Just another Friday without adventure

Season 3 of Stargate Atlantis was difficult to rewatch, and I’m glad to have moved on to season 4 of the show. Spoiler alert; that whole story rehash with the replicators is not my favorite example of science fiction-style writing. Next week, I might jump into watching some Stargate Universe, and that was a series that I’m not entirely sure I ever finished watching. My big plan for the upcoming week is to rework a paper that was drafted and shared on GitHub back in 2023. It feels good to jump back into some of the coding efforts I had previously spent a lot of time thinking about advancing. With the launch of the ChatGPT 5.0 model, it might be time to see if some of that code could be revised and reworked. Each part is broken out and executed step by step in a Google Colab notebook. That makes it very easy to ensure that what was previously produced is good code and can be iterated on based on it being broken out and independently verifiable.

I started using the Google Gemini 2.5 Flash model to make the thumbnails for this functional journal Substack. Apparently, I somehow got a Pro subscription to Gemini, probably with my Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold, but I don’t remember exactly how that came about. My efforts so far have included making a couple of different thumbnails, and that is pretty much it for the most part. My computers are all set up to use the OpenAI ChatGPT application. I would not have even tried to use Gemini, but I hit some type of image generation quota and had to move models. Oddly, by refusing to generate a couple of extra images, ChatGPT forced me to engage with and now become familiar with another model. I’m going to keep the thumbnails for the Lindahl Letter over on the OpenAI side of things and keep exploring Gemini for my functional journaling. That is supposed to yield a daily ongoing narrative based mostly on stream-of-consciousness style writing.

I guess I ordered my Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold on August 23, 2024. Apparently, my first foldable phone has survived for about a year now. My best guess is that I have used the folding part of the phone a couple of times a week, but by no means on a daily basis. The phone does not provide you with an active fold counter or any updates on the health of the foldable screen. Maybe future generations of the technology will provide that sort of information. I’m not even remotely exciting about the upcoming Pixel 10 launch event this month. It used to be that every new phone launch I was super invested in watching, learning about, and ultimately getting the latest generation phone. That time of phone related exciting has come and gone.