Notes for July 29-Aug 4

I have a vague recollection of the week going by, but August is having its inescapable effect of turning things into a hot, sunny blur, and it’s tough to keep track of everything.

• I switched my news summariser to gpt-4o-mini for a couple of days, but ended up being lazy and switching it back to gpt-3.5-turbo because there was some API weirdness going on and I wanted my morning news.
• I also had to tweak the prompts for it, but with sqlite-vec getting a first release and my adding more and more feeds, I’m now more interested in moving it from a PoC to a more production-like affair and reimplementing it in Python.
• Another factor here is that with improved tool support in ollama (which I had a brief go at testing) I can now consider having the summariser do cross-referencing (like linking to similar news for the week) and be LLM-agnostic with minimal code (and zero weird frameworks), all while mapping tools directly to asyncio.Task.

• Our lovely Clavinova CLP-F01 stopped working this weekend (no audio, but MIDI works), which always leaves me wondering about how long-lasting our technology really is. Hopefully it’s just the audio part flaking out.
• I got my TrackerKB PCB in the mail, so I soldered my M8 headless onto it, printed a 3D case and submitted a little patch to get it to work on my Logitech G Cloud–which, incidentally, recently got a security update (always a good thing on Android devices)¹.

Only issue I’ve had with it is that the internal USB hub chip doesn’t like being plugged into other hubs (understandable, but annoying).

My last non-NAS platter disk drive (a 500GB Mac Mini HDD that was hanging on for dear life inside rogueone) finally gave up the ghost today, possibly due to the heatwave (serendipitously, I had just moved one of the containers on that disk to the Radxa X4 for testing).

Nothing of consequence was lost (I had backups of all the Proxmox VMs living in it), but since I have to open the box again this soon, I’ve added to the list looking into more long-term maintenance stuff like re-doing the thermal paste on the CPU.