Quips
This is a section for short thoughts, links, pictures and silliness. Mostly I focus on technical topics here.
I have successfully set the schedule on my thermostat, and that is a technical achievement I wanted to announce to the world.
2025-05-30 21:58 EST
What would happen if you suddenly lost your email, contacts, and calendar?
I just wrote a short article about how I backup these using open source software: mbsync and pimsync.
2025-05-26 20:47 EST
Excel supports LAMBDA now! Google Sheets has has this for a while, and I missed that this was released in Excel 2024.
LAMBDA lets you make reusable functions with named parameters. It makes formulas 1000% more readable.
Ex. =LAMBDA(x, y, x + y)($A1, $B1)
2025-03-13 20:50 EST

PSA: If you use Ollama, remember to set the context size (/set parameter num_ctx XYZ). The default is 2048 and silently truncates any excess.
On OpenWebUI you can do this on the model settings page.
2025-03-08 13:50 EST
Does anyone else remember the scene from Westworld where Maeve's dialog tree leaves her speechless?
LLM token probabilities are fun to explore, too. niaquinto.com
2025-02-22 19:50 EST
Editing by reading aloud to yourself works even better with TTS. I've caught so many supertypos and weird phrasing this way using Kokoro TTS to read what I wrote back to me.
There's even a no-install-needed browser version: see huggingface.co / github.com/xenova/kokoro-web
2025-02-21 13:01 EST