Brinens and Things

Upper floor: 73

Ground floor: 70.5

Basement: 65

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(The thermostat (ground floor: living room) and the "fridge" thermometer (upper floor: bathroom) roughly agree with these numbers. The thermostat has crept up a degree since I started writing this, while the outdoor temperature has climbed from (keeping the same language) 72 to 80.)

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It's weird how the inter-floor temperature difference is very noticeable in summer but not in winter. I think of "the beginning of summer" as the day you go up the stairs and get hit by a wall of heat, and that was yesterday.

(Though it's expected to go back to being cool in a couple days. Probably not time just yet to put the window air conditioner in upstairs, to pump out the upper-floor heat without being able to open a window to the toxic pollen outside.)

((You bet your ass I *thoroughly* duct-tape a seal around the edges of that window air conditioner. Which is a big part of why it would be a hassle to put it in for two days and then take it out again.))

(((I feel like there has to be a better way, some setup involving mounting a HEPA filter on your open window, but thus far I have failed to think of anything that wouldn't involve daily re-taping.)))

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We have poor insulation (except in the attic) but high thermal mass, which makes us surprisingly good at coasting through periods of hot days and cold nights. We have only lost 3.5 of our 8 degrees of stored coolth from two days ago. On cool evenings after sunny days, the temperature in the living room often drifts *upward* in the late evening, the passive solar heat still working its way through the brick.

Tonight, however, is not expected to be cold.

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Dad is in his usual basement chair, wearing a hoodie. Mom, alas, is too mobility-disabled to chase temperature gradients, and is in an upstairs bedroom with a ceiling fan.

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Summer is always a hard adjustment. I'm so used to carefully hoarding heat, to practices based around keeping heat *in* and not keeping it *out*.

(I grudgingly boiled pasta on the stove yesterday, deliberating on whether to dig out the lid. I hear you can make pasta in a pressure cooker, and I really need to experiment with that.)

I haven't taken down the black tarp on the building-envelope wall of the mudroom, but I *have* closed the blinds so it's not getting direct sunlight. The blinds in the southeast are closed too (which is disorienting, as I spend much of my time there), but probably I will open them in the afternoon.

It is the time of year to be reminded of why I haven't pushed for forms of increasing our solar gain that don't have an exit plan.

Apparently I am a good level of tech-savviness for vibe-coding a Linux version of this thing.

"Write, from scratch, a program that monitors a specified area of the screen and makes an alert sound if any of the pixels in it turn white": beyond my skill level.

"Here is a Python script that monitors a specified area of the screen and makes an alert sound if any of the pixels in it turn white! It has one (1) critical bug causing it to silently fail. Figure out that the bug exists, then track it down, then fix it": *not* beyond my skill level, actually.

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(I *was* originally running the linked program in a Windows 7 virtual machine (connected to the Internet, but not logged into anything), but at least one of the following possible explanations had started to happen:

(1) Windows was pissed that I didn't give them a software key and, after a grace period, started throttling me.

(2) The updates Windows 7 had downloaded (apparently Microsoft is still running update servers for 7, just not uploading new patches to them?) had increased its minimum viable specs beyond the specs I'd given the VM.

(3) It was getting clogged with viruses.

(4) Other.

A Linux Lite VM should be better at these. (Except maybe "other".))

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the code (click to expand)

import time
from PIL import Image
import os

# Define region to monitor: left, top, width, height
REGION = (100, 100, 200, 150) # x, y, w, h

# Path for temp screenshot
SCREENSHOT = "/tmp/screen_region.png"
SOUND = "/usr/share/sounds/freedesktop/stereo/complete.oga" # replace if needed

def capture_region():
os.system(f"scrot -o -a {REGION[0]},{REGION[1]},{REGION[2]},{REGION[3]} {SCREENSHOT}")

def contains_white_pixel(image_path):
img = Image.open(image_path)
pixels = img.getdata()
return any(pixel[:3] == (255, 255, 255) for pixel in pixels)

while True:
capture_region()
if contains_white_pixel(SCREENSHOT):
os.system(f"ffplay -nodisp -autoexit -loglevel quiet {SOUND}")
time.sleep(1) # avoid repeated alerts
time.sleep(0.5) # check interval

Everything *except* the bolded "-o" was written by ChatGPT (current default free tier). If you don't include the "-o" (for "overwrite"), each screen capture is written to a new file with a new filename, but the program only tests the *original* file for white pixels. So it only actually functions during the very first screen-check after you start the program, and each new check after that just re-does the first check over and over (while also piling up more and more screenshot files it isn't looking at).

You also have to figure out yourself (and manually edit) what the pixel coordinates should be for your particular usecase, but that's fair.

