Do you feel comfortable telling what kind of protest are you atending to? I want to know, because it is rare to protest on the country I live in, though we have more than enough reason to do so.
Yeah its no problem you can ask anything, its an Anti-Nazi protest, although i had to cancel as i just got a job trial to do tomorrow, so i am sad i cant go, but all my friends are going so that’s good.
I try to go to the relevant protests for my political and moral view when i can, its worth doing as the world is getting more messed up everyday and there seems to be a lot of benign indifference to what happens in the world if it doesn’t directly effect someone.
I am sorry to hear that protesting is rare in your country, have you looked at the possibility of protesting online?
There are a lot of ways you can do it anonymously, but make sure you research it properly especially if your in a country that has restricted freedom of speech and horrible consequences for speaking out.
I agree that we should not fall in the trap of benign indifference. Personally, I think we (as individuals) have the obligation to speak against unjustice, sadly most of the individuals in the society are not interested in trying to find a solution to our problems.
I live (and have lived) in a poor country, from Central America, where freedom of speech is non-existant and people consider you a threat in case you want to speak about our problems. Writing things on the internet is certainly on my list of things I’d like to do regularly, but have to change VPS provider to one that is more aligned with my views in technology.
One can protest against Nazi parties before they are part of a government. In fact, given past history, it’s the only time one can protest against them.
I’m going to start reading William Gibson’s “Neuromancer” novel. If I can find the time, I also want to begin reading Katsuhiro Otomo’s “Akira” manga series, published back in 1988.
The Difference Engine (1990), an alternative history novel Gibson wrote with Bruce Sterling
Personally, when I do a re-read, I stop there. If you’re still really keen, go on to:
Bridge trilogy
Virtual Light (1993)
Idoru (1996)
All Tomorrow’s Parties (1999)
Just beware that they totally lack the lyrical writing that people find so gripping in the Sprawl trilogy. All of his works after 2000 take place in the very-near-future or the present and have straightforward stories and themes. I don’t find them compelling whatsoever and they generally get mixed reviews (in contrast with the universal acclaim of his earlier work).
That makes depressing sense - cyberpunk dystopia is no longer fiction, nor is it in the future. Though I haven’t read his work so that’s easy for me to say.
Thank you for the recommendations, it’s good to know where to start!
Heh. Horses for courses I suppose! It’s been a while since I read them now but I remember liking the bridge trilogy (though not as much as the sprawl ones) but I hated Difference Engine and found it a dreary slog that I struggled to get through.
I’m going on a weekend holiday to Tbilisi, Georgia! Also I’m continuing hacking on NewBusinessMonitor. Sending letters through the service works now, but I haven’t opened it to everyone else yet. I’ll do that this weekend.
I’m super happy with it. I’m able to just click on companies to send personalised sales letters to them in the post. I’ve sent 103 sales letters in the past two days!
I joined an amateur astronomy club to get back into backyard astronomy (despite living in an apartment in a city) and I’m going to their AGM. I loved it when I was a kid and I want to get back into it.
Also going to try and setup the Hercules 390 emulator and get some version of MVS working so I can continue with what will be the penultimate entry in my debugging series. (It’s taking me a long time.)
Out of curiosity, what kind of background do your colleagues have?
I have one coworker that’s been using more python, but they have a more sysadmin background, and all the other developers are C#,Java.
I am like your co-worker. I am a sysadmin / platform / cloud person. My colleagues are programmers and data scientists. They are better programmers than I am. My goal is to show them just enough python 3 so that they can move along on their own. So I am going to show them list comprehensions for example, how to open files with the “with” statement, csvfiles also, a bit of matplotlib, pip and python -m venv, but not numpy or Pandas. We estimate something like 8 hours split over the next two Mondays.
My take away is that since I am forced to present something in an audience with expertise (OK not in Python, but surely in code) I too am forced to become better.
Fighting my losing fight against entropy; e.g. cleaning my apartment.
I’m also going to try playing Shroud of the Avatar with my dad. It runs terribly on my machine, and I’m not a huge fan of online games, but my dad loves & I’m mainly playing it to spend time with him.
Also working on my congressional outreach tool that seems to just be dragging on & on & on.
