What I'm doing now

(This is a now page, and if you have your own site, you should make one, too.)

Updated February 8 from my home in Miyazaki City, Japan

Switched from Windows 11 to Linux. I tried OpenSUSE Tumbleweed first, which worked quite okay except the nvidia drivers. Since I have most experience with Ubuntu, I decided to try ubuntu again, where everything mostly worked out of the box.

The biggest issue is the lack of an official google drive client for Linux. There luckily is the rclone program, but it is not as easy as the official client. I happily note that NTFS read/write access works mostly out of the box. I set up an rasberry pi ubuntu server installation and could mount the drives right away. It's easy to make a NAS.

Updated December 15th 2022, from my home in Miyazaki City, Japan

ChatGPT

So fun. It's basically a ChatBot, but this time it's the real deal. I've seen this AI mix together information into a story, like a journalist could do. There's times where the AI answer suddenly turns into a strange dream, similar to the scene in Inception when the dream starts collapsing. The AI researchers call this hallucinating. As an expert, you will hopefully be able to spot the hallucinations. The value lies in the mixing of ideas. You can feed it articles, but in the future it will be really powerful, when you can just point it to articles and ask it questions about them. I feel like it's a new form of reading.

Also the chat is filled with young people trying to cheat on their programming classes. Not great, but I mean it is a way to learn how to use technology. It beats the old method of copying that one student.

Stuff that I tried out.

• Chatroom with famous people.
• Writing a chat box on my site, similar to something like intercom, that will send me a message on the chatapp LINE (sort of worked)!
• Generating a static site generator with RSS feed, sitemap generator in Ruby and adapting it to my usecase: I used it in a new project. Would have taken me a few days to come up with this otherwise.
• Rewriting articles and adding new information with data it analyzed from the articles. This could be used for simple plagarism, but I think there is value in intepreting data and making it easy to read.
• Have it generate elaborate stories and then turning them into newspaper articles.
• Writing a press release.
• Checking if a Python 2.7 app works on Python 3.
• How to extracting a hash into instance variables in Ruby from a basic question.

My new website

I'm working about a new website about Miyazaki Prefecture called Miyazakian.com. Right now there are pages in English, but nothing that really ties it all together. When I speak to people in other places in Japan, especially foreign residents, they usually have no idea about Miyazaki. This place used to be one of the biggest tourist destinations in Japan and while a lot of that has shifted over to Okinawa, beautiful amazing but tropical and thus rainy. By the way, there are flights between Okinawa and Miyazaki Airport and foreign tourists get quite a good deal. For the new website, I'm trying to keep it as simple as possible: Markdown files instead of databases, static page. Markdown files are actually quite cool, because you can put any fields you want in the frontmatter. Comments too! With ruby scripts you can then do stuff based on those field.

Surfing

Really into surfing right now. My wife is more into it. It's still very warm compared to other places, but it's getting a bit chilly in the morning in the extremities. I might need boots and gloves.

Diary

trying to get back into writing my diary.

Business Cards

Recently printed my own business cards, bought the paper at the shop, designed in Word, then printed on my Epson Inktank. I added my LINE qr code to the card. I might have them professionally printed sometime, but the quality is better than some professionally printed ones. My case is a rather unusual one, otherwise I would just have went to a company here. In the process I also learned that numbers, when vertically have to be written in japanese characters. This also goes for the address.