Colder
07:21 Tuesday, 7 February 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 49.08°F Pressure: 1026hPa Humidity: 84% Wind: 3.44mph
Words: 653
The National Weather Service thinks it's 49°F, but it's 44° here. Sun's up, so it should warm up quickly. The heat actually came on this morning.
Mitzi gets home today after a little more than two weeks away helping to look after her granddaughter. It'll be nice to have her back again.
My office is perhaps just a little less of a catastrophe. I opened the other file drawer the other day and had to deal with its contents. I have a couple of those expandable folio organizers on the way. The file drawers didn't actually contain files. Just piles of paper mostly. Some in folders, some in binders, some in plastic bags. That should all be sorted soon.
KEH.COM wrote to say they have my stuff and they'll let me know what they think it's worth soon.
I got rid of another camera on Sunday. My son collects miniatures and mentioned he'd like something better than an iPhone to photograph them in close-up. I said I'd wished he'd mentioned something sooner, or I'd have given him the E-M5 Mk.2. I suppose I could have asked as well. Anyway, I still had 5 OM-D bodies, which is probably too many. So I bundled up the E-M10 Mk 4, the 12-50mm electronic zoom, with a dedicated "macro" feature (close-focusing setting), a couple of primes and an old Joby GorillaPod, the DSLR one, along with a bag. Gave him a circular polarizing filter that only fits the 12-50, in case he gets any glare from the miniatures.
So the shelves are a little less crowded.
I had a shoebox that functioned as something like a junk drawer on the top of the bookcase. I got rid of most of its contents, and now it contains all the myriad USB cables that tend to accumulate, sorted into ziplock bags. It also contains an assortment of wall-warts that go to various radios that normally operate on batteries. Ideally, I'd like to get rid of that too. But that's going to wait for another round of purging.
Since I don't have the E-M10 anymore, I put the 75-300mm zoom on the E-M1 Mk3 and took that for a walk yesterday. It's heavier than the E-M10 by a lot, it also has a Really Right Stuff bottom plate mounted, which I suppose I could remove, but I like the way the camera feels with it on.
I've found that if I put the camera behind my back, resting on the top of my hips, I can do the full 2.5 miles without developing a knot between my shoulder blades. (I use a sling, not a neck strap.) It's little bit more of a reach to bring the camera to hand, but I was never very quick on the draw anyway.
If I was going to be out hiking for a couple of hours or more, I'd use the Cotton Carrier G3; but for 45 minutes to an hour, it seems I can handle the Mk3 with a plastic zoom. It'll be nice because the E-M1 has more features than the E-M10, and I can set up some custom modes. There have been occasions when I'd have liked to try to capture a bird in flight; but it would have been a bit fumbly and time-consuming to configure the E-M10 and the bird would be gone. I can assign a custom mode to a button on the E-M1 and be ready with just a press. I haven't taken advantage of custom modes very much in the past. Mostly just configuring the camera depending on what I'm hoping to shoot at the time.
No walk this morning, though. As soon as I post this, I've got to get ready to go to the dentist.
And with that, I'd better sign off.
✍️ Reply by emailSerendipity, Part Deux
10:19 Tuesday, 7 February 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 53.69°F Pressure: 1025hPa Humidity: 91% Wind: 6.91mph
Words: 703
Recently I mentioned that Spotlight wasn't behaving as advertised in my install of MacOS Ventura. (I'm waiting to see when Suggested surfaces that post.) And I wrote about using LaunchBar as my choice of keyboard launcher.
I've been doing some searching and installing various LaunchBar actions, and trying to wrap my brain around many of the more sophisticated features that I haven't been taking the most advantage. There's little progress to report on that front. As it goes with many of these sorts of endeavors, at least for me, there have been numerous digressions, to include installing Homebrew and consulting ChatGPT for assistance in that effort. (It's helpful.) But my interest continues, nevertheless.
So yesterday, during the Tinderbox Zoom meetup, someone mentioned that Dominique Renauld had created an Alfred workflow to take notes in Tinderbox. Someone also posted a link to a video and a forum post (I didn't save the chat, but the tabs are still open.) With LaunchBar not many registers deep in the stack, I clicked through to see what the deal was, thinking I'd try to replicate it with LaunchBar. (Gazing at the Action Editor being another of the aforementioned digressions, though perhaps not too far off the trail.)
