<h1>The Best 25 Bucks I Ever Spent</h1>
Earlier this year (I don’t re­mem­ber the ex­act day or month) I de­cided, screw it, I’m go­ing to try us­ing a ﬂip phone.
For years I’ve won­dered what it was like be­fore the in­for­ma­tion rev­o­lu­tion, but <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Z">as a Zoomer</a>, I’ve never had the op­por­tu­nity.
I got the cheap­est Verizon-compatible ﬂip phone Amazon had to of­fer and I com­mit­ted my­self to us­ing it ex­clu­sively for at least a week.
A week with­out the en­tirety of hu­man knowl­edge in my pocket.
A week of us­ing my voice to com­mu­ni­cate, rather than a touch-screen key­board.
<img src="/images/flip_phone.jpg" alt="The phone in question">
Beside two fac­tor au­then­ti­ca­tion for GitHub, that ﬁrst week was a breeze.
I found my­self so­cial­iz­ing more, since it turns out that most peo­ple in my so­cial cir­cle are just a phone call and a 10-minute walk away.
I also found my­self read­ing bet­ter qual­ity lit­er­a­ture.
Rather than re­sort­ing to HackerNews to ease my bore­dom, I be­gan de­vour­ing full books at a fright­en­ing pace.
That ﬁrst week turned into two, then four, then twelve.
All the while, I was prov­ing to my­self that I did­n’t need a smart­phone.
For a num­ber of rea­sons, I’m back to us­ing a smart­phone.
But this ex­pe­ri­ence has taught me some im­por­tant lessons that I don’t think can be taught any other way.
Organizing so­cial en­coun­ters over text just does­n’t work.
Some peo­ple don’t check their phone too of­ten.
Call­ing them make it clear that their par­tic­i­pa­tion is im­por­tant to you.
This may sound triv­ial or ob­vi­ous to some of the older mem­bers of my au­di­ence, but to pretty much every Zoomer I’ve talked to about this, it is a rev­e­la­tion.
Quiet is sa­cred, and should be pro­tected.
I see loads of peo­ple who walk around every day with their head­phones in, barely pay­ing at­ten­tion to the mu­sic blar­ing out of them.
I’ve done this my­self.
It closes you off the world.
From the tap­ping of wa­ter off an ici­cle.
From the shaky but warm greet­ing from a col­league.
From the chortling roar of an en­gine.
But most of all, it closes you off from your own mind.
The best think­ing and imag­in­ing hap­pens in the quiet, when your brain has noth­ing more stim­u­lat­ing to do.
Overall, us­ing a ﬂip phone was a very qui­et­ing ex­pe­ri­ence.
It helped the world feel larger and more mag­i­cal.

The Best 25 Bucks I Ever Spent

<h1>How I Designed (and built) My Own Pen Plotter</h1>
For the last few months, af­ter read­ing Preslav Rachev’s book <a href="https://p5v.gumroad.com/l/generative-art-in-golang">Generative Art in Go</a>, I have been play­ing around with writ­ing al­go­rithms that cre­ate in­ter­est­ing graph­ics. I even­tu­ally ended up build­ing a <a href="https://github.com/elijah-potter/denim">mod­u­lar can­vas li­brary</a> for Rust to make that eas­ier to do, for me and other peo­ple.
After mak­ing a few al­go­rithms and post­ing them to the web, I started look­ing around for more in­spi­ra­tion. I hap­pened upon a video with this pen plot­ter:
<img src="/images/reddit_pen_plotter.png" alt="A screencap of a pen plotter from Reddit">
I was amazed. A ro­bot that could draw vec­tor graph­ics? I had been nerd sniped.
<img src="/images/xkcd_nerd_sniping.png" alt="XKCD Comic #356">
<h2>The Math</h2>
The math­e­mat­ics in­volved in­ter­ested my es­pe­cially. How do you trans­late <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><semantics><mrow><mo fence="true">[</mo><mtable rowspacing="0.16em" columnalign="center center" columnspacing="1em"><mtr><mtd><mstyle scriptlevel="0" displaystyle="false"><mi>x</mi></mstyle></mtd><mtd><mstyle scriptlevel="0" displaystyle="false"><mi>y</mi></mstyle></mtd></mtr></mtable><mo fence="true">]</mo></mrow><annotation encoding="application/x-tex">\begin{bmatrix} x &#x26; y \end{bmatrix}</annotation></semantics></math>[x​y​] to ro­ta­tions of mo­tors? It in­tim­i­dated me a lit­tle at ﬁrst, but once I sat down and worked it out, I re­al­ized it was sur­pris­ingly sim­ple.
