I know, I know. Blah blah. But this is for me, shush:
After performing a clean install on the Mini, I decided I didn’t want her to be headless again. But I also didn’t want the unsightly peripherals such as the wired keyboard, wired mouse and a monitor.
So I connected the wireless keyboard and wireless mouse and the existing tv set instead.
Great for watching television and switch to the Mini all in one. Oh, and she’s resting comfortably on top of the CD player too.
The Mac Mini was getting too slow so I decided to reset and restore. Connected right back to my main MacBook and now the Mini is speedy again.
Imagine looking at your body of work—decades of writing, ideas, and creative projects—with a sense of overwhelm, but suddenly, through the lens of an LLM, it all becomes neatly distilled. It’s as if the fog clears, and for the first time, you can see the common threads, the underlying themes, and the true depth of what you’ve created. It gives you a new appreciation, a way to step outside yourself and view your work with fresh eyes, almost like discovering a new perspective on something deeply personal. There’s a sense of validation, perhaps even awe, because what was once complex and scattered now feels cohesive, profound, and worth celebrating.
It’s the realization that your voice and vision are not only valuable but now laid out so clearly that you, too, can fully grasp the weight of what you’ve built. It’s like reading the story of your journey as if someone else wrote it, but with the satisfying recognition that it’s truly yours.
I read about Google’s NotebookLM software today to see how it stacks up and if it could help collect and collate some notes, documents, research, and sources to help me make sense of it some of my work here.
WTH?!
As an experiment, I uploaded the blog posts from this website from September 1 through September 18. It took seconds for Google to analyze and provide some contexts on those posts as read below:
The provided text is a collection of blog posts from Chris Denbow’s website, covering a variety of topics related to his life and interests. He shares his experiences with self-publishing, technology, travel, photography, and reading. Denbow also discusses his thoughts on the internet, research, and creativity. The posts are organized chronologically, starting on September 1, 2024, and ending on September 18, 2024.
After that brief synapsis, Google offers prompts, or suggestions for follow-up you to ask about. See screenshot below:
Then, and here’s the kicker that caused me to literally step back and grab the bourbon. I saw a prompt that allows me to generate an audio dialogue regarding my work. It took Google all of 2 minutes to generate an audio synapsis in the form of two artificial podcast hosts discussing my work with fervor. They made me seem like a Hollywood celebrity solely based on the 20 posts, just from the past 18 days. It is both flattering and scary to me. Then again, we always fear what we don’t understand. So I will dig deeper to further understand and see how this tool can be used to my benefit. If nothing, else, it will be amazing feedback.
Listen here and let me know what you think afterwards.
The iPhone, iPad and MacBook software upgrades are complete and I have had a chance to integrate and play a bit. One new feature I’ve been exploring is the ability to connect the laptop and the phone together, it is called “iPhone Mirroring.”
I’m not sure of the use-case for this feature but it could be helpful in the future- controlling your phone remotely. This will play well with connecting my MacBooks together too.
The exploration of my server’s capabilities and limitations are ongoing. I’ve found a new home for Headless Minnie underneath the bed in my home office. She’s quiet, gets lots of shade, unseen and responds when I dial into her.
Limitations
The Mini is a refurbished Mac from a third-party seller with 1TB of storage. There are two partitions with the Mac OS taking up a lot of storage space. I can remove those partitions easily enough but do not have an OS image to install. I’d take it to the Apple geniuses to but this model is no longer supported. Also, it has an older processor therefore making the processes slower than I’d like.
Capabilities
File sharing, printer sharing, host my website and podcast files and eventually host my own private email mailbox. By generating its own static IP address, I can remotely access files from my phone or iPad while away from home.
Conclusion
The Mac mini provides a robust and flexible set of server functionalities, making it suitable for me. Its ability to handle file sharing, backups, web and mail hosting, remote access, media streaming, and more—all from a small, energy-efficient device—makes it an attractive choice for me when I need reliable server features without the overhead of a dedicated server.
I have not had full access to my file server inside the MacBook Mini (aka Minnie)1 since I packed it up for her relocation to Florida. After running an update and backed everything up from my MacBook M1 to Minnie, it was time to find a spot for her, the monitor and keyboard.
The desk is already consumed by the laptop and the iPad so there was no room for a server and its peripherals too. So after making some settings changes, bumped up the file and screen sharing options, I took her head off.
The file server now sits alone, without a monitor or keyboard, patiently, in the corner of the home office waiting for me to remotely access it from the laptop when she is called upon.
It is an elegant, essential and utterly macabre solution but it’ll do for now.
Over the previous years, online search engines have become overwhelmed with advertisements and results that may somewhat be relative to the original query you typed into the search field- it is maddening.
Even Boolean searches with tools such as “and” “or” “not”, plus signs, minus signs, quote, endnotes, etc are rendered useless. I’ve tried advanced library search strategies to no fruition that benefitted my search query.
