Rui CarmoI decided to take a couple of days off and generally tune out, thanks to a few strategically placed bank holidays – which meant my usual mix of relaxing and dealing with a few chores.
For starters, I replaced the battery on our A1466 MacBook Air, which just keeps on trucking – it’s now on its third battery (I swapped the factory one some four, or was it five, years ago). For around EUR 80, keeping that rather nice keyboard/screen/trackpad combination in use was a no-brainer, and it too now runs a Niri desktop, having been converted to Fedora a few months ago.
Putting Pi on the Desktop
And since I quite like having an AI assistant that can actually do something useful on my desktop, I did a quick hack to wire Pi into Noctalia:
This took around 30 minutes to become useful, and gave me a couple of ideas for improvements to piclaw’s UX – I had forgotten how flexible QML is.
AI Can Be Entertaining Too
I’ve been automating away a fairly large chunk of VM and container management – I have a dedicated agent that knows how to manage my Portainer stacks and version them in Gitea, for instance – but as it turns out, LLMs are also pretty good at a few other things, like setting up emulators under Steam (creating nice icons, fixing controller input mappings, tuning upscaling and shaders, and the rest of it).
But I hadn’t let an LLM loose on my Calibre and music collections yet, and – with the right safeguards – it’s been awesome at tidying up metadata. I had dozens of ancient books with slightly broken Calibre metadata, so I’ve been putting together an MCP server that sits next to my library to fix them – mostly because I don’t want to give a model full filesystem access to my NAS, and this way I can snapshot the database whenever it tries anything more extensive. I may well make something more generic, given time.