<img src="/images/plotter_math_diagram.png" alt="A diagram of the math involved to create the plotter">
We con­sider that the two mo­tors are sim­ply length­en­ing or short­en­ing each string a spe­ciﬁc amount. Here are the equa­tions that dic­tate the length of each string, given a point <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><semantics><mrow><mo fence="true">[</mo><mtable rowspacing="0.16em" columnalign="center center" columnspacing="1em"><mtr><mtd><mstyle scriptlevel="0" displaystyle="false"><mi>x</mi></mstyle></mtd><mtd><mstyle scriptlevel="0" displaystyle="false"><mi>y</mi></mstyle></mtd></mtr></mtable><mo fence="true">]</mo></mrow><annotation encoding="application/x-tex">\begin{bmatrix} x &#x26; y \end{bmatrix}</annotation></semantics></math>[x​y​], and a dis­tance <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><semantics><mrow><mi>m</mi></mrow><annotation encoding="application/x-tex">m</annotation></semantics></math>m be­tween the two mo­tors.
<math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="block"><semantics><mrow><msqrt><mrow><msup><mi>x</mi><mn>2</mn></msup><mo>+</mo><msup><mi>y</mi><mn>2</mn></msup></mrow></msqrt><mo>=</mo><msub><mi>r</mi><mn>0</mn></msub></mrow><annotation encoding="application/x-tex">\sqrt{x^2+y^2} = r_0</annotation></semantics></math>x2+y2<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="400em" height="1.28em" viewbox="0 0 400000 1296" preserveaspectratio="xMinYMin slice"><path d="M263,681c0.7,0,18,39.7,52,119
c34,79.3,68.167,158.7,102.5,238c34.3,79.3,51.8,119.3,52.5,120
c340,-704.7,510.7,-1060.3,512,-1067
l0 -0
c4.7,-7.3,11,-11,19,-11
H40000v40H1012.3
s-271.3,567,-271.3,567c-38.7,80.7,-84,175,-136,283c-52,108,-89.167,185.3,-111.5,232
c-22.3,46.7,-33.8,70.3,-34.5,71c-4.7,4.7,-12.3,7,-23,7s-12,-1,-12,-1
s-109,-253,-109,-253c-72.7,-168,-109.3,-252,-110,-252c-10.7,8,-22,16.7,-34,26
c-22,17.3,-33.3,26,-34,26s-26,-26,-26,-26s76,-59,76,-59s76,-60,76,-60z
M1001 80h400000v40h-400000z"/></svg>​=r0​
<math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="block"><semantics><mrow><msqrt><mrow><mo stretchy="false">(</mo><mi>x</mi><mo>−</mo><mi>m</mi><msup><mo stretchy="false">)</mo><mn>2</mn></msup><mo>+</mo><msup><mi>y</mi><mn>2</mn></msup></mrow></msqrt><mo>=</mo><msub><mi>r</mi><mn>1</mn></msub></mrow><annotation encoding="application/x-tex">\sqrt{(x-m)^2+y^2} = r_1</annotation></semantics></math>(x−m)2+y2<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="400em" height="1.28em" viewbox="0 0 400000 1296" preserveaspectratio="xMinYMin slice"><path d="M263,681c0.7,0,18,39.7,52,119
c34,79.3,68.167,158.7,102.5,238c34.3,79.3,51.8,119.3,52.5,120
c340,-704.7,510.7,-1060.3,512,-1067
l0 -0
c4.7,-7.3,11,-11,19,-11
H40000v40H1012.3
s-271.3,567,-271.3,567c-38.7,80.7,-84,175,-136,283c-52,108,-89.167,185.3,-111.5,232
c-22.3,46.7,-33.8,70.3,-34.5,71c-4.7,4.7,-12.3,7,-23,7s-12,-1,-12,-1
s-109,-253,-109,-253c-72.7,-168,-109.3,-252,-110,-252c-10.7,8,-22,16.7,-34,26
c-22,17.3,-33.3,26,-34,26s-26,-26,-26,-26s76,-59,76,-59s76,-60,76,-60z
M1001 80h400000v40h-400000z"/></svg>​=r1​
<h2>Is This Actually Going to Happen?</h2>
I ini­tially sat down and did the math out of cu­rios­ity. I was­n’t plan­ning on build­ing any­thing. After re­al­iz­ing the el­e­gant sim­plicty of the math, I falt em­pow­ered to go through with it. I threw to­gether a parts list.
