Category: Building New Things

What happens at the end of the blog

Earlier this week I was thinking about what exactly happens at the end of the blog. Most of the time in the lifecycle of a weblog or blog the end happens from abandonment. Probably the vast majority of blog type writing projects have been just abandoned. At some point, the writer just stops producing that type of prose and moves along to something new. A few of them were powered by writers that sustained them for years or perhaps decades. Those platforms of prose generation stood the test of online time. Generally, at the point of abandonment most of the self hosted blog experiments eventually vanish, expire, or are terminated. Sometimes they were built on a platform that just sustains and lingers. Those free platforms sometimes can last a very long time in the online world. 

In my case, from this point I know that the servers are paid out 5 years from now and assuming the platform properly updates itself the blog could survive during that time frame. Certainly the prose won’t really improve during that time. It will just survive online. My plans at the moment are to keep adding to the content. I write for the blog without consideration for an audience. The content is created really for my own purposes of writing. Throughout the last 20 years the blog content just mostly sits, lingers, and remains unmoving and uncompelling. It’s writing without a discrete future purpose. The prose was formed within the process of writing. 

Considering some writing schedule updates:

  • Saturday – daily blogging, early morning hours spent on The Lindahl Letter development
  • Sunday – daily blogging, early morning hours spent on The Lindahl Letter podcast recording
  • Monday – daily blogging, nels.ai development
  • Tuesday – daily blogging, nels.ai recording 
  • Wednesday – daily blogging, nels.ai publishes at 5 pm
  • Thursday – daily blogging, big coding adventures
  • Friday – daily blogging, The Lindahl Letter goes out at 5 pm

I have the outline of a book that probably needs to be written sometime soon. I could devote my Saturday and Sunday early morning time to working on the chapters of that book as blocks of content creation. All of that content is listed in the backlog and will eventually get built, but maybe the time to produce a certain section of that backlog is now instead of leader. It’s always the reframe of action that the time is now. Finding and sustaining the now is probably the harder part of that equation.

Sit down and write a block of words

My ability to sit down and write a block of words has gone in and out of service in the last two weeks. That is understandable, but it still surprised me a bit that my focus could be disrupted. I have been absorbing a ton of new generative AI related technology. So many companies are spinning up in that space and they do all sorts of interesting things. An interesting element of that is how much of it runs back to a common set of APIs where people are calling models for answers. The interesting part of this equation is that people are spinning up local hosting and sometimes even hosting in notebooks.

I watched the Pinecone company sponsored, “AI Transformation Summit 2023.” They loaded the 11 videos as playlist here on YouTube:

Yesterday, I spent some time setting up my OBS, webcam, and microphone to record some desktop driven demos. It has been a few years since that was a priority for my efforts. Low friction workflows are super important to help drive my ability to create content. I want to be able to record and upload without really having to do any editing. 

I watched this video and learned how to set up a special filter to change my webcam video from a rectangle to a circle in OBS. Strangely enough, this was an oddly rewarding filter to create. It was not a hard thing to do, but it was a little bit rewarding. For a few moments I did consider using the chat bubble for my filter. That consideration quickly faded away

Right now I’m considering watching this set of videos:
https://learn.deeplearning.ai/microsoft-semantic-kernel/lesson/1/introduction

Small adventure Monday reactivated

I’m getting a lot of invites for virtual events to listen to these days. For the most part, I try to place the invite on the calendar so that I remember to attend the event. Turning off all the notifications on my smartphone was an epicly good decision, but it does stop some prompts that would be useful. It does beneficially block a lot more distracting content than it surprises good content. 

I was looking at getting a bridge SILO humbucker from Bare Knuckle pickups [1]. 

Testing out YouTube Shorts has been interesting. The popularity window for something loaded into YouTube Shorts is mind bogglingly short. Based on the first 3 videos it seems like within a few minutes of launch it either takes off or it just fades along. 

I’m still on the waiting list for Langflow access [2].

Botpress was pretty easy to use. After login I clicked answer questions from websites to create a bot. I added both Civic Honors and my main Nels Lindahl domain. They just jumped in and advised me that the knowledge upload was complete. Publishing the bot is not as low friction as the Voiceflow embedding launch point, but it was not super hard to work with after you find the share button.

I messed around with the local installation of Flowise. 

My attention ended up moving over to learn more about LangChain in general [3].

