Public Transit Audio-Only Recordings - A Fun Travel Keepsake

A discussion with a friend yesterday about portable audio recorders had me thinking about something fun to do while travelling that I only really recently realised I should try doing more of.

That is: Recording short audio clips (in addition to any video clips I'm already capturing, though again... more random clips from different places are again something fun to have) from various places during my travels - and in particular, doing it for any public transit route you end up spending a lot of your time during the trip using. 

Reaction to "Enough AI copilots, we need AI HUD's" - i.e. Thought Provoking Ideas on Reframing the UI / UX of AI

I just read a very thought provoking blog post from Geoffrey Litt, based on some ideas pitched some 30-ish years ago by Mark Weiser

Blog Title: "Enough AI Copilots, We Need AI HUD's"

https://www.geoffreylitt.com/2025/07/27/enough-ai-copilots-we-need-ai-huds


My (Non-AI Powered) Summary, with additional spin on top: 
1) The industry at large is going about this all wrong!

2) The "me too" industry frenzy currently of just piling in on top of the "tasteless" (to paraphrase Steve Jobs) zombie train of building digital versions of Tom Riddle's horcrux-diary is stupid.  

    I'm with Mark on this - as those who've followed me for long enough know, I'm very much against all this "chat" and "agent" style crap that all the AI-TechBros are currently all still hyping up.

3) HCI + Interaction Design specialists/experts such as myself should really be stepping in and stepping up to meet this challenge head on - to get back in there to steer the ship as it were, instead of being backseat passengers to an almost certain trainwreck - by doing what we do best:

    a) Taking a step back, and asking the essential basic questions about what exactly we're trying to really achieve, and **WHY**...

    b) Crucially, not letting the existing framing cloud our judgement, and obscuring our own personal ethical + philosophical principles on the direction that we wish to steer technology in

4) What is it that we have to offer then?

   A) Show Don't Tell - If your tech is really that fancy, it doesn't need to be in our faces all the time. We shouldn't *need* to be constantly "conversing" with it, like micro-managing a third-rate annoying minion

   B) An Assistive Superpower - (Now where have we heard *that* before?  ;)    Yep, the emphasis here should be on the tech taking care of the mundane stuff, while using its strengths to highlight stuff we can't figure out as humans...

*NOW* we're talking.
  i) Harnessing tech to help people do what they couldn't otherwise do
  ii) Augmenting + Building Up, NOT Replacing + Subjugating!

These are indeed very much things that are right in my wheelhouse, and problems that I can get behind!  (Whereas the "AI" discourse to date has very much been a very alienating, and unpalatable soup of world-destroying slop that make me and countless others sick to our very core)

Thanks for the reminder Geoffrey!

 

As for the rest of us:   It's high time we started getting cracking, and righting this ship! There's lots of work to do!

Picasa Replacement Project - Update 3 - Some Easy Wins

In the latest installment of my ongoing series of posts about my current "Picasa Replacement Project", a few days ago, I managed to make a few more easy wins:

1) First, by applying some of the simpler manipulations to a "calibration" image, and trying to match the results - This has quickly revealed some starting points for working with the "Tilt" and "Color Temperature" sliders (even if the values obtained still seem a bit odd / weird, and may still need some fine-tuning)

 

2) It turns out that during an earlier search session, I had in fact managed to dredge up a bunch of very useful posts about the various formats used - especially for the on-disk thumbnails / preview images databases (which will prove useful for having a way to batch-test some of these filter calibrations later  (i.e. the thing apparently uses the standard Windows "Thumbs.db" format, for which libraries do exist !!!)

However, to protect all this info, I'm gonna have to make sure I save off all of it on the various archive sites (in addition to having already grabbed copies for my own stash, in case they disappear before I manage to do even that)... So yeah, I'm not going to publish the list of links until I have secured them. 

Picasa Replacement Project - Update 2 - Initial Working Parser

It's taken a few more days than originally planned, but I've just reached a first concrete milestone:

The rudimentary parser for Picasa.ini settings file is now able to fully parse the settings file for the test folder I chose from my collection!   (Albeit, this was one of the newer ones that I haven't applied as heavy edits on as some of those in the full collection... but it's still a starting point!)

There's lots more to do still to make it actually useful, including:
* 1) Set up a Git repo for this project, so it can be used by others  

EDIT:   The code can be found here            https://github.com/Aligorith/picasa_lib_utils 

* 2) Need to unpack how a handful of other filters I've sometimes used on other photos have their parameters done too

* 3) Figure out what the pixel-level operations some of these were actually doing (i.e. most critical is the "finetune2" filter though that is the hardest; but even something like the "tilt" filter will need translating into a concrete rotation angle)

Late night musings on Pixar's relative "downfall" in recent years...

What follows are a bunch of late night ramblings + musings about things I can't help wondering after seeing seeing a YT rabbithole analysing the relative downfall of Pixar in the last few years...

 

(Disclaimer:  As some of the topics here are apparently contentious, I will be moderating any comments on this post heavily as I see fit... you have been warned) 

Picasa Replacement Project - Day 1 Status Report

Following Monday's incident, I have decided to urgently bring forward + accelerate my plans to start developing a replacement solution to my Picasa-based Photo Management workflow. As this incident had highlighted, I do somewhat urgently need to find a reliable automated solution to migrate my almost 2 decade library of non-destructive edits over to a future-proof solution I fully control!

