F1 silly season continues, Open Studios and the in-laws descend upon Rotterdam

Notes on the week

WDKA just had their Open Day for prospective students, and one part of the program of events is the Open Studios. The current crop of MFA students, of which Elle is one, open the doors of their studios spaces to the public to talk about their work, their process, the college and field any other questions that might come up. It’s a really great idea that’s beneficial for both future students (who get to learn more about the college), and for current students (who get to focus their practice, workshop ideas, and tidy their studio spaces!). I helped out in a small way, painting one of the walls in Elle’s studio that was need of a bit of TLC, and setting up my monitor in her space for people to view some video work of hers. It meant that this weekend would be spent without my usual computer setup at home, an inconvenience any other weekend but not this time because….

The Wallaces were in town! Starting Wednesday, and continuing Thursday and Friday a series of flights landed in the Netherlands carrying Elle’s siblings, plus one partner. It’s important to note that she doesn’t have 696 brothers and sisters (the passenger capacity of four Aer Lingus A320s), but rather her two sisters, one brother, and a sister’s partner were all travelling from different cities. The climate of impact of this weekend was immense, but it was easily exceeded by how good of a time was had. Mandatory visits to the Cube Houses and Markthal were interspersed with Bike rides, Bitterballen, Pints, Movies and the general catching up and good times that can only be had when everyone is in the same room together. The next time we’ll all be together again will be the Summer at the earliest, Christmas at the latest so it was a really precious moment. The fact that the trip lined up with Elle’s Open Studio day was amazing, and it meant we could bring the family to show her work and to meet the new friends we’ve made since moving here.

In my spare time I’ve been working on a little E-Ink dashboard for Elle’s college calendar. Their system is based on MediaWiki, which is for all intents and purposes objectively terrible. You cannot subscribe to the calendar, so you can’t have it sync with your existing iCloud or Google calendars. It has no way to alert you to an update or removal of an event. It is ugly, and honestly is just no fun to use. It is however, completely open to outside internet which means I can write a script to scrape the information (this also means anyone else in the whole world can see the comings and goings of a number of MFA students, but that’s beyond the scope of my ability to change). My goal with this project is to take this information and make a nice little wooden frame that will house an E-Ink display, showing today’s events, the current and predicted weather conditions for the day, and tomorrow’s events.

I’ll make a more detailed breakdown at a later date, but at this point all the code is running, successfully scraping the MediaWiki calendar and parsing out the correct event data, as well as tying into the BuienRadar.nl API to grab weather information. This is all passed into a html template that is laid out in a simple, but hopefully visually pleasing way. Because this information will be rendered on an E-Ink display and running on a very low power cpu, rather than displaying the output of the script as it runs, I convert the html to an image file, which the display will then render. In theory this all works, but the next step is to purchase the physical components and get building. I’ve never really worked with electronics before so this should be lots of frustrating fun!

Links

RSS is pretty great

How to make a self balancing cube

Thoughts after 40 hours with Vision Pro

The Dutch art of doing nothing

The world is awful. The world is better. The world can do much better

Rules for negotiating a job offer

Deepfake video call scams are now a reality

Linux drops support for Floppy Disks

Reading

I think I’ve forgotten how to read. Things are not looking good for 12 classics in 12 months.

Listening

Final Fantasy 7 Remake part two, Rebirth comes out in just a few weeks, a fact that both to my delight and surprise slid under my radar. With the release impending this weeks MacStories Unwind goes into detail into how Federico is preparing, including a quick overview of the first instalment in the Remake series.

F1 Corner

Last week the F1 community was thrown into disarray with the news that Lewis Hamilton will join Ferrari in 2025. In what has already been a tumultuous off-season (Steiner sacked from Haas, Andretti’s bid to create a new team being rejected, Barcelona being replaced with a Madrid street circuit) the Hamilton news felt like the seismic shock to cap the silly season. However, right now as I type this on Friday morning Christian Horner, Team Principal of Red Bull Racing is taking part in an internal hearing into allegations of inappropriate behaviour made against him by a colleague.