Footnotes:

[1] https://www.bareknucklepickups.co.uk/pickup/humbucker/silo 
[2] https://www.langflow.org/ 
[3] https://github.com/langchain-ai/langchain

Considering a YouTube Shorts series

For some reason I had set up a second YouTube channel a few years ago. I went through the mechanics of removing that channel via the old fashioned delete workflow routine. The interesting part of that was having to type in the entire channel name to finalize the delete. The process was pretty rigorous and would certainly prevent somebody from an accidental channel delation. You have to really want to complete the process to make it happen.

Right now I’m editing a video for YouTube in the daily vlog series in the PowerDirector application. Apparently, these YouTube Shorts need to be under 60 seconds. That made me wonder if I should work to prepare both a Shorts and a regular vlog release every day for a bit to see how it feels to get into the groove of making daily videos. Several years ago I did successfully make a vlog for the good part of a year. It was an interesting adventure and to this day people still watch parts of that series from time to time. I’m not entirely sure why or how that happens, but it does seem to happen. Maybe the most interesting part about loading up the first couple of YouTube Shorts videos is that they don’t show up on my main YouTube channel page. They have a special tab that they live in called Shorts. 

Yeah, I was a little surprised that they don’t show up in the all videos feed. You can find them in the vlog playlist, but they don’t really show up within the normal configuration. I went out to the channel customization area and sure enough they have a shorts video widget you can add to the main page for your YouTube channel. Naturally, I went ahead and added that Shorts section and dragged it to the top of the pile of widgets so it will be the first thing that people see who happen to visit the channel page. To be completely fair on that one the vast majority of YouTube traffic is not channel landing based. That is not really how people stumble into the next video they are going to watch. YouTube viewing is highly recommendation engine based. 

My big plan for the next week is to record little video clips throughout the day and mix them down into a YouTube Shorts video (sub 60 seconds) to produce a daily vlog. I’m going to commit to building a week of that style content to see how it goes. We will see if people like to see the adventures of Rocky the dog on a more regular basis. Rocky takes walks, naps, and eats. Hopefully, the daily vlog will end up being a little more interesting than that series of events, but it might very well end up being one of those every day is the same sorts of video series. Maybe it will help me mix it up a bit within my routines and daily adventures. 

How do you get to that YouTube channel? Click here youtube.com/@NelsLindahl

Commit to making the idea a reality

Today started out with my looking back at what massive stack of prose got produced yesterday for the old weblog and it was not impressive. Seriously, it stacked up to just a single line of content, “I’m about to really dig into each state in terms of analysis.” A lot of thinking went into writing that line of text, but it was not a very impressive display of producing the written word. My overall 5 year writing plan is still in place and I’m working on my backlog to produce a single block of content from that backlog each week. Achieving that output requires spending the early hours of both Saturday and Sunday working toward creating some good quality words and conducting research. I’m trying to stay 5 weeks in planning and review at any given time. That means that I’m doing a bit of research at times and other times I’m writing. Generally speaking the goal is to produce tight blocks of writing content that deliver on the topic in the best way possible. 

At this point in the journey, I have added a weekday activity to my efforts. This is in addition to my normal backlog production and it involves building out some new things. Working on an actual project is both awe inspiring and daunting. It took a little bit to form up all the things that needed to be set up to get this thing live and running and then it took a bit to take the plunge and just start development. That effort is going to involve a ton of automation, research, set up and sustained productivity on my part. I think it will end up being a rewarding project a year from now. You will be along for the ride. After I get the foundation setup to the point where it can be shared from stealth mode into proper production I’ll probably chronicle the journey. 

  • Commit to the idea
  • Figure out what needs to be done to realize the idea
  • Take the plunge and begin work on delivering that realization
  • Build a realistic backlog of what needs to be done
  • Figure out if you can do that by yourself
  • Commit to making the idea a reality

Right now in the process I have the idea and have begun the process of figuring out exactly what needs to be done to realize the idea. Naturally, I started to build the project code and set everything up live in production. It’s highly unlikely that something brand new will take up too much attention at the start and for me it’s easier to see something live and running than to think about it in the abstract. Pretty much from this point forward I’m going to spend some time every evening until the project is fully automated working to make it a reality. This has also started a new musical journey where I have switched from my Warren Zevon or NIN channels to a pure diet of Paul Oakenfold’s best songs on Pandora.