As a result, I made a bunch of promising progress on my Picasa Reverse Engineering project last night - i.e. the first night of a new journey!

Fixing Picasa3 suddenly freezing on Windows10 (July 2025)

This evening, Picasa suddenly started freezing on Windows 10 here.  (Yes, it has been officially discontinued for years now... but for my workflow, it is still much better than many of the alternatives I've tried, and so, until I manage to get my own self-built alternative up and running, I'm continuing to use it...)

After a whole bunch of sleuthing (including deleting my old DB and rebuilding it, in case of some database corruption there), it turns out that the culprit was Windows Defender!

TLDR:  To fix this, add an exclusion for the following setting (i.e. "Block Untrusted Fonts") for Picasa3.exe 

EDIT:  Posted too soon!  While doing that gets things moving a little at least, a few seconds later, after letting you scroll, it will again lock up, while it now starts another batch of CPU activity.  Doh!   (Trying again with disabling a whole lot more to see what sticks...)

EDIT 2: Tried a bunch more stuff, but annoyingly each "fix" only seems to last about 5 seconds before Windows Defender catches on and locks down even harder!

Things that didn't go down well:

* Going through disabling *every* checkbox in that infernal program-settings-override dialog.  Doing that just makes it worse it seems!

* Switching "Compatability Mode" to "Windows 8" - This worked for about 5 seconds (i.e. longer than when just doing "open + scroll" tests, but still it locked right up!

Ultimately, after an hour of testing this crap, I'm going have to call it a night on this here, and have ended up filing a bugreport with MS about this... hopefully they do resolve it!  Gah!

(PS:  The project to again try to migrate my personal workstation to Linux ahead of October just got another massive boost again tonight!)

A Piece of Old Christchurch History - First "Jade Garden" Location

Many people know this old building as the old "Canterbury Public Library" building

For me, this was and always will be: "The Original Home of 'Jade Garden' - Dim Sum Chinese Restaurant"  (although apparently, they may have been in one other location before this one IIRC)

 

I was inspired to write this little oral history down for posterity when stumbling across the photo below earlier today (complete with the caption that showed below it). It was one of the first times I'd come across a decent photo of the place, so thought it was a good chance to write this down. 

Canterbury Public Library 19 December 1981. Exterior of the former Canterbury Public Library building on the corner of Cambridge Terrace and Hereford Street. Christchurch Star archive photo

(NOTE: Once again, am reposting this long-form post from my Mastodon for archiving - though this probably means the AI's will now ingest this too... sigh)

WhioDoc Updates - Version 1.1 just released

I've just released a minor update to WhioDoc to add some clarity + tweaks around the formatting of range-specifiers, and guidance on how "complex type specifiers" should be documented (i.e. "there is no established standard here yet, as you're probably doing something wrong if you need it")

 

Links to WhioDoc Repo:

* The Repo:  https://github.com/Aligorith/whiodoc

* Today's Updates:   

    https://github.com/Aligorith/whiodoc/commit/66aba8762073eabd948872e149323f17584a2b87

 

Key Points:

* Changed the delimiter for "type vs range" parts of the range-specifiers to use "::" instead of "-" 

   This has been changed after I realised on my current project that the "-" is really not too visible in my text editor (where I usually have "show all whitespace" enabled now - long story for another day), and a more heavy-weight symbol was needed.

  i.e. The recommended format is now something like:

         (Num :: 0.1 <= v < 0.9)

 

In other news:

The lack of news / updates here recently is because I'm currently hard at work on a bunch of projects, with a view towards getting some of them in a shippable state. And with that, I need to get back to actually building stuff, and less time talking about building it!  Over and out!

Blast from the Past: Cathay Pacific 747 Cardboard Model Plane / Glider

When doing some long overdue cleaning of one of our bookshelves yesterday, I ran into the following fun little guy:

IIRC, it's a Cathay Pacific 747 cardboard plane model from a Meadow Fresh milk-carton promotion here in NZ. It would have been from the mid-late 90's (as it uses the "brush tick" tail).

(At least that's what I think it's from! I could be wrong, with it potentially having come from an in-flight activities pack for kids instead, since I do have a few of those... somewhere...)

 

Thoughts on Windows 11's "Recall" Feature

Seeing one of the latest threads this morning about Win11's Recall feature, I'm not surprised that it does what it does TBH

Some of these points overlap with comments I made earlier when news of this feature first broke. I can't easily find those now, but if/when I do, I may amend this post with those notes as well, as they better cover a bunch of other insights I don't think I've captured here as well.

 

EDIT:  Cool, according to this Ars article, they do seem to have put in place most of the reasonable safeguards I'd expect / recommend them to have.

PureQML Followup - Initial Code Audit Notes

Following on my previous post, I did some more poking around the PureQML code as an initial stage towards vetting whether it is a suitable and/or trustworthy codebase to build any projects with.

Here are some observations I've made regarding things I'd want to fork + hack the codebase to do before I did anything more serious with it. I thought I'd post these here in case I lost the file I kept these notes in when I came back to try to work on this later (and also for anyone else considering using this)

DISCLAIMER:  I still don't know all that much about this project, so some of these may be able to be fully disabled + fixed in ways that I haven't found yet.

 

EDIT 2025/04/25:

* Have forked the pureqml/qmlcore repo with these changes to

    https://github.com/Aligorith/pureqml_qmlcore/tree/PureQML-Clean

* Added "Issue 5" below