cassidy

cassidy, 1 day ago to random

The preschooler was sick with a 24-hour stomach bug on Saturday, my wife was sick with it on Sunday (and is still recovering), the toddler was sick with it on Monday, and now I am pretty sure I am getting hit by it. 🙃

Parenting is fun!

cassidy, 1 day ago to android

The OneTracker app for Android is just… gone??

https://onetracker.app/

Luckily the web based version still works, but I can’t install the app on my phone so I can’t get push notifications anymore. 😞

I really liked how simple and straightforward the app was, and how it wasn’t trying to up-sell anything besides its core competency of tracking and notifying about packages.

#Android

cassidy, 13 days ago (edited 13 days ago) to ai

I really like the convention of using ✨ sparkle iconography as an “automagic” motif, e.g. to smart-adjust a photo or to automatically handle some setting. I hate that it has become the defacto iconography for generative AI. 🙁

#AI #LLM #LLMs #GenerativeAI #design #ML

cassidy, 15 days ago (edited 14 days ago) to fedora

TIL Fedora is packaging a web browser app I developed for elementary OS, stopped updating over three years ago, and marked as end-of-life two years ago—yet it happily shows up in Fedora 40 if you search my name. It crashes on launch, so it doesn’t even work…

WHY??

Edit: I guess the package is being EOL'd in Fedora due to it no longer building and this thread, huzzah! My recommendation to distros: don’t package random apps and then not maintain them/communicate with upstream.

#Fedora #Linux

cassidy, 14 days ago to random

Pro tip: if your Bluetooth isn't working with a certain wireless card, check the BIOS settings before installing a new wireless card… apparently my Intel NUC had Bluetooth disabled in the BIOS; the card works just fine!

The upside is that I installed an extra RAM stick as long as I was in there. TWICE the RAM at a whopping 16 GB.

Palpatine shooting lightning, saying "Unlimited power!"

cassidy, 15 days ago to gamedev

The future of game development is open source.

https://youtu.be/EYt6uDr-PHQ?si=uJ4evnp1-f4Z4XgA

#GameDev #OpenSource #Godot #Blender #Linux

cassidy, 16 days ago (edited 16 days ago) to random

I really need to automate this somehow, but my latest estimate is 3.13 million active users of Flathub!

This is a number of updates delivered to a popular dependency, org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default//23.08, between the 23.08.14 and 23.08.15 releases. This was less than a month window (March 18 through April 9).

Pretty impressive stuff!

Edit: updated, more realistic stats based on @alatiera; thanks!

#Flatpak #Flathub

cassidy, 16 days ago to GNOME

Image encoding × FOSS desktop nerds, I have a question…

The current format for dynamic/dark-style wallpapers in GNOME is not great. I don’t think anyone—including distros, designers, & maintainers—likes how it works: it’s a legacy system of GSettings keys and an XML format that sets those keys but is not biderectional; choosing that XML file in Settings sets the individual GSettings manually, making it hard to show the pair of wallpapers as selected.

So let’s do better?

#GNOME #Linux #FOSS

cassidy, 16 days ago to random

I’m seeing a strange issue in several GNOME 46 apps: it seems like if the first interaction within the app is touch, then a bunch of things like menus/popovers just don’t respond to either touch or mouse input until you close and re-open the app.

Am I going crazy, here? I’m testing this on Endless OS but I have a bug report against one of my apps stating this as well.

I need to do some more testing, but I’ve seen this in apps like GNOME Music and GNOME Builder as well.

cassidy, 16 days ago (edited 16 days ago) to ai

I was listing something on eBay, and they encourage starting with an existing listing—presumably to increase the amount of detail and decrease the amount of work.

When I selected the same model, I got a default description that was extremely robotic and wordy while just repeating the spec sheet. I thought it sounded LLM-generated; sure enough when I went to edit it, there is a big shiny “write with AI” button.

🤢

This is not actually helping anyone.

#AI #LLM #LLMs #ebay #GenerativeAI

cassidy, 18 days ago to random

a jet engine is audible in our living room

Me: “Uh, @katie, what’s going on??”

Katie: “My MacBook is trying to open Photoshop…”

five minutes of jet engine fan noise passes

Katie: “Yay!”

😶

cassidy, 20 days ago to random

I just realized I could have the worst RDNN ever for my apps: es.ssidyjam.AppName

I own the domain for the extremely novel c@ vanity email address it gives me, but it’s also pretty short… 🤔

cassidy, 20 days ago to Starwars

#NoSpoilers

I watched “Into the Breach” (S03E13) of The Bad Batch last night. This show continues to be great, and I really enjoyed this episode! I was anxious and on the edge of my seat until the very end—and I’m excited for next week.