There is little to no information out there other than rumours right now, but to say that he very well may be fighting for his career is no overstatement. F1 is not the old boys club that it used to be, and I applaud the Red Bull organisation for taking any allegations this seriously. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out, and what information makes its way out from the hearing.

Horner, whether you like him or not, is the beating heart of the Red Bull team and his partnership with Adrian Newey has dragged the Milton Keynes team from a curiosity on the fringes of the grid, to a multiple world championship winning team, and in 2023 the most dominant driver/car pairing in the sports history. If Christian is found to have behaved in a way incompatible with his role as team principal, and must go, it will leave a vacuum of monumental scale within the RB hierarchy.

Vision Pro launches, Care packages arrive, Lewis goes to Ferrari and house hunt 2.0 begins.

Notes on the week

The news of the week, perhaps the year, is that Lewis Hamilton will be leaving Mercedes to join Ferrari for the 2025 Formula One season. This is Brady leaves the Patriots, Messi leaves Barcelona or the UK leaves the EU levels of bombshell. A hint of a rumour started to float around Wednesday night that something big might be about to hit the paddock, and by Thursday morning those rumours had picked up more credibility as more informed and respected voices started to share what they had heard through the grape vine. My little F1 group chat was giddy, especially when the likes of Adam Cooper started to corroborate the story.

Before any official announcement had been made, we were already busy determining the knock on effects across the paddock, as the seat freed up in Mercedes must be filled, and Carlos Sainz leaving Ferrari will surely stay on the grid? The permutations were debated, with dream scenarios (Alonso to Mercedes), and likely outcomes (Sainz to Sauber ahead of it becoming the works Audi team in 2026) passed back and forth. It was great craic, and within about an hour Sky Sports were reporting on the move as ‘a done deal’. Ferrari and Mercedes both came out later that day to make it ‘official official’, but at this stage the reality was already beginning to sink in. Lewis will be wearing red in 2025.

So what does this mean? First, it backs up a statement by Sebastian Vettel a few years ago, “Everyone is a Ferrari fan. Even the people that say they aren’t, are Ferrari fans”. The most romantic, turbulent, brilliant and infuriating team in the sport’s history, Ferrari has an allure for F1 fans and drivers alike, one that transcends the reality of sporting accomplishment or statistical methodology. Are they the best team in F1? Absolutely not. Does everyone want to drive for them? Absolutely. To win an F1 race is a dream of any driver, to win for the Scuderia goes beyond simple dreaming and is more akin to a religious experience. The Tifosi, the ultra passionate devotees at the alter of the Prancing Horse, have already dubbed Charles LeClerc “The Little Prince”, as if awaiting his inevitable coronation as the World Champion some day, now they have their King.

This driver line up is a win-win for Ferrari. Lewis arrives with nothing to prove, 7 World Titles in the bag, the most wins, the most poles, the most points. If the Little Prince can go toe to toe with the King and hold his own, the future of the realm is healthy, and if the King comes out on top, well thats what a King is supposed to do. In 2025 Ferrari will have the strongest driver pairing on the grid, with Lewis bringing unrivalled experience, mentality, an underrated technical ability in the garage and the personality to forge a team around him, and with Charles they have the outright fastest driver on the grid over one lap. If they can close the gap to Red Bull over the course of 2024, ‘25 could be very, very interesting, and who knows what the competitive order will be after the new regulations come into effect in 2026.

