Brett Hutley's Blog

Today I discovered the sheer awesomeness that is Emacs with EIN. This lets my Emacs environment to to Jupyter Notebooks. Through it, I have the power of Emacs Python completion and editing while writing iPython functions. It works really well! I can display matplotlib graphs inline in my Emacs buffer. There is even symbolic computation via the sympy package! Bliss!

There is an interesting video over on YouTube about creating no-etch circuit boards using a laser printer. I want to give this a try!

My new Amazon Spot was delivered yesterday. It is a round Alexa device with a small screen that lives in the bedroom and acts like an alarm clock that you can shout at. We have a number of other Alexa devices, although this is the only one with a screen. It is great to be able to ask Alexa for the news in the morning and get a video feed from the BBC. First impressions are very positive, although it was quite expensive given that an Echo Dot is about £30.

I just formed the company "Hi-Tech Nomad Ltd". I have had the domain for forever, and have always wanted to do something with it. I have the twitter handle @hitechnomad, and lots of other social media assets. My plan is to provide information, goods and resources for "digital nomads" - those people who travel and work on things that are location independent.

In Charlie Stross' Keynote at the CCC, he talks about corporations being like Slow A.I. organisms. They pursue their instrumental goals, they exist apart from people yet are legal entities in their own right, and they can have lifespans way longer than human lifespans.

Continue reading “Slow A.I.”

I've been using Todoist for my daily tasks, but today I decided to upgrade to a Premium account. I used Things for a while, but when I switched to using an Android phone (OnePlus One), I had to switch to something that was cross-platform. Todoist allows me to structure my projects hierarchically and put priorities on the tasks. The Premium account means that I can add labels and comments to the tasks. It integrates with Amazon Alexa, and there are apps for all my devices!

I just bought myself the latest Apple Watch! I had the original one - the Series 0 - and just upgraded to the Series 3 (without cellular support). I use my watch all the time - I keep track of my heart rate, exercise, and it is my main interface to my phone when I am out and about.

Continue reading “New Apple Watch!”

There is a great post over at Charlie Stross' Blog that gives the text of his keynote at the 34th Chaos Communication Congress in Leipzig, December 2017. He makes some interesting points about old, slow AI - i.e. corporations, and compares them to cannibalistic organisms that shed people like cells. He talks about the ways the standard limiter of regulation are failing (regulatory capture and regulatory lag). He ends with a fairly negative assessment of where we are heading. It's a thought-provoking talk, and well worth reading / watching.

Continue reading “Dude, you broke the future!”

I am currently experimenting with coding using a Vortex Pok3r Mechanical Keyboard. I'm not sure whether it was a good buy or not. My rationale was that has a programmer, my keyboard is my primary tool, and it makes sense to have the best that I can get. I quite like the action of the keyboard, but it is too early yet to tell whether it is making me more productive or not.  

I finally took the plunge and bought a pair of Air Pods. So far I quite like them (although it's only been a few hours). I quite like the way that you can pause the track you are listening to simply by taking one headphone out of your ear. Playback resumes when you put it back in your ear. They are quite expensive though, and I'm fairly sure that I will lose them unless I develop a routine way of storing them.