The Steelers' Russell Wilson era started off slow in the first quarter, but once he knocked off the rust, it was fun to watch! 😃#

Another warm day today. Going to watch my grandson play fall baseball. 😎#

Going to be a nice warmup today! 😎 #

This is a very clever idea that I am going to explore for my own use. Alex Chan creates static websites to browse her local archives. Check out the article.#

This weekend is going to warm up, starting today with highs in the upper 60s and the 70s on Saturday and Sunday. 😎 #

I watched a wonderful music documentary the other night called Immediate Family. It's about four of the best session musicians that played on some of the most iconic albums from the late 60s to the late 70s and early 80s. It's currently streaming on Hulu so if you get a chance, please do watch it.#

I figured out a workaround for the two Python scripts that broke after Homebrew updated my Python to 3.13. I changed the Python path in the shell scripts that call my Python scripts, and they both now work as expected.#

Damn! I just realized when I installed bat last night using Homebrew that Python 3.13 was also installed as my base version. I now have some scripts that are not running in a virtual environment breaking. This happened when 3.12 came out, so you would think I would have learned! 🤬#

Having lunch with some old friends today at the OTB out in Upper St. Clair. I really like their food and atmosphere.#

I love the feeling when I am programming and have been struggling with a particular issue when it finally gets resolved. It's such a rush of endorphins.#

I spent Saturday in Ligonier for my daughter's show as part of Fort Ligonier Days and I really like the small-town feel. In the evening, church bells ring every hour and the town glows from homes and small shops. It reminded me of the small town in South Carolina that the movie Doc Hollywood was set in. It made me very nostalgic for my youth that didn't include the internet, cable TV, and social media. Just friends and neighbors.#

I'm really not ready for this cold weather, but it's supposed to warm up this weekend. 😎 #

I really admire Dave Winer's writing. If you get a chance read this post about WordPress. #

If I have something worth saying I should be putting it on my site even if no one else reads it, I will have it as a record of what I was thinking or doing at the time.#

Another cold morning. 🥶 #

Almost feels like winter is coming, but I'm sure we'll see a nice warm-up soon! 🤞🏻 #

I was tied up all day yesterday helping with my daughter's show at Fort Ligonier Days and I totally forgot to post here. 🤔 Today is the last day so I will be picking up the rental van we use to take the setup to the show and heading back up to Ligonier this afternoon.#

Just watched a wonderful YouTube video about an artist that I'd never heard of, and I'm sure you haven't either: Wes Cook. It's a very funny and touching video that you should take the time to watch, either here or on YouTube.#

Got home late last night after spending the night setting up my daughter's show at Fort Ligonier Days. It's going to be a busy weekend!#

Hurricane Milton was unbelievable. Power outages affected over 3 million customers after Milton ripped across the state and is now out in the Atlantic Ocean.#

Damn, it's cold this morning! 🥶 #

I've just discovered the "seed" parameter you can pass to LLM models that returns deterministic results, meaning that if you send the same "seed" number while asking the same question, you will get the same result. I'm learning more about LLMs every day.#

Up until this morning, I had been using the iPad Twitter app on my MacBook Pro M1 after Twitter removed their Mac app from the store. Today, an update was pushed by Twitter and now it crashes every time it launches. Sigh.#

Another cool, fall morning! 🍂🍁 #

Came across this short film by Eric Kissack, called The Move, on Jason Kottke's site. Very entertaining!#

I really love my little Groq spell checker that I built in Electric Drummer, as it also does punctuation checking :)#

The one thing I use regularly on Twitter is lists, so I can separate my topics of interest. I know Bluesky offers lists, but I'm not sure about Mastodon and Threads. I need to do a lot more investigating.#

It may be getting closer to the time for me to leave Twitter and focus on other sites like Mastodon and Bluesky, and possibly Threads. If I can find the developers that I follow and learn from on these other sites, the time to leave may be sooner rather than later.#

My goal is to improve my blog writing, modeling it after Dave Winer's Scripting News site.#

It's really brisk this morning! 🥶 #

Today is the 30th anniversary of Dave Winer's blog, Scripting News. I've been reading it probably since its beginning. I incorporated Dave's Userland Frontier back in the early 90s into an automated workflow for service bureaus, printers, and newspapers. My partner and I bundled it with our product called Let'er Rip! that downloaded Postscript to different types of imagesetters back in the heyday of desktop publishing. Frontier was at the heart of the automation before AppleScript had come on the scene. Congratulations Dave!#

During the bad storms last night, we lost power for 6-7 hours. I ended up watching the Steelers game on my iPhone. I found out the power came back on around 3:30 AM because Alexis announced loudly that our Wi-Fi wasn't connected to the internet.#

While waiting for the Steelers-Cowboys SNF game, which is under a weather delay due to lightning and thunder, I added a script to Drummer that lets me easily add and remove blockquotes. Fun!!#

I just realized I can add HTML tags and inline styling to my blog in Electric Drummer. You can see the result of adding a blockquote tag in the paragraph from yesterday. I'm going to add some scripting so I can just choose a menu item and it will style the selected text in my outline.#

