Tuesday, October 08, 2024
Friday, October 04, 2024
A Raycast extension I contributed to
I contributed a couple of commands to the excellent Raycast app and command launcher (similar to Alfred). The commands are called Transform and Transform Preview and are in the ChatGPT Quick Actions extension (needs a ChatGPT User API key).
- beautify JSON
- do the math
- count the occurrences of each line
Things I bought that I wish I knew I could have gotten at Ikea for cheaper
These are things I bought that I wish i knew Ikea sold so I could have bought them more cheaply:
- doormats
- rugs
- saucepan
- boot tray
- cleaning gloves
- microfibre cloths
- soap dispensers
- flat bedsheets
- food containers
- garbage cans
- measuring cup
- tape measure
- can opener
- salt and pepper shakers
Friday, September 27, 2024
Asking ChatGPT for voting advice
It's elections time in British Columbia, so I asked ChatGPT:
do the bc conservatives or the bc ndp align more with catholic values?
It had a detailed response that ended with:
Conclusion:
• BC Conservatives may align more closely with Catholic teachings on pro-life issues, religious freedom, and traditional family values, though these are not always central to their platform.
• BC NDP aligns more with the Church’s teachings on social justice, care for the poor and vulnerable, and environmental stewardship, which are key aspects of Catholic social teaching.
A Catholic voter in BC may weigh these different elements depending on which aspects of their faith are most important to them in the political context.
So not a straightforward answer, but gives good food for thought.
Tuesday, September 24, 2024
Arc Browser
I’m really liking the Arc browser. One cool thing it does is: if you hover over any link and press Shift, it displays a small popup with an AI summary of the web page behind the link.
Tuesday, July 30, 2024
Another cool thing about Microsoft edge for GitHub users
Another cool thing about Microsoft Edge (in addition to my post before) is you can select some code on GitHub then choose Ask Copilot, and it will explain whatever you selected on the right:
Saturday, March 30, 2024
What i like about the Microsoft Edge browser
I'm really liking the Microsoft Edge browser on Mac:
- The Read Aloud feature is really good. The voice quality is as good as Speechify
- I like the vertical tabs. The only thing I don't like is the vertical tabs snap shut after you click X on one of them, so it's tedious if you want to close a bunch of them.
- I like the Split Screen feature. You can right-click a link and choose Open Link In Right Split Screen
Saturday, February 10, 2024
Workaround for AI hallucination: Make them sound less sure
At work I asked our Confluence (wiki) AI, "What does BADF stand for?" It answered
BAMDF stands for Bidder Advertiser Metadata Framework
But I couldn't find “Bidder Advertiser” anywhere in our wiki.
It turns out this was completely wrong. My coworkers told me it actually stands for "Binary Augmented MDF".
To work around the hallucination problem, maybe AIs should prefix everything they say with “I think that...” or “It seems to me that…” instead of sounding 100% certain all the time.
Wednesday, January 24, 2024
Sunday, December 31, 2023
My Holland Code
My Holland code is still CIA, as it was in 2020. In 2004, it was different: IAR.
Sunday, December 03, 2023
Favourite Things
- Chocolate chip mint ice cream
- Trying new technological devices and apps
- Audiobooks, like Jane Austen novels
- Podcasts, like Called to Communion or The Journey Home
- Wrestling with my son
- Assisting at Mass
- Eating out with my wife
- Harrison Hot Springs
- Fettuccini Alfredo
- Computer programming, especially UI projects or small backend projects
- Reading tech news
- Producing quick data visualizations
- Comparison shopping, researching products, reading reviews
- Conversion stories
- Tools and books for self-improvement
- Being a great dad
- Personal finance
- Lord of the Rings, Narnia, other imaginative fiction
- Watching tech documentaries
- Visiting the beach with my family
- ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot
- Computer programming tools
- Smart home devices
- Lex Fridman podcast - interviews remarkable people
Sunday, August 14, 2022
One Mouse
One mouse, two mice.
One house, two hice.
One louse, two lice.
One blouse, two blice.
One nouse, two nice.
One rouse, two rice.
One twouse, two twice.
