Lenovo Smart clock gotcha

 I'm a fan of Lenovo Smart clocks.

Minimalist, functional, simple, intuitive, they are essentially a small linux computer which incorporates Google Assistant and emulates all the features of a 1980's clock radio, telling you the time, allowing you to set an alarm, listen to the radio and play music.

It also helps that we got our smart clocks for the cost of shipping. (I had a pile of Telstra loyalty points, and Telstra were selling off their stock of smart clocks.)

Recently I noticed that all of them, and the Google Hub in the study that I use to play podcasts on had taken to telling me it was sunny and 26C. (Actually the Google Hub decided to simply say it was --C).

I wasn't worried, and decided it was most likely a glitch with the weather data feed and that it would fix itself.

It didn't.

Now I control all my Google Assistant based appliances via Google Home running on my Huawei mediapad, which I bought through Amazon AU's marketplace as as a grey market device from Amazon UK.

At the time it was the only recent Android device I owned, so using it to administer the various smart devices seemed sensible.

So I had a look at the Google Home settings.

It said I was in the UK and didn't have a street address. Obviously not correct.

So I changed the location settings to my address in Australia, and immediately the weather settings corrected themselves.

Obviously something must have changed, perhaps as a result of an upgrade to Google Home Assistant, and the application became confused as to location. The fact that I'm running it on a grey market tablet originally destined for the UK possibly didn't help.

So, if you have one of these and the weather details stop working, or are just plain wrong, check the location settings inside of Google Home Assistant ...

End game at Dow's

 Just before the pandemic struck, I applied for a reader's ticket for the State Library of NSW - I was planning a research trip to search for material relating to some nineteenth century pharmaceutical manufacturers.

Didn't happen - Covid and border closures meant it was a non starter.

But I kept the message at the bottom of my mailbox as a reminder.

Today I deleted the email. 

Covid aside, I reckon that in six or eight weeks I'll be done and have handed over my data before the cold weather makes it unpleasant to work.

I'm not sure what I'll do after but I do know that I don't want to do another big multi-year project ...

Buffer does mastodon !

 Just a quick note to day that Buffer (https://buffer.com/), which I've used for years to schedule posts on twitter, now works with Mastodon to schedule posts and share web pages.

I've tested it (twice) and it does what it says on the tin ...

Some more thoughts on Chat-GPT

I've played some more with it, and it's certainly very impressive.

It's remarkably good at producing formulaic text and you can, if you're prepared to put in some effort, get it to produce something clever and amusing.

But that's not the point.

It's simply (a bit of a misnomer here) a very clever text generation engine with a remarkably rich dataset from which to draw it's information. As with all such software, it gives the appearance of intelligence due to the complexity and richness of its responses.

If, for example, I made my living writing real estate advertisements, or some of the formulaic advertorial that goes on real estate sites, I'd be worried - tools like Chat-GPT are admirably suited to that sort of task, but none of its output is so good that it doesn't need to be reviewed by a human.

And that brings me to my second point. 

Chat-GPT's rise to prominence has been accompanied by a wave of  education departments and universities banning its use in essays.

Too late, the horse has bolted.

It's out in the wild, and so it, or some competitor, will inevitably get used. 

So it's time to embrace it.

For example, on my little Chat-GPT exercise on wet plate photography, give the class the example and ask them to critique and expand on it.

I would expect that students would immediately run off and raid wikipedia and camerapedia for information and use that as the basis for an answer. But we're after more than the facts here, we need some critical analysis as well.

Doing so successfully will show that they understand the topic, and it doesn't matter if they use an AI tool to generate the final text - it's the requirement to critique the answer that's important.