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Robert J WallaceOld magician who likes old cars, and old whisky

From the personal collection

Author: Bob

Casting AIs in Person of Interest: Who Fits?

I have been a fan of the TV program “Person of Interest”, which has two fictional AIs in the cast. Lately a new AI has come on the market, “Deepseek”, so for fun I had the following conversation with it. Are you familiar with the tv program “person of interest” Yes, I’m familiar with Person of …

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My Experience with a Romance Scam on Facebook and WhatsApp

Read about my experience with a typical romance scam. This started with a Facebook message, moved to WhatsApp, and then to crypto currency using an “app” named HTX-Web3 (HTXWeb3). I was smart and limited my losses to a level I was willing to lose. You can read about it on “I was scammed“.

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Using gThumb in ubuntu

I use gThumb for organizing and viewing my photos. One feature I wish it had (version 3.8) was the ability to list un-tagged images. I recently figured out a way to do that. I search for all images, then tag them all with the tag “temporary”. Then using the find (search) dialog I search for …

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Up-scaling images.

I keep getting ads for Topaz up-scaling software, and have wondered if it is any good. Not that it matters, since I am running on Linux computers, and Topaz is Windows. But recently I found an open source up-scaler program names Upscayl, which runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac. So I installed it to do …

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Faro Simulator as a stand-alone Windows executable

Faro shuffle simulator, as a stand-alone Windows application.

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A wall mounted control panel for home assistant

While not the most glamorous, or largest, or most expensive control panel, this meets my needs perfectly. I wanted a small control panel, using Home Assistant, mounted by my front door that I could use for controlling my garage door, to turn off all the lights, etc. I wasn’t interested in spending any money for …

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ESPresense and Home Assistant

This post serves as my personal record of the steps required to integrate an ESPresense ESP-32 device into my Home Assistant setup. Additionally, I hope it will be helpful to others. The screenshots included were taken in February 2024 and might have been updated since then.

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Wordle bookmarklet

Do you have trouble remembering words when playing Wordle. I wrote a bookmarklet that examines your guesses and displays a list of words that potentially match for your next guess. The bookmarklet is at the end of this post. If you don’t know what a bookmarklet is you can use the link above to learn …

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Deleting Devices in Home Assistant

As of the time of this posting there is not an easy way that I have found to delete devices from Home Assistant. Checking on-line it seems like the only way is to edit a core.device_registry file in a hidden folder. Yuck. Well, OK, if I have to do that I want to make it …

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Artificial Intelligence

Just for fun I asked ChatGPT to write an essay explaining ChatGPT. This is what it produced.

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