I’m typing this on my Pixel Fold as a bit of a test to see whether blogging might work well on here. I’ve a keyboard on the bottom screen and the edit window on the top. Seems OK so far, although I can’t really touch-type.
We’ve moved house! In the end, we managed to get 99% of our stuff transferred to the new place on Friday, as then went back for the rest yesterday. We’ve for a few days left on our ease for the temporary place so we can go back and clean.
Unsurprisingly, moving house is tiring, expensive, and a huge hassle. Especially when you sell, rent for a bit, and then buy, meaning two moves instead of one. However, I think we’ve done a good job, and the new place is going to be great for us. It’s so quiet!
This last week was my third week of holiday so I’ll be back to work tomorrow. As I me mentioned last week, I’ve written the end of module assessment for my MSc, so I’ll check through that and get it submitted.
My temporary home office is in the utility room. It’ll be fine for now. Next week, I’m not sure what I’ll have on, as I’ve been away for so long. Probably getting my head back into existing projects and doing some business development.
Photo: last load of the van heading to our new house!
We’ve now exchanged contracts on the house we’re buying, and will be moving next weekend. The sense of relief Chez Belshaw is palpable as things are never sure until this stage. We would have liked to have moved earlier, especially as the Easter holidays for the kids end tomorrow, but I’m continuing to channel my inner Epictetus.
This is the end of my second week off work. Last week, I felt better after having a cold, or Covid, or something during the last few days I was at work. This week, I’ve either caught something different, or what I had’s come back with a vengeance. It’s weird: I ran Monday and Wednesday and went to the gym on Tuesday; everything was fine. Then from Thursday to today I’ve been sick. I could do without it, to be honest.
I’m not a great patient, so I’ve been drinking full cafetieres of coffee and getting my MSc assignment done. It is indeed written, although weighing in at 6,500 words instead of the 4,000 word limit. While my tutor says she’s never known anyone be penalised for going over the limit, I should probably spend a couple of hours cutting out some waffle. It’s due on April 23rd, but ideally I’ll submit before we move house.
Without replying to anyone, I’ve glanced at work emails and Slack as a distraction from writing, and noticed that Laura published a post we collaborated on before I went on holiday entitled Examining the Roots: Unpacking the foundations of Verifiable Credentials. It looks like she’s also published the next couple of episodes of Season 9 of our podcast, The Tao of WAO.
Erm, other things to report? I saw Dune 2 with my son at the cinema last night. Visually absolutely incredible, but it didn’t really do anything for me on a visceral level. Perhaps, as I mentioned on the journey home, it’s because I’m now at an age where I don’t identify with the main protagonist. Or maybe I just find it difficult to sit still for almost three hours.
I wrote a pretty niche post about exporting blog data to a format to make it easier to use with LLMs like ChatGPT. I published some things on Thought Shrapnel. I bought a Pixel Fold for less than half of the list price and installed GrapheneOS. I packed and moved some boxes. I took my kids to football and basketball training/games. (My son’s basketball game was particularly exciting, coming back from 20 points down against the team he used to play for, to draw in the last few seconds.)
I’ve nearly finished Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI. It’s pretty good, although it doesn’t really tell me anything I didn’t already know. Definitely useful to pass on to others, though, which is one of the advantages of buying dead tree books. I’m also reading one of the most recent Jack Reacher novels, and although the early ones are clearly much better, they’re an easy read and way to switch off.
Image: two boxes stacked in the living room of our current rented house, with clothes drying wherever we can find space.
I’m currently working on the End of Module Assessment (EMA) for my MSc in Systems Thinking which involves pulling together a lot of learning over the past few months. I’ve captured a lot of it here, in this category of my blog.
What I want to do is to query a Large Language Model (LLM) such as GPT-4. However, referring to external URLs in ChatGPT is not always straightforward, and copy/pasting each post individually is tedious.
Adam Procter gave me the idea of exporting the posts to a file format called JSON, and then uploading that into GPT-4 for ease of referencing. So, given I’m not a programmer, I enlisted the help of ChatGPT to create a very small and simple WordPress plugin.
The above video shows how it works, but after activating the plugin, you can export all posts, or just those in a particular category. The downloaded JSON file can be used anywhere, with LLMs online or offline.
I’ve already found it useful to help pull in ideas that I wrote about a few months ago that I forgot might be relevant to a particular question I’m answering as part of my EMA. If it’s useful to you in its current form, then great! Just don’t bug me for updates. 😉
