Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

A weblog created by Dr. Nels Lindahl featuring writings and thoughts…

Category: Technology

  • An external computer power button

    Strangely enough the power button stopped working on my Be quiet! Dark Base Pro 900 Rev.2 computer case recently. Instead of taking all the computer parts out of the case and rehoming them in a new case I elected to try out an external power supply button [1]. A bunch of options exist for external power buttons. Some people apparently like to be able to push the power button without having to reach down to the computer location. This new option worked out well for me as I just ran the external power button toward the front of the case where I can now turn the computer on and off without any problems. This oddly enough was a good solution that worked out well enough for me and saved me a lot of work to rehome the computer parts. 

    Footnotes:
    [1] https://www.newegg.com/p/2A6-021F-00001?Item=9SIB7VEK713319 “Desktop Computer Power Switch Power Supply Control Adapter Cable”

  • Yeah, I bought an iPad

    Back to blogging or so they said. It should be fun to spend some time writing. That writing should be the thing. It could be the thing. Back to a bit of blogging had to be the way to start the day. Maybe it was and I just missed the point.Throughout this last week I thought about writing a fiction book staged out of the early millennium, but written to feel present in the moment now. Instead of writing that novel or taking the time to at least sketch it out things took a turn to something else entirely. Thanks to the magic of some current discount I purchased a 9th generation iPad for about $250.00 and had it delivered to the house. It’s my first Apple purchase in the last 43 years and for the most part it was super easy to use. Honestly, my last month using a Macbook was way harder to deal with where everything is opposite in terms of closing windows or clicking on things. Oh, and on the Macbook using the trackpad was just difficult and not intuitive. I plugged in a regular mouse and keyboard and have been able to work without much disruption.

    A 9th generation iPad sitting on a desk

  • A day of coding adventures

    Things got off to an interesting start today. I was rocking and rolling some code development instead of writing the opening missive of the day. That means here after recording the penultimate episode of Coffee with Nels I sat down to begin the writing activity for the day. This switcheroo does have the added benefit of some extra caffeine. I’m probably going to spend some extra time today writing some more code. It is one of those days where my mind is really focused on the next steps for this particular package of code. 

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  • A computer hardware refresh

    This morning I had some thoughts about maybe doing a refresh of my main computer system. That series of thoughts quickly dissipated. Custom computer building has gotten more complex over the years. At least, it feels like things have gotten more complex. It might be getting easier at some point here in the next couple of years [1]. Within my current computer setup two potential changes are possible. First, I might swap out the hard drives at some point for larger ones depending on how much video editing I end up doing over the next year. Second, now that the price of the RAM this system uses has gone down it might be time to add more. None of that required me to put on my thinking hat this morning to get going. 

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  • Considering advertisements and prompts

    This week I tried enabling ads on the weblog and it turns out I just don’t like the placement. Apparently, the advertisements when enabled show up above or below and are very large. Right now I’m not willing to leave those running on the old weblog. They have been turned off, but maybe I’ll do some testing on them again later this year. Based on volume it is not a big deal to turn them off or on for that matter. Right now that type of monetization scheme is not material to this effort to engage in daily weblog writing. For the last few days at the start of the day I have been sitting down to actively write. It’s a pure stream of consciousness exercise at this point. It may have some direct aim at writing about things that are happening, but that is not a disruptive guide to creating content at this point. 

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  • 24 hour application usage sample

    Today got off to a slower start than intended. My alarm went off and I got out of bed and was ready to jump into working, but it took about 30 minutes to boot up and become productive. Even with two shots of espresso and some Sunday with Ola playing. Part of the slowdown was due in part to a bunch of web surfing about how Eight Sleep products work. We have two large dogs and I have been hesitant about any technology they could destroy. Yesterday, I started a little tracking project to see what applications or software packages I’m using actively right now. During the course of the last 24 hours of big adventures I just kept a list. It turns out that I used 15 different things. You can check out the list for yourself below. The list is roughly in the order of how the applications were used throughout the last day.

    1. Android OS – Alarm clock on my Pixel 7 Pro went off at 5:30 AM
    2. Windows 11 OS – unlocked my main computer the Dark Base Pro 900
    3. Microsoft Outlook – Checked my primary email inbox
    4. Gmail – Checked my secondary email inbox
    5. Pokemon – I had to clear out some Pokemon to get ready for Go Fest 2023
    6. PowerDirector – Edited some video clips for the daily vlog
    7. YouTube – Watched the All-In podcast and the WAN show
    8. Google Docs – edited some documents and did some writing
    9. Google Podcasts – listened to some podcast audio during a walk
    10. Pandora – listened to some music during a walk
    11. LinkedIn – I’m checking this daily now
    12. Twitter(X) – I’m still a daily active user of Twitter
    13. YouTube TV – I watched a bit of the Bears vs. Bills game via Sunday Ticket
    14. GitHub – I was messing around with some Colab notebooks
    15. Google Colab – These launched out of GitHub

    I probably used the Chrome operating system as well on my Pixelbook Go at some point during the day. Generally, I mess around with Colab notebooks on the Chromebook. The major GPU work on those notebooks is happening somewhere else so the Chromebook interface is plenty powerful to support the Colab notebook browsing experience. The list does not include any indexing to how many times I used anything. For the most part, I was just tracking the first use of something to help make the list. This was not intended to be a time in motion study of any kind. It was just an effort to help understand the tooling being used. The next step here would be to extend the sampling period to an entire week and see if anything else ends up being caught up in a longer sampling period.

