Notes for July 23-28

This was a moderately productive week, although to be fair I feel like I could have achieved a fair bit more if I hadn’t decided to add more side projects.

• With the release of both llama 3.1 and ollama 0.3.0, I finally have a nice, clean way to do tool calling across a bigger range of models, so I did some tests and… Everything broke, as expected.
• Continuing my ARM SBC local inference saga, I got a bit more hardware to test, but RKNN-LLM still requires me to convert model weights (oh ONNX, where art thou?) and I just couldn’t spare the time.

I’m now patiently but surely starting to rewrite my personal automation prompts to use ollama’s tool schema in the hope that the state of constant breakage starts to trend down and I can actually finish an LLM project.

• I got myself a soldering microscope on Prime Day–flash sales and discount coupons made it an irresistible proposition, and I will write a bit more about it in due time.
• It’s now being used to solder a MicroDexed Touch PCB, parts for which have been trickling in over the past few weeks, always irritatingly being delivered half an hour after I leave home for some errand.

A part of me guiltily acknowledges that I keep building hardware synths (the MiniDexed, the Monome Norns Shield, a couple other RP2040 toys, etc.) but don’t use them nearly often enough, and I really should do something about that.

I broke the site yesterday. Let’s just say that timezones and naïve dates don’t mix, and that the new front-matter parsing logic I had been meaning to implement failed to take that into account. Also:

• In the process, I quite satisfactory nailed a weird OpenGraph update bug I’ve had for months that boiled down to a missing transaction in a set of SQL queries (ORMs are nice, but hey hide so much from you that sometimes the only way is to dig in and trace things).
• Given all the hoopla around AI and web search indexing, I became curious enough to login to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tools for the first time in years (probably even a decade). It’s been a long while since I bothered with SEO (which was back when I was doing advertising analytics) and I don’t care about the actual results except to try to find a replacement for getting an overview of who links here (these days HTTP referrers are either removed for privacy reasons or just spammed with Russian gambling site links), but it was useful to spot a couple of minor issues with site markup.
• Since for the first time in years Obsidian didn’t immediately crash when I aimed it at the folder with my site content (it just miserably failed to make sense of it), I unwittingly went and added to my pile of random side projects an Obsidian plugin that tries to do exactly what I want in terms of note and media management.

Of special note (and a dismal reflection on Obsidian’s code quality) is that its runtime does not sanitise front matter–in some cases, it interpreted metadata with 0xZZ as literal hex strings and converted them to decimal, completely failed to parse dates (I can relate to that one), mangled tags etc.–which are all things I want to try to fix.

I’m calling it the Opinionated Obsidian Plugin, which is, come to think of it, a recursive oxymoron…