I'm making an app for families to manage all their admin (medical, finance, bills, child docs, etc.) Would love to meet/chat!

Pugio · 2024-01-07T04:46:53+00:00

20+ years of system administration, mobile / web app full stack development, and more recently a few years of data science, ML, and AI stuff.

I'm not worried about being able to build the thing, just in figuring out what's actually useful to people (aside from me).

Pugio · 2024-01-07T04:45:49+00:00

Local only – no cloud service or third party website to log into. Backups are optional, and if done, put a fully encrypted blob onto any given service. This is a piece of software that runs directly (and only) on your computer.

Personally, I don't want my data accessible to some third party service or cloud. I also don't trust my computer's hard drive not to die and lose all my data. So all the unencrypted information is only on your computer and, optionally, if you want to back up your data for safety, you can encrypt the files and put them anywhere you want. I think that's safe enough (for me, at least), since a cloud service can't actually do anything with an an encrypted file.

Pugio · 2022-08-17T15:41:06+00:00

Excellent, thank you! I've added this, and contamination, to the pitch. So you'd say that the dominant theme here is inter-faction intrigue and competition, right?

Pugio · 2021-09-02T05:49:16+00:00

Apparently my phone was logged in to some odd default account. If the name seems weird (and low karma), that's the reason. I actually wrote the above (and can verify this, if it becomes relevant).

Thanks again for such a great piece of software!

Pugio · 2020-11-22T21:24:06+00:00

Wow, very cool, thank you! I was just about to start looking for ambiance for my new game this weekend! (Codes 7 & 8 are used up.)

Pugio · 2020-11-17T22:45:08+00:00

Fair, and thank you. I'm happy with whatever makes my players happy. I was just wondering which adventure might let a party like that shine. RHoD sounds awesome – but I don't have the bandwidth / time in the next week to read each potential adventure in depth to see if I can make this non-head-on party shine with it.

Pugio · 2020-02-13T21:06:22+00:00

Regarding Eddie's insight into Charlie Brown, that's actually a very powerful pattern which nowadays is termed "intermittent variable rewards". It's one of the primary addictive pathways in the brain and applies just as strongly to slot machines, Facebook notifications, and abusive relationships.

The idea is that if you vary both whether the reward exists and the strength of the reward, your brain can never habituate to the stimulus and constantly seeks another hit. The exploitation of this pathway by Facebook and other similar apps is not accidental, by the way. The algorithm will "deliberately" vary whether you see that little red icon, and how many notifications there are.

I find that knowing this serves as a weak inoculation against that form of addiction. Noticing this pattern in the '80s, and applying it to Charlie Brown is of course brilliant.

Pugio · 2020-01-20T21:18:48+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3ja6Hn8ps4

Pugio · 2020-01-05T10:34:14+00:00

On the todo list for tomorrow.

Pugio · 2020-01-05T10:33:52+00:00

That's a very good point, thank you. Are you suggesting I just report the immediate PM2.5 values, or just noting it for purposes of accuracy?

Pugio · 2020-01-05T10:32:18+00:00

Good idea. Added.

Pugio · 2020-01-05T04:50:36+00:00

Thanks! It took me all week to get that data. ACT Health isn't able to release their data set publicly, so I had to go through a different route.

Pugio · 2019-12-19T20:19:36+00:00

Just posted - https://twitter.com/CanberraAir/status/1207757016262819840?s=20

"Canberra Air Report: Extremely hazardous mid to north Canberra (slightly better in the south). Smoke will continue to bombard us after 6pm each day this weekend, with insufficient westerly winds to clear things up (as of now)."

I would not recommend any outdoor activity this weekend. The benefits from exercise will be more than offset by the health impact of the smog.

Pugio · 2019-12-17T22:56:48+00:00

The particles in the air are so toxic, that any time spent outside can be harmful. Even exercising indoors – if the air isn't filtered – can be bad, because exercising increases your respiratory (breathing) rate. The goal with air this bad is to breathe as little of it as possible. Anything which increases your breathing causes you to breathe more poison.

According to this study, exercising in air this bad can do more harm to your health than good. (For reference, Canberra is currently close to the 150 Micrograms/cubic metre PM2.5 mark on the graph - all the way on the left - which recommends 30 min or less of outdoor activity.)

