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 …
From the personal collection
Author: Bob
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“.
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 …
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 …
Faro Simulator as a stand-alone Windows executable
Faro shuffle simulator, as a stand-alone Windows application.
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 …
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.
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 …
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 …
Artificial Intelligence
Just for fun I asked ChatGPT to write an essay explaining ChatGPT. This is what it produced.
