Vernal (Spring) Equinox 2025

By Robert Ellison.

Spring Equinox 2025 in Catfood Earth

Spring has sprung (09:02 UTC, March 20, 2025) for the Northern Hemisphere and Autumn is here if you are south of the Equator. Rendered in Catfood Earth.

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Vernal (Spring) Equinox 2025 #code #earth #catfood #equinox #spring #vernal #autumn The exact moment (09:02 UTC, March 20, 2025) of the Spring Equinox in Catfood Earth. )

Building a Digital Photo Frame

By Robert Ellison.

Building a Digital Photo Frame

Google recently bricked my digital photo frame, so I set out to build a new one. I did this in two parts - a Raspberry Pi to display the photos, and a C# script to preprocess them. The second part is optional but worth it.

The display side of the project turned out to be way easier than I thought. There is a utility called fbi that will run a slideshow to a HDMI monitor. Create a boot SD card from the lite version of Raspberry PI OS, copy over your photos and then run:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install fbi

You can then connect a monitor and test that images are displaying as expected.

Create a file called launch.sh with the following:

#!/bin/sh
# launch.sh
# run photos
sleep 2m
fbi -T 1 -noverbose -mode 1366x768-30 -t 60 -u -blend 1500 -a /home/rob/photos/*.jpg

-T 1 uses the first display, -noverbose just shows the photos, -mode depends on your monitor and is likely safe to omit, -t 60 changes the image ever sixty seconds, -u displays in a random order, -blend 1500 cross fades for 1.5 seconds between images, -a is auto zoom and the path at the end is where ever you copied your photos to.

The sleep 2m command allows the system to complete booting and bring up the login prompt. Without this the photos might start first and then the login shell ends up on top, which is pretty boring.

Make the script executable (chmod 755 launch.sh) and then edit your crontab:

sudo crontab -e

Add the following:

@reboot sh /home/rob/launch.sh >/home/rob/logs/cronlog 2>&1
30 22 * * * /sbin/shutdown -h now

The first line runs the launch.sh script at startup and sends any output to a log file (adjust paths to your system). The second line will shut down the Pi at 10:30pm every day. I use this so I can control when it's running with a smart plug - the plug turns everything on at 7am and off at 10:45pm, and the shutdown prevents the Pi from getting in a bad state from having power removed unceremoniously. If you want it running all the time just omit this line.

Reboot and you should have a working digital photo frame. Fbi will do a reasonable job with your photos, but I wanted something better.

The C# script below preprocesses all my photos to make the best use of the frame. I'm using an old 1366x768 TV so I want all the photos at that resolution and 16x9 aspect ratio. Many of my photos are 4x3, or 3x4, or 9x16, or something else entirely. I don't want any black borders so cropping will be involved.

Cropping is handled by detecting faces and then trying to keep as many in frame as possible. This uses FaceAiSharp.

Photos are processed in two stages. The first stage just crops horizontal photos to fit the screen. Any vertical photos are saved in a list, and then paired using image embeddings (CLIP using this code). My implementation pairs the most similar photos - it would be easy to do the most different as well.

Here's the code. I run this with C# 9 in VSCode on Windows. You'll probably want to change the input and output folders, and possibly the output resolution as well:

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Building a Digital Photo Frame #code #c# #raspberrypi #ai #ml How to create a Raspberry Pi based digital photo frame with face aware cropping and AI image pairing. )

Bye Skype

By Robert Ellison.

Bye Skype

Microsoft is killing Skype in May 2025. I haven't used it for a few years, but I'm going to shed a tear or two.

It's hard to overestimate how important Skype was a little over 20 years ago. I had recently moved to San Francisco and made a lot of phone calls to friends and family back in the UK. There was this thing called a landline, and as well as local service you had to choose a long distance provider with all sorts of complicated tariffs and fees. Cell phones were their own nightmare and even for SMS you paid per text message. Incomprehensibly, ring tones were on their way to being a multi-billion dollar business. My current phone has been on vibrate for its entire life and I travel the world with free high speed Internet included in my plan. Skype marked the beginning of this transition using P2P to open VoIP and video calls to the masses. I even had a cordless phone that made local calls over the phone line but seamlessly switched to Skype for long distance.

Skype's P2P stack could be used for more than phone calls. I built a business to backup your computer over Skype. It's one of the best things I've ever worked on. The Internet was slow for most people. and so you could do a local backup on LAN and then send incrementals P2P via Skype whenever your computer was idle. We also did superior local backups with full history, encryption and locked file support when most competitors choked on PST files. Skype were kind enough to include us as a premium extra in the client. We did some paid search and PR, but the lion's share of our customer acquisition came from this placement.

My current job involves many Teams calls, but before that we operated on hundreds of Skype channels. Before that work was driven by email and conference calls. I'm ambivalent about this shift. Email has some advantages, and hours of video conferences are way more draining than the voice bridge alternative. Teams brilliantly combines channels and chats that look very similar but work completely differently adding an entirely new mental load to the workday. Skype used to display a special cat emoji if you held down three keys at once. I know which philosophy I prefer.

