Flickr users and video
Isn’t it amusing to see what you can find on flickr video?
Now to add some music and get a laugh out of people.
Last night I went to the Kendra event not knowing what to expect from the event. It started at 6pm and ended by 9pm and i had the opportunity to meet with a few people of which Brendon Kenny of VK media and the Jummp project.
A large amount of metadata is currently being discarded without understanding its value! JuMMp aims to promote interoperability for metadata and signalling information exchange. This will enable contextual navigation within live and recorded content for users of digital devices such as PVRs, games consoles, mobile phones and computers – providing value to end users and to all stakeholders in the content chain.
It’s an interesting project and you can participate in the conversaton and learn more through their facebook group. It’s an interesting project with some very interesting backers so I look forward to seeing how they implement this in the wild.
Other people I met with are Mark and Alex of Astream – a streaming service provider, Darren of Ioda, an independent online distribution Alliance and Dennis of zzizzlfilm – short film distribution for filmmakers by filmmakers. I was also introduced to Nick, product development Director for Bsky and a few more people.
It was a good event with many interesting people to meet and whenever the next event is organised I will make sure to turn up.
Yesterday a drive failed to mount so Photoprism and Audiobookshelf failed to work. The server was up and running but the files were not accessible. For this reason two of my services have been unusable for several hours. I believe that the issue came from using an ExFAT drive rather than EXT4 or another journalled file system.
The reason for which journalling is important is that Pis and other systems crash, and when they crash, read write cycles are not completed. The consequence of this is that the drive that had been fine before the crash becomes corrupted after the crash and needs to be fixed. Most of the time this is quite easy. I use disk utility two to three times, and eventually the problem is fixed long enough to backup the data.
The rational thing to do is to think, “I’m using these drives for something that NAS drives are designed for so it’s normal that external drives would fail.” The reality is that the file system has a bigger role to play than the drive type. If the drive keeps track of what it was doing, and what was interrupted then it can quickly resume from where it left off. Without a journal the drive just sees missing data and asks for repairs to be done. By “asks for repairs to be done” I mean that it fails to mount until the issue is resolved.
From now on I will use ExFAT as a temporary solution for when I move data from one OS to another but once the move is finished I will use APFS for mac, EXT4 for Linux systems and NTSF or equivalent for windows when flexibility is not needed. It’s easy to format a drive to a more resilient file system.
Once I have backed up the data I will reformat the drive to EXT4 and copy the data back. This should make the drive more resilient.
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For a few weeks I have tried to install NixOS on a raspberry Pi without much success. I have finally managed to get NixOS to work with a GUI/Desktop environment. I kept getting stuck at the command prompt but in the end I found a blog post that helped me.
The first thing I struggled with was finding a version of NixOS that played nicely with Pi’s processor. With some distributions you download it, install and it’s easy. With NixOS it took some searching to find the right ISO image that I also had to download a tool to unzip.
I think I could have got NixOS to work much sooner but I was confused by the command prompt. Every few seconds it gives messages about bluetooth devices and more. It made me think that the install had failed and that there was an error. I also had to learn to use the passwd command at the first prompt to set the password for the nixos user before moving forward.
When you install NixOS on an HP laptop, or other device you can download the standard ISO, make a bootable USB stick, and then install NixOS from NixOS. With the Pi you can’t do that. You have to do some things in the command line. The key step is to set the password, find the IP address and then SSH from xour usual machine. Once that is done it is easy to experiment with setting up NixOS.
Now that I have NixOS up and running on a Pi I can experiment with the OS. When I update the configuration file I can keep a copy of it. Any time I install Nix on a system I can re-use the config file and replicate a setup within minutes, rather than hours. I set it up on a Pi4 with 2gb of ram but I could move it to a Pi4 with 4 or 8gb of ram, when I see that it requires more ram. Now that I am at this point I can experiment with more flexibility.
Many decades ago, when computing was still in its infancy punch cards were used for looms, to design patterns in English mills. They were then modified to store census data and to help measure the US population. In the process they saved the US government weeks of work and five million dollars at the time. This is according to my memory of reading The Big Switch and coming across this information two or three days ago.
The idea of punch cards was that you design cards with holes. Each hole gives a true or false value. Instead of writing “Billy Bob lives in a house with five children, two cats, three geese with an income of 500 USD per month you could punch the relevant hole on a tabulating machine. “Two contestants required 44.5 hours and 55.5 hours. Hollerith astounded Census Bureau officials by completing the task in just 5.5 hours!”
Fast forward to last year or the year before and you see that the world become super-excited about AI and how it could process big data, but also how it could intuite what we wanted to write by hoovering petabytes of data. Plenty of people are saying “This isn’t AI, this is machine learning”.
I am currently reading I, Robot by Isaac Asimov and we see that even today the same problems are occuring. (spoiler alert coming up). They fed info to one supercomputer and it broke, so another company fed the same information to another system but told it “if you find that this would kill people ignore it and return the document”. To this day AI is being taught this. “I am only an AI and I cannot answer this question” for Gemini and “I am not able to answer any questions related to events after September 2021 by ChatGPT.
If The Big Switch was written today it would be extended from “Rewiring the world from Edison to Google” to “Rewiring the World From Edison to OpenAI”. The book was published in 2008 and I’m reading it in 2024 so it will stop way before current information.
I bought the book over a decade ago, but didn’t get around to reading it until now. We are told that AI and other technology is revolutionary. Books such as the Big Switch show that in the grand scheme of things AI is evolutionary and itterative, rather than a brand new paradigm. Punch cards were as revolutionary in their day, as AI is today.
If we want to jump forward a few decades is another good example of “evolutionary progress”. We see that the technology that Google uses to help us look for flights is decades old and that Google is just a user interface built upon old code and interactions. The video I link to demonstrates how old tech needs to be modernised to help cope with crewing requirements. In the video they speak about how when everything is working it’s easy to manage. It’s once flights are cancelled and flight crews are scattered in the wrong place that chaos ensues.
During a big storm you need one system to track flights, but you need a second one to track aircrafts, and a third to track crews. You then need that system to route new routes until everything is brought back to the normal schedules. With time you could combine these three requirements to provide a flexible and optimal flight re-booking system to minimise bad weather disruptions.
It’s easy to call something revolutionary, if you don’t look far enough back in time. If we look only at our own lifetime then plenty of things seem revolutionary because the change is new to our generation but if you expand beyond our own lives, and look back a century or two you will find that almost everything is itterative. If anything is “revolutionary” it’s that we now have enough processing power for AI to make reading “punch cards” that are petabytes of data faster than in the past.
Just search for a file on a mac with easyfind or finder and you’ll see how slow searching on a local machine is, compared the the AI optimised systems that people are playing with today. LLM runs slow on Pi and 2016 mac book pro but it runs fast on newer machines. That’s where the new opportunities lie. Machine learning, masquerading as AI is enabled by technological advancements. Just look at the rivers, lakes, and gigawatts of power that are required for “AI” to be of any use.
Twitter is suffering and Jaiku is showing off about how great that website is in comparison. They omit to mention two facts.
It’s (giving the impression of being) proprietary, interesting mainly to Nokia users (at the moment)
It’s better online (requires a browser to take full advantage)
Twitter is a mobile status tool of sorts
–edit note–
All text in italics is an edit following on from Petteri’s comment.
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This is great! I’m becoming a fan of Flickr video…
Hi, by the way! (@rivalee on Twitter) 🙂