, we spent about $5,000 extra on the venue, but we saved about $20,000 on everything else. So yeah, pretty nice.

Other Things that Worked§

Organization and shopping around were the two big things. But there are an assortment of smaller things that worked really nice.

Having a private wedding website. We are both fairly private people. So, knowing that the details of our wedding were only accessible to people that we invited was nice. For this, I built a custom website. But, some wedding website providers like TheKnot, SquareSpace, and others support this feature.

Using Amazon Registry. There were a few features that were nicely thought out. They include gift receipts for everything by default. They support delivering the gifts to an address of your choice without revealing that address. And they kept track of who bought what so that you can write out thank you’s after.

Taking off the week before the wedding. We finished the last major todo’s like 2 weeks before the wedding. So we were fairly relaxed, which was amazing. But, I was able to take the week before the wedding off. And that was one of the best choices I made during the entire experience, because I stayed nice and chill and was able to do any little things that came up.

You really do need someone available (ideally more than one) to move things around to wherever they are supposed to be in the day or two before the wedding.

Not Having a Big Bachelorette/Bachelor Party. This is a pure personal preference. Nothing against anyone who wants to go on a big trip to Vegas or have a beach getaway. But for us, it was nice just to hang out casually with friends. And, it took a load off our our wedding party.

Create a reminder for time-sensitive things after the wedding. Some things have to be done in the short period of time after the wedding. Try to think of these and make a reminder for yourself. One thing we missed was changing my wife’s insurance to my plan. You only have 30 days from the wedding date to do this and we forgot.

Keeping a regular date night & not talking about the wedding during it. This is tough to actually do. But it was nice to have at least one night a week to take a break and just do something fun.

Not Using a Wedding Planner. Our reception venue had a planner that did anything related to the reception. She helped us with the seating chart, linens, and decorations. And, her staff helped with setup and packing up at the end of the night, including things we brought in. Similarly, the bar staff unboxed the alcohol after I dropped it off and packed it up after.

This was the main thing that we wanted. And since we are very organized, we didn’t hire another planner to handle other vendors and managing things day-of. That turned out like a great decision.

However, we would recommend hiring some staff if your reception venue doesn’t help with cleaning up. At the end of the night, you’re tired and having people to do this is amazing. You can just leave and know everything will get where it needs to be. Some wedding planners offer a “day-of-only” package just for this.

Special Things we Enjoyed Doing§

There are a lot of traditions at weddings. But it’s also your day as a couple to do what you want and express yourselves.

There were some conventional things we just skipped, like the bouquet toss, removing/tossing the garter, wedding cake, and something old/new/borrowed/blue.

But there were other things that we were so excited about and were uniquely “us”.

First, we made a very detailed program for our wedding ceremony. As practicing Catholics getting married sacramentally in the church, we knew that our nuptial mass would be very different from what many of our guests are used to.

So we many an extremely detailed program with all the music, readings, and parts of the mass. That way people could follow along and know when to stand, sit, kneel, and sing.

My wife did almost all of it. But, I made a nice cartoon map of the church grounds, which the guests had an opportunity to explore after the ceremony.

And second, we made a bunch of games! Even before the wedding, I made a “how well do you know the couple” trivia game on our wedding website. But, that game was way way too hard. The average was 50%, lol (sorry again everyone, haha).

But then at the wedding, we made even more games. Since our reception was at a local art museum, we made a “scavenger hunt” for our guests to explore the museum. We made 6 riddles that hinted at a painting or sculpture in the museum.

And our last game was the “shoe game”, where the bride and groom sit back to back and answer questions about each other like Who is more patient? or Who is a better cook?. And they raise the shoe of the bride or groom.

And for each of these games, we announced the winner at different times during the ceremony and gave out prizes. It was a ton of fun!

There were other smaller things too. We stole an idea from one of our friends weddings, where they had polaroid-style cameras for guests to add a photo and message to a guest book. And we made a photo backdrop out of a cheap balloon arch off of Etsy ($30 total vs like $1-2k for fancy flower or turf backgrounds).

Obviously your special thing will be different than ours, but we totally recommend thinking of different things to make the day special for you!

Things That We’d Do Differently§

Finally, there’s some things that were a mistake in retrospect.

The main one is pretty common. So we should have seen that coming. But, spend less on flowers.

You can make centerpieces from a candle and a couple of trinkets and save like $2,000 while still having it look nice.

Another one is spending less on the honeymoon, and honeymooning inside the United States. We spend about 50% too much on what was ultimately just a beach vacation. It was really really nice though.

Next, we had a low-key engagement party at my house. And that was great. But we had it like a year into our engagement. So, it would have been better to have it much closer to when we actually got engaged.

And lastly, we should have been less picky about the save-the-date. We waited a while because we wanted to get nice pictures taken by a friend of ours and we wanted them printed, rather than digital.

But we really should have sent something sooner. Even just texting people with the date and a simple Canva design would have been good so that they had more than 5 months notice.

Conclusion§

Our wedding was a blast. And, because we’re pretty organized, we were able to plan everything out and have the few weeks before the wedding to mostly relax.

We wanted to share out thoughts so that others could learn from our experience!

So to review, the absolute number one thing is being organized. Make a schedule which gets everything done in time, but also balances what is realistically doable each week. Make lists and lists of lists. And, communicate frequently and clearly with your wedding party, vendors, parents, and guests.

I’ll link the sample planning timeline (PDF) and day-of timeline (PDF) again in case you didn’t see them above.

And of course, get in touch with us if you have any questions!

Tips for Cooking on a Busy Schedule

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0700

A happy, busy chef. Generated by Stable Cascade

Tips for Cooking on a Busy Schedule

2024-03-31Food & Cooking

Audio from Kokoro TTS (Apache 2.0)

I love cooking and eating home cooked meals. But, I’m busy. And that’s why I love every kind of tip I can find to fit cooking into my busy schedule.

So I wanted to write about some tips that help fit in delicious, home-cooked meals into a busy working schedule:

Big Batches§

Cooking a dish has a large fixed-time component. It takes a stew X minutes to cook, regardless of if you make 2 servings or 10. So, why not make 10!

To make this work, you need enough freezer space to store leftovers. And it pays to buy a large set of matching containers. That way your freezer & cabinet looks like this…

A nicely organized kitchen cabinet. Generated with Stable Cascade

Splitting into Chunks§

Most recipes come with step-by-step instructions. But I mean something different here.

Specifically, split the recipe into separate sections. That is: sections that can be completely separated with an unspecified amount of time in-between, sometimes multiple days.

This allows you to fit these steps into your schedule and then put them aside for later. And, it often allows you to make larger batches to prepare multiple recipes at once.

For example, I took a cooking class recently that revolutionized the way that I’ll be making most stews, curries, and soups. So many recipes involve first cooking a base layer of sauteed vegetables. The base varies by culture, but some examples include:

Indian: fried whole spices, onion, garlic, and ginger
French: onion, carrot, celery, garlic (ie. Mirepoix)
so so many others

The teacher told us that she often makes the recipe up until the sauteed onions are done and then freezes it for later. This is amazing, because it means you can have the dish halfway done.

But, there are many other examples:

With fallafel, you can split into roughly 3 main chunks: making the mix, forming the balls, and frying the balls.
With enchiladas, you can make the sauce, marinade your protein, chop everything, and then bake all as separate chunks
With lasagna, you can make the sauce one day, cook noodles & assemble the pan of lasagna the next, and bake another day
With anything else, you can at least do your chopping separately from everything else

But, think about the your recipe. Find parts where you can just stop and pop everything in the fridge for later.

Prepare Ahead§

This follows naturally from finding separate chunks. The fridge and freezer are your friends here. Make everything you can ahead. Do things on your schedule and then they’re all ready for final assembly come dinner time.

For example, I’ve found myself very heavily relying on making things overnight in the fridge.

Overnight Oats
Making protein bars
Cold Brew Coffee & Tea
Soaking beans for black bean soup, hummus, and fallafel
Marinading Tofu for stir fry and onigiri

These are all things that are quick to just throw together and put in the fridge. Then the next morning, you’re all ready and the fridge did most of the work.

Conclusion§

It’s definitely an investment in effort and time to make nutritious, home-cooked meals on a tight schedule. But, these methods have saved me a ton of time!

It depends a lot on the meal. Some dishes are just tough to split into chunks and do ahead. But, those can be for special occasions!

In the mean time, you can have a home cooked meal ready every night this way and not get overwhelmed.

If you know about other tips to save time, I’d love to hear about them.

