Yes, I know that's not what Shakespeare meant. Not like that's ever stopped anybody in marketing or people with too much money and hungry for more.
Okay. You've been inundated in what the industry is calling AI technology for months on end. I don't need to introduce it because the only way you could have avoided it is to have been in the middle of nowhere for the last year 1 or so. I would ordinarily have said "in a coma" but the way word gets around it would surprise me not a bit if folks would be talking about …
Note: I used the tag 'searx' for this post even though I've been using SearxNG for quite a while. There's enough compatibility between the two that the stuff I've written (so far) will work. However, I haven't decided if it's worth the hassle of changing the tag and possibly making things harder to find.
A constant problem when you have a sizeable external memory is finding what you need, when you need it. It's a problem that I've been poking at for a while and, which I probably don't have optimal solutions I've found a couple that work well enough …
I haven't been tinkering a lot lately. Not because I haven't wanted to (well, that's not quite true) but because I've had other stuff that I wanted to get out of the way. Basically, I couldn't stand the impacted shitpile that I call an office-cum-workshop in its current state anymore. Figuring out how much floor space I had a few weeks ago really got to me and I decided to do something about it. I've been spending a couple of hours every day (after work and over the weekends) going through one thing at a time (one stack of drawers …
I mentioned not too far back that I'd finished migrating my wiki over to a new piece of software, but it was a little outside of what I'd been trying to accomplish in that post. It seemed a good idea to circle back and explain what I meant by that.
Don't get me wrong, I quite like Pepperminty Wiki. It's a fine piece of software - lightweight, configurable, it uses flat files for storage, and it's nice and snappy. Especially in situations where the web hosting provider is badly over-provisioned and moderately complex web applications tend to bog down. But after …
I'm still around and kicking, just taking it easy (or as easy as feasible right now). As I write this, we're well into March and I'm trying to be gentle with myself - not forcing writing if I can't string words together (which is annoying when ideas come in the shower), not really looking for anything specific to do, just letting things unfold for a while. I don't have any big projects lined up, nor am I looking for any (I do, actually, but it's going to be one of those "pick at it off and on for a while" kind …
A very common problem one has if one has enough files stacked up in one place, is whether or not those files have been copied to another system already. Have they already been copied off? To where on the other system were they copied? Sure, you can deduplicate them through various means but that tends to be kind of a sledgehammer thing to do, especially when one of the things with files is a mobile device. You could always upload the files to a provider's cloud1 storage, like Google Drive or iCloud or something.
I apologize in advance for how disjointed this post seems. I've been tinkering with it off and on for a while, and I've come to the conclusion that there isn't strictly a linear narrative. The context loops around a bit because it's easier to explain a few things after the fact than it is to arrange them chronologically. I promise, it'll make sense (probably).
Modulo people possibly taking me slightly too seriously I've never been particularly shy about talking about my love of table-top RPGs. Though I started with Dungeons and Dragons as a kid, as I got older I …
One of these days I'll get around to doing a writeup of an indispensible part of my exocortex, Wallabag. I used it to replace my old paywall breaker program, largely because pumping random articles from the web into a copy of etherpad-lite was janky as hell and did not make for a good user experience. To put it another way, when you're looking for a particular thing in your archive it's a huge time sink to then go through and edit the saved document because it's a single huge line of text. At least Wallabag saves copies of …
Long time readers are probably familar with two things: Horror stories about my dental work, and my endless quest to find search software that'll let me make sense of my data hoard (because I never delete anything). Thankfully, the former's been fairly good lately so I don't have any real complaints there. Things have improved on the latter front, remarkably.
I've experimented off and on with a personal search engine called Recoll, which was designed to work alongside Linux desktop environments initially but later it was ported to Mac OS X and Windows. It is noteworthy in that it tries …
It's been a while since I've written a technomancer tools article. In the intervening time some things have changed; I've discarded a few tools because they didn't really work for me, or I didn't need them anymore. As you might have surmised (I didn't until I sat down to write this article, which should not be much of a surprise) it seems that I've been compensating for my ADD all this time. While medication has helped there are still a few deficiencies that effort, not phamaceuticals help with. Effort is good but a few tools don't hurt.
