Reminder system, component #381.6: https://starbeamrainbowlabs.com/msg.html By writing a message and using the *send tab to device feature*, I can send myself little messages I know I'll see when I sit down at that target device. It's also got a feature to help with furiganising 日本語のかんじ with […]

I have hyprland on my lab pc (considering a switch to niri), and just had a situation in which I couldn't get gamepads to work no matter what I did. Solution: make sure I had the `input` group so I had permission to access `/dev/input/*`...... * facepalms * 🤦‍♀️ #linux #linuxdesktop #hyprland […]

`lnav` is a fab tool for analysing logs. Today I used it for debugging a verbose `systrace` log file to analyse what the problem was w/smth and it was cool Tip: hit `<tab>` to edit, enable, and disable existing text filters added w/e.g. `:filter-in` and `:filter-out`. #lnav #linux #logs […]

@sbrl's 2 laws of artificial intelligence: 1. AI will always hallucinatinate 2. AI will always be biased AI is like a dictionary. It stores the important things in the training dataset in its memory. Then it matches against them when queried. Anything outside of what it learnt matches results […]

Dr. Starbeamrainbowlabs is me :D Blog post when I have the energy to write one #graduation #phd

Because all the existing tools I could find were either badly documented or terrible to install, I wrote a little image deduplication tool that's actually sane and is: 1. Easy to install (hopefully) 2. Has actually decent documentation https://www.npmjs.com/package/idedupebox If it doesn't […]

htop | lolcat #linux #bash #terminal #lolcat #showerthoughts

Useful character: the unicode zero width space '​'. Ever wanted to @​mention someone without pinging them, but felt awkward doing the space thing ala @ mention? With the zero-width space assigned to your compose key, you have a solution at your fingertips :D #unicode #composekey […]

Solved sekrets management for my budding NixOS pi application cluster (kinda :P)! In this case, it's transcrypt to the rescue: https://github.com/elasticdog/transcrypt ....I really should have initialised it in aes-256-ctr instead of the aes-256-cbc default tho....... But yeah, transcrypt + […]

First experiences with @nixos_org on Raspberry Pi: • Documentation is just *bad* at explaining things in a way that I understand • Got confused abt the image download • Learning Nix has been a struggle .....but: I LOVE the experience of declarative service definitions on the server! It's […]

Polite notice to app developers: when something doesn't work, don't fill the system logs up complaining about it :P #sysadmin #linux #applicationdesign #sysadminchatter

TIL that one can publish a docker port to localhost instead of the default external interface (e.g. if you wanna put it behind a reverse proxy etc) like so: ```bash sudo docker run -it --rm --publish 127.0.0.1:5000:5000 --name registry registry:3 ``` ...this example using the default docker […]

It's done. It's *finally* done. It does not feel real at all and I am constantly second guessing myself but my corrections were accepted \o/ My PhD is, as far as I know, complete pending paperwork. Title: Using Big Data and AI to Dynamically Map Flood Risk (link to thesis pending said […]

It's definitely not perfect but I made a thing! It's a shiny card effect 🎴 with 3d perspective, done in mostly-pure CSS with a bit of Javascript for cursor positions etc. 📱 Doesn't work very well on mobile at the moment though - it's on my todo list. In other news, CSS container queries are […]

Discovered a cool online (and open source!) ascii diagramming tool that is very cool and is better and asciiflow: https://monosketch.io/ Great for drawing diagrams for a range of purposes! #Website #AppRec #tool #ascii #monosketch

I don't know how to word it, but mental health issues in academia are frighteningly common, and often are caused by the system. More scary still is the culture of normalisation around this. It's okay to be not okay, but this *has* to change somehow. I don't have any answers, but surely if we […]

New blog post time! It's been a while. PhD Update 20: Like a bad smell..... https://starbeamrainbowlabs.com/blog/article.php?article=posts%2F558-phd-update-20-like-a-bad-smell.html We /will/ get through this long night. #phd #phdcorrections #thesis #blogpost

Wanna make a tiny planet from an image with imagemagick? That's easy: `magick IN.png -distort arc 360 OUT.png` Wanna blend the 2 sides together? That's MUCH harder........ `in="IN.png"; w="$(magick identify -format '%w' "${in}")"; h="$(magick identify -format '%h' "${in}")"; magick "${in}" […]

Just discovered the PPA for Firefox Next on Launchpad hasn't had any new packages for 34 weeks, which suggests it's been discontinued - latest version of Firefox there is 131, when latest beta is 139. If you're using <https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/ubuntu/firefox-next>, then the […]

I found a kewl compact long-period clock for Minecraft redstone yesterday, but calculating the settings to get the period I wanted was a pain. With a bit of HTML, CSS, and JS and an unknown amount of my evening, I am now +1 period calculator for said clock […]

Cute little script is cool! I wrote a little bash script to wrap around a thesaurus .txt file I found in a unix stack exchange answer (link in script). It started out as a one-liner, but I adapted it after the results were not completely terrible, though I'm always looking for better ones. Why […]

Did #colliderfest today on the Viper HPC stand! It was fun talking to people about supercomputing/HPC and AI, but also exhausting. https://colliderfest.co.uk/ Used my UMAP word cloud demo to talk about how foundational language models (e.g. like ChatGPT, Ollama, etc) work, and how […]

If anyone from the University of Hull follows me, did you know I maintain a set of latex templates that support the Hull Harvard referencing system? I don't remember who I inherited it from, but it's pretty cool and I've taken up the torch of maintaining it myself. Yesterday, I updated it to […]

When you need to find *another* synonym of "further" for the fourth time to add to your thesis while doing corrections...... #ughijustwannabedonewiththemalready #phd #phdThesis #phdcorrections #suck #academicchatter

While I try to find time to write a PhD update blog post, here's a Cool Graph I plotted recently for my rainfall radar model. One of the things I have been asked to do in my PhD corrections is to assess the model's stability. To this end, I trained a series […] [Original post on fediscience.org]

@admin I've been trying to debug why Bridgy Fed isn't bridging my account into BlueSky, because some of my academic colleagues are on BlueSky and not on the fediverse. However, bridgy fed doesn't seem to be receiving messages from fediscience.org - so I was wondering if there was anything on […]