Kyle Rankin @kyle@librem.one

For the second fancy hand towel, I'm experimenting with inverting the colors for the stripe section. I like the effect but now I'm wondering whether it would be even better to invert the colors for the borders around the stripe as well. The problem is, now that I've committed to this, I can't really try that idea out on the other half of this towel without making it asymmetrical.

#weaving

@neilbearse Thank you!

@Romibel2 Thank you, this is from page 124 of Handweaver's Pattern Directory, but adapted for doubleweave per the Weaver's Studio Doubleweave book. Both warp and weft are the same white and tan 5/2 mercerized cotton from Silk City, and this pattern ends up being 32epi/32ppi with the white picks following the tan tromp as writ, with a special treadling for the white picks.

I finished weaving the first in a pair of fancy hand towels. From this angle you can see how the doubleweave overshot technique makes the pattern reversible--the opposite side of the fabric has the same pattern but the colors are inverted. I also somehow leveled up on my selvedges partway through this towel.

These are for us to use and don't have to be a matching pair, so I'm going to experiment with a different stripe pattern for the second one.

#weaving

I finally started weaving the next in my series of fancy-so-you-feel-guilty-using-them household items: fancy cotton hand towels!

This project is an excuse to try doubleweave for the first time. In this case I'm doing a doubleweave overshot technique which results in a dense, thick fabric without the long floats overshot usually has.

#weaving

When I finished threading my warp, I discovered I had some unexpected threads left over. Oops. So when I sleyed the reed, I painstakingly double-checked every threading and caught a few mistakes.

In one case I had to insert temporary heddles, and halfway through I found I threaded a pattern twice in a row, so I had to shift the remaining 200+ threads, a pair of heddles at a time. After 13 hours total to measure warp and dress the loom, I'm now ready to weave.

#weaving

The biggest piece of advice I'd give to colleagues who are devs, is to figure out what you will do when software dev work moves from many opportunities writing code at a large number of companies to fewer jobs managing automated systems that write code.

Sysadmin/neteng careers made that transition w/ cloud over the past decade, the remaining major cost for tech-heavy orgs are devs, which is why the industry focus is on reducing that head count with automation. Tech is not there yet, but coming.

@thrrgilag I suppose it depends on whether you are happy enough with the work you are doing, your advancement (if you want that), and the employer. The key is to keep an eye on where your industry is heading and prepare to make a change if it is going away, or changing in a way you don't want to follow.

I moved from sysadmin to security because I saw the industry moving more to software dev managing proprietary infrastructure, instead of the sysadmin work I enjoyed.

If you were laid off recently, especially if you are taking it personally, I recommend reading The End of Loyalty. It covers the shift over the 20th century from companies providing lifelong employment (retirement watch, pension, etc) to mass layoffs at the drop of a hint.

Take home message is that the future promises not only little job security, but less *career* security. Have to be prepared to retrain/retool, and possibly even change careers multiple times during your working years.

@repeter I just have two portable battery banks (industry calls them "solar generators" but I think that's a silly name) that normally power my camper van. I have an Ecoflow Delta (~1kWh) and an Ecoflow River Max (~.5kWh) as a backup. The River is what I connected to my server gear and I used the Delta inside.

I try to make my emergency gear dual-purpose with camping so I have maximum flexibility and also test the gear frequently.

Final update: The power came back on a bit after 5pm.

This was a good exercise to see what worked and needs improvement for an extended outage (like in a major earthquake). In summary, if I want to use solar to help charge batteries, I will likely need larger (probably permanent) panels. An additional, larger battery pack would help too.

Update 2: Power is still out. The solar panel was not providing enough energy so the battery bank ended up slowly draining. I had to fire up a portable 700W propane generator I normally keep in the camper van to charge it back up. With all that, my home server/router has stayed up the whole time.

After it was clear the outage was going to be longer than a few hours, I plugged my fridge into the larger battery bank I've been using inside to charge devices. It still has plenty of charge to go.

Update: power is still out, supposed to return this evening. The power bank was at 20% with a bit over an hour to go, but instead of firing up a small generator to charge it, I decided to try my portable solar panel setup I use when camping.

It is supplying enough power to the battery bank that there is a small surplus, so I should be able to keep the equipment running for a few more hours without resorting to a generator.

I woke up to a power outage that had been going for 30 mins so I was able to test a portion of my emergency plan. My router/home server was on a UPS and still powered, so I hooked it all up to a larger power bank from my camper van to give it a few more hours of life and actually have Internet at home.

Gas heating (simple battery-powered thermostat) and stovetop meant I was able to be warm and make coffee (equally important). So I guess I'm saying it could be worse, and so far my prep paid off.

@RyunoKi I'm not quite ready to add something like a ticketing system to my workflows yet. Perhaps it's leftover PTSD from past sysadmin jobs...

It does make sense though and I'm glad you have found something that is mostly working for you.

"Flag for follow-up" is how I track emails I need to respond to, but can't right away. I never took the "INBOX zero" approach because I wanted easy searching for recent threads all in one mailbox.

The problem is when flagged messages scrolled out of view, I'd forget about them. Some were months old! At some point you feel too guilty to reply.

The solution was so simple: apply a filter that only shows unread and flagged email by default. Instant view of things that need my attention.

#email

@evacide Basing progress on word count might create perverse incentives. A colleague once told me they thought they would be a good writer because they can type fast.

If you are looking for something to motivate you to maintain momentum, maybe track time spent writing per day/week. I tend to break down my outline into bite-sized chunks (a subsection of a chapter in my case) and measure progress by fully completing a chunk.

@evacide I have been more the write in silence type. Of course I share more progress with my editor, but even that is still in the form of a fully-finished chapter at a time, ready for them to review.

Did Turing realize his standards for computer intelligence made incentives to develop AI that are judged first on how well they deceive?

Whether it's lying about being human, lying about the quality/correctness of your work, or creating false images/audio/video presented as real, many (most?) current applications for "AI" and their metrics for success, seem to be founded on intentional deception.

It seems risky & unethical to create intelligence where lying is the first lesson.

#AI #AiEthics

@jorge Heh, same thing goes for fashion (they aren't "mom jeans" anymore), which SNL comedians you prefer, shows/movies you quote, and anything else where tastes cement themselves in early adulthood and folks stop searching for new things.

Same phenomenon happens in tech. I can typically guess when someone first got into the industry because their technology choices tend to firm up and stop changing 5-10 years later (depending on when they transitioned to "senior level").