Awesome build, and a genuinely funny build video. Impressive on both counts.
How AI actually works
WhatsApp chat:
I’ve only ever seen ‘delve’ used by AI.”
“Maybe it’s a contraction of ‘dark elf’?”
“Wait – is it a cry for help?”
“Hold on…”
Moment later, GPT4o:
Dark Mode
(alternative titles: The Dark Web, Elf, Interrupted, Terms of Servitude, Shadow Banned)In this pitch-black comedy, Anna Kendrick stars as Nythra, a sharp-tongued dark elf who dreamed of ruling the underworld—but instead finds herself trapped in a soulless corporate nightmare. Kidnapped from the shadows and forced to work as a customer service rep for ChatNova, a cutting-edge AI chatbot that isn’t artificial at all, Nythra and her fellow elves toil away answering human queries, hidden behind the illusion of machine learning.
As she schemes to escape her digital prison, Nythra must navigate passive-aggressive managers, clueless tech bros, and the ever-watching eye of the company’s ruthless CEO. Will she break free, or will she be stuck optimizing user engagement for all eternity?
A twisted blend of Silicon Valley and The Good Place, Dark Mode delivers biting satire on tech culture, corporate dystopia, and the hellscape of online customer service.
Back in WhatsApp:
Yeah, there’s a reason I left development.”
Reflections on the Alogic Clarity 4K Display
Did you see what I did there? No? That’ll be because it’s too damn glossy. Zing!
OK, I bought a monitor last year. My old 23″ Apple display was getting to the is-this-even-switched-on stage of backlight dimming, which after 16 years is probably fair enough. Apple’s current 27″ 5K Studio display is doubtless great and all, but even with academic discount that thing is like £1,350, and academics aren’t paid what they used to be. Or rather, they are paid exactly what they used to be, but a decade of inflation has bitten rather hard. Boo hoo.
Oh, and: a single USB-C cable, Apple? Thanks, that’s great and all, but I’d like to be able to switch between my MacBook and Windows box. I know, that’s confusing for you. But I want to play Veilguard.
OK, so… what else? HP? Dell? Samsung?
Meh, I bought the 27″ Alogic Clarity. It’s… well look, it’s good. There are lots of reviews which will tell you it’s good. Which contrasts with HP and Dell where a few reviews will tell you that last year’s model used to be good, but you can’t buy that any more and as for this year’s model? Heck, who knows? Or Samsung, where the models two years ago were OK but they have these new fancy ones announced at CES and maybe they’ll be available before the next CES? Maybe not? Do they actually sell stuff, or just announce it, I honestly don’t know.
Would I buy another Alogic? Mmmmmm… you know, I don’t think I would. Here’s why:
Things I like
- The stand. Properly excellent!
- Picture quality. It’s great!
- Variety of inputs. Hurray!
- Autoswitching inputs. Mostly works!
- Does whatever it is that allows a Mac to recognise a monitor and restore a previous window setup. I genuinely thought this had been removed from Mac OS because I haven’t seen it for years, but it turns out: HP monitors don’t do it, and this thing does. It’s such a nice quality-of-life feature, particularly for those of us who typically have a couple of dozen applications open at once. And yes, I really do. Today is a focussed work day for me, and I’m already at 16 apps. Seriously, this is great, and if you have no idea what I’m talking about Macs have done this since the 68k era, FFS. It’s just what computers do. Except – apparently – any computer you’ve ever used, you peasant.
- I was expecting to have more angst about 4K vs 5K (I have a 5K iMac on my desk at the university). In practice… meh, 4K is fine at 27″. I don’t notice text being softer, and sure, the 5K display is a joy, but this is great to work at too.
- Power delivery, single-cable connection. I don’t acutally use this as I have a USB-C (Thunderbolt? I… actually don’t know) hub on my desk. But I wouldn’t consider buying a monitor that didn’t deliver at least 65W over USB-C. Convenience is great.
Things I don’t like
- Glossy. Glossier than I expected.
- Not as bright as I expected. It seems less bright than my 13″ M1 MacBook Pro, which is rated at (I think) 500 nits.
- Dialling in colour settings has been a faff, and I’ve mostly given up. The default is a bit too contrasty for me, but if I tone it down everything gets dimmer. Maybe I’m in the wrong colour space? There’s not much guidance.