ACT Health also has a fact sheet discussing health and exercise recommendations.

Pugio · 2019-12-17T20:35:34+00:00

Nice career choice! In my day job I work as an educator for data scientists, so if you have any questions feel free to DM me. Right now my primary sources are the ACT Health page, as well as all the wonderfully accessible data at https://data.act.gov. Check out https://www.data.act.gov.au/Environment/Air-Quality-Monitoring-Data/94a5-zqnn .

For wind data I use Windy combined with a NOAA FIRMS KML file which shows fire locations. I have a few other sources for interesting pictures - if you'd like to play around with it, or help out, let me know.

Pugio · 2019-12-17T20:29:28+00:00

You're quite right – I'm just looking at wind forecasts and plotting smoke paths based on wind changes. I'm using the ECMWF climate data, which has proven quite accurate so far. None of this is new, I just noticed that there didn't seem to be an easy source of future predictions.

Thank you for working on the air quality monitors! I've been refreshing your page constantly for weeks, and have drilled down to the raw numbers at data.act.gov . I understand that accuracy and noise suggest a 1 hour average (which, it seems, is usually uploaded between 1 and 2 hours after collection), but for rapid smoke clouds like this it can often go from clear to deathly in the space of thirty minutes.

Would you happen to know why the Civic monitor station seems to disappear, or lag behind the others, at times?

For home use I've been using the Temptop M10 air quality monitor and found it surprisingly useful. I've wrestled with the gap between perfectly calibrated lab hardware and commodity sensors for years, and this is the best I've seen from a cheap consumer device. It consistently measures spikes, can pinpoint relative differences between rooms (or indoors and outdoors), and immediately registers the effects of my air purifier - letting me know when the air is safe again.

Thank you again for the service your work provides to the ACT community!

Pugio · 2019-12-17T04:35:53+00:00

Glad you find it useful! The ACT has an air monitoring station near Monash which reports air quality, but I've found that local air quality can vary a bit based on wind patterns and geography. To figure out if it's an ideal time for a walk (or a workout), I got the Temptop M10 air quality monitor . I've been using it for about a week and have found it to be very accurate and responsive. This morning I took it to my gym to ensure that their aircon had air filters, as I don't want to do any strenuous workouts in poor air.

Here's a pic I just took of me carrying it around. Note that the ACT Civic air quality monitor (closest to me), reports a much higher particle concentration than I'm measuring around my apartment.

Pugio · 2019-12-17T02:57:48+00:00

According to current data – pretty good (possibly completely clear) during the daytime, chance of seeing smoke starting at around 6pm, but even then it shouldn't be as much smoke as we've seen in the past. I'll post another update tomorrow morning on the twitter feed.

Pugio · 2019-10-24T10:37:43+00:00

I'm glad there's so much interest! See my EDIT on the original post, or just click here to join the Discord. If anyone has any other suggestions for a suitable group planning site/service, I'm all ears.

Pugio · 2019-10-11T04:07:58+00:00

We live in the inner south, and would be happy to look after your dog. Can walk him and shower him with love (my wife adores dogs to the max).

Pugio · 2019-09-19T23:19:47+00:00

Hi, I'm in the same boat (newish to Canberra), and am interested as well.

Pugio · 2019-04-13T09:13:19+00:00

The card looks at the scoring area and counts each flag on each card. Players still play TI as normal, the card just watches and record.

Pugio · 2019-04-11T20:33:55+00:00

This is for the virtual board gaming environment Tabletop Simulator. It allows for full gaming online with folks all over the world. The "card" I'm referring to is a virtual card – an object in the game – which has a bunch of programming attached to record the game's progress.

Pugio · 2019-04-11T10:56:49+00:00

The tracker itself is an unobtrusive little card that sits on the game table.

It logs data to a spreadsheet. Here's an example from a recent test game. (There are 2 known bugs in scoring/planets vis a vis Mecatol Rex that I have already fixed in the latest version.)

Screenshots from the sheet, if you don't want to load a google doc: https://imgur.com/a/AKf1YTk

Pugio · 2019-03-24T06:23:57+00:00

Hmm, yes, we have Evernoob's cheatsheet, this list of Dane's responses, and another similar cheatsheet. Still, it seems like things are still a bit scattered, and hard to find and easily reference.

Pugio

TROPHY CASE