Someone broke into my house last night and stole my limbo trophy. How low can you go?

Every week for the past few weeks I’ve been working on a mini side project each week 🙂

This week, it was a site/feed checker. I have been using the excellent baRSS (https://github.com/relikd/baRSS) for at least a couple of years now to monitor updates to a few RSS feeds I follow.

But this week I realized that I might also want to follow updates to non-RSS feed items, for example, a list of posts on a forum. I realized that there was no solution to do that — at least, not the way I wanted it to work …

So I started work on a quick-and-dirty replacement to baRSS in Swift that would do both jobs at once — monitor RSS feeds, and monitor a given site for updates to a set of items identified by an xpath.

The basic implementation took only about a day of work and it is working quite nicely, if I do say so myself 🙂 Plus, when I compared memory usage, my implementation uses like 25% of the memory that baRSS did — granted, baRSS was written in ObjectiveC and my implementation was SwiftUI, but I didn’t expect that huge a difference in memory usage …

I do have more things to do — add a Settings screen (currently all settings are hardcoded) and add a xpath tester so that you can easily figure out if the correct data would be extracted for a given site, to name a few. But I’m happy enough with the basic functionality for the time being …

#RSS #SwiftUI #macOS #Coding

I told a joke on a Zoom Meeting and no-one laughed.

It turns out I'm not remotely funny.

@AimeeHill I wrote my first book in (possibly) 6 months or so … but that was almost 20 years ago … Since then I’ve made numerous attempts to get started on the second one and all of them drop off somewhere along the way.

But I’m sure we’ll both get there one day 🙂 Enjoy the journey while you’re at it is what I say …

@dipti

@AngelaPreston And apparently there’s a new animated movie coming soon? Also there was word of more live-action shows (possibly) after that …. Hope all these do materialise …

I was just let go from my job and I’m looking for a new place to land.
If anyone knows of an open role for a Senior QA with 10 years of experience, please let me know.

I have extensive skills in Agile, SDLC, Jira, Confluence, Smoke and regression testing, Postman, documentation and more. I’m in the US (NY) and am looking for something remote / WFH.

Even if you don’t have a role but see this post, PLEASE BOOST IT so someone else may see it. Thank you.

#FediJobs #GetFediHired #NeedAJob

I’ve posted before about using fitness trackers and how we’d settled on AmazFit since it was cheap and seemed to work well … Unfortunately, after a few days of use it became evident that it wasn’t doing a great job at sleep tracking 😛

It was fine for the price point but it wasn’t totally accurate. I watched some YouTube videos by the Quantified Scientist (https://www.youtube.com/@TheQuantifiedScientist) and finally settled on the Fitbit Charge 5 as being accurate enough and yet cheap enough for my needs 🙂

I generally steer away from FitBit because it doesn’t sync any data with Apple Health and that was a big no-no for me.

But needs must and so got a Fitbit Charge 5 and then began looking around for solutions to the Apple Health data syncing. There were apps around but all the ones I found were subscription based. I didn’t want to pay a subscription to synch my data and so I took a look at the FitBit API, searched for any open source solutions on GitHub and when I didn’t find anything recent/working, I decided to code my own …

It’s been a bit of an adventure, I can tell you that 🙂 I’d worked with HealthKit before but I’d forgotten most of it and so had to do a bit of reading of the docs but once I got going, it was easy enough.

It took me about a day to get sleep data to sync properly to my satisfaction. If anybody wants to talk about (and complain about 😛) syncing (and updating) Apple HealthKit data, I’m your guy for the next week or so — then I’ll probably forget most of this again.

Initially, I thought I only wanted to sync sleep and maybe my step count for the day. But once I got going, I realized that there was a lot more I wanted — heart rate, resting heart rate (which is different), and SpO2/blood oxygen levels .. I’ve got it all now.

But I’m still not done 😛 Now I want respiratory rate and skin temperature too. I guess once you get started, you just can’t stop?

The app doesn’t have much of a UI at the moment since it simply connects to the FitBit API, gets the data and syncs with Apple Health. All the UI does is show logs of the actions going on. So no point in posting a screenshot …

I’m thinking of releasing the source as an open source project so that others can compile the app for themselves too instead of having to pay subscription fees. But that requires documentation since my app is set up only to fetch personal data and so others who want to compile and run for themselves will have to know a few things about configuring the project. So maybe in a few weeks once I get everything working just right?