Stressing out about the climate breakdown and the latest IPCC report. Considering how to get involved in the development of carbon capture technologies. There’s no such work locally as far as I know.
Further development on my app called “My Leaf” for Android and iOS. It’s a third party alternative to the official NissanConnect EV app. Basically an app to for the Nissan Leaf. It’s free and open source of course ;)
Written using Flutter.
Besides that I will be outdoor in the woods. Also playing through Valkyria Chronicles 4 on Switch late at night.
Various improvements to BAN.AI — bringing up Lisp LOGO, diagnosing an FNP channel wedge, cleaning up a few weak points in the mail gateway … and a lot of other little tasks!
Hopefully someone can recommend the right tool for the job for me here for one of the many items on the BAN.AI TODO list.
BAN.AI has a search engine which searches our large collection of Multics reports and documents.
I have a few thousand PDF files totaling ~12GB, many of which do not have any OCR’d text layer, and thus not fully indexed.
I’m looking for the easiest solution to pragmatically OCR these documents and merge the resulting text layer back into the PDF files, which would lead to an immediate improvement in search results.
Thanks again, the suggestion helped me very much, and sent me in the right direction. I ended up modyifing a script that uses similar workflow, and using pdftk to put the text back into the original PDF.
I wish more people in the IT industry, including most tech enthusiasts, would spend more time with real people - friends and family - than with machines.
Maybe they do but just don’t mention it? Probably not; I feel like if they did, various community issues could be avoided.
I wish more people in the IT industry, including most tech enthusiasts, would spend more time with real people - friends and family - than with machines.
That’s how it goes when you don’t have friends and family doesn’t live in town.
I just bought a cheap Raspberry Pi Zero and I’ll try to use it as an audio bluetooth receiver, recycling an external USB sound card I don’t use anymore. I think I’ll use Alpine Linux, it seems commonly used on embedded hardware and I had a great experience with Alpine inside Docker containers.
I’m also doing this because most bluetooth receivers can’t be renamed (they’re all named “SomeBrand Bluetooth Adapter Thingy” while anyone would prefer seeing the name of the room they’re placed in) and I’m somewhat concerned with non-upgradeable IOT devices.
I’ve also an unbelievable amount of things to debug and improve on GitHub.
If you get something up and running, I would love to see a writeup posted here. I’ve got a Pi Zero W with a DAC hat that I’ve been meaning to do this with for almost a year now.
I have a Pi-0W running volumio with Airplay, DNLA, & spotify connect. To the best of my knowledge being able to use it as a bluetooth receiver is still a work in progress, but there are several people documenting how they got it working on their system.
I’m planning to go see the movie The Sisters Brothers with my brother. It was great book, so I’m (naively?) hopeful it will be a great movie.
I started building an OpenBCI EEG interface and I want to test the leads and see the data coming back. if that all works, I’m going to assemble the 3D printed parts and try to record an EEG while I’m meditating. Should be fun!
I’m going to look a bit at my little Java functional utils project. Basically I’m doing a Try, Either, Tuple (0 to 8 items), and possibly yet another Optional - is there something obvious I’ve missed that you guys could see as a nice addition?
And then I’m going to the big city to attend a concert with Shania Twain on Sunday.
I’m going back to home to the land of red earth and dialectics to celebrate the life of my late uncle. He was well known as the author of a long-running humorous column in our state newspaper.
I totally flunked my electronics test I had to take yesterday, so I’ll just be relaxing a bit, working on some projects I had to set aside for a while, playing around with some graphics and taking the time to read a bit until the next semester starts… on Monday.
A little bit of cracking/reverse engineering on a hardware device. Experiment some more with an ATECC508 chip I wired up on a protoboard last weekend. Finish off some library books that are woefully overdue. Go running, and perhaps play a bit of soccer if I can drag myself out of bed early enough. Review a few software side projects that have been languishing without much attention and either retire/archive them or plan some next steps. Stop by the office for a bit to effect a cubicle move outside of work hours.
Work, work, work. SO and her family are on a backpacking/climbing trip, and I’m stuck here working. Probably going to try to get some extra long runs in when I have some free time. I have a half marathon coming up that I’m not very well prepared for.
I might get a pretty good chunk of reading in too, pending my release from Overtime Hell.