Only TWO WEEKS LEFT of this show! 😭 If you’ve been sleeping on it, it’s a great time to get into it so you’re caught up in time for the penultimate or final episode… I have a feeling it’s gonna be good.

#StarWars #TheBadBatch #StarWarsTheBadBatch #BadBatch

cassidy, 22 days ago to 3DPrinting

I printed a little book riser for our kids' IKEA shelf! I love little purpose-designed functional prints like this.

#3Dprinting

The same photo but with some books in the front row
The finished product with books in a back row, elevated, and books in the front row on the shelf itself

cassidy, 28 days ago to random

I have to take a short weekend trip to Montana and after considering different transit options, I decided to rent a car and drive; it's a bit of a road trip, but I found great rental deals and was excited to rent an electric car to try it out as we're considering buying one.

lol, Montana is huge and has hardly any charging stations on the route 🙃 According to one of the EV charging maps there are single chargers in towns about 150 miles apart, which seems dicey to me?

#EVs #infrastructure

cassidy, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to random

Hey uh something is up with the sun

#Colorado #eclipse

cassidy, 1 month ago to Starwars

I’m playing Star Wars Jedi Survivor on PS5 and it’s such a frustrating experience:

• Great story, acting, animation, environment design
• Extremely STAR WARS
• Good gameplay—though at times frustrating
• Constant, frustrating graphical issues

#StarWars #JediSurvivor #StarWarsJediSurvivor #EA #gaming #PS5

cassidy, 1 month ago to ai

“AI” as currently hyped is giant billion dollar companies blatantly stealing content, disregarding licenses, deceiving about capabilities, and burning the planet in the process.

It is the largest theft of intellectual property in the history of humankind, and these companies are knowingly and willing ignoring the licenses, terms of service, and laws that us lowly individuals are beholden to.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/06/technology/tech-giants-harvest-data-artificial-intelligence.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ik0.Ofja.L21c1wyW-0xj&ugrp=m

#AI #GenAI #LLM #LLMs #OpenAI #ChatGPT #GPT #GPT4 #Sora #Gemini

cassidy, 1 month ago to random

I have to do a bunch of number crunching to confirm this*, but it appears our house is generating as much electricity as we use—if not more—thanks to our solar panels!

This fact brought to you by digging into our energy billing after seeing a huge spike in bills for the TWO MONTHS it took the solar company to come back out and reinstall our panels after getting our roof replaced due to hail damage. 😬

*Xcel could make this 1000× easier to understand…

#solar #GreenEnergy #SolarPower #NetZero

cassidy, 1 month ago to random

Love spending the morning “entertaining” (really, mediating between) the toddler and preschooler—successfully quelling various conflicts and breakdowns—just to have the toddler inexplicably throw their entire weight into their hands, performing a surgical strike directly on my stomach organ when I wasn’t looking. Now I get to be in pain and nauseous all day as a result!!

Kids are great.

(I love them so much but sometimes they drive me bonkers)

cassidy, 1 month ago to random

I was looking into adding a “simple” feature to a core GNOME app and backed away slowly as I realized how seemingly overcomplicated the codebase is. 😬

It’s probably mostly due to me being unfamiliar with both the codebase and the language bindings, but it makes me feel sad. I thought it would be a pretty simple addition… but I’m in no place to rewrite the app, either. 😝

cassidy, 1 month ago to random

Semi-regular reminder that if you would care to see photos of me with my kids, you can follow @lucy and @nora! We don’t share their photos publicly for privacy (and to not annoy people who don’t care), but are happy for anyone we know (even just “Internet friends”) to request to follow their accounts.

Recent posts include an adorable selfie with matching outfits picked out by the toddler, kids wearing bunny ears, and general kid goofery.

cassidy, 1 month ago to random

Our new tree is budding for Spring! 🌱

cassidy, 1 month ago to mastodon

Mastodon feature (or third-party integration) idea: curated/shared filters! I feel like I’ve thought about this from the spoiler angle before (platforms could have a list of potential spoiler-y phrases that get associated with a certain movie/show/etc. and then users could “subscribe” to those filters), but maybe it could be more crowdsourced? 🤔

#Mastodon #filters #ActivityPub #fediverse

cassidy, 1 month ago to android

Trying to decide if I want to go with a Pebbleee¹ or Chipolo² tracker if I want a tracker that works with Android’s imminent Find My Device network… they look pretty comparable, with one major difference:

Pebblebee is rechargable with a USB-C cable, Chipolo has a replacable CR2032 battery. 🤔

¹https://pebblebee.com/products/clip-for-android
²https://chipolo.net/en-us/products/chipolo-one-point

#Android #FindMyDevice