I often refer to F1 as my Soap Opera. The characters are larger than life, the plot lines incredulous and the political subterfuge more potent than any season of Succession. That this drama is all merely the backdrop against which the main event takes place is the icing on top, because for all the gossip, rumours, write ups and emergency podcasts, at some point in March 2025 Lewis will put on a scarlet race suit, climb into the seat of a Ferrari, his Ferrari and put his life on the line for the Scuderia. If the car is competitive, if he’s still sharp and if the dice rolls the right way, the Tifosi will take their yearly pilgrimage to Monza, The Temple of Speed, and maybe, just maybe he’ll win. In Red. In Italy. They have hated him for so long, perhaps begrudgingly respected him in recent years, but once he dons the red they will love him, and if he can win for them, they will immortalise him.

Okay, with F1 Corner out of the way, this past week in Rotterdam was pretty good. I spent a bit of time hacking away getting Elle’s video project running on the CRT TV we bought last week. The connection was a mess of adaptors, HDMI->RCA->SCART, which I was shocked worked straight away and without much strangeness. The only weirdness was the SCART adaptor had a switch to toggle between PAL and NTSC, and for whatever reason I was getting terrible flickering when set to PAL, despite the TV being European. Flicking over to NTSC solved the problem though. I set up a Raspberry Pi to autoplay the video files on startup, without any input so that if the power went it would go straight back into action. This was pretty straightforward, just a little shell script to trigger VLC on boot, with a few arguments to play without and window chrome, on screen controls or video titles.

cvlc --no-osd -fL /home/pi/filename.extension

One of the days this week I was out doing some shopping, and it was cold. Not the bitter chill of winter that we had a few weeks ago, but a more insidious cold. Because the weather has been improving, I wasn’t ‘prepared’ in the same way as a few weeks ago, no leggings, no scarf, hat and gloves. By the time I got home I was freezing, tired and just wanted a cup of tea and a biscuit. When I got up the stairs to our door there was a little An Post package at the door. A care package, from home. Let me tell you, there are precious few things in the world better than coming home to surprise HobNobs, Terry’s Chocolate Oranges and ‘real’ tea bags. The fact that you know in that moment that your people at home are thinking about you, and went to the effort to send a little taste of home is enough to warm you right up, without having to put the kettle on at all.

Apple Vision Pro launched this week (in the US). I am convinced that this is one of those roadmap products that will influence how we think about computing on a global scale, the ramifications of which probably won’t be obvious for at least another ten years. I would give an arm and a leg to test one out, and have been watching and reading every review I can get my hands to learn more about what the experience feels like. Elle hates it.

Links

41 years of UX design

A teeny tiny cyberdeck

A look back on the glory days of iPhone hacking

Tim Cook in Vanity Fair

Big book of keyboards

China, the worlds shopping car

Converting ADB to USB

Siracusa on Spatial Computing

There’s not planet B, for fantasy writers

Listening

Of all the coverage of Lewis going to Ferrari, nothing else quite matched the level of giddy glee and utter bewilderment of Matt on the emergency episode of the P1 Podcast.

An Oldie, but such a goodie. Ahnohni has one of the most unique voices out there, and this album is a masterpiece. Definitely not a happy body of music (The opening lyric to the album is literally “I hope theres someone when I die, who’ll take care of me”), but so beautiful.

Notes on the week

A stiff neck is no joke, something we learned the hard way this week. Elle pulled a muscle in her neck (after a sneeze) and for the past few days has been pretty much out of action. I was due to fly home but had to postpone until next week and she’s able to put on her own socks again.

Work announced the biggest deal in their corporate history. I’ve seen first hand the incredible effort gone into pulling this off and couldn’t be happier for, nor more proud of, those that dragged this into reality.

My new favourite thing to do to pass a few minutes is to create images using Dall-E. I find that the more detailed and descriptive the prompt you provide, the better the output image is. Instead of spending time coming up a prompt myself, I’ve taken to asking GPT to generate a prompt for Dall-E to create what I want, and then massaging that initial prompt into exactly what I want. Some of the results leave a lot to be desired, but some are delightful, like this Art Deco inspired desktop computer.

