Coronation
In 1994 Prince Charles promised to be a defender of faith rather than the faith. The BBC has some disturbing news on his coronation plans:
"Despite changes designed to reflect other faiths, the three oaths the King will take and form the heart of the service remain unchanged, including the promise to maintain "the Protestant Reformed Religion"
Less than half of the UK now claim to be Christian. An established religion is as much of an embarrassing relic as the monarchy itself. This is disappointing, but the shocker is that we're being asked to pledge allegiance:
"The order of service will read: "All who so desire, in the Abbey, and elsewhere, say together: I swear that I will pay true allegiance to Your Majesty, and to your heirs and successors according to law. So help me God."
Modern democracy or Game of Thrones? I personally refuse to bend the fucking knee. At least with his mother there was a polite pretense that the allegiance worked the other way round.
Let's disestablish the Church of England, kick out the lords and elect an upper chamber (or establish legislative service) and re-join the EU as a humble republic.
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Shipping a website in a day with Generative AI
It usually takes me a few weeks to get a new website up and running. Last weekend I tried an experiment with Cloudflare Pages and generative AI.
I have wanted to find an excuse to test Pages for a while. It's a pretty awesome product. I'm not doing anything too fancy with it - I have a local generator app that creates the pages for my site. Committing to the right branch in git automatically deploys to Cloudflare's edge network. It seems to do the right thing with all the file types I've thrown at it so far. My only complaint at this point is that it doesn't handle subdirectories. Everything needs to hang off the root unless you want to write some code. I think this is possible with Cloudflare Workers but that's for another day.
The generative piece is automatically writing content for review and publication. For each generated page I'm creating a prompt to write the post, and then another prompt to summarize it for meta descriptions and referencing it from other pages. I also create an embedding to use for interlinking related posts. Finally I create a third prompt to gin up an appropriate image. The site generator stitches these together into HTML and as soon as I commit, the updates are live.
The site is not yet a work of art, and there is plenty to optimize and add, but the basic thing was working in a few hours. It's all ridiculously cheap as well. I'm more than a little frightened for Google given how much of this must be going on right now. And then the next generation of LLMs will be trained on the garbage produced by the current crop.
My super rapid site is called Shop Stories, collecting / dreaming takes of ecommerce heroics. I'll report back if anyone goes there.
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Blogging on reMarkable
Crossed a small thing off the bucket list today.
I've used a reMarkable paper tablet for a few years. It's a distraction free eInk writing device with a long battery life and no app store. At least half of productivity is getting stuff out of your head. The reMarkable excels at this without the risk of losing anything.
My dream was always to blog from written notes but the handwriting recognition isn't good enough. Or maybe my handwriting is just too bad. I probably could have got into medical school on that basis alone.
reMarkable recently released a keyboard case and I just got my preorder. With a few small changes to handle its HTML email format I'm up and running. There is still no app support, but you can send email and happily that's been how I post to my blog for over a decade.
It won't work for everything but it's great to have a new option.
So far the only thing I'm missing is a spell checker. Not my strong point so any typos are reMarkable's fault. Hopefully this will be added in a future update.
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3D Printing a Window Mount for a Google Nest Indoor Wired Gen 2 Camera
Having sworn off Google Nest I just ended up with two more cameras. I didn't pay for them. Google has announced that the original DropCam units are no longer supported. Rather than just knife me in the kidneys like the rest of the smart home industry they provided free replacements.
I stick these in a window looking out. I learned this the hard way after a Nest Outdoor was immediately cut from its secure wiring and stolen. And then a second one. The police thought this was hilarious and whoever stole them is/are now enjoying worthless lumps of plastic. The DropCam was nicely designed to clip out of its mount and into whatever accessory grabbed your fancy. The Google Nest Cam Indoor Wired Gen 2 (snappy name) has a heavy and barely articulated base that makes it worthless for many applications. It also doesn't look like it will detach.
There doesn't seem to be any elegant solution here so I came up with a brutal one.
Step 1: Hacksaw. Just cut off that base as close to the camera as possible.
Step 2: A chute to introduce the camera to the window at a reasonable angle and block indoor reflections. This gets attached to the window with strong double sided tape.
