Nortrup in Development

Technology

Yoto Mini Teardown and Rescue

Yesterday my daughter’s Yoto mini took a dunk in the bathtub. She was devastated, she uses it almost constantly. So it was Dad to the rescue.  The device was straight forward to take apart, but I wanted to share how I did it so that other parents don’t have to figure it out on the fly.

#Technology | #Yoto

LLMs - I Won't Be Fooled Again

I’ve stayed on the sidelines of much of the LLM debate, but I’m willing to stake out my skepticism on this “world changing” technology. As I think back over the arch of my online life, I see these foundational models as the latest in a series of events where amazing technology was going to change the world. But each time individual value is diluted for corporate money grabs.

Going way back in time, my first real formative experience on the internet was Geocities. When a friend showed me that I could write an HTML file and make it show up on the internet I was hooked. It was magic to me that I could make something the whole world could see. I quickly fell down the rabbit hole of how to make these sites.

#Technology | #LLMs | #AI

Hashtag Strings in Hugo

I did a fun bit of Hugo templating today that seemed worth sharing. I was previously generating my list of hashtags to apply to a social post inside of my Zapier workflow. I’d pull the list of tags then manipulate them into a single string and add the # symbol.

Today I realized that this would be much simpler to do in Hugo as part of my JSON output. It came out like this:

#Technology | #Hugo

Solid Pods - A Better Place to Store User Data

Solid Pods (Personal Online Data Store) are an open source project from the efforts of Sir Tim Berners-Lee (creator of the original internet) with a goal of re-decentralizing the internet. This project is still in development, I think it has a lot to offer in order to help make developing web applications easier and safer for the developer, user, and society at large.

Solid provides a web standard’s compliant API to provide the owner of the pod with an identity (WebID), storage (document store), and relational language for data. Applications can be built to access and store data in the pod, rather than in storage systems owned by the application.

#Technology | #Open Source

The Email Interview

I don’t like conducting interviews. I would rather be interviewed for a job than interview someone for a job. If I have to choose between written and oral communication, I will usually prefer to write. I like async communication because I have time to think clearly and then commit to words what I’m thinking. I have a mild central auditory processing disorder, meaning an in-person interview pushes my limits of listening, and critically processing, and taking notes on answers in real time. Critical assessment of the candidate’s answer will probably be the functional task that drops.

#Technology