I have been thinking about how to provide my Hermes agent with more context about me since we’ll be working together a lot. I figure the more it knows, the better we’ll be able to collaborate. It occurred to me that the largest somewhat structured sources of insight would be things I have written. I started with this blog since it goes back 16 years and then tried an experiment using archived emails.
Continue reading “Hermes: Local corpus analysis”Lotoroute
In May, we took road trips to Halsou, a small village in Basque country and to San Sebastián, just on the other side of the Spanish border. It was a fair amount of driving and to pass time, we kept track of the number of license plates (registry plates, plaques d’immatriculation) with various French Department codes or European country code. For instance, we live in Gironde, which is département 33 and part of the Nouvelle Acquitaine région with country code “F” for France. A truck passing us might be from Spain with a country code “E” (not ES – these aren’t ISO 3166 codes). A car from England might be either GB or UK, depending on whether their plate was from back when Britain was great or after (2021).
As I understand it, this is a pretty common activity for family car trips — the French are particularly attached to their department numbers (although strictly speaking, the number of your plate no longer strictly reflects where you live). So, I was suprised when I did a quick search that there weren’t apps for some form of road bingo (or loto, in French). So, I wrote one. It’s at https://dhakajack.itch.io/lotoroute and is free to play online.
Continue reading “Lotoroute”Hermes Set Up
Early in June, I set up Hermes as my go-to harness on my MacBook Air (M4, 32 GB). I followed the tutorials at Nous and got it configured quickly with GPT 5.5, and then added some gateway services so I could access it remotely from my phone while traveling. I had been working with Codex, both as an IDE extension and using the Mac App for most of the year, so some aspects were familiar, but there was still a learning curve.
Continue reading “Hermes Set Up”Hangperson
I’ve written a new variant on that old game, hangman, but modernized it just a bit. The game can be played online in your browser at http://templaro.com/games/hangperson. The game play is familiar: guess the missing letters of a word or die trying, but I’ve added some features. First you can play in English, French, Russian or Greek. So that’s a bit different. Also, you can pick your difficulty. A scoreboard keeps track of how many games you have won out of however many you have played. Finally, as you would expect, if you guess incorrectly, body parts get added to a picture and when the last part is added, you lose. There is a different, culturally inappropriate picture for each language.
Migration
Templaro.com has picked up stakes and moved from A2 Hosting to Opalstack. The site started at io.com (io.com) in 1997, the heyday of animated gifs and PERL CGI scripts with now laughable security measures. IOCOM began as Steve Jackson Games’ Illuminati Online BBS (the one raided in the early 90s by the US secret service to investigate conspiracy theories). By he late 90s, it had morphed into a very welcoming early ISP, a favorite of PERL developers. Unfortunately, it was bought out and the new corporate overlords absolutely screwed the pooch.
Continue reading “Migration”Duolingo Fail
I’m a little miffed at Duolingo for torpedoing my progress this week. I had set the goal of hitting 100,000 XP in a week. Let’s put aside the whether that’s nuts or not — after a few years of using the app, I wanted to push it boundaries. I got to 92,000 points and found myself yanked from the leaderboard. I’m not sure if it was algorithmic or an administrative reaction to a user complaint , but it was really disheartening since I had invested not an insignificant amount of time owling my way up all week. I’m not the one that gamified Duolingo — they are — so it seems ingenuous of them to react poorly to someone gaming the game.
Continue reading “Duolingo Fail”SOTA F/MC-233: La Plane
This is a drive-up peak about two and half hours from my house outside Bordeaux, just about due East along route A-62. A paved access road runs to a series of commercial radio towers at the top of the hill, but I pulled off the access road a bit earlier and set up on a grassy field separated from the antenna site by a row of trees. This was a very relaxed outing and I set up a table, some folding chairs and had a nice picnic lunch with F5LGB, who accompanied me from our club station, F6KPW.
SOTA: F/MC-192 (La Ramière)
This was the final of three sites near Brive-la-Gaillarde that I had activated on a day trip starting near Bordeaux; the other two peaks were F/MC-263 and F/MC-178. What sets this site apart is that I was not only activating a summit, but a prehistoric megalith (I’m not aware if there is a program for that, but probably).
My first inclination was just to follow a road towards a commercial antenna site near the summit, but when I looked at the site on OpenTopo, I saw a point of interest within the activation zone, the Dolmen du Puy de la Ramière. The map also showed paths leading from roads to the dolmen. A quick check with GoogleStreet view showed me that there are signs along the street and a parking lot next to the trail head, so I decided to take the trail to the dolmen and pick an activation spot in the woods a bit off the trail.
SOTA: F/MC-178 (Roche de Vic)
This was the middle-of-the-day summit on my tour including F/MC-263 and F/MC-192, and it turned out to be the most comfortable of the three.
The site shows up on various online maps because there is a chapel on the summit and I have the impression that it is a landmark that probably draws tourists during the summer months. At the base of the hill, there is a large gravel car park, and although a number of cars came and went, I was the only one who went up the hill.
I think other people probably struck out in different directions on hikes or made use of the picnic tables near the parking lot.
Continue reading “SOTA: F/MC-178 (Roche de Vic)”SOTA: F/MC-263 (Lacoste)
I left the house near Bordeaux in the early morning and returned after dark, but I succeeded in activating three sites clustered just east of Brive-la-Gaillarde: F/MC-263 (Lacoste), F/MC-178 (Roche de Vic) and F/MC-192 (La Ramière).
The journey commences with MC-263, which is a grassy hilltop with a commercial antenna tower at one end, but plenty of room to activate at the other end. My GPS calculated directions correctly, taking me through a hilltop village with some narrow streets. The final road to the top was dirt and gravel, but no problem, although after a recent rain the top of the hill itself got muddy.
Continue reading “SOTA: F/MC-263 (Lacoste)”