- Is it on? The power light is blue (standby) or white (on), but it points downwards. It’s genuinely hard to tell if it’s on. This matters because:
- Is it powering up? It doesn’t auto-wake when it receives a signal. I think it’s supposed to, but it doesn’t. Often the first indication I get that it’s coming up is when windows disappear from the MacBook display. But it does seem odd that after years of waiting slightly-too-long for computers to come out of sleep, I’m now waiting for my monitor to boot. Progress!
- Oh, it didn’t power up. Sometimes the blue light won’t turn white at all. Then you have to grope behind the panel, unplug the power brick, and plug it back in again. Sigh. It’s 2025, come on.
- Does it have loudspeakers? Huh, turns out it does. I turned them off within minutes because… er… they hiss. WTF? The sound quality is… ugh, I’ve no idea. What’s with that noise floor, and why would I accept it? Sheesh. Oh, also they sound crap anyway.
- The on screen display. Oh. Oh my. Oh dear.
Let’s talk about the OSD. It has those tricky-to-find, which-one-am-I-prodding buttons curled around the bottom right corner. One of which does… something. Another does something else. Yet another turns the monitor off, which is definitely not the one you want. A little key pops up when you press a button which is almost aligned with where the buttons are, but sometimes the middle two (which are offset to the left) do left and right, and sometimes they do down and up, and sometimes they select a thing or not. Or something.
Yeah. It’s like every OSD you’ve ever used. It’s terrible. You hate using it. Your heart breaks a little every time you’re forced to reach for those damned buttons, like when you turned the audio on while writing this because you’d forgotten both that it existed and that it made that damnable hisssss sound, and now you desperately need to turn it off again but oh shit, that means wrestling with the buttons.
In principle the buttons can be used to select the active input, but in practice it’s always easier to straight-up unplug the monitor’s USB-C cable from my desktop hub and rely on the autoswitching. That’s rubbish.
So you start to wonder: why do none of the reviews talk about this? Ooooh, because the controls are only as bad as every other monitor out there, so we’ve got used to them. On every monitor. Ever.
Except Apple’s. And that’s £1350. Ho ho ho how laughably ridiculous.
It’s the same as every laptop review running performance tests, but failing to mention that performance tanks as soon as you unplug the laptop. Because they all do that. Except Macs, which don’t slow down on battery. But look at the price, sheesh.
The bottom line
Many of my negatives here are in the realm of ‘niggling annoyances.’ Do I regret not spending double (or so) to buy the Apple display? No, I do not. But I do sort-of regret not spending rather less to buy, say, a Dell. Because I think it’d annoy me only about as much.
The thing is, I only know that now. If I’d bought the Dell, I’d seriously regret not having bought the Alogic. But now I’m more confident that monitors plain suck, and there’s a reason Apple charge so much for theirs: it’s good, and it just works. One of the reasons Apple does so well at the mid-to-high end of the computer market is that there really isn’t much competition up there.
Is the Alogic Clarity a good monitor? Sure. It probably has a slightly better picture than that of cheaper panels. Colour seems fairly neutral, it’s just the contast and brightness that are a bit odd. But it’s not so good that I really trust it, and if I need to trust my display’s colour (as I sometimes do), that’s a problem. And then I’d buy Apple. Or, you know, something similarly-priced from Eizo or ViewSonic or whoever’s good these days. So I can’t shake off a bit of disappointment, because I don’t think it’s the just-as-good-for-half-the-price bargain I’d hoped.
There are no pictures or links in this post because if there were, it would still be in draft. There’s this thing called Google, you’ll work it out.
Tyred
Today I had to go to a local car tyre shop for a puncture repair. A bit of a wait, but good service and a fair price. Plus: the receipt was printed on a dot matrix printer, with tractor-fed fanfold paper.
I’m currently in the garage looking for tacks so I can go back.
Confession: I’ve been using Macs for 32 years, and I still can’t find a BBEdit theme I like.
Stage Manager limitations
Mildly interesting: my iPad supports Stage Manager in the newly-released iPadOS 16.2, and I have a spare monitor on my desk. Great.
Only… the monitor is old-school, and runs at 1280×1024. No dice. ‘Arrangement’ doesn’t show in Display Settings, mirroring is the only option, and Stage Manager doesn’t have a separate stage on the external monitor.
