Experimenting

 

How do I find out which are the best LLMs to use for different tasks?

LLM
Sources of rankings and info on LLMs
Apr 20, 2025

The perfect chat interface for LLMs

ai
llm
I’m not sure if I’ve found the perfect chat interface, but I’m going to try out open-webui.
Apr 13, 2025

Vibe coding with Cline

claude
cline
llm
vibe-coding
I like Cline a lot as an in-IDE assistant but I need to experiment with it more, perhaps with a larger project. I can see costs increasing quickly.
Apr 12, 2025

 

Choosing a web page to markdown extractor

markdown
parsing
tools
I used ChatGPT Deep Research to find an HTML to Markdown tool and it suggested a really good one I’d not come across before—trafilatura
Apr 12, 2025

Trying out a few markdown editors

markdown
note-taking
Just spent a while trying out some markdown editors that I’ve not tested before or not used for a while.
Apr 4, 2025

 

2D animation techniques

animation
I got Claude and ChatGPT to suggest applications for 2D animation that are programmable/scriptable. I didn’t like any of them, but it’s given me some good ideas.
Mar 13, 2025

Experimenting with revealjs animation

presentations
revealjs
I want to update my technique for creating presentations so I can include fancy animation and transitions.
Mar 9, 2025

Image Zoom experiment with revealjs

javascript
presentations
revealjs
After a presentation someone with bad eyesight asked if I could zoom into images more. I experimented with ways to do this, and decided the Accessibility functionality in OSX is the best method.
Mar 7, 2025

Using Apple Voice memos to record notes whilst running or reading

productivity
A successful test of recording notes with iOS Voice Memos. I will be incorporating this into my routines.
Jan 25, 2025

 

Using TamperMonkey to preprocess a webpage before using a Safari extension [failed experiment]

bear
research process
safari
I tried to use TamperMonkey to clean crud from a web page before it being sent to Bear App using the Bear App extension, but it didn’t work.
Dec 19, 2024

 

Using the OpenAI API

Artifical Intelligence
chatgpt
python
To use the OpenAI API, first you need an account and to add some credit. I added 10 USD some weeks ago and I’ve still used very little of it. Then you need to create an API…
Dec 11, 2024

 

A quick look at Cursor, and why it sucks

Artifical Intelligence
A lot of people seem to be talking about Cursor, a programming tool similar to GitHub Copilot. I decided to try it out.
Dec 5, 2024

Hello world on Google App Engine

Google App Engine
Google Cloud Platform
It takes me ages and a load of frustration to get Hello World to work on Google App Engine
Nov 28, 2024

 

What hosting services should I use for a personal app?

hosting
web development
I should write my application in Python and host it on Google App Engine using the Standard Environment — subject to experimentation of course. For the framework I think I…
Nov 27, 2024

Does using 8bit PNG with transparency increase file size significantly? No! PNG transparency compression is simple but clever.

Web images
compression
graphics
png
I discover my assumptions about how 8-bit PNGs store transparency are wrong, and it uses a clever technique meaning images with transparency can be smaller than those without.
Nov 20, 2024

Can I consistently create AI images in my own visual style?

artificial intelligence
recraft
I recently gave a talk about how AI threatens many creative jobs. I’ve spoken to some designers and illustrators about it, and a couple of them said they were not concerned…
Nov 20, 2024

 

ChatGPT Work with Apps tool

ChatGPT
vscode
ChatGPT work with Apps tool
Nov 15, 2024

 

Hosting a static website on Cloudflare

Web sites
cloudflare
hosting
web development
Updated 31 January 2025 — some things have changed a bit so I’ve updated the below.
Oct 23, 2024

 

BigQuery CSV import sucks

bigquery
csv
TIL that in bigquery, when you are importing a CSV file and all your columns are strings, it will automatically assign column headings rather than using your first row. So…
Oct 17, 2024

 

How to normalize multilingual categorical data with ChatGPT

data processing
prompting
I had a dynamically updated BigQuery table containing a column with categorical data, but the column was in multiple languages and formats. This is how I solved that problem…
Oct 17, 2024

 

Hugo is fast!