Hunkering down indoors due to a storm. No real problems here though; power is still on, and my flat seems to be coping with ~50 mph winds fine. Hopefully will get to reading something on my to-read list.
Spend time with family, visit in-laws for lunch, maybe do a little DIY (painting/decorating), practice my guitar and generally stay away from my computer. Though 6-year-old son will probably beg me to join him in Minecraft, and I’m sure to cave in for a bit ;-)
I wasn’t happy with the current state of calendars that require a mouse, I also love timeblocking so I wanted to make a calendar that felt like a text editor and was easy to timeblock with.
Finish writing some code, go to a protest.
Do you feel comfortable telling what kind of protest are you atending to? I want to know, because it is rare to protest on the country I live in, though we have more than enough reason to do so.
Yeah its no problem you can ask anything, its an Anti-Nazi protest, although i had to cancel as i just got a job trial to do tomorrow, so i am sad i cant go, but all my friends are going so that’s good.
I try to go to the relevant protests for my political and moral view when i can, its worth doing as the world is getting more messed up everyday and there seems to be a lot of benign indifference to what happens in the world if it doesn’t directly effect someone.
I am sorry to hear that protesting is rare in your country, have you looked at the possibility of protesting online?
There are a lot of ways you can do it anonymously, but make sure you research it properly especially if your in a country that has restricted freedom of speech and horrible consequences for speaking out.
I agree that we should not fall in the trap of benign indifference. Personally, I think we (as individuals) have the obligation to speak against unjustice, sadly most of the individuals in the society are not interested in trying to find a solution to our problems.
I live (and have lived) in a poor country, from Central America, where freedom of speech is non-existant and people consider you a threat in case you want to speak about our problems. Writing things on the internet is certainly on my list of things I’d like to do regularly, but have to change VPS provider to one that is more aligned with my views in technology.
Which government in the world currently is ideological nazi?
AFD in Germany, and multiple other groups, but its not Germany’s current controlling party thankfully, we all know how that went last time.
#unteilbar?
Yes thats the one.
One can protest against Nazi parties before they are part of a government. In fact, given past history, it’s the only time one can protest against them.
I’m going to start reading William Gibson’s “Neuromancer” novel. If I can find the time, I also want to begin reading Katsuhiro Otomo’s “Akira” manga series, published back in 1988.
If you make it through Neuromancer, you might want to check out his anthology Burning Chrome. Probably my favorite works of his.
That’s certainly the plan, going through all of Gibson’s work. Thanks for the recommendation.
Oh no, don’t read all his work. The gems are:
Personally, when I do a re-read, I stop there. If you’re still really keen, go on to:
Just beware that they totally lack the lyrical writing that people find so gripping in the Sprawl trilogy. All of his works after 2000 take place in the very-near-future or the present and have straightforward stories and themes. I don’t find them compelling whatsoever and they generally get mixed reviews (in contrast with the universal acclaim of his earlier work).
That makes depressing sense - cyberpunk dystopia is no longer fiction, nor is it in the future. Though I haven’t read his work so that’s easy for me to say.
Thank you for the recommendations, it’s good to know where to start!
Thank you. I’m gonna do what you suggest, and will dive into his other stuff in case I feel curious.
I agree with your summary but I’d like to add that I really enjoyed one of his modern books as well: ‘Pattern Recognition’
Heh. Horses for courses I suppose! It’s been a while since I read them now but I remember liking the bridge trilogy (though not as much as the sprawl ones) but I hated Difference Engine and found it a dreary slog that I struggled to get through.
great choices, Akira is epic. I want to finish reading Snowcrash at some point!
I am amazed you could put Snowcrash down.
SUCH a good set of books!
Thank you. I’m really excited by Gibson’s. Considering the fact it was the first time the term “cyberspace” was used.
Neuromancer is amazing. Enjoy :-)
Great! I’m even more excited about it.
I am so jealous you have not read Gibson yet.
I know that feeling to experience great things for the first time. It’s certainly a grateful experience.
I’m going on a weekend holiday to Tbilisi, Georgia! Also I’m continuing hacking on NewBusinessMonitor. Sending letters through the service works now, but I haven’t opened it to everyone else yet. I’ll do that this weekend.