The link to the forum post included a link to his blog regarding the Alfred workflow, which turned out to be dead with regard to that particular post, but did get me to his blog. So I poked around to see what Dominique had been sharing of late. I confess, I don't, or rather, haven't read Dominique's blog in the past. He speaks and writes English far better than I read French. Je parle un petite peu. Je suis tres désolé. I happen to believe he reads the Marmot from time to time.
I found this recent post, from November of last year, where I spotted a screenshot of Tinderbox.
(As an aside, sometime in the past few minutes, Tinderbox has posted 10 Suggested posts. The earliest is from November 2021. This suggests there's a limit to the number of related posts Tinderbox displays, as it has been 10 in each of the three (small sample size, I know) notes I've investigated so far.)
I'm not fluent in French, but I do recall making some translation settings in MacOS or Safari, so I suspected there had to be an easily discoverable way to translate the page. Sure enough, in the address bar was an icon that looked like a pair of cartoon speech bubbles that seemed to suggest language. I figured it was either going to read the page aloud, or translate it for me, and fortunately it was the latter!
The topic was Tinderbox in the context of all the relatively recent buzz about PKM. I'm in agreement with his views, but what was also a "surprise and delight" was the link he posted in the context of Tinderbox as a blogging tool. It was the session I did with Michael Becker a couple of years ago!
The Marmot doesn't look or work exactly like that anymore. In fact, as I've been slowly absorbing more knowledge about Tinderbox, chiefly through osmosis, I've been thinking about refactoring it once again. I likely won't undertake a complete redesign, but there are some additional changes I think I can make without breaking too many things.
I don't know if the Suggested notes are ranked by relevance, but the second note is this post from just over a year ago. (First is the preceding post, Serendipity, naturally.) Reading it, and looking over the others, I get the strong impression I do tend to repeat myself! Or at least, struggle with the same issues. When I was writing the Ephemera post, I was trying to recall when I last wrote about deleting photos from the library. I had the impression it was only a few months ago, but it was just over a year. I think this speaks to the subjective experience of the passage of time accelerating as one gets old. An insight that often intrudes on my thoughts these days.
Anyway, all of this perhaps amounts to nothing, but it did make me smile; and that's a noteworthy event in these times.
✍️ Reply by emailExploration
11:26 Tuesday, 7 February 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 52.9°F Pressure: 1025hPa Humidity: 93% Wind: 4.61mph
Words: 96
Just because I'm excited, not that you should be, a short post before I take my walk.
I picked a post from 2018. Should have done it in another tab, because it's not open anymore. This facility is going to alter the way I use Tinderbox.
Suggested notes populated instantly. Number: 10. But it went back to 2013, the earliest days of the Marmot. It also went forward in time to 2021. So there's no chronological limit, it appears to be the ten most relevant, "relevant" as determined by whatever the algorithm is.
I'm loving this.
✍️ Reply by emailAuthority
06:06 Wednesday, 7 February 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 47.84°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 79% Wind: 8.05mph
Words: 1053
The marmot's tag-line is from The Big Lebowski, which is also the source of the marmot's moniker. It's a disclaimer, and a comment on blogs in general. Maybe life, too.
The marmot's ancestor was called Groundhog Day, and I believe it went through a few tag-lines. One I recall was from The Princess Bride, "Let me explain... No, there is too much. Let me sum up."
And one of the recurring themes in GHD was about the illusion of power.
In our sloppy, lazy idiomatic way of communicating we often ascribe certain outcomes or results to the "power" of leaders or parties or corporations. We speak of "asymmetric power dynamics" in relationships. We encourage and facilitate the illusion in our culture and society, largely because it helps maintain hierarchy and order.
But it's still an illusion.
The only power that exists, in a human relationship context, is the power to choose. Yeah, there's work per unit time power of my fist hitting your nose, but that's physics. A course of action involving an individual is the result of two things: habit or choice. Most of our behavior, our daily course of action, is habituated. This is, in the main, a good thing. Nobody has the cognitive capacity to consider, moment to moment, all the possible courses of action and potential outcomes of any particular choice.
And one of the artifacts of that habit is the illusion of power.
This post isn't intended to recapitulate all that. It provides a little context. When we say a police officer has "power," what we really mean is that he has "authority." Authority is an element of a social contract. We agree to consider the statements or commands of people whom society has granted "authority," as being compelling, having the effect of "force" (power again). But participating in that social contract, recognizing that authority, is always a choice.