My workflow for this weekly notes section is built entirely on Obsidian. I understand that Obsidian isn’t the most approachable piece of software, but after a few tweaks and thanks to it’s incredible collection of community plugins I think I’ve settled on a setup that I love, and most importantly gets out of the way when it’s time to write. Paired with the excellent micro.publish plugin I have everything I need without ever context switching. The appearance is the AnuPpuccin Theme with a few tweaks to the workspace layout made in the Style Settings plugin

Google have released their Gemini Model that promises to meet or exceed the performance of OpenAI’s GPT-4. Most interesting from my point of view is the limitations of this model in Europe, it appears that a lot of the most powerful aspects will not be available in the EU. I value a lot of the customer protections that the EU provide us, but there is a fear that AI is the next great arms race and the EU is woefully behind. It’s taken the EU over a decade to start making progress into breaking some of the monopolistic practices of the larger Tech companies, and with the exponential growth of LLMs and their potential to drive economic growth this is not an area that I’d like to see the entire continent take a backseat on.

Links

Designing the first Mac

A Decade of HaveIBeenPwned

18 Months working at Snap

Obsidian starter pack

Early Computer Art from the 50’s and 60’s

What is a Heat Pump

Reading

After finishing “Legends and Lattes” last week I haven’t spent too much time reading this week, but hope to sink back into “A Gentleman in Moscow” over the weekend. I think I’m going to check out “Project Hail Mary” over Christmas, “The Martian” is one of my favourite books ever and Hail Mary comes highly recommended.

Listening

I’ve decided to expand the listening section here to include podcasts and well as music, and the first item on the list is the wonderful “Sherlock and Co.”. It’s a modern telling of Sherlock Holmes told from the perspective of a Doctor Watson who fancies himself as a budding podcaster. I look forward to every new episode released on Tuesdays. Start from episode one and enjoy a wild ride.

Morning music is a staple in the house, and Fatoumata Diawara’s new album has been getting played a lot lately. It’s the the perfect accompaniment to a big cup of coffee looking out at the sun breaking up the morning fog.

Notes on the week

Two weeks in a row. I’m honestly a little surprised, but I think that this format actually helps building a writing habit quite a bit. Adding some structure to the task of regularly writing makes it so much easier. What happened in life, what have you read, what links did you find interesting and what are you listening to? Easy questions to answer, and make for a (maybe) interesting weekly update.

It’s nearly time to head home for Christmas, and wind down the Rotterdam apartment for a few weeks. I hope to write a bit more about the experience of the first few months here, but so far so good. The City is cool, people are nice, weather sucks (but no worse than at home), bikes are great, and having our own place together is incredible.

I’ve been reading a lot more lately. I buy physical books because they look nice, but most serious reading gets done on my Kindle (It’s old and I’d love to upgrade to an Oasis, but until Amazon add USB-C to their flagship e-reader it’s not for me). It never really bothered me before, but all that content is locked away behind Amazon’s DRM. I’m locked into their devices, and whilst that’s fine now, in the future I might like to change my reading device. I stumbled upon a cool project where someone has created a private GPT to absorb their book collection, and a major step in this was ‘de-DRMing’ their Kindle library. I just spent the last twenty minutes doing this to my entire library of Kindle books, and will probably continue with every new purchase I make.

YouTube threw some nostalgia at me today with Chetreo’s remix of Portal 2’s “Want you gone”. This sent me down a rabbit hole of listening to a lot of Chetreo’s remixes, but also thinking about Portal and how it’s pretty much as perfect a game as it gets. Elle has been looking to play more games, so on my recommendation we fired it up. It really struck me just how inaccessible first person games are to non-gamers. Very, very quickly the mechanical demands of the game outstripped her ability, and I could see her getting frustrated at not being able to do what she wanted her character to do, despite knowing exactly how to solve the puzzle of a particular level.

I grew up with a controller in my hand so this body-brain disconnect is completely foreign to me, so I have no advice to offer other than put in the hours and it will begin to feel more and more natural. This is possibly a topic for a much longer piece, there is a plethora of gaming ‘vocabulary’ that I’ve absorbed over literal decades that all inform how comfortable a new game feels, and this vocab is completely absent for an adult looking to get started.

