ben

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AI, I.T.

Last time Esther wanted some coloring pages, I guess it’s time to battle with a bazillion sites trying to monetize everything. Jump through hoops here, web inspector there, the usual “this will take a minute” turns into another tech ordeal. Wait… I could just ask ChatGPT for some black and white stuff made for coloring.

The cool part? Esther gets a say into what she’d like to color. Well, she likes cats.

Then I realize that instead of asking for the generic stuff we’re used to seeing on coloring pages, we can ask for specific moments of her life.

Playing with an umbrella on a pile of woodchips? No problem:

Jumping on a trampoline full of Duplos? You got it!
And quite a few more:

Beyond the cool factor, I wonder if coloring her lived experience has a similar effect to journaling. Maybe, this helps process things?

More could be done to clean up the SVGs but this is quite sufficient for us. Evidently though, artists who were in the kid’s coloring niche have some competition :\.

One of the things that blows my mind with AI is all the things it can already do but have yet to be discovered.

All images above clickable for SVG, if you end up coloring one please send a pic 🙂

nature encounters

It’s only a wing I found on the ground, but it’s making me hopeful. We’ve seen Luna Moths only once 11 years ago. We were fresh transplants to Vermont then and didn’t realize it was rare. When I ask, people tell me they’ve only seen them once or twice in their lives.

nature encounters

Skunks don’t cause much trouble, their great defense is the only thing that makes them so darn undesirable. I wouldn’t mind them at all if I wasn’t worried we’ll run into each other unexpectedly. I’ve learned to shoo them on, they really don’t care about anything, but if you’re mildly annoying (from a distance), they’ll move along. And moving along is the whole point, for if they pick your stuff for a den, they’ll need to go and that’ll be a guaranteed mess.

life in the U.S.

An ideology became so ingrained in education its flag was flown alongside that of state and country. And the people who wished Jesus were there instead high on the wall, turned to the ugly demagogues who would hear their grievances. In the tug-of-war between competing ideologies, both sides had been willing to erode the fundaments of democracy, too happy were they to see public institutions sanction their ideologies disguised as righteous truths.

Raising kids in the middle of America’s culture war can be jarring.

I.T., maniacal paranoia

I get disproportionally upset with websites playing videos which pause when you background their browser tab. I don’t understand why browsers respect the focus and blur event at the window level, clearly they only benefit nefarious purposes seeking to milk a poor soul. Either by forcing them to watch content, or by building a better model of their attention behavior. Attention which we all know is a currency to be extracted on the internet.

A while back I added a Tampermonkey script to catch the registration of these events, and invalidate it. Out of curiosity, I added reporting to it these past 10 days. I was curious to know how prevalent the practice was.

Out of 140 domains visited these past 10 days, 28 cared to know whether my eyeballs were pointed at them or not. 8 were in the constellation of Google.

Now of course, I don’t use social media, I have pretty established work routines, and 2 layers of ad blocking. I suspect both the numbers of domains visited, and the number domains interested in my eyeballs would be significantly higher if I disabled ad blocking. But do I really want to subject myself to 10 days of ads? No, I really don’t, not even for science.

agriculture, self sustainability

Some of the stick we put in the ground 8 years ago are starting to look like real trees. They have barely yielded any fruit so far, and so we hope that they’ll decide to produce a real crop one day. It’s been interesting to compare how well everything we bought from various nurseries performed. The best nursery by far has unfortunately closed. Another one I won’t name has given us only bad performers I’m tempted to just pull out of the ground after years of tending to. Worst failure rate, worst growth rate, worst everything, bleh.

plum

pear

I.T., miscellaneous, plotters

As is now tradition, I taught my session on X,Y coordinates to local 5th graders.

