Thought Bricks

I upgraded my ancient but still working Lenovo X1 Carbon yesterday to the latest version of Linux Mint 21.3 from 20.3 yesterday. The name of the release, Virginia, is particularly appropriate here in the Old Dominion. It went well but took quite a while to get everything downloaded from my local mirror. The only hiccup was some confusion about what version was actually installed from the instructions. It seemed like the base 21, but on reboot was 21.

At the beginning of the year, I bought a uke and started to learn how to play it. I just completed the 30-day Uke Challenge by Bernadette Teaches Music and it was really good. She’s got a nice teaching style and goes through things at a good pace - not too fast, not too slow. Highly recommended. It’s interesting learning how to play an instrument as an adult. I took a few years of piano lessons as a child but don’t remember anything.

I usually try to learn a new thing every year. Last year, it was rowing. This year, it’s ukulele. I know I’m a couple of years late to the trend as learning an instrument was very de rigeur during the pandemic, but it looks fun and I have some nice memories of my Dad playing ukulele. I ordered an inexpensive Kala Concert Ukulele and it looks nice. I don’t really know how to play it yet, but I’m going to do a 30-day uke challenge and then see if I can take some inperson classes later in the year.

An article in The New Yorker about feeling a little sad about the inevitable replacement of coding with AI really hit home for me. I’ve not used AI for coding yet professionally, but I’ve done a couple of experiments that indicate how useful it might be in replacing not only the boilerplate and drudgery but also some of the thinking that goes into it. I don’t think it will eliminate the role of people in creating software, but it will change it dramatically by potentially devaluing all of the deep techy things it was really fun to learn (e.

WaPo had a article about tall wood buildings that was quite interesting. I love the look of The Wood Hotel. The clean lines and the color and warmth of wood really works well. The article points out that using wood as a construction material is good at reducing the carbon footprint of big buildings which typically rely on very carbon intensive concrete and steel. The fire risks to wood construction are dealt with by sprinklers, fire retardant treatments and the sheer mass of the wood which tends to char rather that be consumed by flame.

I’m usually in the habit of keeping my Linux desktop up to date. Normally, it’s pretty uneventful to run the Ubuntu updater or do it on the command line. However, today something interesting happened. I ran the update, noted that there was a kernel update from 6.2.0-34 to 6.2.0-36 and let it run. The fun started when I rebooted my computer. On reboot, the WiFi network was gone. I’m using a pretty crappy USB network adapter that required some special drivers and apparently the update borked the driver.

I’ve been working my way through Seneca’s “Letters from a Stoic”. It’s a slower go for me than “Meditations”. It’s a little more academic than “Meditations” with a good amount of discussion of abstract “virtue” and the like. The style in “Letters” isn’t as approachable as the personal dialog in “Meditations”. Now that I’m two-thirds of the way through, I’m starting to get into it more. I quite enjoyed Letter XCII On the Happy Life.

Amanda Mull has a nice piece in The Atlantic about retail self-checkout. Self-checkout is horrible. For the most part, it doesn’t make things faster and in some cases (like you want to buy a beer), it makes things much slower. The only use case that it works well is if you are picking up a very few items that have big and obvious bar codes and don’t require a bag. Even then, there is a chance things will go awry.

I really enjoyed this article in Men’s Journal about a ride by Erick Cedeño to retrace a route ridden by 20 Black soldiers in 1897. I didn’t know that the U.S. Army had ever experimented with a bicycle troop, but apparently they did and assigned a very tough task to some soldiers stationed at Fort Missoula, MT. Mr. Cedeño’s ride sounds very difficult but nothing compared to what those soldiers must have experienced.

In the same vein as my post yesterday, I was very impressed by this description of how small you can make a simple ELF binary. Starting with the generic output of compiling one of the simplest possible C programs from gcc at 3998 bytes, the article outlines how you can slim it down. The first steps are using the features in gcc to optimize the size. That gets it down to 2616 bytes.