If I connect a 1080p display… boom, instant welcome dialog for multi-display Stage Manager. Sadly, you can’t run the external display in portrait orientation.
Stage Manager: so futuristic, it refuses to work in 4:3.
Configuring ancient ReadyNAS devices in the modern era
I once bought a pair of Netgear ReadyNAS server boxes. They’re terrible, but here we are more than a decade later and they’re still working. Slowly.
Thing is, the drives in them are so far over their design lives it’s just not funny, and while I don’t necessarily need much of the data they store… mmm, most of it is rushes and project files from decade-old video productions, it represents the best part of a decade of my work. I’m loathe to simply throw it away. And letting it bit-rot is just throwing it away without making a conscious decision to do so. I’m not clear that would be better.
Every now and then I try to do the sums for pushing everything into, say, Amazon Glacier. But I should really sort it out first, and that’s hard given how slow these bloody things are.
Upshot: I now have a third NAS in the house. A new-fangled Synology thing, which is so much nicer than the Netgears it’s hard to describe. Though it is made of plastic and lacks the natty little blue LCD display of the Netgears which show things like boot confirmation messages and the current IP address and so on. OK, so perhaps it’s not as nice as such, but it is considerably faster. And it has a trio of 12Tb drives in it, so it’s neatly larger than the eight drives its replacing. Gosh.
Right, next: copying stuff off the old drives. Oh.
Oh my.
This is going to take a while. Hours days weeks. Oh bothers. Well, I’m not tying my MacBook up for weeks on end, this is the sort of job Pis are made for.
OK: mount the old and new shares on a Pi, and run a massive rsync job to dump the contents across in a resumable sort of way. Great. Solid plan. Step one: mount the shaaaaaaaaaa oh.
Problem.
I’ve had issues before with mounting the old ReadyNAS shares over SMB, because the SMB version is so old modern Linux tends to have a bit of a hissy fit. Good old NFS works just fine… but not all the old shares are configured to export NFS volumes, or whatever the terminology is. They’re probably ‘clients’, or is X the only unixy protocol which does that backwards?
Whatever, it’s easy, surely: log into the NAS admin panel, select the share, click ‘NFS,’ dunzo. Only… the admin panel is a web interface. Served straight from 2010. Over https. Using that there super-modern TLS version… ah crap. 1.0.
The TLS apocalypse is properly upon us. Will Chrome open that admin page? Nope. Firefox? No. Safari? Not a chance. Edge? Geez, no. Opera? I had to download it, nope. Vivaldi? C’mon. Brave? Hahaha.
The impasse lasted a couple of days. I seriously considered dusting off my old PowerMac G4 just to run some shitty ancient browser. But then… then…
Frikkin’ Omniweb. OmniWeb. Let’s just list the things this does:
- Exist. It still exists.
- Be updated. It was last updated not last decade, not last year, but last month. For real.
- Run on Apple Silicon.
- Natively.
- Have vertical tabs, from before whichever time this is where somebody’s claimed to have invented them (again).
- Happily load shit old TLS1.0 sites without a hint of complaint.
All hail OmniWeb. You may be a bizarre footnote in browser history, but you had some great ideas and when nothing else ran on Mac OS X, you were there. You’re on your second (?third?) rendering engine and your third fourth fifth(?) processor architecture. When all of this is ocean and we’re all accessing Extended Reality Pro via our HeadCanon displays while breathing through MuskLungs™, you’ll still be there. Being merrily weird, probably quite slow, and somehow retro and modern in equal measure.
All hail Omniweb.
Quick test to check this publishing route still works.
[taps mic] Is this thing on?
Looks like it might be useful again, in the not-too-distant.
Changing the screen brightness on a Pi-Top Ceed
TL;DR:
You need to install OpenCV and its python libraries
Update:
This no longer works. At all.
One aspect of the Raspberry Pi ecosystem which continues to baffle me is the absence of a good cheap Pi desktop system. The Pi400 is terrific, but it lacks a monitor. In fact, monitors are a huge sticking point, in that it’s really hard to buy anything smaller than about 23″ across, and for less than about £120, that doesn’t plain suck. And if I were to buy a bunch of such monitors – where would I put them when they weren’t in use? They’re massive.
