Notes for March 20-26

Finally having the time to do more ML stuff again.

Trying to get back into the groove.

• Bootstrapped the U59 again.
• Fired up OpenSCAD to tweak a couple of electronics cases. Tempted to re-do them in something else so I can keep learning new stuff.
• Briefly investigated possible ways of using a semi-dead iPad as a desktop dashboard to replace my now playing display and the Amazon Echo Dot in one fell swoop, but there’s a fly in the ointment–I can’t get Siri to activate if I use the iPad’s headphone jack (and as far as I can tell that’s not something I could enable via Accessibility or similar options).
• Decided the world needed another cloud-init-like bootstrapping mechanism for setting up new machines, so I whipped up ground-init¹.

Definitely not getting the hang of Tuesdays. Haven’t had decent sleep in a few days, which doesn’t help.

• Got llama.cpp installed on borg, but was not impressed by the quality of the output or the way it hallucinates within three sentences even with the 13B model. LLMs are not that useful in local environments yet.
• Poked at ComfyUI a bit more. Getting the hang of using latent images to condition model outputs.
• Built a new Node-RED dashboard to keep track of storage metrics (am downloading too many ML models). Briefly investigated FlexDash, but found it lacking. This may be a problem in the future given that the “standard” dashboard-ui is now in maintenance mode.

Ended up staying in the office until 9PM, which isn’t healthy.

Tried to get an early start to the day, was borderline successful. Bing Image Creator captured the mood accurately:

• Enabled wake-on-lan on the U59 so that I don’t have to bend under the desk or plug in a USB keyboard to wake it up (now Alexa can do it for me via Node-RED):

sudo nmcli connection modify "Wired connection 1" 802-3-ethernet.wake-on-lan magic
sudo nmcli connection modify "Wired connection 2" 802-3-ethernet.wake-on-lan magic

• Did the same for borg, just because it is kind of cool to say “turn on Borg”.
• Cleaned my desk thoroughly at the end of a long, long workday.

Hardly any fun was had on this day.

Fairly busy day, and too tired to do anything of substance off-work.

• Used ground-init to successfully provision a couple of piku test instances.
• Poked at OrcaSlicer, perhaps as a way to procrastinate finishing a couple of 3D models I have in the back burner.

Couch potato day. Spring weather is starting to trigger my allergies.

• Read The Economist.
• Did some sysadmin stuff, like upgrading borg to the freshly minted Proxmox 7.4 and updating all of its guests as well as a few other machines around the house, plus adding another set of configs to my restic backup scheme.
• Updated my OpenMQTTGateway to 1.5.0 and poked at 433MHz sensors again.
• Decided to fiddle with the ChatGPT 3.5 API directly (and via a VS Code extension) and see if it could generate OpenSCAD code. Which it can, although the results are a bit janky. It gets the gist of things right, and writes decent comments, but it’s not really usable yet because among other things it happily leaves floating geometry around:

Yay, Summer time. Also, slept an hour less.

• Reset all clocks, visited family, did chores.