Informational on An Untitled Blog

Rather Impressive Image Compression

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Can you tell the difference between the two images above? At first glance, probably not. If you look at them side by side long enough, at least in fullscreen on an HD display, you might notice a little bit of a difference. In one the sky looks an ever so slightly darker shade, and if you look close enough, color shades seem to change in a more blocky structure instead of a more smooth transition. Zoom in, and you might notice the word “Excel” on the side of the windmill is mostly legible on one, and mostly illegible on the other.

Non-Generative uses of Local LLMs

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Update Oct. 21st: The transcription portion of the post has been updated, what I originally mistook as issues with how the data was formatted was an issue with too many tokens in the transcript I wanted transcribed.

At this point we all know how LLMs can generate text, and I’m guessing that everybody reading this knows some relatively lightweight libre LLMs can be installed and run locally. But, as you can probably guess by reading this, I enjoy writing stuff, so text generation isn’t really something that I have a use for. The knowledge stored in them is helpful for sure; I use local LLMs to find data or troubleshoot something on probably more or less a once-a-week basis (because I’m not connected to the internet, can’t find what I’m looking for in search engines, want to ask about an error code in plain English, etc). They’re also always fun to toy around with at first, but after using them for a while the fun wears off and it just becomes another tool.

Confessions of a Data Hoarder

Mon, 20 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Okay, so I’m not actually sure I would consider myself a data hoarder, but I thought the title was pretty eye catching, and archival is close enough to data hoarding to only be moderately clickbaity. (I actually think I’ve got a pretty well organized and reasonably trimmed home directory). Anyway, I thought I would go over a couple of related topics, specifically my backup strategy, some data archiving, and me getting back into useing optical storage.

Get The Most of Win 11 (and the least bloat)

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

11/03/2023 Update: I fixed some grammar, and Google just announced they’re going to stop the implementation of WEI (hopefully permanently, but they may just be trying to outwait bad publicity and anti-trust actions - only time will tell).

If you read my first post here you probably got the idea I have strong feelings about recent versions of Windows, and you wouldn’t be wrong. There’s a lot of junk on Windows, but there are many ways you can go around and clean up some of the worst of it, and I thought I would go over a few potential ways of doing so.

Random Tech Tidbits if the Lights (or Router) Goes Out

Mon, 23 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I count myself lucky to live in a pretty stable and safe part of the world. The last three years or so might have been slightly less so, but still in the scheme of things I certainly haven’t seen the worst of it. But hey, this year is as good of any to think about useful ways to utilize your electronics, specifically your phone, if the power goes out or something similar happens.