Here's the OpenSCAD code for the window mount:
There is also an STL file on thingiverse.
One more horrible hack to confess to. My filament kept getting tangled while printing this. I have it on an under-counter spool and I think it's just too loose so the printer pulls out more slack than it needs and then gets in a mess. Seems like it should be a common problem but all the advice I could find was worthless. I wrapped the spool with kitchen towel until I created some friction but with enough give that the 3D printer could ingest the filament. There is probably a better answer with a more expensive spool that has some tension built in, but this was enough to get the part to print for me.
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Milky Way Rises over South Lake Tahoe
Timelapse of the Milky Way rising, shot from South Lake Tahoe, California. This shows two consecutive nights from slightly different perspectives. In the first segment the bright lights at the bottom right hand of the frame are cars descending from Echo Summit on highway 50.
5,998 frames total at 4k 60fps shot on a Sony A7C / 20mm, f1.8, 5s, ISO 1600. Post processed in LRTimelapse, Adobe Lightroom, Filmstro Pro and DaVinci Resolve Studio.
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Tree with Lichen
SONY ILCE-7C 20mm f22.0 1/30s ISO250
A tree with lichen at Echo Summit on Highway 50 in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
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Surf Scooter
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I think a Surf Scooter, surfing a wave just off Fort Funston in San Francisco.
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Reviews for April 2023
Spoilers!
Movies
The Thing
I caught the 2011 prequel on Netflix which I completely missed when it came out. The setup was pretty great and then it all got fairly boring once the killing started. As a prequel it's set in the 80's and it's really hard to tell that this is true. There are no cell phones, but then you probably don't have any signal in Antarctica. The vehicles are old, but how often does a Norwegian research station swap out its snow-cats anyway? And everyone is wearing what you'd probably always wear to such a cold destination. It was pretty average horror and I wish I hadn't bothered.
Music
Raw Raw
Nice new K.Flay track.
Podcasts
A Very British Cult
A Very British Cult investigates a life coaching outfit called Lighthouse which seems to be very very expensive and for some reason brings some sort of cheap UK Scientology to mind.
Any Questions
Every so often I'll review a podcast that is a regular listen rather than a series. It feels odd to call Any Questions a podcast as I grew up with it on the radio, but that's what it is to me now.
Any Questions is a long-running comedy panel show in the mold of Just a Minute. Politicians have one minute to talk about a subject without answering the question. As with many BBC panel shows there are many long running gags and in-jokes, like asking for more houses (just not in the community where the program is being hosted this week!), or any question involving HS2.
I went to see it live once but didn't get my question picked. There is a companion program called Any Answers which is less comedy and more care-in-the-community for people who decide to phone in.
I'm Not a Monster Series 2
Series 2 of I'm Not a Monster is The Shamima Begum Story. Begum was stripped of British citizenship after joining IS in Syria as a teenager. The Home Office believes that she is a terrorist and others that she is a victim of child trafficking. Regardless of the truth this didn't turn out well for her and it's hard not to feel some sympathy.
TV
Euphoria Seasons 1 and 2
Euphoria season 1 answers the question: what if Bret Easton Ellis had written Beverly Hills 90210? It's unflinching and hard to watch, a crazy mix of every horrible story about what the teens are up to these days. It makes me want to move my kids to Norway and home school, although I can't due to Brexit. Season 2 answers the question: what if Bret Easton Ellis quit and they had to go with a committee instead. It's initially gratuitous and then gradually becomes boring and self referential. I don't think I'm up for Season 3.
I downloaded this to watch on a flight and all things considered it's probably good that it didn't work. But HBO, really. I've been paying you for years and using the same phone and account for years and the second you don't like the look of my IP address you bail on me? For travel only Netflix really gets this right and works pretty consistently. Every other streaming provider seems to fail horribly at the slightest sign of travel.
(All images included with ITHCWY reviews are the property of their respective owners and are used to illustrate reviews only.)
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Links for April 2023
It’s Not ‘Deaths of Despair.’ It’s Deaths of Children.
Defund the #GOP
--
Fuck the Monarchy
+1
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Bangalore and Back, a Time Lapse
The latest installment in my series of Bangalore time lapses. This one is about the interminable journey and all of the airports.
