📙 #067 - GOOGLING HOW TO WASH BLOOD OUT OF A CARPET
# WORK…
…is in particularly crunchy crunch mode at the moment. Not so much that I’m sacrificing work/life balance, but enough that I’m sacrificing this newsletter deadline today. Also I’m cat sitting this week [Edit: more on that later], which mainly involves having bad sleep while the cat sits on my head. In that spirit I present a mainly pictorial edition.
# VESTABOARD PATTERNS
I wanted to update my rubber stamping code (next section). I took that as an excuse to shoot some video explaining the logic & process behind aligning text, which started with the Vestaboard as an example.
The main gist being that you try and fit words in, until you can’t, and then move onto the next line, repeating the process with increased padding on both sides until the text fills all six line, wrapping it up with some simple maths to centre the text.
I would write that out in more detail but; I’m already late with the newsletter, I’ve explained it better in last weeks #Weeknotes, and I’m still kinda distracted by the idea there may be a pigeon head somewhere behind the sofa because I still haven’t found it yet.
There’s 22 flip “bits” across and 6 rows down on a Vestaboard, and basically you send an array of numbers down the wire (or over the air), where each number represents a letter, number, symbol or colour, it looks a bit like this…
I was going to focus more on the pattern part, but I haven’t been able to get into the studio to take the photos I wanted (and let’s face it, now you’ve seen the array structure and the colour codes, you could probably already code up a Vestaboard pattern maker yourself), instead, here’s last Friday’s video…
…and I promise you only need to watch the first 35 seconds, which is where the fun noise flipping stuff happens. Honestly, hit play, watch the first half-minute, and then you’re done. Unless it tries to show you an advert in which case don’t bother.
# THE STAMPY STOMPY MACHINE
All of the above was so I could explain some of the maths behind the layout code for the rubber stamps.
Which basically means I can now send arbitrary text to my code, and it’ll figure out how to centre/left/right/align it all on any sized paper and generate the GCODE for the pen plotter.
Still working on the vertical alignment though. And don’t come at me about the lack of apostrophe or commas, I may need to hand carve rubber stamps for those.
BEE VS OMI AI
Last week I mentioned that BEE the wearable always listening AI thingy had been bought by Amazon (boo!), so I grabbed an Omi to see how that is.
The short version is that it’s fine, just fine, perfectly adequate, while being slightly worse in nearly every way.
The form factor; fractionally worse. The way it charges; fractionally worse. The instructions; almost perfectly usable. The software is … evolving and mostly works.
The developer documentation always seems to be talking about something slightly different, some words maybe mean different things now, screenshots have different UI layouts? Their branding is awful, the box design is grim, how they’re pitching it on their website is just super confusing.
But luckily it does what it’s supposed to do, which is record and transcribe what you say, apart from those odd times it doesn’t and you don’t realise until later.
Thankfully just like the Bee, you can grab the transcripts, which is all I really want, so I can process them myself, but the way you get those transcripts is predictably ever-so-slightly more awkward than the Bee.
On the plus side it’s open source and hasn’t been bought by Amazon, which makes it infinitely better.
I’ll report back once I’ve had a chance to use it some more. Mainly though I have managed to feed what comes out of it into my Obsidian notes app, and therefor also Kitty my AI, without Amazon listening in, so nearly two thumbs up for that.
# CURSOR IDE & OBSIDIAN & PYTHON; VERY NICHE
If you use Cursor as your code editor for the AI features, and you use Obsidian for keeping all your notes, and you’re okay with letting the AI Agent spin up python scripts, then open up your Obsidian vault in Cursor and have fun by asking the AI Agent to do… stuff.
You can thank me later.
Also, now’s a good time to backup your Obsidian vault.
# THE END
I signed off work today with this in Slack
…and this is what Omi made of it all…
Which hopefully explains why this newsletter is EVEN LATER than I was expecting, and somehow the Omi didn’t record anything from 11:40am until 5pm and I didn’t notice.
It’s almost good.
The next newsletter should come out in two weeks time on Thursday the 21st of August, when I’m *checks notes* in London, the day after launching the work project into alpha.
As much as I use AI to help me in the art studio, I don’t use AI to help me write at all, I’ve even stopped using Grammarly since they went all AI. But if there was ever a time I’d let Kitty take the wheel and write a newsletter the next one would be it.
Love you all
Dan
❤️
A blast from the past for music this week.