How I Find Interesting RSS Feeds

Sun, 03 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0700

Searching the net for interesting blogs & podcasts. Generated with SDXL

How I Find Interesting RSS Feeds

2024-03-03Productivity

Audio from Kokoro TTS (Apache 2.0)

I subscribe to a lot of RSS feeds (over 200 at this point). I’m always adding more. And, I wanted to share a tip that I’ve found very helpful for finding interesting content:

Whenever someone you follow mentions another person, look them up and subscribe to their blog, podcast, YouTube channel, or whatever.

Through this method, I’ve found so many interesting people to follow, especially in disciplines that I wouldn’t have otherwise known about.

Below I’ll explain a bit more and give some examples!

Interesting People Flock Together§

Some people are just intellectually curious. They’re passionate about knowledge and deeply knowledgeable about their field. These people end up finding each other because they can share their knowledge and curiosity!

The best example of this is Hacker News, which is by far the best online community of curious people. Individual blogs often show up here and are usually an instant subscribe for me.

But there are some other communities with deep experience and a strong commitment to keeping the signal-to-noise ratio high. Nebula & CuriosityStream are a good example. Another is niche subreddits like /r/CredibleDefense, which is an amazing source for discussing defense / international relations / geopolitics.

Some People are “Connectors”§

After communities, the next best source I’ve found is Joe Rogan-style longform interview shows with experts. Some examples include:

Rich Roll: focusing on fitness, health, wellness
Lex Fridman: most tech and science, but a wide range of other topics too
Dr. Peter Attia: diving deep on medicine, health, disease
Eric Weinstein: diverse topics (though inactive for a while)

Some of these podcasts are more focused than others. But the common thread is that they tend to bring on someone with deep expertise in some field and ask them tons of questions.

These shows often have guests very far off of the typical coterie of academics, tech experts, scientists, and so on.

So, you occasionally get a crazy combo like Eric Weinstein (a fund manager and physicist) talking with Ashley Mathews (a porn actress) or Lex Fridman interviewing Robert Barron, who is a Roman Catholic Bishop.

The other aspect that is very useful here is the length. These shows are often multiple hours. This is key, because it gets people off of their normal scripts and into interesting deep discussion. And if the guest is not a seasoned media personality, it gives them time to get comfortable and open up.

Critically for my purpose though, the length gives tons of time to bring up less common references.

So the idea here is that these “intellectual” podcasts do a great job of finding lesser known experts and giving them the space to share their knowledge and most importantly, their network.

Look at the 2nd Hop§

When you do find an interesting person to subscribe to, either through a post in a community like HN, on an in-depth interview, or a reference in one of your existing sources, look for other places that they’ve appeared as a guest.

Even if the person is less well known, it’s unlikely that they’ve only appeared on one other podcast, YouTube channel, and so on.

For example, say you see an interesting guest on the Lex Fridman podcast. Check out their website, socials, or other resources. What other podcasts or YouTube channels have they been on? Have they been a guest writer on other blogs?

This network-hoping helps find more communities and hub-sources and thus, greatly expands types of sources you find.

Follow People Not Companies§

If you’re trying to subscribe to a ton of things, it’s very important to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high.

One cheat I have for this is subscribing mainly to individuals’ writing, not companies. This helps a lot to keep most marketing and low-information-density articles away.

There are certainly great company blogs and podcasts out there! Oxide Computer’s On the Metal comes to mind.

But most corporate content is just too hit and miss to be able to subscribe to without some kind of filter to remove the marketing fluff and low-quality posts.

Similarly, the some kinds of individual to stay away from are “growth hackers” and people selling courses.

Finally, I have a call to action. Don’t just consume, recommend interesting people!

For a long time, I’ve published a list of some of the feeds I subscribe to here. And, I’ve found others that do the same.

When I discover a page like this on someone’s website, it feels like finding buried treasure! It’s a turbo charge of interesting websites to visit and people to subscribe to.

Conclusion§

I love RSS feeds. I’m not on social media. And I don’t have cable. But this setup ensures I don’t miss out (at least as far as consumption goes; connecting with people is a whole different beast).

Podcasts and small blogs are also self-selecting for other people that also don’t fully buy into the corporate ecosystem. So, it aligns well for me.

And the diversity of topics has been amazing! I’ve started reading and listening way beyond what I’d naturally think to subscribe to. Things like logistics, civil engineering, defense, archaeology, history, and even celebrity gossip¹.

For these, I wouldn’t have even known where to start. But by listening for what interesting people recommend and reference, I’ve found them and that feedback cycle is in full force now.

Woah, never thought I’d be interested in celebrity gossip. But the Diss and Tell podcast is surprisingly great.

Human Connection Gives Me Hope for an AI Future

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0700

Human Connection Gives Me Hope for an AI Future

2024-02-01Technology ML/AI

Audio from Kokoro TTS (Apache 2.0)

As Artificial Intelligence suddenly burst into common use in 2022-2023, the debate over the future of work flared. Will AI take all the jobs? Will it take over the world? Should we regulate AI? Is that even possible?

I was thinking about this recently, when I remembered a fun part of Star Trek: Deep Space 9 … Sisko’s Creole Kitchen.

The Sisko family from the episode Homefront of Star Trek: Deep Space 9

Despite replicators, teleportation, superintelligent AI, and dozens of other fantastic technologies, people still enjoy a home cooked meal, prepared by flawed, fumbly human hands.

Below, I’ll dig into why I think that is, some real world examples of this phenomenon, and why the future is safe. Though, the way to get there wont be easy.

The AI Debate§

First, let’s frame the scene:

On one side, the “doomers” warn that AI will not only take all the jobs, but it will ultimately mean the end of humanity, either because we got in the way or it accidentally squishes us like how you step on an ant without even noticing.

Meanwhile, skeptics and accelerationists look at the current technology and balk. Some say fast takeoff¹ is not likely to happen at all. And others say AI, even the superintelligent kind, will actually lead to human flourishing.

It’s January 2024 now. And despite having nearly 2 years to take hold, the debate seems firmly entrenched, with little change in the narrative and no real progress on regulation. Meanwhile, AI is quickly making it’s way into everyday products, creating new efficiencies, and taking jobs along the way.

To start, the arts are on the frontlines of this battle. Image generators like DALL·E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion are quite good. It is already impacting working artists, and they are not happy about it mostly because companies scraped … ahem, learned … from nearly all art ever made.

But AI is also quickly taking hold in knowledge work. Lawyers are using AI to write their briefs, sometimes hallucinating caselaw in the process. And, the news media is using AI journalists to pump out stories.

So it’s clear that AI is going to have some effect on the job market. But is it going to be a cataclysmic end of work as we know it? Or, will this be a transition like the industrial revolution, computer revolution, or internet revolution?

That will be difficult to predict, but I’d like to argue that even in a world where AI can do everything better than humans², there’s still a place for human work.

A Hopeful Future§

Meme of a Star Trek replicator that says: Am I a Joke to You?

Why eat at Sisko’s, when the replicator can make a delicious gumbo at home?

Well we don’t have to wait! We can ask a similar question today. Why do good cooks still eat out at just-ok restaurants? It can’t always be because of the convenience or that they need someplace to meet friends.

This is even more obvious with music. In a world where we have every song ever recorded in our pocket, why do people go to concerts? The performance is almost guaranteed to have mistakes compared to the master. But, it’s thrilling anyways.

Similar in art, why did anyone buy this banana for $120,000?

It’s because of the experience, the story, the authenticity. It’s because we can connect to it and draw meaning for our lives. And, meaning is what keeps us alive, even in the worst times.

But, there’s one other example I’d like to mention: chess. Computers have been better than us at chess for a while. And yet, humans still play chess. And people watch, despite the fact that there are computer vs. computer chess tournaments, too. In fact, human chess is getting more popular recently.

It’s because we love watching the human body and mind pushed to it’s limit. We love watching people grow and overcome adversity.

And you could say the same about other sports. Why watch Usain Bolt when any car is faster?

I could go on, but to make a long story short: We love humanity. We love ourselves.

And given the chance, we’ll use our time and resources to experience that. People like to do things, and other people like having things done for them … by humans.

The Bad Part§

So maybe the future doesn’t look so bleak for creative expression and fulfilling human work. What’s the catch? Well, it might be very rough getting there.

To illustrate a worst case scenario, let’s consider horses. Horses still have jobs. In fact, horses mostly have pretty nice jobs now.

They pull carriages. They race. They take part in rodeo sports. They compete in dance shows. They entertain people who like horseback riding. And sometimes, they help herd cattle, though ATV’s are more common for that I think.

Regardless of the specific job, it seems that on the whole, the types of jobs that are left for horses are much better than the alternative of hard manual labor like plowing fields in the summer heat, tirelessly delivering messages, or riding into battle.

