Moar Crazy Project Ideas: Mastodon Archives / Live-Feed, and Personal "Boss Mode" Dashboard

As if my current projects slate wasn't full enough, I did admittedly spend some time this weekend thinking how nice it would be to have a few other little utilities to solve a bunch of problems I don't currently have nice solutions for.

    1) A Mastodon Archives/Live-Feed viewer - Mainly for searching for past posts (and/or managing ones you no longer want to keep up) - e.g. to extract a bunch to a blog post for easier access in future (e.g. similar to how this post came about).

    2) A personal "boss mode" ish dashboard screen that can be launched with a single keypress, and can be used to put up a placeholder / dashboardy type screen that allows monitoring a whole bunch of feeds = info that you'd like to keep an eye on, while you step away from your machine OR are interrupted (and/or don't want others to look at what you were doing)... Sort of like the lock screen, but more fully featured, and maybe also a bit like the  

 

Now, both of these "ideas" aren't really something I plan to go "all in" on. But, having had the thought, they are tempting enough to at least toy around with to see if I can clobber together some prototypes (or at least draft designs) - as a bit of an "itch scratching" exercise in creativity.  Whether I ultimately built these properly for my own use (or even for others) is moot... it's likely I won't get that far, as these are not really priorities!  But still, it's fun to tinker with!

Christchurch Wastewater Treatment Stench Rant (+ A Layman's Alternative Interim "Workaround" Scheme)

If you've been following the news from Christchurch in the past week (or my socials for that matter), you'd be aware that this week, we've been *plagued* by waves of a putrid poopy stench (that irritates the eyes and airways, and yes... aggravates asthma in folks like myself). The last time many of us were faced with this stench was for the first half of 2022, after the water treatment plant caught fire in late 2021!

That was 5 years ago now! Yet this, we suddenly have the same bloody problem again!

For additional context:  No we are *NOT* in the "Eastern Suburbs" near where this plant and all the open-air "oxidation ponds" that the poopy water is pumped into are located, next to the Estuary / Eastern coastline lining the Pacific Ocean. Anything past the centrally located "Hagley Park" really cannot be considered an "Eastern Suburb" here, with places like Wigram, Halswell, or out around Burnside/Harewood where the airport is located certainly falling *well outside* the range where you'd expect to smell stuff like this!

Despite all this, and the problem first *really* rearing its ugly head city-wide (after having been a problem for months already in the areas surrounding the plant), the latest council update today says they are still "monitoring" the situation and hoping it miraculously improves - somehow... by itself... when hopefully some algae miraculously grows to fix it!  WTF?!!   🤬 

"Monitoring" (i.e. standing there with you hands to kept to yourself, scribbling away on a clipboard, while peering into the abyss / monitoring screens, staring at the charts) is about as much use as "thoughts and prayers" after yet another mass terrorist / gun violence incident... jeez 🙄

Linux Migration + Picasa

Good news!  Tonight, I finally got around to testing running Picasa under Wine, and can confirm it works rather well for the main things it needs to do!

Which is a very good thing to tick off, as that means that as I can run that on Linux now, that's one fewer blocker to migrating over there anytime now🥳

The only annoying thing is that it will launch the "Wine Folder Explorer" window when exporting...

Thoughts on Venue Design and Crowd Control

Is it "just a NZ thing" that crowds will just all mosh-up in the area nearest the entrance they enter from, causing a massive "standing-room-only" tightly crowded mess in one area of the venue that snarls up entering traffic (causing queues + delays), while the far side ends up being relatively open or even conspicuously *deserted*?

This post looks into two such cases - the one that inspired this post, and another instance from a few years ago that I saw myself... 

January 2026 - Position on AI

Given the fast moving nature of these things, and how heavily it's still being pushed by all the Big Tech interests, I guess it's time for another update on my current position on AI stuff

 

General Position

Get your stupid effing "Large Lying Model" / "Grand Theft Autocorrect" / "Pervasive Spying Narks" away from me!!!

For the record (even if it's useless actually saying this):  

In general, I DO NOT consent to any of "my data" or any of my work / creative outputs being used for AI training / processing, except for very specific case-by-case purposes.

While I'm asking nicely: Please cease and desist any operations where this may have happened, and delete all relevant records or thus-trained models  🙂 

 

For Coding / Software Development 

For work stuff, my current position on this stuff is:
* 1) If I'm stuck on trying to resolve a sticky "compiler says no" problem (BUT only after having given it a decent stab), then I will now consider getting AI to suggest a fix / solution, since it's there and may be able to help.

I will however scrutinise whether it passes the sniff test for bad code... (and have on a few occasions just thrown that approach out and changed tack, after seeing how bad it can get!)

* 2) For big tricky changesets, I will also ask it to do a pass over the code and check for any obvious issues (since we have found it can catch or at least flag a whole bunch of stuff that tired eyes might miss)

* 3) I've had mixed results getting it to do any bulk code generation (mainly unit tests), and TBH don't trust it to do actual feature implementation (which is usually the fun bit that us humans should get to do anyway!)... so: So far there's really not much need / use for it on that front from my end!

 

Oh... and this only applies to work problems, where work has said we should experiment with these tools + fenced off some "approved" tools that appear suitably tame.

 

(*) EDIT (22 Jan): 

I have also had some luck with getting it to generate a whole bunch of boilerplate for translating between one enum definition, and a protobuf protocol one (that I got it to generate from the first), and then writing all the conversion logic (that would've been tedious to do by hand). The best solution of course is to not need that boilerplate (i.e. the language / compiler should really be able to deduce it itself), but since our environment isn't set up for that sort of "experimental" stuff, having this tooling available when cases like this call for it is certainly nice...

 

For personal stuff:
Nah, I like the challenge / can deal with whatever it is over a longer timespan when I can be bothered...  😜

 

Exceptions (for personal stuff):

* Wrangling intractible CSS / Javascript problems - As those are nasty, and I suck at that

* Wrangling compile errors stemming from trying to build publicly available third-party OSS repos 

MediaSlurper - Phone Data Archiving Tools

Mwahahaha... had very productive hacking session yesterday on my MediaSlurper tools  (mainly on the phone backup side)

Main Changes:
* Hacked together fancy new thing custom-op mode to make it possible to go through and selectively archive screenshots, while moving the old ones out into their own folders. 

This makes it easier to archive a whole bunch of the less important ones, then just delete them from the phone 1-2 years later to free up space

(Unfortunately, web-browser ones cannot be distinguished from the filenames alone, and will need OCR processing integration to solve later - I have a tool I can integrate, but I'd like to switch that away from Windows OCR since I'm moving away from the platform soon-ish, and need these tools to keep working)

* Hacked together another custom-op mode that only does the moving-between-directories on phone too

* Then plugged a whole bunch of cases where timeouts could bring down the ship, by wrapping all the native calls with a wrapped-API that makes it retry several times before giving up

* Then bolted on mechanism to get these custom modes to run before a nominated main mode (i.e. so the "main / fixed" one won't double-capture these files)