After yet another pair of Shure SE215s developed a sketch electrical contact, I picked up Campfire Honeydew IEMs for music and gaming. They sound good. The Shures sounded good until they became unreliable. I'm not an audio guy. Haole likes 'em though.

Source.

The blogroulette site that Rob sent me a while back dropped me at a site called Vitabenes. I think I landed there before and decided that the content was simultaneously pretentious and self-evident. But I liked this one:

Vitabenes

The [da Vinci] notebooks contain thousands of ideas, sketches, mechanical designs and more. What I see is a man who could be bored easily, and so he used his perception and imagination to construct an infinite world of inspiration of his own making. He constructed his own interconnected web of ideas, 100% relevant for him, that was centered around the things he was creating or wished to create. He ran on his own self-generated inputs. That's what I mean by self-stimulation. Of course, I wonder if Leonardo would become the famous "Il Florentine" today with all the stimulation offered by others, on tap 24/7. I'm not sure.

The rest of the post was pretty good:

• It has neat factoids about da Vinci, about whom I know very little (beyond the boilerplate paintings and inventions stuff).
• The ideas notebook is something a lot of us can relate to. More on that later.
• The author twice clarifies that by 'self-stimulation' he didn't mean, er, physical stimulation. So much for me thinking the author is pretentious :D

Source.

I clicked through a few more posts and found a lot of content about (down to earth) personal improvement that can be summarized as, "do challenging/uncomfortable things rather than endlessly scroll on your couch". While that's a bit close to my earlier critique of the advice being self-evident, the author has some interesting digressions into the rationale and cognitive aspects of things. E.g.

Vitabenes

The phenomenon of vice-sharing is understandable. It's about trying to make the unacceptable acceptable to oneself. If I drink 8 cups a day, but others like my tweet about it, it's fine now, right? Right? It's a mechanism to avoid feeling discontent (which could be transformative), and instead find comfort in socially distanced validation. The problem is that it stops us from changing, evolving, and fixing the fatal flaw. Vice-sharing posts erode the collective standard, don't let it fool you.

Source.

Not that da Vinci code. The above discussion about self-stimulation and da Vinci's notebooks seemed like a good segue into posting a cocktail napkin diagram of my cyber works:

Believe it or not, this was the second revision.

In short, there's a core library of data types and utilities, like any library. Those (and third party libraries) are leveraged by larger graphics, UI, and web components that I've developed in support of client applications such as the generator for this site and software for a previous employer (who signed off on open sourcing the core code).

Some applications

My blog image preprocessor: crop, thumbnail, specify preview, stylize, blend, rename, populate alt text.

Applications like the image preprocessor leverage GUI components with main() demo functions. Here's box select.

My MtG scraper and deck builder was great for creating and publishing draft results and EDH decks.

Having the scraped MtG data and UI composites, it was just a few lines to create a random name generator akin to something like https://gfycat.com/astonishinggloriouschick.

Crunching numbers on trades via an Excel library and some regex. Applying Wins Above Replacement to fantasy football was a similar exercise.

Axis & Allies battles can sometimes be unintuitive.

Getting into machine learning meant I needed bulk graphics processing for large datasets.

Since generative machine learning typically produces small outputs, automated splitting and stitching is nice to have.

Om nom nom

Each successive application has become easier to develop. Each has upstreamed piece of functionality has improved the core library, making the next idea easier to realize.

No sneklang? Nah, I need strong typing and OO.

Here's a Windows thing I ran across on the internet that I hadn't done before. Task Manager is okay, but there's also command line support for displaying active connections and querying them by pid:

Related - internal

Related - external