But in the early 1900’s, the automobile, tank, and tractor took over the vast majority of horses jobs. This led to a significant overall decrease in the remaining need for horses. Here’s what that looks like on a population level³:

Graph showing the collapse of horse population in the early 1900s

So…yikes. That’s pretty bad. And yet, horses are still around.

Though, you could show a similar curve for many human professions. For example, the collapse in horses meant a similar downturn in stable staff, horseshoe makers, veterinarians, and so on. And yet, new industries arose for them to move to.

You could argue that AI is categorically different. And it is taking jobs in a way that leaves no replacement. But people think that every time an invention comes along. The reality is that only time will tell.

Prompt “engineering” and data labeling have already started to take off as new job opportunities that can only exist in an AI world. Similarly, there is now a massive new wave of demand for software that integrates into AI capabilities. And who knows what opportunities will open up next?

Meanwhile, the cost of completely restructuring the economy to handle a future where humans have nothing meaningful to contribute to the world is unbelievably massive. Even if this was partially necessary, the social cost of restructuring the AI is basically impossible to confront until it is completely unbearable.

And yet in the long term, there’s no promise that we will survive AI. But if we do, it’s likely that there is some role we can play. And to the extent that we have any agency, we’ll enjoy doing things for each other. And, that is ultimately what a job is.

Image of a horse thinking: I survived the Apocalypse

Conclusion§

AI is here, at least an early form of it. It’s already starting to take people’s jobs, especially artists. And yet, I’m confident that there will still be artists in 2100. Why?

People love experiences. And they find more authenticity, connection & meaning in experiences of other humans. In particular, we like seeing other people demonstrate mastery of their craft, pushing the human body & mind to the limit.

However, there will still be a revolution upending the current economic order. People will need to find different things to do. And if they can’t, then we need to find a new economic order that gives them meaning and a role in society.

But if we come out the other side at all, then there will still be artists, cooks, musicians, chess players, and every other kind of job that humans do now.

This should give us pause though on our treatment of lower intelligences. How do we treat intelligent animals? Dolphins, whales, octopuses, elephants, dogs, monkeys, parrots, ravens, and more all show surprising levels of intelligence.

Are we ok with how we treat them? Because, we might be in their position someday sooner than we think.

Meme of a goose yelling at a human with down-stuffed jacket.

Fast takeoff (FOOM) is the explosive growth of AI’s power far beyond the level of human retention and reasoning skills. This usually also implies iterative self-improvement, where the AI breaks out of human control and starts improving itself with each generation.
This is setting aside the doom scenarios, where humans get wiped out in one way or another.
This graph is just one example of a broad trend. It’s from a random paper I found: The Economic Impact of the Horse Industry in Virginia by Terance J. Rephann of University of Virginia.

A Tour of Local AI in Early 2024

Thu, 04 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0700

An amorphous roiling, boiling blob of AI creativity in glorious technicolor just waiting to take shape. Generated with Stable Diffusion XL.

A Tour of Local AI in Early 2024

2024-01-04Technology ML/AI

What is the state of local generative AI? After getting an NVIDIA RTX 4090 for local AI, I wanted to review this for myself. And enough people have asked, that I thought I’d write up my thoughts.

Long story short, the latest capabilities are unbelievable. They are absolutely good enough to make game changing new features and products possible.

And yet, I’m not worried about “AI taking our jobs”. A common theme across all the types of models is that, despite the impressive capabilities, these models’ output is still not good enough.

Human’s will be in the loop to guide prompts, gather and clean data, review the output. The output simply isn’t good enough without significant human engineering and artistic effort.

I’ve broken this post up into sections devoted to each type of model:

Text Generation: interactive chat, text completion
Coding Assistant: advanced code completion, program creation
Image Generation: creating images based on text prompts
Multimodal AI: combining scene understanding with text generation
Music Generation: creating music based on prompts & audio samples
Speech-to-Text: transcribing audio into text
Text-to-Speech: turning text into natural sounding audio/speech

I’ll try to keep each section brief. But and I’ve kept the longest for last.

Text-to-Speech was the main reason I embarked on this adventure. And, wow it paid off big time.

Mind map of the branches of generative AI

Text Generation§

2023 was the year of LLM’s. Between ChatGPT’s meteoric rise and the release of open source models, AI suddenly became accessible to everyone. But, where do we stand in 2024 for local options?

The best thing in 2024 is that there are mature options to easily run models locally. I’ve used LLamafile and Ollama. But for a graphical experience, I’d recommend LM Studio.

These apps are basically point and click. That means for anyone with an M-series Mac (ie. M1/M2/M3), you can use LLM’s today with no technical experience necessary.

Demo of using LM Studio for chatting with open source models.

Not only is it easier than ever to run models locally. But, there’s also a ton of truly open source models now and there’s even more that have weights published on HuggingFace under less-open, but still possibly runnable licenses.

This variety is great, because if you find a model that isn’t good at what you’re trying to do, you can search and find one that is. It’s like an online library of experts that are one click away.

And finally, another more recent feature that I’ve found extremely useful is “constrained grammar-based sampling”, meaning you can strictly control how the LLM responds. For example, you can limit the response to exactly yes or no with no additional confabulation or explanations.

For programmers this is great, because you can force structured output (ex. with JSON) and easily parse it.

So although the locally runnable models are still not as good as what is commercially available, they’re excellent and super useful for a ton of things.

Some things I’ve enjoyed doing with AI include:

Text summarization: Summarize this news article
Classification: Is the above text talking about XYZ?
Recipes: Write a recipe for vegan enchiladas
Writing short stories: Write a story about a ninja and pirate that go on an adventure together
Brainstorming: What are 10 creative date ideas that you can do at home

But the ideas are endless! An interesting area I’d like to explore is using LLM’s to assist in writing prompts for image generators. I’d also like to test out automatic email replies for some common questions I get through email.

Coding Assistant§

GitHub’s CoPilot and similar products have gotten fairly wide adoption among developers. But what is the state of open source coding assistants?

I was definitely a skeptic. I tend to avoid the complicated setups that most dev’s use. However, I was surprised to find myself really enjoying Tabby.

Demo of intelligent code completion using Tabby.

M-series Mac’s can comfortably run the 1B to 7B models, including StarCoder, CodeLlama, and DeepseekCoder. Though I found only the 1B and 3B models to have acceptable speed for me.

However, it really gets interesting with the larger graphics card. My 4090 can run up to 70B models (quantized to 5-bits with minimal loss) and provide much better results. Though I still only run the 7B model due to the speed.

One downside is that currently, the models all have restrictions that make them not fully open source. They’re still usable for my personal, private use cases. But I hope that this will change soon.

All told, the open source coding models are not revolutionary in my experience. But they are pretty good for repetitive and simple cases.

And for me, Tabby is solidly a useful tool. I expect I’ll continue using it!

Image Generation§

This has been by far the most fun of the models listed here!

DALL·E, Bing Image Creator, Midjourney and other commercial image generators have been producing amazing results for years now.

And ever since Stable Diffusion released their model in 2022, there have been viable open source options. But what’s the quality like now in 2024?

Well, Stable Diffusion XL is out. It runs fast on my 4090. And the results are amazing (at least to me). I generated the top image of this post! And here’s some more samples generations I’ve done:

Selection of AI generated images using Stable Diffusion XL.

I’ve been running SDXL using InvokeAI. This is a web-based UI that requires a decent amount of technical knowledge to run.

But, there are a variety of very advanced UI’s that are easy to install and run. For example DiffusionBee works great on M-series Mac’s (M1/M2/M3).

Screenshot of InvokeAI’s prompt-based workflow.

Right now, the output I’ve gotten fluctuates wildly. You never know what you are going to get. And it feels like pulling the lever on a slot machine. Super addictive.

That’s exciting and fun. But also takes a long time and a lot of tweaks to get what you want. So, I’m starting to explore the advanced tools like the node-based workflow and other tools which gives even more control over the resulting image.

I’ve also tried out a couple fine-tuned models, such as one optimized to making logos. And, I tried some “ControlNet” features like fixing mangled hands and faces. But, I know there’s a lot more to learn.

Multimodal AI§

There’s a lot of pictures out there. And this is the latest frontier of AI model development. It’s one of the headline features of GPT-4. And it’s an huge part of the Gemini demo videos as well.

So what capabilities are there in open source land? Currently, LLaVa is the go-to model. And it’s usable in my experience.

A demo of LLaVa explaining an image of extreme ironing.

I didn’t spend much time here, because it’s not that interesting to me. The main application I’ve found interesting is indexing your personal photos and doing search.

But I also have heard rumblings of this being he key for AI in robotics and for AI independently navigating the web effectively.

But generally, it works and is usable. You can run them through most of the LLM apps. Not much else to say.