Society recognizes the dangers of authority, so it erects guardrails to prevent its misuse. Authority is granted commensurate with responsibility or duty. Society says certain people are responsible for various elements of conduct or behavior, guiding or compelling people's choices, to maintain some beneficial feature of society, or military order.
That authority is bounded by responsibility. Its exercise is accompanied by accountability. That is, the organization that grants the authority can also withdraw it, and impose penalties for its abuse or misuse or failure to exercise it in meeting the responsibility for which it was granted.
So there's a three-legged stool that kind of supports this idea of "power" in the social contract.
It also exists in the professions. We grant titles to people who possess expert knowledge in particular fields that convey to us that we can rely on their opinions. Doctors, lawyers, architects and so on. Someone tells you that they want to cut you open and take out your gall bladder, you want to have some confidence they know what they're talking about!
Again, there are three legs, or pillars, pick an analogy Rogers. Responsibility, authority, accountability. We don't like our buildings falling down, so we make people responsible for ensuring they don't. We grant them the authority to state that a set of plans will result in a safe structure that won't fall down and their signature has a certain force to it. You can rely on it, and you must comply with it. And professionals are held accountable for misuse, or incompetent use, of their authority by legal and professional structures. People can seek damages, attempt to be "made whole." (Good luck getting that gall bladder back.)
Basically, everything else is bullshit and you're on your own. Now, people can acquire reputations for being sources of reliable information. But the only thing they have to lose is their reputation if they give you a bum steer. And there are certain requirements of law in contracts or testimony under oath that can impose penalties if you bullshit someone. But basically, most of life is just bullshit.
Which brings me to AI.
We are suckers for our own infernal cleverness. I remember when we got these fancy color computers in the combat information centers of navy ships. They purported to give an "all source," "fused" picture of the space around the ship. Because it was in a fancy box, and especially because it was in color graphics, we all bought it. It didn't take long to learn that it was bullshit. The data was time-late. The data was wrong. It was just a fancy picture. A toy. But we sure did love it for a while.
It did get better. We learned what its limitations were. We understood what it could tell us. We got better at vetting the data, and faster at inputting it. Today, that sort of thing works pretty well and it's used every day. But occasionally a drone will fly through and blow up a bunch of your shipmates.
AI is a toy. It's bullshit. Some fancy-boy, tech bro nerds might take exception to that characterization, but they're emotionally invested in their toys so that's understandable.
We can begin to take AI seriously when it's supported by the three pillars of responsibility, authority and accountability. And since it's hard to figure out how to make a machine learning model accountable, we'll have to be satisfied with holding its corporate masters accountable. When we start putting people in prison, I'll know we're taking it seriously.
In the meantime, I expect we're going to have a lot of fun with AI as a toy. And it's going to do quite a bit of damage too, because it's kind of like treating an AR-15 like a toy. Some folks will do some useful things with it, but a lot more folks will cause chaos and mayhem just for shits and giggles, or because they genuinely want to sow chaos and mayhem, or because they had good intentions, but just didn't know any better.
But, hey, this is all just my opinion. I could be wrong. I don't have any intention of deceiving anyone. I probably just don't know what I'm talking about.
And this is the marmot. It's a blog. I'm an authority on nothing. I make all this shit up. Do your own thinking. Or ask Chat GPT.
✍️ Reply by emailA Lot of Ins, A Lot of Outs
07:04 Friday, 7 February 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 61.92°F Pressure: 1021hPa Humidity: 96% Wind: 3.44mph
Words: 385
After chugging along reliably for almost a year, Captain's Log has begun to trip over its shoelaces. In recent days, I've awoken to an alert box from Automator saying, The action "Run AppleScript" encountered an error: "Can't get attribute "Text" of missing value." (sic on the quotes within quotes).
The script is run as part of an Automator application, which is called in a Tinderbox function, which is called in an OnAdd Action for a day note in the log, which is created by an edict in the month container.
What the error suggests is that the new day's container doesn't exist, and, in fact, it does not. It's not there in the log.
Wherein lies the conundrum.
The function is only called as a result of the OnAdd action. That is, the new day container must be created in order for OnAdd to be triggered. The month container edict creates a new day, which triggers the OnAdd action, which fires the function.
But the function has clearly run, invoking the Automator application, which grabs the next few days' events from my Calendar and places them in the Text of the Midwatch entry of that day's container.