Ireland has made it to space! Massive congratulations to the EIRSAT-1 Team that successfully made it to orbit and got AOS. The energy in this video is lovely to see, and hopefully this is the only the first of many future Irish missions.

Links

A visualisation of how a Large Language Model works This is an incredible free resource for understanding whats going on behind the scenes in a transformer model.

Extracting Training Data from ChatGPT This is wild, and the technique for triggering the leak is equally hilarious as it is scary.

No Feature The team at iA with a nuanced take on adding AI to existing software. Part 1 of 3, it’s worth reading them all.

What if you pointed Hubble at Earth? xkcd’s ‘what if?’ in video form.

Let’s build a GPT Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and former Director of AI at Tesla discusses how to build a GPT from scratch.

An Ultrasonic TV remote from the 70’s

The best way to ripen avocados

Chickens can be hypnotised

How to choose better colours for your charts

Reading

Paused progress on “A Gentleman in Moscow” to check out “Legends and Lattes”. I don’t know if it’s the time of the year, or just being overwhelmed with the mess the world is in, but I fancied something cosy and Travis Baldree’s breakthrough novel is very light, very easygoing and was the perfect companion to a chilly week in Rotterdam. An Orc is fed up with her life of bloodshed and decides to make a clean break to set up a coffee shop in a new city. I wish I’d had this during the depths of the pandemic, but like a great Latte it went down well this week all the same.

Listening

The one and only Robert Grace has a new release out this week and it’s typically top class. Rob has really matured as an artist over the past few years, and his writing partnership with Ryan Mack continues to blow me away. You couldn’t meet two nicer guys either.

Something new! I enjoy writing, or at least I think I like writing, but friction is a killer. In an attempt to build a habit I’m going to try to keep a weekly log of general life stuff and interesting links (hat tip to Kev).

Notes on the week

Moving to Rotterdam a few months ago has been a big change. This apartment is the first place that Elle and I can truly call our own. It’s amazing. I’ll be forever grateful for how welcome I was at home during the pandemic, and the opportunity to live with friends again once the world started to open up, but there is something fundamentally different about having your own place.

A side-effect of having our own place is entertaining visitors! In the past few weeks we’ve had my family, Elle’s parents, her brother and two of our friends. Nothing will make you feel more loved than people using up annual leave to visit a cold, wet and windy Rotterdam in November. Now if we can nail down dates for the 2 remaining Wallace siblings to go we’ll have collected the whole set!

It’s impossible to write anything about moving to the Netherlands without mentioning bikes, and we are now the proud owners of two scrap heaps that cost a combined total of €150 from our local charity shop. The temptation was definitely there to go all out off the bat, but our apartment only has on street bike parking, and we were warned that nice bikes have a tendency to go missing when parked on the street, no matter how good a lock is used.

With all that said, we got both bikes serviced and honestly they’re not bad! I haven’t cycled this much in my entire life, and trips that left my legs burning (embarrassingly so, considering the pancake flat terrain) only a few weeks ago are second nature to me. It helps that the infrastructure is amazing (even if Rotterdam is apparently one of the worst cities in the Netherlands for cycling) and drivers tend to respect cyclists. I even rented a Bakfiets recently to help move some things to Elle’s studio!

Links saved this week

The Revised Psychology of Human Misjudgment, by Charlie Munger

The Rest of the World’s list of books

Doctorow on AI in-fighting

How to help people use a computer

What if Money had an expiration date

Some cats have an instinctual fetch response!

Preston Thorpe is a programmer, writer and prisoner

Reading update

Making progress with ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’. It feels right to take this book leisurely. It’s a total change of pace from ‘The Sunlit Man’, the last of Sanderson’s Secret Projects, which surgically attached itself to my hand shortly after the opening scene.