As before, the collaborative drawing website I made worked wonder for getting them to time-share on the drawing machines. Each of them picks a square and works on it, I disable actual drawing for the class and they can only “code” with go_to(x,y) type commands. When they submit their drawing, the machines get to work. Kids absolutely love the idea of controlling the machines, and having that bit of time to shine as their drawing is being rendered. They are all extremely motivated to figure out the minutia of the code to these effects.

It looks like I bring a new machine every other year, we started with the tabletop plotter, then I added the gondola one, and of course this year it was lasers!

The kids really loved it as I suspected they would. I have learned that light management is a bit of an issue in the classroom when it needs to be dark but not too dark. Something to improve for next year.

It was a good crowd this year and I’ve been tempted to see if I could do something extra having some of them build the etch-a-sketch plotter.

maniacal paranoia

I’ve struggled more and more with the idea of posting things on the internet as of late. I’ve kept a reasonably high bar on personal stuff (thank you gifs for your terrible quality), but the reality is that it’s not high enough. Beyond privacy, I’m questioning why even toss nicely curated & authentic pieces of information into the sewer, I enjoy doing so less and less. Algorithms seem to gain new exploitative dimensions every few years, making everything you posted before a retroactive liability. The advent of AI clearly is one such evolution. Where social media fed off our attention, the fuel for AI is authenticity. Just as I absconded from social media early on when its extractive nature became clear, I seek to avoid fueling models, nor do I want them used against my family.

I don’t think I want fractions of our lives to be digested and regurgitated, this is especially true as my kids are getting older. I do realize the same was said about nascent photography, and I know it’s a funny thing for me to criticize generative models given my work with markov chains. That is how I feel nonetheless, and don’t get me wrong I love AI, just with someone else’s data in it :).

This blog has definitely turned into a bit of a personal journal over the years, and I don’t want to lose this as I often refer back to it. But in reality, there’s a lot I refrain from journaling here because it’s too public, and now more than ever it also feels dirty for a myriad of reasons all stemming from the current state of the internet.

I’m in a pickle, how does one filter for reasonable humans? Well, on this imperfect internet, the least bad solution I can find is to password protect some posts. And so I’ll do this from now on, and I’ll have to be better at segregating personal content from what is meant for public consumption. It’s unfortunate really, the projects I work on are deeply intertwined with our life, and will be more dry separated from it.

If you’re a reasonable human and you know me, the password when used is where I worked from 2003 to 2004.

plots

I launched another big plot, it was a 7 day one, I swapped the servo motor for the occasion to reset the pen up/down cycles it would have, but that was a bad idea. I think I’ve learned it’s better to stick with a lucky servo that keeps performing. And so on day 5, the new servo failed. So I stopped things early, the plot still looks pretty good, you might recognize it from this post.

Bellow is the unfortunate artifact of a pen that doesn’t go off the paper. Another interesting thing I’ve learned from these large deployments, is that the slight misalignment I keep having from one plot to the next, but not enough to be a real bother, I think is due to the paper or the belts loosening over the days.

An so I bought a couple of very premium servos, it’s time to get hardware in line with the ambition. I’m hoping they’ll make a difference. They better.

aesthetics, all out geekery, electronics, plots, plotters

I had a chance to run 2 Pewtybots at a public event where people could have their picture taken to be turned into line art to be rendered by lasers. I should have taken better pictures and videos, but I was too busy manning the station and talking to people. It’s unfortunate because it’s hard to convey the experience with words.

Ever since the first successful prototype, I kind of knew I wanted to do something for this event. And so I built 2 machines, refined the software, the math… well maybe that’ll be another post… I’m not sure I have it right just yet, I might. I have it right enough at least, let’s just say I refined the math. Finally, I spent time developing and practicing a pipeline where I can take someone’s picture and send it to either Pewtybot happens to be idle.

Esther helped man the station so we practiced at home with all her toys pretending to be the various personalities she’d encounter at such an event. From the overly curious bear to the llama in a hurry. And so the pipeline is as such: first we take your picture. A monitor is facing you to see what it is.