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Bye Skype #etc #skype #microsoft Memories of Skype, including building a backup business on it, that mysterious cat emoji, and a landline with Skype built in. We'll miss you! )

Google Photos killed my Aura Frame

By Robert Ellison. Updated on Wednesday, March 12, 2025.

A sad looking empty photo frame

I want to do two things with my digital photos. First, keep them safe, especially all those precious memories of random parking meters and unfathomable HVAC mechanisms. Second, enjoy looking at the small subset that are precious family moments. I'm not a special snowflake, these basic requirements should represent a large and competitive market. Unfortunately I'm not holding my breath for much in the way of consumer friendly regulation for the next four years in the US.

Google is making some changes to their Photos API next month, which amount to "Get the fuck out of our Photos API". They're a polite organization so they phrase it a little differently: "We're excited to see the creative solutions developers will build using the new Picker API and the updated Library API.". The developer documentation is a little more pointed: "If your app relies on accessing the user's entire library, you may need to re-evaluate your app or consider alternative approaches."

I have an Aura Carver Mat, a nice digital photo frame that I synced to a shared Google Photos album. Easy for me to add photos, way too easy for the kids to add photos - a fantastic device. As of next month it's ewaste though. I'm not going to upload photos slowly through some picker API like an animal. I'm going to end up building something complicated out of a Raspberry Pi (adds to actuarially unrealistic to do list).

This change doesn't impact backup, because that was already broken. For a while Google Photos nicely integrated with Google Drive and I ended up with a local copy of everything that I could then backup through other means. I'm never going to trust any one company to look after important files and so my philosophy is to backup twice online and once to an external hard drive that lives in a fire safe. (At one point I even built a backup company based on this model).

Google killed the Drive integration and so I MacGyvered together an apps script based solution that used the Google Photos API. This revealed to me that the Photos API would not return location information. Even worse it was impossible to get the full resolution version of a video to download. So it's not like I was in love with the API before this most recent change.

My current approach is a mix of sad and awesome. The sad part is that I use Google Takeout once a month to get an archive of all my online photos. Thankfully this still works. The awesome - I wrote this photo sorter tool that takes the messy download and organizes it by year and month. And I also wrote a volume shadow copy tool that lets you backup a drive without getting hung up on locked files. Those pieces get my photos safely to an external drive, and I upload to Amazon Photos too (the third leg of my backup stool).

Update - fixed with a Raspberry Pi!

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Google Photos killed my Aura Frame #etc #google #photos #aura #backup Google is changing their Photos API so my Aura frame is ewaste. Thoughts on using and backing up digital photos. )

Simple Perceptron

By Robert Ellison. Updated on Monday, February 24, 2025.

Simple Perceptron

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Simple Perceptron #code #ml #perceptron #wml Python notebook illustrating a scratch perceptron implementation as well as an sklearn example. )

Adding AI to Todoist with Google Apps Script and OpenAI

By Robert Ellison. Updated on Sunday, May 18, 2025.

An AI completes a task on a To Do List

This simple script adds useful AI to Todoist and runs in the cloud on Google Apps Script.

I use Todoist to run my life, and my dream is for it to be able to complete certain types of tasks for me. With OpenAI Operator and Anthropic Computer Use this is getting closer and closer to reality. Yes, there is a risk that Todoist spends all of my money on paper clips. But there is also the upside that it will eventually do my weekly shopping, pay my bills and call back the dentist's office. Google's new Ask for Me is promising too, even if right now it's just going to bother nail salons out of existence.

I already put together an Alexa replacement using a Raspberry Pi and the OpenAI realtime API. It switches lights on and off, adds things to my to do list, figures out when the next L is coming and more (I'll blog more about this soon).  One thing I learned is that this kind of thing can get pretty expensive. I can see why Amazon is procrastinating on an LLM Alexa. But costs keep going down, and the future will get more evenly distributed over time.

The first version of this script has two objectives. Respond to tasks, and create calendar events. Here's the script:

To get this working you need API keys from OpenAi and Todoist. Perplexity is optional, if you have a key add it at the top. It only works with tasks that have the right label, ai is the default - you can change this with AI_TASK_LABEL. I initially developed this with o1, but it looks like the tool use was rushed out too quickly and it calls the same tool repeatedly. GPT-4o works well enough and you can test switching out the model by changing OPENAI_MODEL.

Quick configuration guide - create a Google Apps Script project in Google Drive. Paste in the code above and add your API keys and any other desired configuration changes. Go to Project Settings in the right hand navigation and make sure your time zone is correct. Then go to Triggers and schedule the function trigger to run periodically (I use every 5 minutes). You should be done.

