Category: Articles

An AI house assistant we can talk to
My friends know me as an obsessive documenter, but in addition to taking pictures of everything, I keep meticulous records about our house, its maintenance, and in general, every project I'm working on. In an attempt to make the house information useful for my family, I created a Google NotebookLM and gave it access to the house notes. Now, Pam (and I) can text chat with our house LLM, which has already proven to be very useful.

AI-based school email filtering
AI-based school email filtering! I can't believe I waited until after the school year to build out this automation flow. It uses a prompt to determine whether an email contains something actionable for a parent, taking into account the names of my kids, teachers and classes, plus a general prompt-based evaluation of the email contents. If the email is actionable, it forwards an minimal task summary to my personal email address...

The Asian Blush Forum is back online
Before social media, I ran a small forum focused on a large percentage (~half) of East Asians turning red when drinking alcohol. It's not isolated to Asian people, but that's how I came across the topic (since I turn red when I drink). In 2003, there was almost no online material about the phenomenon, and a post of mine on my website (this website) led to hundreds of comments, which prompted me to open the topic up as a dedicated discussion forum...

Booking Japan rail travel from the USA
tl;dr Visitors looking to pre-book local travel in Japan know that it isn’t always straightforward. We needed to book travel to visit our friends, Kozyndan, which can luckily be done by booking a single local express train from Shinjuku that doesn’t involve any transfers. We heard that Japan Bullet Train was a service that some ...

Using ChatGPT in every day life
Like many others, I’m using ChatGPT and other LLMs a lot these days, but I’m finding that I have to apply a specific mental context to all interactions, which is one of extreme skepticism. Critical thinking and fact checking are *required* when using ChatGPT. For example, I asked it about tourist visas for American travelers ...

Backing up Apple Messages
My Apple Messages archive is around 40GB across 2445 threads and goes back to 2012. I love having all of my messages instantly available on all of my Apple devices, but the size of the archive is getting out of control. I decided it was time to archive all of my old messages...