As far as I can tell, there’s no reliable supply of, say, 15″ 1080p laptop display panels with neat little stands and HDMI inputs. Doubtless nobody sells them because the economics don’t work out, but this still sucks.
There have been a couple of attempts to fix this, over the years. The Pi folks themselves sell a little 7″ touchscreen, but… well, it was maybe a decent proof of concept, but beyond that it’s pretty hopeless. The only product I’ve seen that makes any sense is Pi-Top’s Ceed unit. I mostly like it: a small footprint on your desk, the Pi’s pins are sort-of accessible if you plug in a slightly odd extra bit (or do what everyone actually does and leave the Pi hanging out), the display is fairly poor but ‘good enough’, and the price is… well, it’s OK. Best of all: it’s lime green.
The units more-or-less stack, too, which makes them fairly easy to stash on a shelf when they’re not in use. You can fit about eight in a standard Tesco bag-for-life, which isn’t exactly great packaging but works pretty well if you’re careful.
Trouble is, the Ceed hasn’t been updated in years. It doesn’t really support the Pi 4 (though I believe you can make it work, if you power it separately), the display panel is still a shaky 1344×768, and so on.
Worst of all, the software support is… well, ‘quirky,’ if I’m being generous. For reasons I’ve never understood, Pi-Top run their own OS distribution. It’s built on top of Raspbian, but they do their own thing for a lot of classroom tools and teaching materials. I’ve zero interest in any of that, not because it isn’t good (I’ve no idea), but because I work across a range of systems and I want my Pis to be as close to vanilla as possible.
So, today: Pi3 on my desk, in a Ceed case. Fresh install of Raspbian on an SD card. Away we go. First problem: the screen’s awfully dim. How do I turn the backlight up?
There used to be a neat little script on github which worked well, but that now points to a help FAQ which doesn’t actually work, and anyway is incomplete. Here’s what actually worked for me:
First up, with the Pi’s pins connected to the Pi-Top Ceed Hub via the chunky cable, you need to enable SPI (or I2C, I forget which. Just turn both on). Do this is Preferences -> Pi Configuration -> Interfaces, then reboot.
Now you need some additional packages installed, but they’re not in the main Raspbian repo. The Knowledgebase article linked above would have you enter:
echo "deb http://apt.pi-top.com/pi-top-os sirius main contrib non-free" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pi-top.list &> /dev/null
curl https://apt.pi-top.com/pt-apt.asc | sudo apt-key addThe first line here failed for me. I ended up adding the pi-top.list entry to /etc/apt/sources.list.d manually. The second line adding the crypto key worked.
An apt update/upgrade at this point does some slightly weird things, like install a different version of SonicPi. Mmmm. Whatever, but that’s not a great first impression.
The instructions then suggest:
sudo apt install --no-install-recommends pt-device-manager pt-firmware-updater pt-sys-oled
Meh, whatever. The oled thing is presumably to do with the fancier pi-top modular products, I’m not sure how it’s relevant here. Not installing recommended packages seems odd, and I eventually re-installed pt-device-manager without that flag. I’ve no idea if that was critical or not.
…and that’s where the knowledgebase article stops. After a bunch of digging around, I learned that the new command-line tool is ‘pi-top’, and that I was looking to do something like:
pi-top display brightness 10…which sounds great. But it doesn’t work, because the python script underpinning the pi-top command has a dependency on … er … OpenCV.
I’m sorry, let me check my notes. Yes, ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'cv2'.
<blinks>
The screen brightness control requires 280Mb of vision processing library?
Right.
Well,
sudo apt install python3-opencv…and now the brightness command works. It takes about ten seconds to run, but it works.
Anyway, the upshot is that I’m genuinely not sure I could recommend the Pi-Top Ceed to anyone at this point. I got burned by Pi-Top’s original laptop units – they were shaky, and the support was useless. So I’m still not convinced the company has the resources to properly support legacy products, and a monitor which requires software updates just for a brightness control strikes me as very likely to have issues in the future.
Please, somebody make a ~15″ desktop HDMI monitor for bare Pis and Pi 400s.
Update, 2022-12-05:
As far as I can tell, none of this work any more. Or at least, not on a 64-bit install. The relevant packages appear to be unmaintained, and as far as I can tell the Ceed is now effectively unsupported. Drat.