I’m super happy with it. I’m able to just click on companies to send personalised sales letters to them in the post. I’ve sent 103 sales letters in the past two days!
გამარჯობა! Enjoy some Khachapuri for me. Or don’t if its not your cup of tea.
How could it not be anyone’s cup of tea? I don’t believe in miracles but if I did, Georgian food would be a great example.
I had soko and shkmeruli for dinner, and it was an absolute triumph.
Mmm, you get to enjoy awesome Georgian food. Enjoy!
I joined an amateur astronomy club to get back into backyard astronomy (despite living in an apartment in a city) and I’m going to their AGM. I loved it when I was a kid and I want to get back into it.
Also going to try and setup the Hercules 390 emulator and get some version of MVS working so I can continue with what will be the penultimate entry in my debugging series. (It’s taking me a long time.)
Preparing to teach Python to colleagues on Monday
Out of curiosity, what kind of background do your colleagues have? I have one coworker that’s been using more python, but they have a more sysadmin background, and all the other developers are C#,Java.
I am like your co-worker. I am a sysadmin / platform / cloud person. My colleagues are programmers and data scientists. They are better programmers than I am. My goal is to show them just enough python 3 so that they can move along on their own. So I am going to show them list comprehensions for example, how to open files with the “with” statement, csvfiles also, a bit of matplotlib, pip and python -m venv, but not numpy or Pandas. We estimate something like 8 hours split over the next two Mondays.
My take away is that since I am forced to present something in an audience with expertise (OK not in Python, but surely in code) I too am forced to become better.
That sounds great and like a great mindset in general. Best of luck and let us know how it goes!
So, is this on overtime pay…? Preparing lessons for colleagues seem like something best done during work hours, IMO, not at the weekend.
Fortunately, I’ve never had overtime issues with my employers.
Fighting my losing fight against entropy; e.g. cleaning my apartment.
I’m also going to try playing Shroud of the Avatar with my dad. It runs terribly on my machine, and I’m not a huge fan of online games, but my dad loves & I’m mainly playing it to spend time with him.
Also working on my congressional outreach tool that seems to just be dragging on & on & on.
Stressing out about the climate breakdown and the latest IPCC report. Considering how to get involved in the development of carbon capture technologies. There’s no such work locally as far as I know.
Further development on my app called “My Leaf” for Android and iOS. It’s a third party alternative to the official NissanConnect EV app. Basically an app to for the Nissan Leaf. It’s free and open source of course ;) Written using Flutter.
Besides that I will be outdoor in the woods. Also playing through Valkyria Chronicles 4 on Switch late at night.
Have a nice weekend! ;)
Various improvements to BAN.AI — bringing up Lisp LOGO, diagnosing an FNP channel wedge, cleaning up a few weak points in the mail gateway … and a lot of other little tasks!
Hopefully someone can recommend the right tool for the job for me here for one of the many items on the BAN.AI TODO list.
BAN.AI has a search engine which searches our large collection of Multics reports and documents.
I have a few thousand PDF files totaling ~12GB, many of which do not have any OCR’d text layer, and thus not fully indexed.
I’m looking for the easiest solution to pragmatically OCR these documents and merge the resulting text layer back into the PDF files, which would lead to an immediate improvement in search results.
Edit: Fixed link.
You can do it using GhostScript and Tesseract. Tesseract can’t read PDF, but according to its FAQ it can output them.
It’d be something like this:
Cool, thank you, I’ll have to play with it and see what I can come up with.
Thanks again, the suggestion helped me very much, and sent me in the right direction. I ended up modyifing a script that uses similar workflow, and using pdftk to put the text back into the original PDF.
It looks like it’s going to take a long time to complete. So far it’s only been averaging ~1.5 documents per hour.
Taking Daughter The First to see Australian sensations, The Wiggles; then, apple picking with the whole family on Sunday.
This is the best weekend plans posted so far.
I wish more people in the IT industry, including most tech enthusiasts, would spend more time with real people - friends and family - than with machines.
Maybe they do but just don’t mention it? Probably not; I feel like if they did, various community issues could be avoided.
You obviously haven’t seen The Wiggles.
That’s how it goes when you don’t have friends and family doesn’t live in town.
