Tip Tips

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Took a bunch of stuff to the tip today. Going to the tip is becoming increasingly complicated. Now they have lots of different categories for rubbish. My pro-tip (which I will follow for next time) is to put different rubbish in different bags. Otherwise you will be standing there for ages pulling bits of cardboard out of a huge bag that you’ve just filled. Like I did. The other tip (at least where I go) is to go in the morning. The afternoons seem to be a lot busier.

One of the things that used to puzzle me back in the day was “How to you get rid of an old dustbin?”. If you leave it out for the dustman they just empty it and then move on. It turns out that the answer to this age old riddle is to take the bin to the tip and throw it into the skip by hand…

Bank Holiday shock - with added AI

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I was going to write “We had good weather today which was a bit of a shock, what with it being a bank holiday”. My blog host now has an AI button. I asked it to write something too:

We had good weather today. Bank holiday weather is always a topic of conversation in the UK, and unfortunately, it's typically not the most favorable. On the one hand, we have high hopes for clear skies and warm temperatures, but on the other hand, we are often met with gloomy, rainy weather. It's not uncommon for people to plan for a barbeque or picnic and then be forced to relocate indoors due to the rain. However, there are those rare moments when the weather decides to cooperate, and we are blessed with sunny days and blue skies, allowing us to fully enjoy the holiday weekend. So, while the weather may be unpredictable, it never stops us from making the most of our bank holidays.

There are a lot more words here, but I’m not sure how much value has been added…

A free man

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I’ve shipped my “Bluetooth Chord Keyboard” article to Hackspace magazine. I’m now properly unemployed for a while with nothing outstanding (except perhaps for my talent - hem hem). It will be nice to have a break from doing much. Personally, I give it around a fortnight before I’ll be looking for things to do……

New Chair

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It’s amazing what having a rubbish skip next door but one can do for your life. I’ve just got a new chair for my office. No - not from the skip. That’s where the old chair is going. The old chair is still OK to sit on, but the vinyl covering began to moult around a year ago giving of clouds of plastic particles each time I sat down on it. Then it developed this amazing squeak when I leaned back.

When I took the old chair to pieces for disposal I discovered a date stamp of 2003. I think its time had definitely come.

Power Cut Friday

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Of course this might not be what caused it

First thing that happened was that the shower failed. It was producing nothing more than a low buzzing sound. Not what you want if you are stood naked underneath it. I’ve had this happen before. The usual solution is to fit a new shower (after you have got dressed). I’ve done this several times over the years. Once with jetlag. But I was hoping for a bunged up filter. I took the shower to bits and I was just removing the filter cover when the 3D printer stopped with an alarm. And wouldn’t power on again. I was just wondering what the third thing was going to be (problems like this always come in threes) when when the washing machine flashed up a fault code.

Then everything went off and I relaxed. It must be a power thing. I put the shower back together. And then the mobile phone signal vanished. I was expecting that important things like cellular networks to have some kind of battery backup, but apparently not. That was kind of worrying. We were completely out of contact with the rest of the world. This is how we must have felt in the seventies. Except that in the seventies our landline phones still worked.

The power came back after about twenty minutes. We did eventually get a text telling us that the power had gone off (in case anyone hadn’t noticed) but that was all. I reckon that for about twenty minutes before the power failed we had been running on a low mains voltage. Anything using a “switched mode” power supply would have kept working. But anything with a motor in it would be suffering. So computers and screens all worked fine. Showers not so much.

I always thought that the power companies tried very hard to provide either 250 volts or nothing, but it turns out that this is not the case. The good news is that everything has come back fine and so all we had to do was reset a few clocks and throw away a half completed 3D print.

A few weeks ago the UK had a test of an “emergency broadcast” thing where most people’s phones buzzed with the message “Do not worry. This is a test”. This made us all feel much safer (except of course for those who didn’t get the message). However, if It turns out that at the first hint of trouble our phones are all going to be disconnected it makes all that effort seem like a bit of a waste of time.

Coronation Curtains

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We watched the coronation today. At least, we watched the interesting bits. One thing that struck me is that Marvell do a much better job with their costumes that we do. The Guardians of the Galaxy have much better threads than this lot. I suppose that back in the day the outfits of all the great and the good seemed much more impressive. Most of the things I saw people wearing today left me thinking that someone’s front room curtains now have great big archbishop shaped holes in them….

Bins and Binnability

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The new kitchen bin arrived today. The old one broke and the type of replacement was the subject of some heated discussion. At one stage I said “But I’m not sure any of these will do exactly what we want” to which the reply was “But at the moment we don’t have a bin”. Fair point. It is always important to remember that with some things, including bins, the perfect is the enemy of the good.

We got the new bin out of the box and put it in the kitchen. It’s perfect.

ChatGPT and my existential crisis

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Last week I discovered that ChatGPT can write “In the style of Rob Miles”. I’m not sure if it will do this for everyone. The internet creates bubbles of personalisation so that our searches find the kinds of things that we like, and perhaps ChatGPT does that too. Perhaps if you ask for something “in the style of Rob Miles” you’ll get the version that fits with your interests. Even so, ChatGPT knows about a version of me.

ChatGPT knows me because I’ve been blogging and posting stuff for over 20 years. There’s a lot of Rob on the internet. Although I must admit that all those years ago when I decided to put up a blog post every day I didn’t think that it would be a step on the road to creating a computerised copy.

It is a tiny bit worrying. Do I need to exist any more, now that there is a freely available version online? People have been known to pay me to write things “in the style of Rob Miles” but now anyone can do it. Where will this lead? Folks might get ChatGPT to write horrible things in my style. Even worse, they might get paid instead of me. When I put my blog up I don’t remember ticking a box that said “I allow companies obsessed with shareholder value to mine this data and use it to create machines that can imitate me.” Oh well. Welcome to the modern world. It is a form of immortality I suppose. At least until ChatGPT finds a better Rob Miles

Coding with Covid

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I had lots of plans for the next week or so. None of which included catching Covid. But there you are. Apparently there is a lot of it about at the moment. I’m the only person in the family who has tested positive so far, which means that I’m confined to upstairs and can only eat things which can be slid under the door. Fortunately I like pizza. The good news is that I’m getting a lot of code written at the moment.

Mudfall

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Today was going great right up to the point where I fell on my back in the mud. I was just about to shout “Careful, it might be slippy” to our six year old charge when I illustrated this fact to great effect by falling over. Fortunately no lasting damage was done, although I did have to spend the rest of the trip walking round in a slowly solidifying coat and jeans.

Video payoff

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I’m recording video walkthroughs for my Begin to Code Cloud book at the moment. I’m really pleased I’m doing this. Today I found an horrendous issue with a setting which broke a bunch of demos in the book text. Moral of the story folks: don’t just use your main machine for demos you want to give away; it will have configurations that make things work for you that won’t work for anyone else….