One ouse, two ice.
Thursday, June 23, 2022
"Grug Brained Developer" in a Yoda voice
A couple of days ago, The Grug Brained Developer was posted to Hacker News. It is a collection of programming wisdom written in a caveman style, like:
Instead grug try to limit damage of big brain developer early in project by giving them thing like UML diagram (not hurt code, probably throw away anyway) or by demanding working demo tomorrow
When I shared the link at work, one of my co-workers said, in her head, she was reading it in a Yoda voice.
Well it turns out I actually do have a speech synthesizer app with a Yoda voice! It's a pricey app called Proloquo4Text and it has a voice called Little Creature which sounds like Yoda.
For your enjoyment, here is the app reading “The Eternal Enemy: Complexity” from The Grug Brained Developer, in a Yoda voice.
Thursday, May 13, 2021
Wordblender
Maybe I'm the only one in the world who needs this tool, but I made a webpage called Wordblender. You paste in a bunch of text and it will chunk it up into chunks of 3 consecutive words. It then shuffles the chunks and outputs it.
Use this if you have a long piece of text and you don't want to understand the overall meaning, but you do want to scan it for small runs of local meaning that might be interesting to you.
Like I said, pretty unique use case. Leave a comment if you find this useful for some reason.
Friday, March 05, 2021
Love static typing
I'm currently working in an all-TypeScript codebase, and have also recently been working in Go, and I must say I'm really loving static typing, especially compared to huge JavaScript and Python codebases. Why? Simply because it adds some checks to make sure that the connections between pieces of my code are still sound when I move code around. It doesn't check that everything is correct, but checking connections is an essential sanity check.
Sunday, January 24, 2021
Don't follow Marie Kondo's advice to give your books away - you'll regret it
A couple of years ago, I read Marie Kondo's The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up and one of its recommendations was to part with a bunch of books you don't use. I dutifully followed it and gave 1 bookshelf of books to Value Village (keeping 1 bookshelf of books for myself).
How I regret that decision.
Years of accumulated books, books I wanted to read someday, books I want to read today – gone, just like that. I warn my fellow bookophiles to not follow Marie Kondo's advice. Do not part with your books. Or if you must part with some, part with the ones you hate. Keep the ones you haven't read yet but plan to read someday, or the ones you plan to re-read someday.
Some books I regret throwing out:
- My undergraduate physics textbook (Halliday and Resnick). In fact, all of my university textbooks. Engineering Physics was my major and I just threw out everything I'd learned. Fortunately bookfinder.com lists an old edition of Halliday and Resnick for $20 so I will at least recoup that.
- A great undergraduate biology textbook – I think it was by Mader.
- Dialogues of St. Catherine of Siena. Never got around to reading much of it, but I'd like to sometime.
Tuesday, December 29, 2020
What to say during 1:1s
My old manager challenged me to do 1:1s with all 22 engineers in my business unit (RollWorks), and out of that came the following three topics that I would enjoy sharing in any 1:1, whether with someone above me or someone below me.
- Anything fun done recently or any hobbies. For them and for you. This helps to connect on a personal level, which is always good.
- Main worries or priorities (or what is currently being worked on). For them and for you. It's good to know someone's top concerns or what they are working on.
- Anything learned recently or new tools. For them and for you. It's fun to share something you learned recently.
Wednesday, December 23, 2020
Annoying basic things that golang lacks
Go lacks some basic features that I am going to document here:
- abs() for integers
- min() and max() for integers
- sets
Wednesday, November 18, 2020
Lego City piece count vs price
It is interesting to look at a chart of Lego piece counts vs. price. The higher the set is, the better the value. Here is a spreadsheet of Lego City piece counts vs. price for November 18, 2020:
Friday, June 05, 2020
Why IntelliJ is better than VSCode
But will VSCode let me click the line to jump to the code? No it won't unfortunately. IntelliJ will. In fact, IntelliJ will even let me set a breakpoint in the code so I can stop and look around.
And I was really hoping that VSCode could serve my editor needs for any language.
