ataary
Last month I wrote about importing six thousand rural dispatch targets out of an old federal dataset like churches, cemeteries, dams, post offices, etc. to fix the small-town coverage gap. That post ended with a confession: the very first dispatch the new system produced sent me to “Armstrong Lake...
ataary
I wanted to build something that didn’t just solve a math expression, but actually showed you what was happening at every stage, how the expression gets broken apart, and in what order the operations get resolved. The result is MathViz, a web-based expression evaluator that parses and solves math...
ataary
I spend a fair amount of my spare time running AI models on my own hardware. Somewhere in there I got stuck on a question I couldn’t put down: when people say an AI “has a personality,” is that a real thing, or just a number we made up and started believing? So I did what I usually do with a...
ataary
A game that sends you out into the real world, and quietly helps map it. Here is the pitch. A handler named Zero radios you an assignment, points you at a real landmark somewhere near you, and sends you out to photograph it as proof you were there. Maybe it is a mural two streets over that...
ataary
If you’ve been following along with my earlier Sebastian post, you know I’ve been rebuilding our family AI assistant on a different foundation: Open WebUI + Ollama instead of our previous OpenClaw setup. The new stack has been running great, but there was one capability I knew I was going to miss:...
ataary
I introduced Sebastian a while back, our Caribbean-accented, monocle-wearing crab of a family assistant who runs the household’s digital plumbing. That version lived on OpenClaw, and we loved it. Still do. This post is the sequel: I’ve spent the last stretch rebuilding the exact same assistant on...
ataary
When I posted about Dispatch Zero a month ago, I mentioned that the app was built from a town of about four hundred people, and that small-town coverage was the part of the system that worried me most. The Wikipedia tier kept things from breaking entirely (every small town has at least something...
ataary
If you’ve got an AMD Ryzen 7040 or 8040 series chip — laptops, mini PCs, the Phoenix family of APUs — you’ve got a Radeon 780M iGPU sitting there. gfx1103 in ROCm terminology. It’s a perfectly capable RDNA3 GPU with about 16 GiB of usable memory once you count UMA + GTT. It would be a great target...
ataary
I have a static HTML site — no React, no Vue, no bundler, no build step. cp is my deploy tool. I wanted to translate the whole thing into Japanese, Chinese, and French. Every i18n tutorial I could find assumed a framework. react-intl, vue-i18n, Next.js’s next-i18next, formatjs — they all want...
Daniel Perelman
The problem# I've somehow multiple times ended up with corrupted video files such that they're cut off at some point, apparently due to a copy being interrupted or similar. As a result, I'm a bit paranoid about my video files not being what I expect, so I wanted a way to quickly check the length...
Daniel Perelman
The problem# I wanted to find a specific Unicode character I had used somewhere in some previous blog post. But by the nature of not knowing exactly what character it was, I wasn't sure how to search for it. The solution# Instead, I wrote a script based on this post to simply list all of the...
Daniel Perelman
The problem# When running an incremental backup with rsync with the --progress flag, it often spends lot of time outputting nothing as it scans through many unchanged files. If you think of it before starting the transfer, --info=progress2 or the name2/skip2 --info flags would give more detail,...
Daniel Perelman
The problem# I've been playing Codenames online a lot lately (using my fork of codenames.plus), and a friend suggested it might be fun to have themed word lists. Specifically, they suggested Star Trek as a theme as it's a fandom that's fairly widely known. They left it up to me to figure out what...