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AirGradient is an open-source solution to measure the air in your
living area. In my case, I need to keep track of the air in my office,
so I have a healthy working environment.
We recorded this on Sunday September 3rd 2023. We met in
person again, and as before first visited the pub called The
Steading where we had lunch. Then we adjourned to Dave's car in the
car park, and recorded a chat.
The name "Steading" is another (Scots?) version of "Farmstead", and
means the same. It's also an anagram of "Sedating"1, so
...
Topics discussed
Vaccines:
Dave has an appointment for COVID-19 and
influenza vaccines. The new Omicron
variant BA.2.86 has prompted another booster for some people.
Dave took a trip on the recently extended Edinburgh tram
There is only one route, from the airport to Leith (port).
Older residents get free access.
MrX and MrsX recently walked from the centre of Edinburgh along the
Water of Leith to the
area where the tram terminus is at Newhaven.
Email:
Dave is using version Thunderbird 115.1.1 which
is a rewrite of the original series where the API has now changed a
lot.
Long-used add-ons now no longer work:
A favourite was Mailbox Alert which triggered sound alerts
(or others) then mail arrived in a folder - so this could be after
filtering. This was much more useful than the traditional "You have
mail" type alerts.
Discussion of tags:
MrX mentions tags, meaning bits of text that can be attached to
messages and used to classify them and to search for them.
In Gmail there are labels which can do this and these can
be used to group messages regardless of folders
Thunderbird also has this concept which it calls tags. It
comes with pre-defined tags such as Important and
To Do, but more tags can be added. Any message can be
given one or more tags. The filtering system can add tags as a message
is processed. Searches can be performed on tags also.
Dave is an enthusiast of nested folders with filters to classify
messages. MrX is keen on using tags for the same purpose. Dave mentioned
Thunderbird's saved search feature (which he wrongly called
virtual mailboxes) which can collect messages according to many
criteria, including tags.
Some discussion about mail message storage strategies: file per
message, mbox format, etc.
Ticks:
MrX's dog has brought some ticks back from recent walks.
Scotland seems to be a bit worse off for ticks in recent years.
Hikers need to protect against them and to perform checks that they
are not on clothes. Wearing long socks or gaiters over long trousers can
help.
Lyme
Disease is a bacterial infection that can be passed by ticks.
This Week in Parasitism
recently talked about an unpleasant disease caught from ticks, Babesiosis
(not bacterial as Dave thought, but caused by a protozoan). This was in
the USA; the disease doesn't seem to be in the UK at the moment.
MrX attended a show by Michael Shafar, the comedian
Dave hasn't been to much at the Festival/Fringe in recent years. He
saw the Doug Anthony
All Stars when they were active many years ago, and found them funny
but intimidating!
A channel about cycling and city design. The channel owner is
Canadian but has moved to Amsterdam for a better life for himself and
his family. He highlights the differences between North American city
design and the design of many European cities.
Another channel about cycling in the Netherlands. This channel host,
Mark Wagenbuur, is Dutch and does videos about cycle routes, and their
development. Lots of videos made as he cycles a route. He is based in ’s-Hertogenbosch
(map)
and cycles in the region and to and from Utrecht.
Hobson and Greg are working with volunteers to develop an open source
AI that we call Qary (QA for question answering). We're adding plugins
to support open source large language models (LLMs) like GPT-2 and
Llama2. Here's how you can use LLMs in your own Python Programs.
Load the .env variables in your python script using
dotenv package and os.environ:
TIP: Use os.environ to retrieve the dict of variable
values rather than dotenv.load_values- Otherwise other
environment variables that have been set by other shell scripts such as
.bashrc will be ignored.
This confused us when we were getting our GitLab CI-CD pipeline
working and deploying to Render.com.
Each of your cloud services will have different approaches to
setting environment variables.
This token string can be passed as a keyword argument to most of the
pipeline and model classes.
On the documentation page for your model you may have to apply for a
license if it's not really open source but business source like Meta
does with its AI so you can't use their models to compete with them
Apply for a license to use Llama2 on ai.meta.com
using the same e-mail you used for your Hugging Face account.
TIP: You'll need to use the kwarg use_auth_token in the
AutoModel.from_pretrained or pipeline
functions.
And it should be set to the token from your Hugging Face profile
page. The hugging face documentation says to use the token
kwarg, but that never worked for me.
from transformers import pipeline, set_seed
generator = pipeline('text-generation', model='openai-gpt')
q = "2+2="
responses = generator(
q,
max_length=10,
num_return_sequences=10
)
responses
q = "There are 2 cows and 2 bulls, how many legs are there?"
responses = generator(
f"Question: {q}\nAnswer: ",
max_length=30,
num_return_sequences=10)
answers = []
for resp in responses:
text = resp['generated_text']
answers.append(text[text.find('Answer: ')+9:])
answers
'four. \n " let me see if i have this straight',
'only 3. and three cows and 2 bulls are bigger than',
'2, 2, 1, 2. \n " not yet',
"one per cow, that's all there is. in fact",
'30. and what am i? oh, yes, about',
'one. the big, white bull that is bigger than 1',
'three. they need to be introduced to the cow population before',
"1. i don't know how many and where exactly ;",
'no 2. 2. two bulls for 1 bull and 2',
'1, there are 1.2, and 2, there are']
Because it doesn't have the word "Civilization" in its name, this
game is unfairly overlooked. It was a major achievement when released,
and it is still a very rewarding game for anyone to pick up and play.
There is a lot of depth to it, and it holds up well even after a couple
of decades.
This show describes how I go about archiving old floppy
disks. These disks date back to the early 90s when floppy disks were a
common way of installing software on personal computers. They were
also used as a portable storage mechanism for data files.
Equipment That I'm Using
IBM ThinkCentre desktop computer with a 3.5in floppy disk drive
Installed the 32-bit version of Slackware 14.2
Making an image of an entire floppy disk
dd if=/dev/fd0 of=filename.dsk
Making a floppy disk from a disk image
dd if=filename.dsk of=/dev/fd0
Copy files from a floppy disk
mount -t msdos /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy
cd /mnt/floppy
cp filename /some/destination/path/filename
cd
umount /mnt/floppy