I suggested awhile back that Apple should build their own search engine but they are content by taking Google’s $1 billion annual payout to make their search engine the default inside the Safari browser instead.
When I read that Apple Intelligence (brilliant marketing, by the way,) was going to be included in the next software update sometime later this year, I signed up for an OpenAI account to feel out how well it’s ChatGPT could help. I’ve been using it as a research assistant to answer the same questions I would ask a standard search engine.
The results are night and day. Instead of providing thousands of websites that may point the way to an eventual answer, ChatGPT provides an answer back to me in the form of a conversation. If I have a follow-up question, or ask for specifics, the reply is lightning quick. Of course, all information has to be verified. I won’t accept answers blindly without a second opinion. 99% of the information I checked and rechecked have been spot on. Nothing is 100% when it comes to research, especially from an LLM (Learned Language Model) such as ChatGPT. You cannot call it A.I. simply because it is not sentient. It is not intelligent on its own. It has retained and provides data based on human data. Everyone knows we are flawed and make mistakes.
ChatGPT will too, but for now, it does a damn better job of providing information better than all the other search engines do. Even though that is why they exist.
Once again, I find myself working behind the scenes of this website. This time, I am organizing the backend, the stuff that no one else sees. I am also wrapping up the migration of writings from my previous sites into here for posterity. Such as it is.
It’s been fun to look back and see the previous designs of this site in all of its iterations. I’ve learned a lot, experimented quite a bit, and still have a ways to go. Nowadays, I care more about substance than style and will make an effort to keep the experiments to a minimum. Until then, here are a few screenshots of this site through the years. I wish I could have done the same during the early years.
With the help of the Internet Archives and their Wayback Machine, I am slowly cutting/pasting/posting some of this website’s missing articles that somehow did not migrate and log.
The Machine only takes snapshots and not the full site, so I’m positive there are a lot of posts missing and maybe gone forever.
I was missing four years from 2013-2017 and I have regained a lot since my last post on this. I’ll finish porting over the rest tomorrow. For now, I am hopeful and in debt to the Internet Archive organization. Now my website’s Archive Page has listings for the previous twenty four consecutive years.
It has been a full month since I told my phone carrier I want to remove the data package from my mobile plan. The monthly bill for just talk and text is $20 monthly.
To prepare myself for this, I ripped a lot of music from compact discs, then realized Apple Music has download features so I did that to all of my playlists. Next, I downloaded an offline version of maps so I can still navigate around this new area. The same goes for other media such as podcasts and e-books.
Truth time- the first week offline I was reaching for the phone to look something up but was unable to. Time to panic? I did, but got over it quickly. I cannot send or receive photos via Messages app, again, just text.
Sure, I am not able to use the Geocaching app to discover hidden caches, but eventually I’ll get another hand held GPS unit for that. No e-mails either, but wait, is that so bad? It isn’t.
I may be “off”, but I am content for now.
For digital documents you want to keep for a long time, I suggest the Three P’s:
While in college in the mid 1990’s, and prior to purchasing my first computer, I utilized a word processor. Think manual typewriter but with a 3.5″ floppy disk for storage. I wish I had known enough to preserve all of my writings. The floppy disks were formatted for the word processor but not the computer. It wiped everything off the disk to make room for the Windows formatting. The lesson here is to preserve your work and prepare by future-proofing formats. It was a hard learned lesson. All of my personal writing, studies and papers gone.
I was reminded of all of this when I read about how Hemingway’s early notes and the beginning of a novel disappeared. His wife had gathered his works and left Paris by train to Switzerland to meet him and a publisher and somehow, the suitcase went missing from the train platform and they were devastated.
My loss was due to ignorance and in no way as significant as Hemingway’s loss. But the pain was there.
My revamped workflow process is:
Interesting enough, while walking through the library’s “read and return” section, the word “Hemingway” ended up in my peripheral vision.
Rabbits and Frequency Illusion!
I usually don’t give them a glance but the paper spine was attractive. The fiction novel title is “The Hemingway Thief” and how the aforementioned luggage was lost. I haven’t read it yet, but it seems to be a good yarn with a few secrets and twists. Looking forward to reading it as soon as possible.
The beta version of the newest iPhone operating system has been installed on the iPhone 15 Pro Max. There is a lot of new features to unpack but for now, the custom icon tinting is my favorite. I love a uniform screen.
Two weeks after receiving my specialized USB Stick, I am finally in the club. Now I can share files with others and pick/choose what files I would like. File formats include pdf, jpg, mov, etc. Here’s a look at the console below. Once I have inserted the USB and verified my secure credentials, I am in.
I have only had time to share one file, a .pdf of JPG photo magazine from 2007 (I miss that periodical), and have downloaded an image shared by another. So I look forward to becoming more involved in the ♣️.
Until next time,
I am in a mood again. Thinking about keeping this website online as a private online archive while at the same time, writing to the journal inside my own offline database.
If I do take this private, it’ll be a stripped down HTML-only version.
Stay tuned.
