I recently bought an aranet 4 from Canadian Tire, of all places. Here’s my review.
TL;DR: It’s calibrated, convenient, and easy to use, and your indoor CO2 readings may surprise you.
Read more
Aranet 4 review
Read “The Auditor and the Exorcist” free online
In 2019, I posted here about a novelette I wrote for TechDirt. The people behind TechDirt had put together an anthology of stories about the future of work, Working Futures. I’ve since put that novelette, “The Auditor and the Exorcist,” up on my writing site as a free read.
Read more
Using GPT-2 as a continuous writing prompt generator via AI Dungeon
OpenAI has released an API for accessing GPT-3, an AI text generator that’s capable of generating much longer responses than GPT-2. The API is currently in closed beta, and while I’ve requested access, I haven’t gotten it (yet?) But, I learned from Mario Dian’s blog about AI Dungeon, a text-based dungeon game powered by GPT-2 and/or GPT-3. Imagine a text-based adventure game, like Zork–that’s the feel of AI Dungeon, but instead of being programmed behind the scenes by something like ChoiceScript, it’s using GPT-2 (free version) or GPT-3 (paid version) to generate text.
I’m interested in exploring GPT-2 and GPT-3 for fiction generation, so I gave the free version of AI Dungeon a try as I was working on a short piece of flash fiction. I didn’t want AI Dungeon to write a story for me, or even to write parts of a story. I wanted to use it as a tool to spur my own creativity. Read more
Scraping web data
I wanted to get some data off an agent listing website and into a spreadsheet. I’d been meaning to play around with python for web scraping and this was the perfect excuse: There were just enough results that it would take longer to manually copy and paste them than to write a little python program. (I never want to automate something that will take less time to do than to automate, as long as I’m only going to do it once or twice…)
Read more
Service Battery warning on macOS
Scene: INT. LATE NIGHT.
NATALKA is typing on a MACBOOK AIR.
Suddenly, the screen goes dark. Silence. The MACBOOK AIR has shut down with no warning.
Read more
The future of work
The people behind the American tech industry blog TechDirt have put together an anthology of stories about the future of work called (appropriately) Working Futures, and I’m excited to have a story in it. Read more
Jami (Gnu Ring) review
An unavoidable fact of database support life is webconferences with clients or users. Most of the time, we’re more interested in what’s going on onscreen than in each others’ faces. But every now and then we need to have a face-to-face. Skype is popular, but I recently had the chance to try out a FOSS alternative with better security: Jami.
Read more
Blogs to read in the Oracle DBA/Developer world
Earlier this month, I conducted a totally unscientific survey on Twitter, asking where people got their Oracle news from. Twitter and the NoCOUG Journal were two popular sources, along with a wide range of blogs. Here are some of the blogs that the Oracle DBA & Dev superstars in my Twitter like to read, along with my own recommendations.
HOWTO solve any problem recursively, PL/SQL edition…
PROCEDURE solve (my_problem IN varchar2) IS BEGIN my_idea := have_great_idea (my_problem) ; my_code := start_coding (my_idea) ; IF i_hit_complications (my_idea) THEN new_problem := the_complications (my_idea); solve (new_problem); ELSE NULL; --we will never get here END IF; END solve;
This abuse of recursion was inspired by @ThePracticalDev !
What’s in a name? – “Brittany” edition
How do you spell “Brittany”? The picture above has four well-known women with four different spellings of the name. It turns out there are nearly 100 different ways that Americans have spelled it. The US Social Security Administration names data lets us tease out all the spellings and find out which ones are most popular – and when.
Read more