#Swift #Apple #HealthKit #iOS #HealthTracking

@davemark I’ve got one of those too — got it for (I think, if I recall correctly) $1 from Apple to do development 😛

Blind woman born and raised in Nebraska, now living in Baltimore where I work as the Education Programs Coordinator for @nationsblind. I love to sing and am trying to figure out how music fits into my life. Also into #knitting, cooking, and baking, and have managed to keep my pandemic #sourdough starter alive and rising decent bread. I enjoy creating things from scratch, dreaming about future possibilities, and working to make dreams reality. #introductions

@lolzac Yeah, you forget so many things over the years 🙂

I know I’ve played it on both a PC and on a mainframe and recently I’ve also played it on Windows and Mac OS 9 using VMs.

But I’ve been searching for the PC version that I remember and still can’t find that exact version. Now I wonder if perhaps I just remember the PC version wrong? 😛

@deavid Any time 🙂

@deavid I haven’t tried this particular one myself, but I’ve been meaning to try fine-tuning LLaMA or Alpaca and so this looks like a good candidate:

https://github.com/lxe/simple-llm-finetuner

This Reddit thread and the linked YouTube video might be helpful too:

https://www.reddit.com/r/deeplearning/comments/11ryc3s/how_to_finetune_llama_models_smaller_models_with/

Plus, that particular sub-reddit and other similar channels are a great place to find people who are willing to help — or at least willing to talk about things 🙂

Looks as if the “Trek” game re-make is continuing … at least for a bit 😛

I got some coding time yesterday and so did some more work. Now the Long Range Scanner and Short Range Scanner work and you can navigate in either scanner view by simply tapping where you want to go … So progress 🙂

Also made things look a little bit prettier … though that might be my opinion and not yours 😛

Maybe next weekend I’ll get to do some more work, I guess we’ll see … While I think Flutter would have made this even more easy to code, SwiftUI has held its own so far …

#Game #StarTrek #Coding #SwiftUI #macOS
A screenshot from WIP “Trek” ga…

@deavid I think I started with GitHub repos some time back when I did some fine-tuning of models … and Medium articles. But it’s been a few months and unfortunately, I’ve already forgotten all the sources 😛

If you want (and haven’t found some yourself) I can try to dig those up …

A Cake Sandwich by @nao2748

@troz I’ve made a bit more progress since I like working out the UI and figuring out how it should all work in this new version … But not sure if I’ll get around to completing it. Will let you know if I do 🙂
WIP screenshot from “Trek” game…

I think I’ve talked about the old “Trek” game on here at least once or twice 🙂

I think I might be obsessed with it — mostly because there is this one magical version I remember from the early 90s that I can’t seem to find anywhere. (Of course, the magic might be all in my mind … or in the fact that I can’t find it 😛)

I did some fiddling with a Mac OS 9 emulator this weekend and in the process ran across the “Trek” game again and it got me looking at “Trek” games in general again. In the process, I came across a version of the game for Windows 9x that is probably the most feature-filled version that I’ve seen (screenshot attached).

That made me think of re-writing a version of the game myself and I kind of got started last night. All I have so far is a plan for what I want it to look like … or at least half a plan (second screenshot).

Not sure if I’ll actually go through with completing it, but it’s a nice thing to dream about 🙂

#Game #StarTrek #Coding #SwiftUI
A screenshot from the game “Sta…
A screenshot from an early atte…

The postdoc position #MachineLearning #MedicalImaging #HCI I'm hiring for is finally online! Please reach out if you might be interested, if you happen to be at #CHI2023 physically or virtually we can talk offline or on the Discord channel! https://candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationInit.aspx?cid=119&ProjectId=181571&DepartmentId=3439&MediaId=338

Yesterday, I photographed this Organ-pipe lichen (Cladonia crispata) growing between Bristly and Juniper Haircap mosses.

#lichen #lichensubscribe #Mosstodon #LichenLandscape

My employer, Shopify, announced layoffs today and I've been affected. If you're looking for someone with deep experience with developer tooling and developer environments, I'd love to work with you. I've spent the last two years building Shopify's in-house cloud developer environment, and I have extensive experience building developer tools as one of members of the Homebrew package manager's Project Leadership Committee.