til - lesser daemon

20

Jun

Home Assistant Is Astonishingly Easy To Set Up On Synology

Just a quick shout-out to Home Assistant, who have relatively easy-to-follow documentation for setting the app up on a Synology NAS. Just download the container, add your time zone, make sure it's set to use the "host network", and make sure port 8123 is open on your firewall. I'd been putting off setting this up given the usual amount of lift involved in getting something new runing on my homelab, but it only took me about 10 minutes. Finally no more fiddling with the Hue app, and K can purchase (some) smart devices without me getting all mad about proprietary software and security.

28

Mar

Using Dependency Groups with uv

I've slowly been getting more familiar with uv and the broader new school of python packaging ecosystems (sorry, I used virtualenv for a long time, it does the job fine), and one of the most exciting things to me is its use of dependency groups in a pyproject.toml file: finally, a non-janky way to use different packages in different environments. However, I think its documentation leaves a bit to be desired on this front, so:

To add a package to a specific group:

uv add --group dev python-dotenv

Which should appear in your pyproject.toml as:

[dependency-groups]
dev = [
"python-dotenv"

#100DaysOfWriting

In googling for a stock image to put at the top of today's post, I discovered there's already a #100DaysofWriting movement. Apparently it's quite popular!

The whole thing is based on showing up to the page with curiosity and gentleness. 'Showing up' can look like whatever you want. Five minutes of note scribbling? That counts. Research reading? That counts too, just as much as writing 1000 words. The point is regular connection without judgement.

These people think it's okay to "set reasonable expectations for themselves" and "not make a demented commitment like write something public-facing on their blog for 100 days straight". Absolutely disgusting. I would like to courteously invite anyone in this "gentle" 100 days of writing to meet me in single combat. While you were freewriting I was studying the blade (blogging).

29

Jan

Programmatically Creating Styled Cells In Jupyter Notebooks

I've been playing around with the idea of using Jupyter notebooks as a narrative game interface for a while, and finally got around to doing some prototyping this week. One thing I really wanted to do was require users to run code cells in Jupyter to unlock story beats: Jupyter notebooks are usually presented as a step-by-step tutorial, which is perfectly fine if you're trying to teach someone how to run a linear regression in sklearn but less so if you're trying to build suspense over the course of a story.

It's pretty easy to get output from just running

"I have a horror of sentimentality, and its name is Saint-Saëns" - Claude Debussy

Ran across this quote recently and went down a bit of a rabbit hole into Debussy and Saint-Saens' mutual hatred. I think it's important to remember that classical composers were all catty as hell and constantly beefing with each other. RIP Claude Debussy, you could have gotten in some great fights on Twitter. (Saint-Saens may have been sentimental but Danse Macabre still slaps).