update: My Top 10 Desert Islands Albums
What about the Beatles!!!!?????
My Top 10 Desert Islands Albums
I often think of this...if I only had space for 10 CD Albums, what 10 would I pick? Well, I would say, if there's space for 10 CDs, then there's space for my mp3 player! But no, that would be against the rules :-)
So, without further ado, here's my top 10 list of of today (May 15/05/24).
1. The Hurting - Tears for Fears
2. The Hour of Bewilderbeat - Badly Drawn Boy
3. Welcome To - The Beautiful South (dififcult choice...and then there's Heatons other work <sigh>)
4. Chumbawamba - Un (THAT was too hard to choose..too manye good albums)
5. Please - The Pet Shop Boys
6. Lincoln - They Might Be Giants (or Flood...oh or Appolo 18...that's a hard one)
7. Mmm Food - MFDoom
8. Skylarking - XTC (..oh god, no what about Apple Venus, Vol or Nonsuch?...or Drums & Wires for some early stuff?...oh this harder than I thought)
9. If you're feeling sinister - Belle & Sebastian (that's a difficult choice too!)
10. Minecraft Volume Aplpha - C418 (maybe I can dream of playing MC on my desert island...but I will NEED to hear the music for as long as I live)
...well, I've run out of slots now and I'e barely scratched the surface - where's Spilt Milk by Jellyfish? Where's anything from Radiohead, Depeche Mode, Neil Young? Aphex Twin!!! Max Trunda?? I can't live without all those amazing songs...I'm going to have to stop this, it's just getting far too stressful.
Web Apps > Apps
I am anti 'apps' and pro web-apps. Why? Security of course - it's insane to give a program full control of your system and it's completely unnneccesary when a web-app can do 90% of what most people need.
Ah, but at the same time I HATE web-apps! I want to run the program on _my_ computer not something in the 'cloud'.
Okay. It depends on the type of app. If the owner of the data or service wants to keep it to themselves (a bank, a game-streaming service) _and_ I really want that thing (banking services, GPU power beyong my own hardware) then we're cool. Otherwise, I want to process and hold data on my own hardware. But banking apps need the extra security of having it's tendrils deep into my kernel....do they though? Just work with what the browser has...bitch.
Raspberry PI Based Assistant
I've been working on attempting to create an Alexa-like device mainly for voice activated control of music. Why did I do this? Well although I have been beaten-down by my family and we now have an Alexa, it bothers me that we do. As with all of these things over the years, I like to see if it's possible to create them using open-source tech and see if my family will adopt them over the costly (but working!) alternatives. Suffice to say, it's never happened, with the exception of the operating system of choice...mostly. Both my kids use linux, one because he understands and one because he has no choice :-) - if he wants Windows10 then he can buy it and install it. I want my kids to be computer-literate, so if they want something, it's either my way or learn!
Regardless, my pi-based device now responds to voice and will play any song from my music collection that is stored on my server. A few months ago, I attempted to parse the text (from speech) in order to determine the user's request and whilst this worked fairly well, it wasn't good enough. I need an LLM, so I opted to pay for OpenAI's API. I had it up and running very quickly and was and still am, amazed with the results! But I wanted it to be completely local...could it be possible? Well, it turns out that yes, it's perfectly possible! I have tried out a few methods of running a local LLM and have found that oobagooba's textgenerationwebui to be the best option. The great thing about it, is that they have implemented the OpenAI API, so it was mostly a drop-in replacement for the [paid for] OpenAI option. Of course, I cannot run the LLM on the PI itself (though Microsoft's recent LLM only uses 4GB) so I run on my NVidia GPU (1080, 8Gig vram). It's working well...and I'm temporarily happy/amused by it all.
Not much going on
So yeah, I might have to delete this site. Nobody looks at it, I never post anything and it's just a waste of time.