Computer benchmarking Notes
Just keeping track of stuff with my old and new VR PC.
Various updates fluffy rambles
Here’s some things going on these days, since it’s been a little while since I’ve posted here.
Disability hearing fluffy rambles
I finally have a disability hearing tomorrow morning. Feel free to send positive vibes, if you’re into such.
⭐️ Leaving Spotify: What Every Musician Needs To Know Notes
Current statuses fluffy rambles
Things seem to be moving forward, except for where they aren’t.
Current TODO list fluffy rambles
Just some stuff to get done
Meds and such fluffy rambles
I had a long-overdue physical with my doctor last week, and after explaining my various struggles with fibromyalgia, long COVID, and suspected ME/CFS she put me on two new medications, Singulair, for the persistent shortness of breath, and Lyrica (pregabalin), for the chronic pain. I’ve only been on them for a few days but here’s some observations so far:
My breathing problems have cleared up quite a bit, in that I’m not randomly feeling short of breath when I’m just sitting on the couch. So far I haven’t noticed any of its many potential side effects, but I also theoretically shouldn’t be noticing any positive effects this soon either. I haven’t done any significant physical activity so I can’t yet tell whether it’s effective as a prophylactic against exercise-induced asthma (which is the main reason I’ve been told I should be on it for years).
I haven’t noticed any significant reduction in pain, but I did have a day of extreme drowsiness when I started the Lyrica. The drowsiness has already cleared up but I’m still having a bit of “finger no worky” problems at times, and I’m already having the major constipation that happened with gabapentin. Increasing my water intake is always a good idea as would be going back on docusate, although I don’t recall that helping with gabapentin.
I’m definitely feeling a bit dizzier than usual and won’t be driving at all until things settle down a bit. Fortunately there’s Lyft (sigh) and the bus for most of the places I need to go which aren’t in walking distance. I’ve been thinking about getting a cheap electric bike/cargo trike/scooter for grocery and short-distance travel purposes, and that might even be an overall better setup than owning a car anyway.
Also as of late my hypermobility has gotten a lot worse and I am pretty sure I do have some form of EDS (and not just some unspecified “hypermobility spectrum disorder”) after all. So, that’s fun.
My disability hearing is in two weeks and hopefully it goes better than the previous parts of the process. I’m not optimistic.
rss2discord Code
For a while I’ve been using monitoRSS to broadcast a bunch of RSS feeds to various Discord channels. However, they’ve cut back on the free tier’s capabilities, and the paid tiers are rather expensive. So, this pushed me into finally creating rss2discord, a self-hosted RSS posting bot which you can run from anywhere that you can run Python scripts.
Hopefully this is useful to someone else as well.
For now it’s pretty basic but I’ve got a bunch of ideas for improving it.
⭐️ RSS is (not) dead (yet)
A simple anti-AI measure for Flask Code
After figuring out a basic anti-bot measure for Publ, I decided to try building a simple experiment for Flask in general.
Here is an extremely simple implementation that has worked amazingly well, having implemented it on The Flickr Random Image Generatr.
⭐️ The rise of Whatever
Preventing bot scraping on Publ and Flask Code
This morning I was once again thinking about how to put some proper antibot behavior onto my websites, without relying on Cloudflare. There are plenty of fronting proxies like Anubis and Go Away which put a simple proof-of-work task in front of a website. This is pretty effective, but it adds more of an admin tax (and is often quite difficult to configure for servers that host multiple websites, such as mine), and sometimes the false positive rates can have some other bad effects, such as disallowing feed readers and the like.
I started going down the path of how to integrate antibot stuff directly into Flask, using an @app.before_request rule that would do much of the same work as Anubis et al, but really the various bots are very stupid and the reason the challenge even works is because they aren’t running any JavaScript at all. This made me think that a better approach would be to have it just look for a simple signed cookie, and if that cookie isn’t there, insert an interstitial page that sets it via form POST (with a Javascript wrapper to automatically submit the form).
But then I realized, Publ already provides this sort of humanity test: the login page!
I FOUND IT fluffy rambles
I finally found the song I was looking for: it was “Lolita” by Moneyshot off the album Bliss.
Which I CANNOT FIND ANYWHERE ONLINE. Spotify doesn’t have it, iTunes Music doesn’t have it, Musicbrainz doesn’t have it, even Discogs doesn’t have it. CDDB probably has it (given that I’m sure someone submitted it when they ripped the CD back in the day) but they don’t make it easy to search. And FreeDB doesn’t.
But anyway, mystery solved.
Building a lyric search engine fluffy rambles
Y'all probably know that my views on AI are somewhat nuanced. I’m not 100% “AI BAD!!!” but I’m also hesitant to rely on AI for a lot of things, and generally do not care for generative AI or any situation where you need AI to “reason” on things.
But, recently I’ve wanted to remember the name of a song that I listened to a lot, and where the lyrics I can remember don’t come up in any of the major lyrics databases. I listen to a lot of obscure indie music that tends to get lost by the major platforms, and I’ve been packratting music for decades now.
Further, it’s only fairly recently that music started to get lyrics embedded into the id3 tags (thanks to bandcamp really pushing for that) and even the streaming platforms have taken forever to pick it up. So a lot of the music I listen to has never had its lyrics entered in any sort of machine-searchable way.
But, hey, there are plenty of AI models for vocal extraction and text transcription… so why not actually use them?