What is Mad Mode?
My day job is writing software to support research at the KU Med Center informatics division, though I'm best known for my work on HTML and Web Architecture at W3C.
I'm a family man, which gives a certain perspective on the KC area, America, and the world we live in.
Between all that, I like to tinker. The bane of my existence is doing things I know the computer could do for me. Have you ever had one of those ideas that won't let go, not even to eat or sleep? My mom said the first time she saw me like that was after they gave me tinker-toys for my 3rd or 4th Christmas. She said I was in "mad scientist mode," just like my father, a chemistry professor.
guix pull
17:42 connolly@bldbox$ time guix pull
Updating channel 'guix' from Git repository at 'https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/guix.git'...
Authenticating channel 'guix', commits 9edb3f6 to c31662f (1,991 new commits)...
...
News for channel 'guix'
Incompatible upgrade of the Syncthing service
Removable devices now mount under
/run/media/$USER' instead of/media'Guix System switches to the Shepherd's system log
Linux-libre updated to 6.13
real 2m25.610s
user 2m53.335s
sys 0m1.385s
mastodon-archive ftw
https://github.com/kensanata/mastodon-archive
office-admin:
2025-03-28 18:48 d131c5e feat(toots): mastodon-archive notes
so... what's left?
I think LLMs (and humans) would benefit from a bunch of examples like the airbnb JS style guide:
💡 publish to archive.org from google photos:
I'm taking advantage of archive.org as a photo publishing service today. I kinda like the idea of doing it with
git-annex, but I struggled to get that to work the other day.How about:
The same should work for Amazon photos, with one more endo plug-in.
The plug-ins should be boring enough for an LLM to do most of the work. I'm sure an LLM could write code to deal with the cloud APIs, but they'll need some clues to maintain ocap discipline and avoid ambient authority.
p.s. it looks like I had about the same idea in July 2024
Say... Google photos no longer lets me embed photos in blog items such as my 2017 SFO item:
What does archive.org say? Ooh!
Separating Downloads between commons, personal (aka family), and mass media is a bit of work, but with
git-annexintegration with archive.org via s3 and torrent, I now see a path to where it's cost-effective.Since getting my feet wet with
git-annex, I see uses for it everywhere! For example...I just put Ubuntu Studio 24.10 on a thumb drive (@TrenchFloat is frustrated enough with audio latency in Windows to try it out).
First, there's
git annex addurl .... I hunted down my ipython notebook for connecting Downloads back to the URLs from whence they came using a Chrome data sqlite db:But for the commons, it's more useful to put it on archive.org than to keep redundant copies in the office. Of course, I'll keep strong names (torrent files, git-annex SHA256 checksums) to maintain integrity when using other services for availability.
wish-list:
I had some luck using
/web/web https://github.com/dckc/awesome-ocap/wiki/DisciplinedPython
/web https://github.com/dckc/awesome-ocap/wiki/OCap-Discipline
/web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient_authority
/web https://www.madmode.com/2019/python-eng.html
Details:
aider was tripping over PEP8 lint; I'm inclined to start again after using
autopep8.also:
guix install ungoogled-chromiumtook me 6 minutes.https://asciinema.org/a/699644
https://social.coop/@dckc/113882980105066175
Very much aware. Hence the "Sigh..." above.
Thank you!
Here's hoping I find time to refine my problem report on use of go-capnp in ocap-merkledag.
Car charging
I wonder if my charge car charging equipment suffices:
The Pixel 7 says charging but not charging fast. But it doesn't say that it's charging slowly or not at all yet.
I got a USB-C adapter for a recent road trip, but the rental car we used had a USB-C port, so I didn't get to test it:
Removing Magnetic Cable Tips
Getting it out of my phone it was difficult. A pen did work but the actual pry tool would be good to have. Ah... now I see that I have it stored in a tub with batteries.
Also my standard kit doesn't seem to include a small screwdriver.
What's left to close this? I can't put my finger on anything.
I guess I'll close it until I think of something.
At Last! Got around PIN to re-outfit the device
I'm up to 51 failures to guess the PIN. I haven't even been able to factory reset it.
But thanks to the clues in this video, I did it!
vol down + power worked got me to recovery mode! Yay!
Then I hit No command. Oh no!
vol up + power worked got me past it!
So I managed to factory reset it.
Doubt my OpSec is better than Android / Google's
As much as I'd like to run open source all the way down (especially postmarketOS for sysinit stuff), I can't really afford the sysadmin burden for it these days.
Declined all optional surveillance features
I took every chance that was offered to say "no".
Created a fresh Google account
It's not connected to anything else.
Well, I did send mail from it to one of my usual accounts: I generated a secret key on the device and sent a bunch of derived public keys to my usual account.
And I introduced it via syncthing.
Now what?
The idea is to lock it away most of the time but use it just in case.
I'm not exactly sure how to take advantage of it, though.
tangengtially related:
pubmed RSS feed: by Connolly DW
scrolled thru favorites manually again today
stay tuned to fosdem in Feb...
GNU Shepherd user services — 2020 — Blog — GNU Guix
via syncthing bookmarks
e.g. profit unit grants doc I just signed
ooh... a job for datasette? https://github.com/simonw/datasette.io makes it look that way.
Zotero already uses sqlite. Doing likewise for my public diigo bookmarks should be straightforward.
Integration with the camera / phone that I carry pretty much trumps this.
They do a fine job of facial recognition. And finding stuff by time. (and place?)
I sometimes put #hashtags in the description.
I use a variety of systems for photos; each has strengths and weaknesses. It's fine.
I'm not sure what the goal was here.
photos are mostly private, not commons
browse GnuCash with datasette?
datasette offers a handy mix of built-in browsing and ad-hoc query
browsing an iPhoto album worked well enough that I'm inclined to try it for a GnuCash db. Mobile access using avahi/mdns is pretty straightforward, though disconnected access would be another matter.
But who knows? Maybe one of the zillion datasette plug-ins provides PWA style access?
SheetSync for Plaid access
I'm pretty satisfied by this approach to getting data via the Plaid API.
2023-03: 2c4757f * feat(sync26): edit Sheetsync txs using a sheet of rules
2023-02: 3c800f4 * feat: push GnuCash tx ids, pull Sheetsync categories
2023-02: f8dc9ab * feat: Google Sheets API authentication
2023-02: 659f181 * feat(GnuCash DB): accounts as Sheetsync categories: code, Category, Group, Type
2023-02: f78f1ab * feat: lookup Amazon orders/items for Sheetsync