(Note: I haven't included the part where ChatGPT explains which prerequisites I should make sure I have installed in order to run this, but it did explain that and it does seem to have been correct.)

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This may all have sounded like faint praise, but as someone who has barely used LLMs other than Whisper, I am genuinely very impressed by how close it got. Nullius in verba, sure, but that's true of Stack Exchange too.

Rather than digging around trying (and failing, other than the Windows program) to find someone who has posted *almost* what you were looking for so that you can tinker with it until it does *exactly* what you were looking for, you can directly ask an Internet egregore to manifest the software that post *would* contain if it existed!

The future is *wild*.

Sometimes, when there is incomprehensible pop gibberish on the work radio and I try looking up the lyrics, it's like "oh, it seems obvious in hindsight, how did I not parse that before", and the sensory data kind of snaps into place. (Though it sometimes turns out that the song was better as incomprehensible gibberish.)

Other times it's like, no, actually, the reason you couldn't understand what they were saying there is because they were secretly code-switching into Korean.

(Okay, yes, the Korean word for "apartment" clearly descends from English (via Japanese, apparently), but still, overall I feel vindicated in that I could not reasonably have been expected to figure out what they were on about this time.)

Hello, folks! I'm going to be teaching a class on advanced grocery-shopping techniques for KW Rationality (currently planned for the evening of Thursday, February 27th March 6th). If you'll be in the Waterloo, Ontario area, I encourage you to come out and join us!

Below is the "textbook" for this class. The further away you are in space and time from late-2024 Kitchener/Waterloo, the less of it will apply to you (in particular, advanced grocery shopping looks very different in the United States), but you may still get useful tips out of it and/or find it anthropologically interesting.

This work distills many years of refinement to my techniques, and to this day I am still learning. If it seems overwhelming trying to take it all in at once, try picking up just some of the new tactics, and expand later. I have tried to put the most important aspects first, where feasible.

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Table of Contents

• Where to shop


• Before your shop


• Rotated stockpiles


• Price-matching


• Loyalty programs


• Coupons


• List-making


• Payment methods




• During your shop


• Clearance


• Error-catching

( Read more... )

You don't realise how much of your income is denominated in USD until the exchange rate goes up 7%, huh.

(I feel like sigmaleph is laughing right now at the idea that 7% constitutes a major fluctuation)

I'd...been thinking of that as an annoyance, paying exchange fees when Americans working the same gigs didn't have to, but I guess it's kind of useful as a hedge.

(And Swagbucks lets you *pick* between [CAD-PayPal at a fixed 1.33 exchange rate] and USD-PayPal, so you can check the spot rate and decide for yourself whether you're better off paying PayPal's extortionate 4% exchange fee. I made the switch and am getting around 60 - 70 extra cents per $10, which is a nice boost.)

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(To give a specific figure: during the last full calendar month (November), 14% of my income was USD-denominated. It varies from month to month, though.)

[Freedom Mobile] also now has a $5/mo plan with 100MB of data, two hours of talk and unlimited text.

holy shit???

I got used to ignoring Freedom back in the day, but they've expanded their network coverage over the past ~few years and aren't effectively city-only anymore

(that's 120 minutes of *outgoing* calls, BTW: incoming is unlimited)

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Oh, that reminds me:

Hey, remember the IRS Free File program?

Yeah, it was *looking* pretty useless at first, but upon careful inspection there turns out to be exactly one Free File participant that accepts self-employed non-residents: OLT (OnLine Taxes). It's a pain in the ass to wrangle into a Canadian shape, but it *can* be so wrangled, and it costs approximately 215 CAD less than doing my dad's taxes through even the relatively cheap expat service.

I suspect that I may need to do one year through ExpatFile after each substantial change in our tax situation, but for years where I can compare OLT's output to the previous year's return to check if I put stuff in the right places, it's a boon.

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I ended up waiting to post this until I actually tried the Freedom Mobile plan.

Signing up was difficult, but if you do it in-person (*not* online) and make sure to specify you want prepaid and *not* postpaid, you should have an easier and cheaper time than I did.

The free roaming in the United States (and also Mexico) seems potentially handy, though I don't have any active plans to go there.

I think it's still worth it even after the hassle and extra signup fees, but only if you have housemates on other providers: these days you're allowed to *sign up* if you live outside the city, and they won't charge you *extra* for it, but it turns out you'll still be spending most of your time on their partnered Rogers network and I think we're all very aware by now of how dangerous that is. As long as Dad stays on Bell or Telus networks, I'm willing to take the risk to save ~$125/year, but I'd never want to put *all* our SIM-card eggs in the Freedom basket.

(though if you have non-Rogers-based home Internet, that might be okay)