I just bought a cheap Raspberry Pi Zero and I’ll try to use it as an audio bluetooth receiver, recycling an external USB sound card I don’t use anymore. I think I’ll use Alpine Linux, it seems commonly used on embedded hardware and I had a great experience with Alpine inside Docker containers.
I’m also doing this because most bluetooth receivers can’t be renamed (they’re all named “SomeBrand Bluetooth Adapter Thingy” while anyone would prefer seeing the name of the room they’re placed in) and I’m somewhat concerned with non-upgradeable IOT devices.
I’ve also an unbelievable amount of things to debug and improve on GitHub.
If you get something up and running, I would love to see a writeup posted here. I’ve got a Pi Zero W with a DAC hat that I’ve been meaning to do this with for almost a year now.
I have a Pi-0W running volumio with Airplay, DNLA, & spotify connect. To the best of my knowledge being able to use it as a bluetooth receiver is still a work in progress, but there are several people documenting how they got it working on their system.
I had no idea Alpine Linux worked on RbPi
https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi
I’m going to try to finish some of my older projects.
I really like these personal threads.
I’m planning to go see the movie The Sisters Brothers with my brother. It was great book, so I’m (naively?) hopeful it will be a great movie.
I started building an OpenBCI EEG interface and I want to test the leads and see the data coming back. if that all works, I’m going to assemble the 3D printed parts and try to record an EEG while I’m meditating. Should be fun!
I’m going to look a bit at my little Java functional utils project. Basically I’m doing a Try, Either, Tuple (0 to 8 items), and possibly yet another Optional - is there something obvious I’ve missed that you guys could see as a nice addition?
And then I’m going to the big city to attend a concert with Shania Twain on Sunday.
I’m going back to home to the land of red earth and dialectics to celebrate the life of my late uncle. He was well known as the author of a long-running humorous column in our state newspaper.
Continue to crunch issues in my pet language tinySelf. I have to implement exceptions and exception handling.
I totally flunked my electronics test I had to take yesterday, so I’ll just be relaxing a bit, working on some projects I had to set aside for a while, playing around with some graphics and taking the time to read a bit until the next semester starts… on Monday.
I’ll be working on a new blog engine for my personal site.
A little bit of cracking/reverse engineering on a hardware device. Experiment some more with an ATECC508 chip I wired up on a protoboard last weekend. Finish off some library books that are woefully overdue. Go running, and perhaps play a bit of soccer if I can drag myself out of bed early enough. Review a few software side projects that have been languishing without much attention and either retire/archive them or plan some next steps. Stop by the office for a bit to effect a cubicle move outside of work hours.
Canvasing for Sonja Trauss, preparing for work trip, going to Autograf & Stayloose, some personal project work of sifting through group feedback.
I love these threads. There’s something about the general default positivity of Lobste.rs that isn’t the case on other websites.
I just finished buying some things at the farmers market and enjoyed some avo on toast while the doggo took a nap.
Hosting a bonfire tonight (you’re welcome to come), and a Sacred Harp singing Sunday afternoon (oh, you’re also welcome to come to that).
I may get some coding in between errands Saturday.
Work, work, work. SO and her family are on a backpacking/climbing trip, and I’m stuck here working. Probably going to try to get some extra long runs in when I have some free time. I have a half marathon coming up that I’m not very well prepared for.
I might get a pretty good chunk of reading in too, pending my release from Overtime Hell.
Hunkering down indoors due to a storm. No real problems here though; power is still on, and my flat seems to be coping with ~50 mph winds fine. Hopefully will get to reading something on my to-read list.
Be safe, especially if you have to get out candles.
Things that I need to get done:
Spend time with family, visit in-laws for lunch, maybe do a little DIY (painting/decorating), practice my guitar and generally stay away from my computer. Though 6-year-old son will probably beg me to join him in Minecraft, and I’m sure to cave in for a bit ;-)
I am pruning my extensive collection of technical books.
HackUMass VI! Teaming with a few friends, should be a blast.
[Comment removed by author]
Working on viscal a vim-like timeblocking calendar:
I wasn’t happy with the current state of calendars that require a mouse, I also love timeblocking so I wanted to make a calendar that felt like a text editor and was easy to timeblock with.