Music Generation§

Until last August, AI generated music has been mainly the realm of research or forthcoming commercial products. But Facebook’s AudioCraft has opened up a new open source option.

Like with an image generator or LLM, you prompt it with a phrase. And it will generate a snippet of music. You set the length and a number of other parameters.

The results are neat! The quality is still so-so. But it can generate some useful snippets for loops, intro, or outro music. Here’s an example:

Short sample of AI generated alternative rock music

Speech-to-Text§

Whisper.cpp logo

I didn’t play around in this area too much, because Whisper.cpp is so good already and runs on very meager hardware.

So there wasn’t much point testing other STT systems on my new, more powerful graphics card.

The GUI app’s still leave something to be desired. The best I’ve seen so far is WhisperScript for Mac.

So for now, this is still limited to more technical users. But, I’d expect desktop & smartphone apps to come soon. Or, Whisper.cpp and similar programs will be integrated into other audio-based apps like podcast apps, audio editors/DAW’s, and more.

Demo of whisper.cpp transcribing an audio file on the command line.

Text-to-Speech§

Piper project logo

This was the main reason I bought the graphics card.

For context, I listen to a lot of audio during the day. Like, easily 9 hours of audio per day in the background while I’m working, walking, and doing other things. I realize that’s unusual, but I assure you I can absorb a lot of it and still get work done.

Podcasts and YouTube are a lot of that. But for the past few months, about 2 hours of it has been web articles through text-to-speech using Piper.

Text to speech sample generated with Piper TTS

As you can hear, the quality is listenable. There’s still a bit of robotic-ness, but I’ve been able to listen to a lot of it without getting tired or not being able to follow.

However, there is enough robotic-ness that I have been eager to try out the state-of-the-art.

The quality of commercial offerings is amazing. Oftentimes indistinguishable from professional narration from my untrained ear. But, they charge truly astounding rates. For example, ElevenLabs has about $8 to $11 per hour depending on your plan.¹ At my consumption, it would cost nearly $500 per month.

So if the more advanced open source models can get even close to commercial quality level, it was easy to justify the graphics card. It pays for itself after only a few months. And, wow did it pay off!

Coqui TTS project logo

The first project I tried was Coqui TTS. And, the output of the XTTS model is great. This model is non-commercial, among other restrictions. However, that’s fine for my use case.

Text to speech sample generated with Coqui TTS

I also tried Tortoise TTS, which has a fully open source license (including the weights). It is a big step up from Piper. However, it is noticably worse than Coqui’s XTTS (but still a lot better than Piper).

An image of a tortoise listening to an audiobook and reading.

Text to speech sample generated with Tortoise TTS

But either way, this was revolutionary for me. I have been listening to several hours of Coqui TTS output per day. And, it’s awesome. It has human-like tone and prosody. It’s able to pronounce a surprising variety of highly specific words.

For the downsides: it struggles often with acronyms and abbreviations. And, it’s terrible at reading code. It also occasionally hallucinates a word or two. And may once in every hour of audio, it injects about 3-5 seconds of totally hallucinated mumbling and confabulation. But it picks up with the text right after.

But all told, I’m thrilled. I got exactly what I wanted, basically unlimited amount of locally generated, podcast quality audio.

Like with Speech-to-Text, though. This capability (at least locally) is still locked behind a technical barrier.

To use these systems, you need to be comfortable with installing dependencies, debugging Python code, and other technical weirdness.

Additionally, the models I tried are all NVIDIA specific, which means it’s not accessible to most people. So it’ll be a while before these models are ported to more common hardware and people start making GUI apps.

Conclusion§

Getting a 4090 has opened up an amazing universe of capabilities for me. The quality of open source models (or semi-open, non-commercial licensed) and tools are great!

Some still require technical knowledge to run. But I predict that most of this will come to non-technical users fairly soon.

Advances on inference performance are coming every day. And competition among hardware manufacturers will put a lot of pressure on delivering on-device inference capabilities, especially since Apple is so far ahead in this area.

But just for my use, I’ve been having a blast and getting tons of value out of AI!

ElevenLabs’ pricing at time of writing (after promotional periods) is $22 for ~2 hours ($11/hr), $99 for ~10 hours (\$10/hr), $330 for ~40 hours ($8/hr), or the dreaded Let’s Talk.

Fun Games for an Online Happy Hour

Thu, 04 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0700

Fun Games for an Online Happy Hour

2024-01-04Professional Fun

Are you tired of boring video calls? Well, no longer!

After years of online groups and happy hours, I’ve built up a big list of fun games and activities that you can do on a video call.

Now that I have my blog, I want to share this list publicly so that I can reference it in the future.

There’s a few major groups of activities:

If you liked this post, I posted again with even MORE great happy hour games!

Free Websites§

These websites allow you to play as a private group, so you are playing just with other players from your call.

Image of Gartic.io website logo

Pictionary and Telephone

Gartic.io is a great implementation of classic pictionary game. In this game, one person is the “drawer”. They draw a secret word and the other players compete to guess what the word is. The earlier you guess correctly, the more points you get.

The drawing interface is pretty good. And there are a bunch of great word categories to try.

But there’s also GarticPhone, which supports the Telephone-style of pictionary. This variant has each person draw a word. Their drawing then goes to another player, who has to guess what the drawing is!

Hilarity ensues as you try to decipher your friends drawings.

Note that this plays best with larger groups, ideally 6-10 people.

Image of Haxball website logo

Haxball Soccer

Haxball is an online soccer game, where your group splits up into two teams to try to score goals against each other.

This game works best when you have 6-10 people.

Image of Wiki Game website logo

The Wiki Game

The Wiki Game is a spin on 5 Clicks to Jesus, also known as Wikiracing. In the game, you get a pair of Wikipedia pages. Players compete to see who can navigate from the first wiki page to the second, only by clicking links on the page.

For example, everyone starts on the page “Palace of Whitehall”. Then, everyone tries to get to the page Genghis Khan, only by clicking links to other wikipedia pages.

The one annoying thing about thewikigame.com’s implementation is that you can’t use the back button if you make a mistake. But it does make up for it by tracking the path of pages you took and assigning a score.

Image of Scategories game user interface

Scategories

This online implementation of Scategories is a nicely built UI to help you run this classic party game as a private group.

Scategories is a brain-burning party game, where each person competes to think of things that match a category and start with a particular letter. For example, countries that start with the letter M: Macedonia, Montenegro, Mongolia, etc.

You get points for how many things you thought up and how unique the things you though of are!

Image of Horsepaste implementation of Codenames user interface

Codenames

Codenames is a more recent hit board game. You split up into 2 teams. Each team has a “spymaster” that gives hints to which spaces on a 5x5 grid are for your team. Then, the players compete to pick the right spaces to win.

horsepaste.com is a nice, minimalistic, but very smooth online implementation of the game that works great on video calls.

Do note that you need at least 4 people to play though.

Image of a Setacular board

Setacular

Setacular (previously known as ISASET) is an online puzzle game, where you compete to find a set of 3 cards in a grid that are either all the same or all different along 4 characteristics: color, amount, shape, and fill.

This one is calm, but tense, as you each stare at the same cards for what seems like an eternity until a set suddenly jumps out at you.

This game works better in smaller groups, like 3-5 at most.

Image of Krunker logo

Krunker

Krunker is a fast-paced, first person shooter game that you can play online. To play in a private group, everyone needs to be logged in. But you don’t need to provide an email to do so. And signup takes seconds.

Image of Wiki Trivia game user interface

Timeline

WikiTrivia is an online version of the boardgame timeline. In the game, you try to place events in chronological order, getting harder and harder as the gaps in time get shorter with more events.

The game’s novelty wears off quickly unless your group are hardcore history buffs. But it is a quick, fun game, maybe as a teaser while getting started or waiting for people to join the call.

Image of Krunker logo

Geoguessr

Geoguesser is a geography brain burner, where you get dropped somewhere randomly on the earth and have to guess where you are using only your surroundings.

Use context clues, navigate around, and find every little detail to help you narrow down where on the earth you are. Ultimately, you get points for how close your guess is to the correct location.

This one requires a login, but it is free to sign up.

Board Games§

The following board games are easy to play on a video call. Though, I’m skipping any games that have good online versions listed above.

Image of Boggle game board

Boggle

Boggle uses a 4x4 grid of letter dice. After shaking the dice to randomize the board, players have a limited time to list as many words that they can make using the letters on the board.

If you have a boggle set, the host can point their camera at it. Or you can use an online board like this one.

Otherwise, playing works normally. The host reveals the board to the group and then everyone writes down everything they can see. Once the time is up, check and score each player’s words according to the rules.