Saturday, March 07, 2020
Favourite authors and influences
- Kent Beck
- Dave Thomas
- Marshall Rosenberg
- Stephen Covey
- Richard Bolles
- Edward Feser
- St. Joseph
- Fr. Jacques Philippe
- John Gottman
- Gordon Neufeld
- Jane Austen
- St. Francis de Sales
- Josef Pieper
Monday, February 10, 2020
Contexts vs Witch
Advantages of Witch:
- Can switch to a specific tab in Chrome and some other apps
- Faster than Witch. Sometimes Witch takes a few seconds to open for some reason.
- Reliably binds to Command+Tab. When Witch is bound to Command+Tab, sometimes the old switcher opens on Command+Tab, for example, when the Google login screen is being shown. Contexts doesn't have this problem.
Sunday, January 19, 2020
My Holland Code
My secondary ones are Artistic and Realistic. Artistic people like to use their creativity and have artistic abilities. Realistic people like to work with machines and tools. I have a bit of both although they aren't my primary strengths. I am a visual person and I like to show data visually. I also like to use my tools to do minor household repairs.
Great software engineers I love working with
- Andrey Sukhachev - Ning
- Thomas Dudziak - Ning
- Jon Hartlaub - Ning
- Henning Schmiedehausen - Ning
- David Sklar - Ning
- Martin Traverso - Ning
- Miguel Lara Encabo - AdRoll
- Emmanuel Garcia - AdRoll
- Piyush Srivastava - AdRoll
- Kushagra Verma - AdRoll
- Nathan Clegg - AdRoll/Ning
- (to be continued)
Thursday, November 29, 2018
Meld: A good diff for OSX
- It has the option to start with two blank textareas that you can paste text into.
- It allows you to edit the textareas.
- It gets the diff right almost all of the time.
- It has optional line wrapping. Some other tools do not have this (such as Beyond Compare).
- It can compare directories.
Friday, November 09, 2018
Saturday, September 22, 2018
Comparison of Surrey BC municipal political parties
This is a comparison of the Surrey BC municipal political parties, drawn from articles in the Surrey Now-Leader newspaper.
LRT (Light Rail Transit) | Municipal police force instead of RCMP | |
Surrey First | Go ahead with LRT | Hold a referendum |
Safe Surrey Coalition | SkyTrain instead of LRT | Change to municipal police force |
Surrey Integrity Now | Go ahead with LRT for Guildford-to-Newton. More consultation for Phase 2. | Weigh options first. Leaning toward keeping RCMP. |
Proudly Surrey | Go ahead with LRT + cross-border US bus network | |
Progressive Sustainable Surrey | Interurban over LRT or SkyTrain | |
People First Surrey | SkyTrain instead of LRT |
Saturday, February 24, 2018
Comparison of smart water bottles
Hidrate Spark | Thermos Smart Lid | Ozmo | H2OPal | |
Price | 60 CAD | 90 CAD | 133 CAD | |
CamelCamelCamel reasonable price | 60 CAD | 90 CAD | 133 CAD | |
Fakespot grade/adjusted rating | F/ | B/3 | F | A/3.5 |
Pros | - alert: app, glow | - rechargeable - alert: app - easy setup |
- rechargeable - alert: LED, vibration - easy setup |
- alert: app |
Cons | - paint peels off - quality issues - sync issues - coin battery - complex setup - corny notifications |
- quality issues - sync issues - skips sips |
- quality issues - sync issues - don't need coffee detection |
- quality issues - coin battery |
Other reviews | PCMag | PCMag |
Thursday, February 08, 2018
Handy prioritization categories
- Safety
- Urgent damage
- Prevent long-term health hazards
- Maintenance / Prevent long-term damage
- Money-saving upgrades
- Low cost, high impact improvements
- Big nuisance factor
- Cosmetic improvements
Saturday, April 29, 2017
BC Provincial Election resources
Voters who are unsure of who to vote for should check out these two resources:
- https://votecompass.cbc.ca/ A long questionnaire that helps you to figure out which party your beliefs align with.
- http://www.icanparty.ca/en/bc-may-9th-2017/ A table comparing the platforms of the three major parties.