Cool morning, but it's supposed to get up around 80 today.#

I'm going to create an LLM playground in Electric Drummer focusing on Groq, and after I have it working the way I want, I'll start adding other LLM vendors like OpenAI and Claude. Still, I would like to figure out a local setup though.#

I enhanced the system prompt for my Groq spell checker to "I want you to act as a proofreader. I will provide you texts and I would like you to review them for any spelling, grammar, or punctuation errors. Once you have finished reviewing the text, provide me with the improved text, and do not include extra declarations or comments." It is definitely an upgrade over my first system prompt.#

Stayed up later than I wanted playing around with my Groq-to-Drummer integration. I have a lot of ideas to further enhance it using LLMs from Drummer. I'm going to look at integrating Gemini, Claude, and OpenAI since their costs have all come down quite a bit.#

Made an update to my Groq spell checker: if there is a change to the text made by Groq, I now insert it below the original text so I can compare them and make sure Groq hasn't made up something! 😊 Then I can delete whichever headline I don't want to keep. It's quick and dirty, but it works!#

While out running around, I decided I'm going to turn my Micro.blog site into a TIL (Things I Learned) site and point to it from my main blog.#

My next goal is to recreate my spell checker locally using my Ollama setup. Update: I'm having trouble connecting Drummer to my local Ollama server. Still digging! Update 2: I think I'm going to stick with my Groq spell checker for now until I find a better solution locally using Ollama which works well when I use curl or Python but coming from Drummer there are continuing issues.#

I now have an AI spell checker for my Electric Drummer setup! I created a script in my Scripts menu that calls Groq using their rest endpoint with the system prompt "please spell check and return only the corrected text" and pass the script the text of the selected node in my outline. Once I get the result I replace the selected line with the corrected text. Since Groq is still free for simple uses like this I figured I'd try my luck and it worked! The only drawback at the moment is I don't really know what was changed if anything.#

I'm thinking about changing my Micro.blog site, which currently mirrors my Electric Drummer blog, to something else that I can link to from my main blog. Not sure what yet…#

I stopped up at Uptown Coffee this morning. My niece had given me a gift card for the place sometime last year and I discovered it in my wallet last night. I hadn't been there in quite some time mainly because I have to pay for parking, whereas other coffee shops I frequent have free parking available. But I had forgotten how cool the ambiance is, plus they bake fresh pastries on the premises. 🥐 The croissant I had was delicious! The place was bustling, so I sat in the corner and observed the clientele, which I love to do. I think I might add it to my rotation again! 😊#

The next 10 days are going to be beautiful fall weather! Sunny and very little chance of rain! 😎 #

A beautiful morning with a little bit of fog. Going to finally be sunny and in the mid 70s after all of the rain the last week.#

My daughter just dropped off the Blue Yeti Nano Premium microphone and I discovered they work best with wired over the ear headphones so I placed an order at BestBuy for the Sony - ZX Series Wired On-Ear Headphones that I will pick up tomorrow. #

This is a test. I did a quick and dirty audio recording using QuickTime player and then uploaded it to my Micro.blog site where I can host podcast files. This is not intended to be a slickly produced podcast at least not yet. I just want to have a way to record my thoughts as they happen and be able to share them from my blog. My daughter has a Blue Yeti Nano Premium microphone she is going to let me play with to see how it could become part of my audio blogging.#

Did a lot of running around yesterday and have some more to do today in preperation for my daughter's show next week at Fort Ligonier Days.#

Rabbit, rabbit! 🐇 #

I realize I do a lot of noodling in my brain about all type of things that I need to get written down on this blog. I know my writing is a bit sloppy but I think I could become a decent blogger if I used some disipline in my daily routine. I'd also like to post more on social media. The bloggers I would strive to be more like are Dave Winer and Simon Willison. I love using Dave's Electric Drummer to write on my blog and I love how Simon shares his programming thinking.#

Another rainy, cool day. ☔️ #

Missed posting yesterday as my daughter had an outdoor show that we had to set up at 6:30 AM! The show continues today at the Mt. Lebanon Artist's Market.#

Somedays I get so far down a rabbit hole that I can't seem to find my way back out. Today is one of those days.#

Another cool, gray morning!#

With all of the different current technologies that keep vying for my attention and begging me to learn about I sometimes feel like the dogs in the movie Up! Squirrel!! (If you know you know) 😆 #

Need to do some running around today and then take my grandson to soccer late in the afternoon. After soccer my wife and I will be babysitting two of our other grandchildren while their parents go to a concert. 😀 #

I just got access to Advanced Voice Mode in ChatGPT on both the iOS and Mac apps. Very interesting with a much more natural way of conversing. What caught me by surprise is I was watching a video about hurricane Helene and when I had fisnished ChatGPT asked me if I was in the path of the hurricane! Was not expecting that at all! Didn't even realize she was listening! I need to do some more exploring especially on my Mac.#

It's starting out as a cool , rainy day with thunderstorms! ⛈️ #

Excellent post by Dave Winer about the situation we find ourselves in regarding abortion. It's horrible what the white Republican men have done to the women of our country!#

I need to make changes in my life instead of living in the past.#