Quips

Washington on his way to destroy some Hessians (colorized).

TIL about HTML datalist component. Searchable dropdowns!

developer.mozilla.org

I feel like half the battle of learning math is figuring out the right MathJax to make pretty pictures.

My website has gone to the dark side.

I have successfully set the schedule on my thermostat, and that is a technical achievement I wanted to announce to the world.

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.

niaquinto.com

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)

support.microsoft.com

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.

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

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

Mostly, I was tired of rebooting everything every snowstorm.

Gopher Lua is also cool.

github.com/yuin/gopher-lua

Embedding a JS interpreter in a Go binary is amazing for lightweight extensions on a core Go program.

Way simpler than RPC-based plugins or Go's native plugins w/ fiddly compiler settings and inability to update or unload plugins.

github.com/dop251/goja

Hello World!