We have just finished un-decorating the tree, un-decorating the house, packed the boxes, and moved the tree to the terrace (where he will be happier as it is colder than the house) awaiting his pickup from the university students, so it is good time to reflect on how fun this silly season was, rather then be sad.
The calendar aligned this new years to give a very nice long vacation with the expenditure of very few vacation days and with it I went down a long and varied rabbit hole exploring Conan the Barbarian. Read on if you dare!
I have been using remarkable_news to have a fresh XKCD comic on my reMarkable’s sleep screen since I got it and have been really happy with it. The other day a co-worker asked how I was doing it and I pointed him to remarkable_news and had forgotten that it had all sorts of options for the sleep screen in addition to XKCD. I tried to set it up for Calvin and Hobbes but found it did not work and that led me down a rabbit hole leading to a fully customized sleep screen with a daily quote, Calvin and Hobbes, the Peanuts, and Bloom County! Read on for the details!
October’s pick for my work book club was Halloween themed with Dracula or Frankenstein as candidates and I voted for Frankenstein and was pleased it won as I see it as a perfectly timely story given the hype around AGI and P(doom) and was interested in insights that could be gleamed from a 200+ year old novel and it did not disappoint!
I think this quote said by the monster to Victor pretty much captures the potential danger AGI presents and what I saw over in over in the movies I watched preparing for the AI apocalypse:
“You are my creator, but i am your master; obey!”
I love when these big companies talk about how green and environmentally responsible they are, but then their actions just demonstrate the opposite. Microsoft did that on October 14th when they ended support of Windows 10 requiring an upgrade to Windows 11 to ensure you keep getting security updates (something that is a must given the current security landscape). The only problem is that there was an estimated 160 million to 200 million PCs running Windows 10 on October 14th that are not compatible with Windows 11. Sadly lots of those devices will end up contributing to the already existing enormous e-waste bin. Or will this be a making lemonade moment and finally give the linux desktop movement the bump we have been waiting for the last 10 years? One of the 200 million PCs is my Surface Go (o the sweet irony, a Microsoft device that they have turned their back on) so I decided give the Linux route a chance!
Thanks to those pesky spammers I can no longer use email for notifications from my different systems because they no longer allow basic authentication (ie user and password) for sending emails so this morning I had to find an alternative. I let Google’s Gemini know my problem and it provided me with multiple alternatives and I was able to implement a solution in less than an hour giving me time to make cinnamon rolls for child number 2!
Who said AI is not making us more productive¿?¿?
Read on for the details!