Then we turn that into lines to be drawn (or lasered in this case). This is supposed to be a first taste of eye candy as these algorithms are cool to see at work.

Then you go in a dark room, and see it all get zapped on the wall (I don’t have a picture of the lasered dog plush).

Because this was a first on many fronts, I was pretty anxious some things would go wrong (they did). I also didn’t know how to present it, or how people would react. So the first couple of “customers” helped me figure out how to guide them through the pipeline. And when the time comes to go in the dark room, I purposefully kind of dump people in there and vaguely tell them to wait for the wall to light up. I have the laser write their name and count down from 3 to 1, and then the laser moves much faster through their portrait.

Nicole quickly realized adding chairs in the dark room would invite people to take in the experience more. And I realized I was silly to tune my setting for single portraits, I almost exclusively had families and groups of friends in the same picture. The reactions were great, although I didn’t get any from inside the room, people coming out were full of questions and kids were smiling. As always with my silly projects, there’s also a smaller fraction of people with whom they resonate more deeply.

Overall it was a big success and pretty smooth for a first. I want to do more for sure. There’s something fireworksy about when the laser really starts moving and light shows up everywhere.

nature encounters

This Beaver’s perfect execution of instinct. It saw an undammed stream, a tree standing near, and it knew just what to do. And the tree went right where the beaver wanted it.


I would have loved to see it at work.
plots, plotters

I’ve been revamping and refactoring the software stack for plotty… pewty… gondola plotty… etchy? bot. Everytime a new riff on drawing machines came up, I’d grab the last code I worked on and tailored it for the new endeavor, often adding generalizable improvements along the way, but never taking the time to refactor previous work.

I always try to be helpful when people reach out on this blog about something they need/want/would like, but I have limited time and I’ve learned to filter a bit and not let other people’s projects take too much of my time. Last December though, the folks from Code Club Luxembourg got in touch with a few questions, and I gave them the usual “helpful but not too much” filter. Except they went on to build 5 PlottyBots, a whole integration with Scratch, and now use it to teach coding. Music to my ears, and clearly they meant business. And so we hopped on a call to exchange ideas.

Clearly the software could use consistency and so I started thinking holistically with the laser code. Each machine has slightly different motor control, but it’s now evident which software pieces are consistent across implementations. Ideally, I’d like the same software stack no matter which machine you happen to be running on. So I refactored back to the gondola plotter, and finally the tabletop one. It’s still not finished but it’s definitely better and more consistent.

To test new software on the original PlottyBot, I ran it on my reMarkable tablet.

I’m not going to do a whole post dedicated to its merits, I’m allergic to promotional content, but I will say a quick few things on this unrelated post. I’ve been interested in Eink for the longest time but never found a compelling device I felt was more than a temporary gimmick. Even getting a pricy reMarkable was a bit of an experiment that could land in a closet gathering dust. But I did want to experiment with quieter and purpose targeted devices so I went on with it after more than a decade of seeing various Eink devices go by. I haven’t adopted it for everything I want to yet, it takes time to change long established work habits, but I will say that it absolutely NAILS writing. It nails it so hard it changed the way I problem solve to an earlier saner process. It might be a generational thing, but writing is key to information absorption and processing for me. The problem with paper is that I have pieces flying everywhere, and mistakes make for an unclean train of thought committed to paper which is frustrating to engage with further. With Eink writing, you get an infinite canvas, and the ability to massage thoughts into a perfect form, one ripe for implementation. I have found that I will pick this device with a sense of relief as it means I’m about to engage in uninterrupted deep thinking. I find many signs that it was carefully designed to be such a device and not your next fancy tech gizmo, and I absolutely love it for this. Hopping on a computer on the other hand does not yield a sense of relief, but rather stressed anticipation at the onslaught of mechanisms devised to get in the way of what I was trying to do. Of course, I can’t do as much on the reMarkable, but I’m curious more than ever to shift to it whatever I can.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
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