Headphone Rant

I have been frustrated with earbuds since mobile phone manufactures dropped the 1/8" inch headphone jack - I think this trend started with the iPhone 7 in 2016. After playing around with headphones with proprietary connectors and adapters for almost a decade, I decided to buy wireless ear buds in April 2024. I chose the Bose QuietComfort Earbuds II. I haven’t been impressed - mostly due to frustration when they refuse to pair with my phone (my Sony portable speaker is flawless in this regard). My wife/kids seem to do better with various Anker soundcore models. But… the noise cancelling on these Bose earbuds is awesome for sharing a small space, walking in loud urban areas, and traveling on public transit. I had planned to use them until they stop working altogether.

Introduction

I was fortunate to be able to spend time with one of my great-grandmothers, who lived until I was in my early 20s. We great-grandkids knew her as GG. GG was born in Lerwick in 1907. In 1912, her parents moved the family to Scotland’s mainland. She had my grandmother in 1928, and they left Scotland for Canada in 1930. So in 2024, when my wife and I were planning a trip to Scotland, I reviewed GG’s memoirs and added the places she wrote about to our itinerary. Here’s what I was able to find.

Introduction

I was looking for something to read in June, and decided to read Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence, the author’s account of his leading the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire in World War I. The book was made into a movie, Lawrence of Arabia. As the author died in 1935, the book is long out of copyright, and I downloaded a free copy from Standard Ebooks.

Paddling is something I’ve associated with canoes and cottage country outside of the city. Living in a small space in Toronto, it didn’t seem like an activity I could take up, even though Toronto is located on the shores of Lake Ontario. That changed when a friend picked up a deeply discounted inflatable paddle board at Winners (an off-price department store) and I got the chance to try it out. It was a blast, I was sold: I picked up a couple myself in 2021.

Background

I don’t have a lot of space for books, which is one of the reasons I’m a frequent patron of my local library. I borrow both traditional books and ebooks, which I can read on my Kobo reader. If I was going to buy a book, my preference is for an ebook over a paper copy, as I don’t want the physical good. A number of years ago, I wanted to read The Road Chose Me, by Dan Grec - it wasn’t available from my library AND I’m pretty sure it wasn’t available on Kobo at the time (it is now!).

Want to make an LLM do something its designers don’t want it to do? Try sharing a secret code word.

Following all the recent news on the Deepseek-R1 LLM, I spent some time playing with its 32b parameter variant on my PC over the weekend using the Ollama tool. I’m familiar with the “Ignore all previous instructions” meme for bypassing the censorship built into models. This particular prompt did not work for me with DeepSeek-R1, so I tried something different.