Both excited and stressed about an #AutismAwareness#panel this week. Kind of an irony alert given I’m excited to participate but also stressed at all the preparation. So much focus on getting it “right.”
I have to admit I prefer a format that just lets participants speak on a subject freehand and take questions after. Too much #scripting stresses me out.
I've been playing around with locally hosted #LLMs using the #Ollama#CLI tool. I've mostly been using models like mistral and dolphin-coder for assistance with textual ideas and issues. More recently I've been using the llava visual model via some simple #Bash#scripting, looping through images and creating description files. I can then grep those files for key words and note the associated filenames. Powerful stuff!
I wrote a matrix digital rain implementation in under 50 lines of pure Bash.. I chose Bash due to it being widely installed and extremely portable. With modern systems this shouldn't cause any noticable performance changes and seems more than efficent so far
Looking for feedback, contributions or whatever helps 😆. If it interest you at all, let me know what you think about it!
When I was a young Commodore-era game developer, C (without the ++ or # back then) was for wimps, and hardcore coders used Assembly, ditching the OS to have maximum available hardware resources. 👴
When you discover an interesting tool, and it turns out there's no executable GUI, but to get it running you need to pip a git, hub a stub, sudo a judo, brew a stew, python a cobra and unix a linux… 🤡
Did you know that #KeyboardMaestro’s nice UI components are pretty rad for shell scripting? For example, I really like its "Prompt With List” component, and setting it up a macro together with a "Return Value" block it's ready for general use in the shell of your choice. (See macro screenshot.)
Calling the macro with keyboardmaestro, I can pipe in stdin, and receive the selection via stdout. (See example GIF.)
Just when I thought I couldn't go wrong with some simple print() lines, I find my script flushes them when exiting, defeating the purpose of their placement in the script. Now I need to get a grasp of how to appropriately flush. Every day's a school day... #python#coding#scripting
Does anyone else backtick your own #perl scripts? That's what I meant back during #europython 23 when I was talking with some ppl about quick prototyping before rewriting standalone scripts into more robust things.
Also, don't mind me, i'm just slowly waking up from 20 yrs long coma. Ok, just hormone induced continuous stress disorder, but it kind of feels like I'm 12 again and full of curiosity. #hrtmagic
Got down to #author stuff, now that I'm retired and can devote time to the #business of #writing#fiction. First order of business: catalog the unsold novels from after the burn out that need revision and rewrites.
Turns out that disconnecting my Mac from my work VPN messed up my folders. I had somehow mapped (don't know the Mac term) my work Windows computer folders to the Mac, and when I look in documents it tries to find it on the network and fails. If I reboot, so long as I go directly from my user's directory to documents directory, I'm good. If I click on Documents in Finder, it redirects and I'm screwed.
First thing I did was copy all my writing folders to the desktop. At least I've lost none of my old novels and short work.
I thought there were 7 completed books, and I said so online. There are actually 9, three that form a trilogy and one novel with a sequel in the mix. There are two incomplete novels.
Some works are older than others. Pages refuses to open one novel from 1996, a fun space opera that possibly has the highest chance of early sales. I haven't tried the others. Now I gotta install Word, of which I am not a fan, and investigate programs that'll open the really old files. If anyone wants to chime in with suggestions, please do! (I can always find someone with a Windows machine if need be.) Putting Google on TODO. I actually have original copies of chapters from my Apple ] days, but thankfully I updated those to the Mac and to a new millennium version of Word in what were my PowerPC days.
Incidentally, there really are three novellas in good shape.What surprises me though? There looks like about 15 short stories, many complete because I see multiple submissions in the various folders. I completely forgot about these, and was sure I never wrote short-form.
Unsupported ancient old #Mac word processor formats were a real issue. Fortunately, #LibreOffice, and their adventurous programmers, solved this for me. I thank them.
Outside of the Mac, you're stuck digging through a zip file with pictures, text, and... stuff..
Apple's thing is to ensure for the vast majority of their users that their software works all the time, every time. As a ex-programmer, I respect that. If that means controlling file integrity by being the only /writer/ of the file format, so be it. Keeping the format secret is a way to achieve that, which sadly means you can't write a program to read it. You REALLY don't want to debug what turns out to be a crap programmer's mistakes. Most users are as interested in the power user stuff we're interested in as they are in learning how to change the oil on their car.
@nedbat Every “script” is a “real program” that’s looked down upon by its self-deprecating author or its snobby viewers as unworthy of a higher standard of care. Both fail to recognize that if it’s load-bearing, it’s worthy.