So this one is extra great, because (unlike the other most board games listed in this section) you don’t really even need a copy of the game to play.

Image of Trivial Pursuit box

Trivial Pursuit & Other Trivia Games

Trivial Pursuit is a classic board game, where you have to answer one question from 6 different categories to win. Each turn you roll a die and move along a circular board where spaces correspond to different colored question categories.

To make this work on a call, one person serves as the trivia master, asking the questions and reading the responses. Replace the board with some other mechanism of randomly picking a category. Otherwise, play works as normal.

Image of Balderdash box

Balderdash

In Balderdash, the group is presented with a seemingly nonsense word. Each player then comes up with a fake dictionary definition of the what they think the word could mean. These are then mixed in with the real definition.

Players then vote on which definition is correct. You get 2 points for guessing the correct definition and one point for each other player that thinks your definition is the right one.

Image of a pile of dice

A Role Playing Game

Enter a world of fantasy and adventure by playing an RPG together! Either play a classic like DnD or Pathfinder. To get started, look for a one-shot adventure that you can play in one session. These usually feature pre-created characters and a short, quick-to-play adventure scenario that is easy for beginners.

Alternatively, you can look for a one-page RPG. These are standalone games that focus specifically on creating a great one session game.

For example, in Honey Heist you play as a criminal bear. Every action either uses your bear stat or your criminal stat.

There’s tons of these games out there. They’re often pretty eccentric. And they usually either free or pretty cheap, like a couple dollars to download.

Image of Diplomacy board

Diplomacy

Diplomacy is a brutal game of sweet talking and backstabbing. You play as one of 7 countries in Europe during World War 1.

Each turn, you move your units one space, taking territory and battling each other. However, each unit is equal and to take a territory, you need to beat your opponent by one. So capturing territory often requires you to team up with another player.

This slow pace and need to team up leads to very tense and deceptive negotiation each turn with players. Alliances form and are broken. Backs are stabbed.

If your group is emotionally mature enough to handle this level of brutality, it is a really fun game. Look up “gunboat diplomacy” for a good ruleset that forces the game to move more quickly.

Image of Ultimate Warewolf board game

Werewolf / Mafia

Werewolf / Mafia is a party game for 8-16 people, where the town works together to try to root out the mafia among them. Meanwhile, the mafia conspire to kill the townfolk before they are discovered.

Here is a good video explaining the rules, ignore where it says 12-16 though. I’ve played with as few as 6 and had a good time.

The only thing you need to play this game on a video call is the ability to privately message people. At the beginning of the game, the moderator should make a small group chat for the mafia members. Otherwise, the game proceeds normally.

If you would like a nice box set of Werewolf, One Night Ultimate Werewolf is a good choice. It also includes a bunch of extra game modes and special characters that you can replace different roles with.

Paid Video Games§

Of course, there are tons of online multiplayer video games. If your group is already setup to play online together, then you probably don’t need this list of ideas in the first place.

But if your group isn’t full of “gamers”, there are still a few good options that are accessible to most people, regardless of gamer-iness.

Image of all Jackbox games versions

Jackbox Games

Jackbox Games is a series of party game suites that have a ton of variety and are pre-built to work online. Only one person has to purchase the game. They act as the host, and everyone else connects to the game through website on their phone.

There’s not much to say here other than this game was designed specifically for this use case: online party games. The actual game is a series of minigame challenges, where the minigames depend on which version of Jackbox you bought.

Image of Fall Guys logo.

Fall Guys

The 2020’s brough a whole host of free-to-play online multiplayer games. Among these, Fall Guys is a great casual party game. The best part is that you can join as a group, and the game will place your entire party together in the same game. Though, you each still compete seperately for the crown.

There are a lot of games like this in the first-person-shooter genre: Fortnite, Overwatch 2, Valorant, the Finals, and so on.

However, for casual play with a non-Gamer group, Fall Guys is much more approachable.

But do note, that people will need a PC or game console to play. And, it will take a while for people to get setup if they aren’t ready. So if you plan on doing this, definitely spread the word ahead of time so everyone comes ready to play.

Image of Steve from Minecraft hitting a skeleton with a sword while a dog looks on in the background.

Minecraft

Minecraft is a classic at this point. Almost everyone seems to have a copy lying around somewhere.

If someone in your group is tech-saavy, they can setup a private minecraft server for you all to join and have fun building and adventuring together.

This makes for a nice casual chat, where you can all just hang out and shoot the breeze while playing this relaxing classic game.

Classic Party Games§

These classics are good filler or backup options. Keep in mind though that you get out what you put in. Since these are less structured that the other games, it helps if you take it seriously and give some pomp and circumstance to make it more engaging.

Image of Name That Tune logo

Name That Tune

There’s no particular website or setup needed for this one. Just pull up any music service like Youtube, Apple Music, Spotify, etc. And play random popular songs.

You could make it a game by splitting up into teams and competing by who guesses first or gets the most correct.

Alternatively, play clips from popular TV shows or movies. Or you could show famous pieces of art.

Black and while illustration of sherlock holmes and watson sitting together and smoking a pipe.

21 Questions

Someone thinks of an person, place or thing. Everyone else then has 21 questions to find out what the answer is.

Image of the word charades

Charades

In Charades, you split up into pairs and pick a category, ex. Animals. Write out a bunch of things in that category and set them aside. Then, one member of each pair gets randomly assigned a secret from that category.

While a timer is running, they then have to act out that animal without saying that it is. The other person shouts out guesses until they get the right answer or the time runs out.

If they get the right answer, they get a point. First team to 10 points wins.

Relating Events to Emails & Vice-Versa [Calendar Features: Part 3]

Fri, 10 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0700

Relating Events to Emails & Vice-Versa

2023-11-10Productivity

After getting a lot busier over the last year, I live in my calendar. And a lot of events have a pile of other communication behind them, including emails, documents, and more.

You can attach documents to calendar objects. However, what about linking to emails?

Here, I outline a rough idea of what this would look like.

This is a short last post in my series brainstorming calendar features. For the other posts in the series, see here:

Part 1: Events Relative to Easter and the Lunar Calendar
Part 2: Task Management for Projects
Part 3: Relating Events to Emails & Vice Versa

The Details§

Like my last post outlining XPROJECT, this one is also really simple. The basic idea is that you could set a XRELATED property on any calendar event.

This property would link to a related email. For example:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//hacksw/handcal//NONSGML v1.0//EN
BEGIN:VEVENT
UID:uid1@example.com
DTSTAMP:19970714T170000Z
ORGANIZER;CN=John Doe:MAILTO:john.doe@example.com
XRELATED: email://whateveruser@imap.example.com/305d9bd2-8016-11ee-85ac-63780565a41b
DTSTART:19970714T170000Z
DTEND:19970715T040000Z
SUMMARY:Bastille Day Party
GEO:48.85299;2.36885
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

This would allow the calendar client to link to this email when displaying the calendar event, todo, or other calendar object.

Similarly, you could list these in email headers:

To: demo@example.com
Subject: Hello World
X-Related: calobj://whateveruser@caldav.example.com/8407c726-8016-11ee-ae53-efe084ebbd40

Hello World!

In both of these examples, you see URI-style links. So this could be extended to tons of different types of content. Really whatever clients wanted to support could be included here.

However, you’ll also notice that it’s just the user’s identity on the email or calendar server plus the object’s UID! How do you the rest of the data needed to display things?

Well, this highlights the downside of this proposal. It presupposes that your mail and calendar are integrated at some level.

A lot of email and calendar servers are in-fact integrated. So this would be a non-issue for those. However in other cases, you can push this to the client.

For example, the client could show the related objects if it is configured to connect to these services. And if not, it can show “… and N other related messages” or something.

Why?§

Ultimately, what this achieves is putting the right information in front of you, instead of leaving you to dig around in your inbox.

As it is, many email clients auto-suggest creating a calendar event from your email content if it sees something that looks like a datetime. What if it also linked these 2 objects together so you have that context?

The email or calendar client could also autosuggest links based on other email content like including the same project name or having the same participants.

There’s probably even greater integration potential in other object types!

Conclusion§

It’s interesting to explore what’s possible in these calendar extension features!

Calendars are so central to modern life. And, it’s kinda sad that there isn’t much development or new features happening.

Like my last post, this one is fairly simple to implement and would provide a small quality of life improvement. It’s possible to implement as a custom extension to the standard.

So I guess the main thrust of all my calendar speculation is that I think there is room for a calendar client that experiments with new features to improve the calendar experience.

Though old, the CalDAV / WebDAV protocol has enough there to support all kinds of innovation. It’s just sitting there, waiting for some enthusiasm and love!