Seriously weird.
I've tested the action code in the Edict in a separate file, and it will create a note with today's date, just as it has for nearly a year.
I've manually created a new day container and run the Automator application from Terminal, just as it's called in the function, and it happily populates the Text of the Midwatch note.
I'm inclined to believe that perhaps Tinderbox is doing too many things at once? It's hard to conceive how exactly. Perhaps OnAdd is being triggered before the Edict has actually completed the Create action that enters the new day's container? The script tries to find the Text of a note that isn't completed, throws an error, and somehow derails the day container's creation?
Beats me.
But, what I can do is move the function from the OnAdd action into a Rule for each day container. I'm guessing that Rules are evaluated after OnAdd, which should ensure the day container note is completed before it tries to create the Midwatch entry.
We'll have to wait until tomorrow to see if that works.
It is a head-scratcher.
✍️ Reply by emailFurther to the Foregoing...
09:12 Friday, 7 February 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 63.81°F Pressure: 1023hPa Humidity: 94% Wind: 10.36mph
Words: 182
I moved the function fMakeMidwatch to the prototype day container. Hilarity ensued.
Lots of blinking going on. This is an 8-core 3.6GHz i9 iMac with 128GB of RAM, and it's handling this rather trivial task quite ungracefully.
As soon as the light show started, I knew what had happened. There are only 644 notes in this document. (I haven't been making as much use of it as I'd intended. That has changed of late.) And of those, a little more than half are day notes (containers). So Tinderbox had to go through each of those day containers and run the rule. This makes the geriatric i9 cranky.
I added a line of action code to the rule to turn off rules in day containers after it ran fMakeMidwatch.
The blinkies have ceased.
Ideally, the month container will notice the date has rolled over sometime after midnight, it will dutifully create a new day container for the current day. Once that day container is created, it will then check its Rules and run fMakeMidwatch, then turn its Rules off.
We'll know tomorrow.
✍️ Reply by emailHot Water
09:37 Friday, 7 February 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 63.99°F Pressure: 1023hPa Humidity: 94% Wind: 10.36mph
Words: 236
I've been looking into hot water heaters for Winterfell. I'd never considered using a tankless hot water heater before, so I've been most interested in those.
There are a few appealing features, mainly the compact size. We wouldn't want a gas unit, so it would have to be electric. The efficiency gains mainly appear to be due to the fact that you're only heating water on demand. The electric units can't support as much demand as the gas units, but in the little house I don't think that'd be an issue with only one shower.
The major negative seems to be the high current demand, requiring over 100 amps of power and three 40 amp breakers ganged together in the power panel. Yikes! That poses significant challenges with regard to battery storage as well.
We've got a relatively old hot water heater installed presently, which may require replacement in the near future. I think I'm going to go with a hybrid like the one we have now. It may not be as totally efficient as a tankless unit, and it will use more space than a conventional electric hot water heater, which may be a challenge. But it's far less demanding from an instantaneous power standpoint, and far easier to accommodate with a battery.
Plus, the thank will hold water we can use in the event of a power outage when the well pump won't run.
✍️ Reply by emailShelley Covering Court Cases
11:48 Friday, 7 February 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 69.01°F Pressure: 1022hPa Humidity: 79% Wind: 8.05mph
Words: 45
If you want to curate a custom feed for the current crisis, you would do well to add Shelley Powers who is bird-dogging the court cases filed against DOGE. (A lot of alliteration-adjacent construction in that sentence. "Curate custom current crisis court cases")
✍️ Reply by emailLast Night's Moon
Current Wx: Temp: 69.01°F Pressure: 1022hPa Humidity: 79% Wind: 8.05mphWords: 25
Stuck the E-M1X out the door last night before I went to bed. Some artifacts in the lower left side, but pretty decent nevertheless.
✍️ Reply by emailAuthoritarian Infrastructure
05:43 Saturday, 7 February 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 0.68°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 72% Wind: 20.4mph
Words: 92
Search YouTube for local public hearings about ICE facilities.
The Trump administration is building concentration camps and jails under the guise of mass deportations.
They will be used to hold U.S. citizens under mass arrest when they refuse to hand over power in 2029. ICE agents will be the federal police force used to round up the political enemies of the administration, whether it is led by Trump or not.
Figure it out, people.
Connect the fucking dots.
And when it gets inconvenient to hold people in gulags?
Figure it out.
✍️ Reply by email