Tony is a Geek

well, it's not all doom & gloom. lol, well, it is, but it isn't. I was clearing out a couple of rooms in the house, I've basically sold off all my old ATARI ST machines and accessories (2x1040STs, 1x520ST & 1x520ST with 4MB upgrade), including a genuine colour monitor, an Megafile 30, an SH204 and other harddrives, loads & loads of other things Atari related that took me years to acquire. I also sold off the Sinclair Spectrum machines, books, tapes, etc... and the Atari 800XL machines (3 or maybe 4 of them?), along with cartridge games and a side3 cartridge and a FujiNet device, again, with a load of software, disc drives, tape drives, etc... all working.  I also threw in the Toshiba MSX machines (2x!) and tape drives and software. As I was in the mood, I threw in an Amiga A500 with a 2Mb plug in with 2xhard-drives, LOADS of floppy discs, software and a genuine monitor too.  yeah, that hurt, a lot. especially seeing as it was for £650. I know, I know, I know. I ...

Well, when life serves you lemons . what are you going to do?  Suck it up. Get on with it. Get back on the horse. Step up out of the gutter and get back on the kerb. <insert all the positive wording here> lol As previously posted, had a bit of a culture / acceptance shock - I guess I had invested so much of myself & my time into "a thing", I had lost myself & got wrapped up into things. How about now? Well, I've had some time to reflect, time to spend some "alone time", time to clear my mind. I would like to give a huge hug & thanks to V.S. for helping with some of that clarity, without even realising it - it was the wake up call, I've been pressing "snooze" on for far too long. What does that mean?  It means I'm starting my disconnection from the distraction that I have had since around 1994.  Yes, 31 years of distraction, turmoil, stress, frustration, addiction, alcoholism(ish) & general unhappiness - yes, I got good at ...

I knew it was looming, I could see it on the horizon, getting slightly closer day by day, but, as we all know, you acknowledge it, you ignore it, you hope it won't happen. But it does.  Of course it is inevitable. What am I talking about? The soon to be ending of my time on a 5.5year project, that I've dedicated my time to, in order to try to make a difference in the world. It's been a blast.  I wished, as expected, to have " just that bit more time to finally get to pull things together to make that bigger difference ", but y'know, there does come a time when common-sense outweighs the financially driven objectives & goals of the consultancy company that you work for, I empathise with the client, the company I work for charge a lot, a hell of a lot ( 5-times more than I get paid - hey, they have "overheads" to pay, like the CEOs $23m bonus for not actually doing anything ), so I cannot blame them for making a tough call. It's not a problem, ...

Okay, so I have resisted the whole drone thing for long enough. I was watching a vanlife youtuber who was comparing 3 drones and this was a cheap version that is basically for people who just want to tinker, use it for 5-10 mins and fly it into things and not have it break - or wound you. Oh ans be <£200. oh and be very light, so it is under the weight for requiring you to do the online drone license exam thingy (not that that is too difficult, more common-sense than anything else). I also kind of need one now for some things I want to do myself, so whilst I was in an Amazon Prime delivery location, purchase it I did. It arrived. It is small! It is quite robust. Those blades are well covered / protected.  I bought the extra gimble protector cover too - as I did see that was a thing to get - there is NO obstacle avoidance on this device, so it will fly into things, so well worth protecting the camera. It did take a bit of faffing about to get the App to install onto my ZFold 4 d...

If you want to unwind, you don't want to play a game, but you want to use technology - you don't want a boring FPS, you don't want to run around an open world "crafting" things. You like the idea of being arty.  You like Warhammer style D&D table top diorama style buildings etc.. but you don't have the time & resources to dedicate 10000 hours to making things like that. Well, fret no more!  This is a "game" with a difference: Tiny Glade:  https://pouncelight.games/tiny-glade/ Grab it on STEAM:  https://store.steampowered.com/app/2198150/Tiny_Glade/ This YouTube video is a great walkthrough of how how pleasant and pleasing it is to use: End result, no killing, no shooting, just nice day / night / sunrise/set aesthetics, pleasant background music, sheep that go "baa!" and the freedom to be creative.  All the therapy you need in one place! In fact, you can just do what I did - watch someone else building stuff - true sloth mode :-D Ser...

okay, I admit I wasn't expecting much.  I was surprised.  I have ollama running locally, so I just pulled the 1.5b model down over my 4G connection. The token output was pretty fast, for instance, it was outputting at a rate that I would consider equiv. to getting it from a cloud service.  It was as fast as I could read, just, sometimes it was going faster. My 1 minute experiment was this:  I asked for some javascript code to be written to render a 3D world in a web-browser and to explain what was being done. The first section of the output showed the "reasoning" logic and "arguments" that were going on between the internal workings of the model.  Now, I recall doing this myself about 2years ago when I first built E.L.VIS - long story, won't go into it - but I was asked to "stop" as I was getting to ahead of everyone else, including myself.  As it was me, I not only stopped, I walked away & focused on "other things". Now though, it lo...