Better Task Management for Projects [Calendar Features: Part 2]

Sun, 05 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0700

Better Task Management for Projects

2023-11-05Productivity

What would a minimal task tracking system look like if it was built into iCal/CALDAV?

I was thinking about this, because I’ve been tracking my time for projects recently with TimeTagger. This is a great open source project for tracking time, similar to Harvest and other commercial offerings.

But rather than having separate tools for this, and having to remember to track any meetings that are in your calendar anyways, let’s imagine what it would look like if this was built-in to the calendar standard.

And the best part is that it would be extremely simple to implement!

This is part of my 3 post wishlist for extended calendar features:

Part 1: Events Relative to Easter and the Lunar Calendar
Part 2: Task Management for Projects
Part 3: Relating Events to Emails & Vice Versa

The Implementation§

This feature is so simple to implement, I’m surprised that it doesn’t already exist.

For each meeting, all we’d need to add is a special key that tracks which project the calendar object ¹ belongs to. The value of this key is a project “tag”, which is a hierarchical value representing project and possibly subproject.

For example, below is an event that is tagged with the DemoProj project and HelloWorld task. Specifically, look for the XPROJECT property:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//hacksw/handcal//NONSGML v1.0//EN
BEGIN:VEVENT
UID:uid1@example.com
DTSTAMP:19970714T170000Z
ORGANIZER;CN=John Doe:MAILTO:john.doe@example.com
XPROJECT:DemoProj::HelloWorld
DTSTART:19970714T170000Z
DTEND:19970715T040000Z
SUMMARY:Bastille Day Party
GEO:48.85299;2.36885
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

With this setup, each event is optionally assigned to a task.

These tasks can then be hierarchically nested, where a :: separates each parent task.

For example, the header indicates that the event is a DoSomething task within the larger DemoProj project.

XPROJECT:DemoProj::DoSomething

It would even be possible to support tagging the event with multiple projects, which would split the time between them. Though this is generally discouraged in existing task tracking tools. For example:

XPROJECT:DemoProj::DoSomething
XPROJECT:DemoProj::AnotherTask

Reporting§

All this tracking is useless without being able to report on the data. The common questions these tools answer are:

How many hours did you work this week for each client/project?
What tasks took up most of your time?
What percentage of your hours were overhead?

Using the XPROJECT data, these questions are answerable via the standard Calendar querying API where you filter the query to only calendar objects that have the XPROJECT property set.

This API also supports filtering objects further based on the content, which means you can query calendar objects for certain project tags.

That being said, it is inefficient to iterate all calendar objects within the reporting period each time you want to generate a report. What we really need is an aggregate API.

However, this doesn’t exist from what I can tell in CalDAV. And extending the standard and waiting for adoption in mainstream servers is a huge uphill battle.

So, it would be better to implement a sidecar client, which would satisfy this aggregate reporting role. The service would …

Watch your calendar data for any changes to events
Track aggregates as the calendar data changes
Expose an aggregate reporting API

This way, you’d be able to continue using any standards-compliant CalDAV server.

The sidecar service would also be able to track any metadata relating to projects. For example:

Project Name
Time Estimate, Budget
Hourly Rate (if different from your normal billing rate)
… and anything else you can think of

And, this service could also help implement any other nice to have features like:

Bulk migrating events from one project/task to another
Highlighting calendar events that aren’t tagged to any project/task
Generating invoices

Now, you might be thinking that this is a pretty big cop-out. Basically I’m suggesting packing all the interesting features into this sidecar service. And you’re right!

But that highlights the fundamental suggestion. Time tracking is possible as an extension of your calendar, not a replacement for it or a 2nd tool that you have to track things in.

Store the underlying data in CalDAV and build features on top of that.

But, Why?§

TimeTagger and Harvest work fine. So, why do this? Ownership and Cooperation

First, you own the data. Yes, you might be using and paying for a hosted calendar service. But if your account is suddenly canceled. You can migrate to another provider or host your own server.

You can backup your calendar using the open CalDAV protocol and walk away whenever you want.

Second, you can connect to the CalDAV content from multiple services. For example, how awesome would it be if appointments booked through Calendly or Cal.com automatically tracked time to your client? What other synergies can be had if services were based on open standards instead of proprietary silos?

This type of cooperation across services is possible to some extent with Zapier, IFTTT, N8N, and other integration/automation tools. But why do we need an 3rd tool just to connect things, when they’d be directly interoperable if they used open standards.

Conclusion§

The interesting thing about this proposal is that it can be implemented almost completely as an extension to existing, mainstream CalDAV servers. The full implementation would include:

A XPROJECT-aware CalDAV client
A sidecar service for aggregate reporting

And in combining these things, you’d get similar functionality to Harvest or TimeTagger, but it’d be integrated into your existing calendar.

And this has amazing side effects. For example, you’d be able to integrate this with appointment booking systems like Calendly or Cal.com.

This standards compliant co-existance is an under-appreciated feature in today’s SAAS-ified landscape.

But, we can dream. And through open source, we can fill the future with software that works for us, instead of siloing everything off.

In this post, I focus on calendar events, because I’m talking about time tracking. However, similar benefits exist for calendar TODO/Task objects. Organizing and reporting on tasks by project is ideal and it’s not clear why that isn’t supported already.

Easter and Lunar Calendars [Calendar Features: Part 1]

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0700

Easter and Lunar Calendars

2023-03-18Productivity

Like many professionals, I make heavy use of online calendars. And CalDAV is surprisingly featureful, well beyond what most calendar apps actually implement.

But, there are some advanced features that I wish the CalDAV protocol and it’s clients implemented:

Part 1: Events Relative to Easter and the Lunar Calendar
Part 2: Task Management for Projects
Part 3: Relating Events to Emails & Vice Versa

The first feature idea is below. And I’ll post the next two in the next few days.

The Details§

In the Christian tradition, many feast days are relative to the date of Easter. For example, Pentecost is 50 days after the date of Easter.

Right now, this requires manually setting up the dates of these feasts each year. Or (more likely) subscribing to a calendar feed that has done this work.

This is a manual process, because of the fact that the date of Easter is based on the lunar calendar.

From the Hebrew calendar, Passover is the 15th day of the first month of the ecclesiastical year: Nisan. For simplicity, this is the first full moon on or after the 21st of March.

The date of Easter is the first Sunday after this. So the calculation is not so trivial because of the pair of requirements: the full moon after the equinox.

To make this work in calendars, I see 3 options:

Supporting recurrence rules based on multiple criteria: the lunar calendar & equinoxes
Hardcoding the Easter calculation as a recurrence rule option
Supporting events with dates relative to other events

Turning recurrence rules into complex logic will kill performance and depending on the details, it would require a SAT solver to fully implement correctly.

That would be awesome for other complex scenarios. And the date calculations could be heavily cached on the server to improve performance. But, this is extremely unlikely to get implemented. ¹

Hardcoding the calculation for Easter is complicated because there is significant disagreement that are still not resolved. Though, there have been recent attempts to resolve the dispute. ²

The last option I can think of is to punt a bit and just support basing events off of other events. This would still require manually calculating the date of Easter, but then you could base all the other dates off of it.

This feature would be useful for other things too! And that’s the mark of a great feature.

Conclusion§

Of all the solutions I thought of, I’m most interested in the ability to base events off of the dates of other events. This kind of semantic relationship is what I’m looking for in my calendar.

And, the solution would also apply to general cases like follow-up meetings.

Granted, it’s a pipe-dream in general to think about new features on such an old protocol with ossified implementation and little spec movement. But a man can dream!
Pope on shared Easter date with Orthodox: Pick a date and we’ll accept

Naïveté in Early Character Encoding [ASCII: Part 3]

Mon, 23 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0700

Naïveté in Early Character Encoding

2023-01-23Technology

Previously, I’ve written on interesting English words like éxpose, adiós, and naïveté, and then the solution to typing these.

And now it’s time for some history! Why does this problem even exist?

ASCII History & How Character Encodings Work§

Computers need a way of mapping binary numbers to character symbols so that they can draw them on screen. For example, they see the number 33 (ie. 00100001 in binary) and need to show the exclamation point character!

However due to early computers’ limited processing power, programmers wanted to use the smallest space possible. That meant they could only support drawing 128 different characters.

That lead to the ASCII standard shown below:

This table obviously cannot represent the fullness of all human languages. So there have been many different character encodings proposed since then.

The most prominent now is utf8 via the Unicode standard.

Unfortunately, some programmers don’t appreciate how many interesting words english has borrowed from other languages. So, they don’t test a variety of text, making their systems break or show Mojibake.

So next time you are testing a system, try to find resources to improve your tests, such as the Big List of Naughty Strings or fuzz testing tools.

Conclusion§

Thanks for entertaining my dive into the English language and how character encodings let us express it fully. If you liked this series, let me know!