One of the things I don’t like about Quarto is that it is slow to build web pages. Even a relatively small site involves a short wait whilst it builds. Another thing is that…
Oct 11, 2024

 

Quarto notation in Bear

bear
quarto
This is a test to see what Quarto notation I can use in Bear that will be transferred to Quarto.
Oct 9, 2024

 

Workaround to export raindrop bookmark highlights to Markdown

bookmarks
study
There is currently no good way to export highlights from Raindrop bookmark manager. This is a workaround:
Oct 7, 2024

 

Use Jina to get the Markdown for a web page

markdown
The following method can be used to extract MD from a web page:
Oct 6, 2024

Comments in Bear app

bear
All of the methods below work. The HTML comment results in the comment being in exported HTML, the others result in nothing exported at all. Source: Comments in Markdown
Oct 6, 2024

 

Footnotes in Bear app

bear
Footnotes in Bear app use the standard method. This is the same as Quarto uses, and so no changes are needed on export to Quarto:
Oct 6, 2024

Comparing ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini

chatgpt
claude
perplexity
In this experiment I compare the generative AI platforms below. I have awarded them stars based on their overall responses to similar or identical prompts.
Jul 4, 2024

Understanding Perlin noise

graphics
In this little experiment I investigate Perlin noise, and end by making a fantasy map
Jun 30, 2024

Using OSX Shortcuts to copy Perplexity.ai responses to markdown apps (Bear, Quarto)

artificial intelligence
productivity
“I … am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.”
Jun 20, 2024

Markdown features that can be exported from Quarto to Confluence

confluence
productivity
quarto
Previously I did a test to export content from Quarto to Confluence. It worked, and very well! You can read about that here: Markdown features that can be exported from…
Apr 24, 2024

Diagrams from Python, exported to Confluence

confluence
productivity
quarto
Final test in this series, can I include a diagram drawn with Python?
Apr 24, 2024

Features in Confluence’s own storage format that can be exported into Confluence

confluence
productivity
quarto
My previous test was to see which basic Quarto features I can export to Confluence. It went pretty well. You can read about that here: Markdown features that can be exported…
Apr 24, 2024

Using Quarto to create Confluence pages

confluence
productivity
quarto
Quarto is a great publishing system for charts and graphs. It allows you to generate data visualizations with Python and Plotly, Observable or whatever. Confluence is a…
Mar 8, 2024

Processing a podcast transcript with the ChatGPT API

artificial intelligence
chatgpt
python
I was going to use Python and the ChatGPT API to cut up a podcast transcript and process it. But I discovered I could just cut and paste the whole transcript (over 9k words)…
Feb 21, 2024

Using Google Sheets as a database for simple web applications

data
web development
Often when creating simple web apps you want a small and simple database for the data. It is also often a requirement to give someone else access to the database, and to…
Jan 31, 2024

Uncle Lubin - experiments with colour palettes

Web images
Web sites
creativity
drawings
experiments-with-colour-palettes
Jan 24, 2024

Connecting to ChatGPT via the API in Python

artificial intelligence
chatgpt
python
I connected to ChatGPT using the API in Python. I ran a couple of tests, which cost $0.01 to process.
Next step - take data from a database, process it, return results to…
Jan 17, 2024

A curious case of JSON data being out-of-sync

drupal
json
Update: this didn’t solve the problem. It was a bug in Drupal itself.
Dec 14, 2023

Image tests: format and size

Web images
info design
When I did these experiments I didn’t include the webp format, which may be a better one than any of these. More experiments needed.
Feb 16, 2023

More experiments with Stable Diffusion

artificial intelligence
Stable Diffusion V2 was released this week (Dec ’22), so I decided to do some experimentation with it. To do this I used the ImaginAIry Python code by Bryce Drennan. I also…
Dec 30, 2022

Experiments with Stable Diffusion

artificial intelligence
I created these images using the Stability Photoshop Plugin by the wonderful Christian Cantrell, with images generated utilizing the Dreamstudio service. It’s a paid-for…
Dec 3, 2022
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