  • A day of LangChain

    I spent most of the morning writing block 142 which was related to learning LangChain. 

    It took a little of an hour to complete the beta DeepLearning.AI LangChain for LLM Application Development short course [1]. It was a pretty good course and it included a mix of both notebooks and video. The nice part of the notebooks was that they were already set up and ready to run in sync with the video. 

    Footnotes:
    [1] https://learn.deeplearning.ai/langchain/lesson/1/introduction

  • That feeling of being behind

    All the winds of change are blowing these days in the AI/ML space. Seriously, things are changing very rapidly. I’m contemplating running some Auto-GPT on my desktop with the latest Llama 2 model maybe. Right now it would call out to OpenAI via API. Right now I’m starting to dig into this GitHub that is relevant to that aim. 

    https://github.com/rhohndorf/Auto-Llama-cpp

    That project could one day be very interesting, but right now it’s way more POC than delivered. 

    Things for me shifted a bit and I ended up looking at this Google Colab notebooks:

    https://github.com/camenduru/text-generation-webui-colab/blob/main/README.md

    https://colab.research.google.com/github/camenduru/text-generation-webui-colab/blob/main/llama-2-7b-chat.ipynb (this took about 5 minutes to run)

    At this point, I’m wondering what other things people do with Gradio that are interesting. 

    Apparently, you can go out to https://huggingface.co/spaces and see a ton of spaces that showcase some of the ML apps made by the community at large.

    It looks like people are making Spaces over on Hugging Face that allow people to run and execute Auto-GPT. A lot of these were built out during April of 2023.

    Need to spend time this week digging into localGPT and privateGPT installations for my main workstation.

    Content consumed this week:

    “The Impact of chatGPT talks (2023) – Keynote address by Prof. Yann LeCun (NYU/Meta)” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyqXLJsmsrk&list=PLKemzYMx2_Ot1MZ_er2vFiINdJEgDO8Hg
    “Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models” https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.09288.pdf

    “Stanford CS229 Machine Learning I Naive Bayes, Laplace Smoothing I 2022 I Lecture 6” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADj95edZc0w

  • Considering a new laptop, again

    This morning started off a little bit slower than it should have. Somebody turned off their alarm and slept in for an hour. It was me. I claimed that extra hour of sleep. I started looking at System76 laptops again this morning. Right now I’m torn between the Lemur Pro and the Darter Pro. I like the idea of 14 hours of battery on the Lemur Pro. However, the Pixelbook Go chromebook I’m using is showing no signs of failing any time soon. We will see how that one plays out. My big plan for this morning is to work on two blocks of content related to weeks 135 and 136.    

    Half of that writing objective is now complete and the content for week 135 is out of draft and will need to sit this week before being edited again after some time passes. That is one of those things about having content in review for a number of weeks that improves it. As a writer I need a bit of time to pass before I’m ready to really provide solid editing, review, and remediation to my own words. The research and digging part of week 136 is up and running. I’m out on Google Scholar and digging around into content. This is one of those use cases for buying a tablet I think where it would be easier to sit around and read PDF documents of academic articles while holding a tablet. Reading articles on my phone is a recipe for problematic experiences. The form factor just does not work for me and I don’t enjoy it. You can imagine that it destroys the experience for me and that is enough to stop the progress. 

    Generally, I read things sitting at my computer which is currently setup to support a 4 screen view where my Chromebook only gives a single screen view when that is preferable. My desktop setup is totally immersive with two 38 inch monitors vertically stacked on an ATDEC stand. This is going to end up being a productive weekend where 4 blocks of content were for the most part created, reviewed, or completed. I even found the tripod and an extra battery for my Sony ZV-1 camera in a backpack that is rarely used. Things are moving along. 

    My side quest backlog is also working well enough during the weekdays. I am far enough ahead of that and my regular writing plan efforts that this afternoon I might be able to whiteboard for a couple of hours and really refine the side quest backlog. Friday evening I wrote out 3 good things I needed to accomplish this weekend to really strap rocket boosters to the side quest and I’m 1 of 3 complete on that target list. We will see what happens within my efforts to close out the other 2 outstanding items.

  • On that power supply problem just started

    Over the course of the last two weeks my CORSAIR RM850x power supply has started acting up. I do not move my desktop computer tower very often. It’s in a Dark Base Pro 900 case and it sits under my desk. For the most part it remains undisturbed and just sort of sits and waits to be powered on via the front switch when it gets turned off. Earlier today I had to switch out the power cable to a different one and it did finally power on which is how I’m writing this missive right now. I ordered this power supply back on February 15, 2018. That means that the power supply has lasted 5 years and is now starting to have some trouble. I’m looking at new ones right now including the CORSAIR RMx Series RM1000x model. I looked around for a bit and finally decided to just order a new one. Power supplies are not really something to mess around with given that they are the base of the entire computer system.