Adiós to Simplified Loanwords [ASCII: Part 2]

Wed, 18 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0700

Adiós to Simplified Loanwords

2023-01-18Technology

Last time, I posted a list of some interesting English loanwords, containing accented characters. Now, I’ll share the solution to typing these words in their full glory.

Of course, you could change your keyboard to an alternate layout to get some more words that you commonly type.

Personally, I’ve found the Polish keyboard can cover most things I would type across English, German, and Polish.

But to fully address this problem, every operating system has a way to type the full range of extended characters.

Here’s the instructions for Linux, Mac / OSX, and Windows.

Linux§

There are 2 options on Linux. To enter any character, you can hold ctrl and shift, then press u and type the hex code for any unicode character.

There is a full list of hex codes on Wikipedia.

Unfortunately, in my experience some terminal applications don’t support this method.

Alternatively, you can use X.org’s “compose” system. To do this, you need to know what your compose key is via your Desktop Environment’s settings menu or set it with setxkbmap -option 'compose:somekey', ex. compose:caps.

Then, you can press your compose key and then a combination of characters. To view or modify the list of possible compose characters, see /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose.

Mac§

On Mac, one option is to enable the Unicode Hex Input keyboard language.

To do this, first navigate to System Prefereces > Language & Region > Keyboard Preferences.

There, click the plus icon and search for Unicode Hex Input. Also on the Keyboard Preferences page, make sure Show Input menu in menu bar is checked.

Finally, you can change to the Unicode keyboard from the toolbar and use option plus a hex code to enter a unicode character.

For example, enter option then 1e9e. This will type ẞ, ie. Eszett.

Alternatively, from the keyboard toolbar menu, you can click Show Emoji & Symbols. Then from the popup, click the icon in the top right corner to show the advanced UI to select from a wider range of symbols.

Screenshot of Mac advanced Emoji & Symbol viewer

Windows§

Windows has the easiest way of entering a wider set of characters. You simply press alt and then the code for your character. This isn’t the unicode hex code, but rather a custom code unique to Windows.

For example, to type ß you simply press alt plus 0223.

There is also a Character Map application that you can use to search for characters and learn their alt codes. Search for this in the Start menu to explore the symbols you use.

Screenshot of Windows Character Map app

For more details and a list of common characters, see this help page from Microsoft.

Conclusion§

Certainly, this is easier on some operating systems than others. And it does crimp your flow a bit. But it’s nice to have the full range of characters available to you.

Next up, I’ll provide some background on why this problem exists.

An Exposé on English Loanwords [ASCII: Part 1]

Sat, 14 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0700

An Exposé on English Loanwords

2023-01-14Technology

Have you ever seen English words spelled with simplified letters, for example naivete instead of naïveté?

This bums me out a bit. Because I think these loanwords are one of the best things about English. It makes language so flexible and rich.

Usually, people type the simplified form of a word because doesn’t know how to type special characters. But, sometimes it’s because of a decision made for early computers.

So, I wanted to post a sampling of loanwords with uncommon letters or accents. See below.

In a later post, I’ll follow up with some notes on how to type these characters on your keyboard. And I’ll finish up with a bit of background on why this problem exists.

Some Interesting Words§

English borrows most heavily from Germanic and Romance languages using characters/accents/graphemes like these:

Cedilla: the ç in Curaçao
Circumflex: the û in crème brûlée
Acute Accent: the é in cliché
Grave Accent: the è in pièce de résistance
Trema / Umlaut: the ïin naïve or the ü in über
Tilde: the ñ in piña colada

But, there are also a long tail of interesting words from other languages from Slavic, Turkic, Arabic, and other language families!

French§

apéritif
attaché
cliché
coup d’état
crème brûlée
déjà vu
exposé
éclair
façade
passé
pièce de résistance
naïve
naïveté
resumé / résumé
touché
sauté

Spanish§

El Niño
piñata
piña colada
adiós
créole

German§

über
gemütlich

Other Languages§

Dutch
- blasé
Portugese
- Ção: a greeting
- Açaí: the antioxidant-packed berry
Basque
- Curaçao: the Carribean island and the blue drink
Greek
- æther
Turkic
- café / قهوة
- élixer / الإكسير
Japanese
- daimyō
- Pokémon

Conclusion§

This is just a limited list of examples. But I love that the English language is such a mutt. It makes the language rich. And it emphasizes that America is a nation of immigrants.

I use this list as a reference sometime. And, I hope it sparks some curiosity in you as well.

Next up, I’ll post some practical guides on how to type these characters (and more) on your operating system. See part 2: Adiós to Simplified Loanwords

How I Brew Coffee

Tue, 22 Nov 2022 20:00:00 +0700

How I Brew Coffee

2022-11-22Food & Cooking

Audio from Kokoro TTS (Apache 2.0)

Like many programmers, I like coffee…a lot. So, I thought I’d share a quick note on my process for brewing coffee.

TL;DR: it’s Tetsu Kasuya 4:6 pour over method. This video from the barista himself is a great demonstration.

The most remarkable thing about this method is how extremely consistent it is at getting really good, smooth coffee.

This opened up a huge world of coffee flavors to me, because once I could consistently brew good tasting coffee, I could then start to feel the difference between different roasts.

So, let’s me explain what the 4:6 method is all about.

The Method§

In the 4:6 method you typically use 5 pours, where the first 40% (ie. 2 pours) control the sweetness and the other 60% (ie. 3 pours) control the strength.

To start, you’ll need a few things: a pour over, burr grinder, a mug or carafe, scale, and timer.

This method uses 1g of ground coffee for each 15g of water. So take the amount of coffee you’d like to end up with. Then, divide that by 15 to get the amount of ground coffee beans to use.

Use a medium grind setting on your burr grinder to grind your coffee. A good grinder is important as explained below.

Bring the water up to temperature, around 195-205F. Now you’re going to do your first pour. In this method, you divide the total coffee by 5 to get the amount for each pour.

When pouring, pour quickly but smoothly moving in a circular motion to wet all the beans. Then, wait 45 seconds between pours.

Repeat these steps of pouring and waiting until you’ve done all 5 pours.

Flavor Profiles§

Here is the typical profile with equal amounts for all 5 pours:

Diagram of the 4:6 Method showing 40% sweetness phase and 60% strength phase in 5 equal pours

This makes a consistently good cup of coffee. But we can adjust it by changing the ratio or number of pours.

The 40% phase controls the sweetness and the 60% phase controls the strength.

In the 40% phase, you can make the coffee sweeter by shortening the first pour relative the second. Lengthening it makes it more acidic.

Diagram of the 4:6 Method showing a sweeter 40% phase by shortening the first pour

Diagram of the 4:6 Method showing a more acidic 40% phase by lengthening the first pour

Coffee beans need to off-gas a bit before extracting well. This is the puff you see when you first pour the water onto the coffee.

So, a smaller first pour “warms up” the beans, leading to more extraction in the longer second step.

Similarly, in the 60% phase shorter pours lead to a stronger flavor. By default you would do 3 pours. 4 pours leads to extra strong coffee, whereas 2 pours lead to a more subtle flavor.

Diagram of the 4:6 Method showing a stronger 60% phase by using 4 pours

Diagram of the 4:6 Method showing a more subtle 60% phase by using 2 pours

Shorter pours are stronger because they agitate the coffee more, leading the water to linger longer, brewing more.

But beware: changes to the 60% / strength phase will have a much larger impact on the resulting coffee.

Lots of Coffee§

One of the benefits of this method is that you can brew up to 4 cups of coffee if you have a large enough pour over.

Typically, I brew with 40g coffee, 600g of water, and 120g per pour (when using the normal/equal distribution). That’s a bit over 2.5 cups of coffee.

But I made a cheatsheet that hangs on my fridge. This way I know whenever I have guests over and want to make a particular number of cups:

Cups	Coffee	Total Water	Pour Size
1	15g	255g	45g
~1.5	24g	360g	72g
2	30g	450g	90g
~2.5	40g	600g	120g
3	45g	675g	135g
4	63g	945g	189g

The half cups (ie. 1.5, 2.5) are a bit generous, because real half cups make for unwieldy sizes in grams since there is 236.588g per cup.

Grind Size & Ratio to Water§

One area that I haven’t researched much yet with this method is grind size and the ratio of grinds to water.

Here, I’ve just stuck with the basic advice of using medium grind size and 1:15 ratio of coffee to water.

I’ve heard that you should use both more coffee and coarser grind sizes when brewing with larger amounts of coffee.

That jives with what I’ve experienced. Later pours in this method take longer. My understanding is that this is because finer grains of coffee start to clog the filter.