Back in Todoist add the ai label to a task (or whatever label you set in the script) and the AI will respond. With the current script there are two use cases - ask it to create an event (it can invite people, add details to the description, etc.), or ask it to research some aspect of the task you're working on. I think this is helpful because it has the full context of the task, and while you're working in Todoist it's useful to store the history there as well.

The point here is to extend the number of tasks that the script can take on. Add new tools for the AI to consider in the getTools() function, and then wire that tool into an implementation in generateAIResponse(). createCalendarAppointment() is a good example of using built in Google services - as well as the calendar it's pretty easy to interact with email, Google docs and many more. I'm planning to add file uploads as well, and will update this post with iterations of the script that add helpful functionality.

OpenAI recommends around 20 tools as the maximum. At that point it might be necessary to break this up into multiple assistants with different tool collections.

Let me know in the comments if you manage to use this to start crossing anything off your list.

Updated 2025-02-17 01:18:

Updated the script to support images and Perplexity. 

Image support takes advantage of multimodal input. Any image attachments will be sent as part of the conversation. This uses the large thumbnail in Todoist by default. It supports JPEG, GIF, PNG and WEBP. If a thumbnail is not available it will send the full size image without resizing, depending on how large this might not be accepted by OpenAI. 

Perplexity is implemented as a tool (so OpenAI is always called, and it may optionally call out to Perplexity to get more information). This is useful for web search, local search and knowledge past the training cutoff for the OpenAI model. It's optional, if you don't include a Perplexity API key then it just won't be used. 

Here's a simple use case - add a photo of a book and ask Todoist to find the URL where you can order it on Kindle. 

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Adding AI to Todoist with Google Apps Script and OpenAI #code #ai #openai #todoist #ml #appsscript #gas #google #perplexity How to add an AI assistant to Todoist, includes code to respond to tasks and create calendar appointments with gpt-4o. )

Bringing Sanity to Window Replacement in San Francisco

By Robert Ellison. Updated on Sunday, September 28, 2025.

The least complex window you're allowed to install in San Francisco

TLDR: If you live in San Francisco and have windows, please consider signing this letter.

I need to replace my front window. The wood is rotten. While San Francisco never gets that cold, all the cold there is whistles in through the gaps.

In general I want to make my house a little bit more energy efficient whenever I replace something. I'd assumed I could find some nice looking double paned replacements and get on with my life. Sane jurisdictions even require certain levels of insulation for this kind of project. San Francisco went the other way. There is a 14 page guide to the requirements. Which boil down to window originalism, if your house is old enough:

"Another significant difference is that vinyl, fiberglass, and aluminum windows often do not have an important detail that is common on most older wood windows: the Ogee (pronounced Oh-jee) lugs at the bottom of the top sash (also called the meeting rail) of a double-hung window."

Yes, when Meta and Red Hat cancelled their conferences in San Francisco I'm pretty sure it was the lack of Ogees.

What about some double paned units?

"There should be an interior space bar, preferably of a dark color, within the insulated unit that visually divides the interior and exterior grilles."

This relates to divided light windows (i.e. you've got multiple panes of glass in one window). You might want to just have a single double paned window, but no, it needs to be in keeping with the original. You might then think that you could put some wood details over that single window but no, just in case someone looks closely and at an angle there has to be a shim inside to simulate it being multiple individual panes.

Doesn't the city care about the environment at all?

"While the advantages of double-paned windows are well known, a properly weatherstripped, single-glazed sash window can greatly reduce or eliminate air, noise and air infiltration (where most energy is lost)."

Greatly reduced is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Looking at U Values here, the rate of energy transfer in watts per square meter per Kelvin (1°C = 1K) – W/m2K, old single pane windows are over 4.8, modern double paned are 1.3 and triple paned 0.8. Lower is better, almost four times better just for double paned.

I don't know exactly how these requirements came into force. It could be out of touch planners wanting windows for a more civilized era. Maybe there is a concentrated benefit / diffuse cost thing going on in favor of a few eye wateringly expensive custom window builders. But when you're trying to pretend that single paned windows are a boon to the environment something has clearly gone very wrong.

Even at the aesthetic level I'm not sure we need all the Ogees. I love the chaotic architectural chaos of San Francisco. The hot pink victorian next to the grey brutalist remodel. It's part of the charm of the city. Also, the expense of complying with what was popular 100 years ago cannot help with affordability, a key challenge.

Happily my supervisor, Myrna Melgar, has proposed legislation to shred this document and allow most people to choose replacement windows that best fit their needs. It looks like her proposal is currently on a three month vacation with the planning department. If you have windows and live in San Francisco you should probably care about this, and you can sign a letter to show your support for the change here.

Updated 2025-05-03 17:06:

This passed!!!

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Bringing Sanity to Window Replacement in San Francisco #politics #sanfrancisco #windows #planning #sfpol San Francisco's insane window replacement rules; legislation to improve the situation; an open letter you can sign to help. )