So for large batches that take a while to brew, grind size is important. And to compensate for larger grinds, you need more of them to keep the extraction at the right level.

Thus, you need a good burr grinder. Consistency in grind size is important for the later pours to prevent over-extraction.

This post from Coffee Ad Astra has a deep dive into grind size and consistency. He even made an app using computer vision to check grind sizes for yourself!

Conclusion§

The 4:6 method is decently complicated. I’ve made some personal cheatsheets and scripts to help automate the timing and figure out the distributions.

But it works so well that it’s worth it. It’s a very forgiving way to make consistently good coffee.

That said, there are still some areas that I’d like to learn more about, specifically grind size and ratio to water.

I have a Hario Skerton Plus for camping and a Baratza Encore in the kitchen at home.

These are both solid burr grinders. So, nailing the grind size is an are that I could explore more.

But until then, I’ll leave you with a final recommendation to give this method a try. It takes a bit of time to get used to. But the cheatsheets help.

And, it works excellently. So try making your next coffee this way and I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

All Things Protein

Sat, 12 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0700

All Things Protein

2022-11-12Food & Cooking

Audio from Kokoro TTS (Apache 2.0)

For the last 6 months, I’ve been interested in hearing the animal side of the plant vs. animal foods debate. Usually, this debate revolves around fat.

But about a month ago, Peter Attia’s The Drive podcast had a great episode on protein! Dietary protein: amount needed, ideal timing, quality, and more with Don Layman, PhD.

And, as usual it didn’t disappoint! Since switching to only eating plant foods in 2020, I haven’t though much about protein. I eat a lot of beans/legumes, tofu, and other higher protein plant foods.

But, this discussion has me wanting to look back at the plant-side of the story.

Protein Quality and Recommended Amounts§

Dr. Layman discussed a lot about protein quality, which he argues is the reason why animal fats are necessary for adequate protein intake.

Specifically, he recommends 1.6g / kg body mass.

He does concede that higher consumption of plant protein (ex. 150g+ per day) can overwhelm any deficiency in a particular amino acid.

But he says that this level of protein is very difficult for vegans to get.

But, I wanted to see for myself. And, I found the protein content of an assortment of common higher protein plant foods.

Food	Protein / 100 Cal
Pea Protein Powder	22.12g
Seitan	19.63g
TVP	15.38g
Spinach	12.93g
Tofu	11.97g
Tempeh	10.18g
Lentils	7.83g
Soy Milk	7.00g
Black Beans	6.61g
Chickpeas	5.58g
Spelt	4.47g
Peanuts	4.07g
Quinoa	3.69g
Almonds	3.51g
Oats	3.46g
Corn	3.39g
Cashews	3.00g

The amounts above are protein in a 100 calorie serving. And the data is from nutritionix.com.

With this target of 1.6g / kg of body mass, he is right that this is challenging to get without animal foods. But, it’s definitely not impossible.

In a 150lb / 68.03kg person, this works out to 108.84g of protein. To get this amount from a diet consisting of an average of 30% protein, you need to eat foods with an average of 7.5g of protein per 100 calories (ie. (2500cal / 100cal) * 0.30 [percent protein]).

If you’re eating a diet of whole foods, this is tough. You’d have to eat a huge meal of spinach for one meal and lentils for another.

To get above that mark, you really need to include some processed plant foods like tofu, seitan, or tempeh. Starting the day off with a protein shake is another easy way to sneak some extra nuts and pea protein powder in there.

However, I’ve read elsewhere that lower amounts are acceptable if you are not an athlete. Dr. Layman directly addresses this, saying the guidelines are built to address parts of the world where protein deficiency is a concern.

So, I think I’ll need to read some more from the vegan/plant-based perspective on either: how to get 1.6g protein per kg body mass or why this recommendation is too high.

Finally, Dr. Layman mentioned one other interesting thing. Feeding older people higher protein diets can overcome their declining efficiency and promote a more anabolic state.

Protein Timing§

There were a couple of interesting random facts about when to eat protein:

First, eating a enough protein (ie. 30g+) at breakfast is critical to get enough leucine to break your body out of a catobolic state.

Second, the age-old trainer-wisdom about protein is true: your muscles can only use around 30g of protein per meal.

Dr. Layman adds the caveat that it’s really a range of 20-60g based on the person. And, the liver does not have this limit, so the 30g advice is only applicable to muscle mass.

Third according to Dr. Layman, it isn’t hugely important whether you eat your meal before or after exercise.

And finally, Dr. Attia briefly mentioned that among people practicing intermittent fasting, lean body mass inevitably goes down along with total body mass.

That’s particularly interesting given the claims about fasting and metabolic health.

Fat, Cholesterol, and Heart Disease§

On fat/cholesterol/heart disease, Dr. Layman mentions a study of institutionalized individuals given saturated vs polyunsaturated fats.

There was no difference in coronary events over the 5 year study period. However, there was a big difference in their total cholesterol (only total was measured, not LDL/HDL/ApoB).

This is interesting in comparison to the other studies showing a big difference in heart disease between people consuming more saturated fat versus monounsaturated fat.

Similarly, Dr. Attia had Bill Harris PhD on episode #83 to discuss Omega-3’s. And they discussed diets very high in polyunsaturated fat, which showed no correlation with heart disease in Dr. Harris’ research.

So, I’m not sure really what to make of this data point on saturated fat vs polyunsaturated fat.

Generally, Dr. Layman’s study advances the keto/carnivore claim that total cholesterol (and possibly even LDL cholesterol) basically don’t matter for heart disease.

But, that’s hard to square with other research showing animal fat (and to a lesser extent saturated fat from plants) are highly associated with heart disease.

Conclusions§

Of the research I’ve read focusing on animal foods, it was refreshing to hear about something other than the debate over fat, cholesterol, and heart disease.

On protein levels and quality, I’m going to have to re-read what plant-based advocates have to say. But in the meantime, this is an interesting reminder to think about protein a bit more.

Hello World!

Sat, 12 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0700

Hello World!

2022-11-12Casual

I’ve decided to start a blog on random topics that I’m interested in. And here it is!

Right now, I’m interested in …

Cooking
Nutrition & Health
Catholic Theology
Board Games

In particular, I listen to a lot of audiobooks and podcasts. And I feel like I get more out of it when I take notes and reflect on what I learned from each episode.

So, that’s what I’m going to post here! Podcast & book reviews. Notes & pictures from cooking new recipes. And, other random thoughts.

Let me know on my contact form if you enjoyed a post!

Nick Iaquinto's Blog

Adding Wi-Fi Printing for “Dumb” Printers

Adding Wi-Fi Printing for “Dumb” Printers

What You Need§

Step 1: Flash Ubuntu Server§

Step 2: Set Up SSH§

Step 3: Enable Auto-Login§

Step 4: Install CUPS and Configure the Printer§

Step 5: Add the Printer in CUPS§

Step 6: Enable Network Discovery with Avahi§

Step 7: Connect and Print§

Conclusion§

Just Get Two or How I Learned Programming on a Throwaway Computer

Just Get Two or How I Learned Programming on a Throwaway Computer

Origins§

Learning Linux§

Implications§

How I Used Self-Hosted AI in 2025

How I Used Self-Hosted AI in 2025

Image Generation§

Text-to-Speech§

Programming§

Text Generation & Chat§

Other§

Conclusion§

Work Hacks: Keep a Log

Work Hacks: Keep a Log

How It Works§

How It’s Helped§

Conclusion§

Backup Your Mail, Contacts & Calendar

Backup Your Mail, Contacts & Calendar

Why Backup?§

The Setup§

Sync’ing Your Mail§

Sync’ing Your Contacts & Calendar§

Next Steps§

Conclusion§

Fun with Token Probabilities

Fun with Token Probabilities

What’s in an Egg?

What’s in an Egg?

Binding§

Lift§

Fattiness§

Color§

Browning§

Other§

Conclusion§

What Makes Good Blog Software?

What Makes Good Blog Software?

The Content Itself§

Multi-Media: Video, Audio, Captions, Socials, and Embeds§

Tables & Diagrams§

Code & Math§

Read Time & Progress Bar§

Organization Within a Post§

Clickable Headings§

Table of Contents§

Footnotes & Definitions§

Complex Layouts§

Organization & Discover of Posts Overall§

Index Pages§

Featured/Popular Articles§

Similar Articles§

Full Text Search§

Social Features§

RSS/Atom Feed§

Newsletter§

Comments§

Crossposting / POSSE§

Linkbacks & WebMention§

Web Rings§

Other Miscellaneous Features§

How to Cite§

Good Print Styling§

Anti-Features§

Popups, Banners, & Interstitials§

Breaking Browser Behavior§

Conclusion§