<img src="/images/pen_plotter_parts.png" alt="A visual of all the parts needed for the plotter">
<h3>Materials</h3>
<ul>
<li>Whiteboard</li>
<li>Expo Marker</li>
<li>2 Stepper Motors</li>
<li>3D Printer Timing Belt</li>
<li>Arduino</li>
<li>Adafruit Motor Shield</li>
<li>12V 2A Power Adapter</li>
<li>Duct Tape (as any pro­ject re­quires)</li>
</ul>
I wanted to build this from scratch, with­out us­ing any­one else’s de­signs or soft­ware.
I or­der the ma­te­ri­als off Amazon and soon enough, I had every­thing I needed.
<h2>Putting It All Together</h2>
The ﬁrst step was to sol­der the mo­tor shield onto the Arduino, and wiring up step­per mo­tors. I used my school’s laser cut­ter to make a lit­tle bracket.
<img src="/images/mounted_motors_pen_plotter.jpeg" alt="The stepper motors mounted to a bracket">
I am us­ing weights to bal­ance the belts on the mo­tors. I mounted it to a white­board so I can it­er­ate in soft­ware faster/​eas­ier.
<img src="/images/mounted_bracket_on_whiteboard_pen_plotter.jpeg" alt="Everything taped onto an old whiteboard. It&#x27;s super rough, but that&#x27;s OK">
I ini­tially did­n’t have the tim­ing belt, so I pro­to­typed with an old length of wire. This is the last pic­ture be­fore I wrote all the soft­ware, which I want to talk about be­fore I show you that ver­sion.
<h2>The Software</h2>
There are two, sep­a­rate pro­grams that, to­gether, make the plot­ter work. The ﬁrst is run­ning on the Arduino, ac­cept­ing com­mands over se­r­ial from the sec­ond, which is run­ning on a USB-connected com­puter (my lap­top).
There are three main rea­sons there needs to be a lap­top in the sys­tem:
<ol>
<li>The Arduino does­n’t have enough pro­gram mem­ory</li>
<li>The Arduino can­not eas­ily ac­cept ﬁles (like SVGs)</li>
<li>It takes for­ever for an Arduino pro­gram to com­pile and up­load, which makes it­er­a­tion frus­trat­ing.</li>
</ol>
<h3>Arduino</h3>
The Arduino is run­ning a very sim­ple loop:
<ol>
<li>Receive two 32 bit signed in­te­gers over se­r­ial (one for each mo­tor)</li>
<li>Linear in­ter­po­late the step­per mo­tors to po­si­tions de­scribed by re­ceived in­te­gers</li>
</ol>
That’s it. It’s im­por­tant that the time it takes for each mo­tor to reach it’s des­ti­na­tion is the same.
<h3>Laptop</h3>
The lap­top is do­ing all the math.
I am used my can­vas li­brary <a href="https://github.com/elijah-potter/denim">Denim</a> to do all the vir­tual draw­ing. I just added a ren­derer that:
<ol>
<li>Converts all points to a se­quence of belt-lengths</li>
<li>Converts belt-lengths to se­quence of mo­tor move­ments</li>
</ol>
And sent the re­sult­ing mo­tor move­ments over se­r­ial to the Arduino.
I also wrote a quick lit­tle parser us­ing <a href="https://github.com/Geal/nom">nom</a> to parse and ex­e­cute the math com­mands you can ﬁnd in­side SVG <code>&#x3C;path></code> el­e­ments.
<h2>Final Results</h2>
<img src="/images/pen_plotter_drawing_a.jpeg" alt="The first drawing on the plotter: the letter A">
As you can see, I also made a big, rec­tan­gu­lar box, to hold the marker. It worked al­right, but not great. You also prob­a­bly no­ticed the main lim­i­ta­tion of my de­sign: it can­not lift the marker off the white­board.
I ﬁg­ured the rough­ness was mainly due to un­bal­anced weights and the slant of the white­board. I ad­justed every­thing and tried again.
<h3>Take Two</h3>
<img src="/images/pen_plotter_drawing_a2.jpeg" alt="A slightly improved letter A">
This one is much bet­ter. The lines are crisp, and ex­actly where they are sup­posed to be. At this point I wanted to try some­thing a lit­tle more ad­vanced out. Something a lit­tle more gen­er­a­tive.
<h3>The First Hilbert Curve</h3>
<img src="/images/pen_plotter_drawing_hilbert.jpeg" alt="An attempt at drawing a hilbert curve">
After see­ing the plot­ter draw a Hilbert Curve, I felt proud and a lit­tle dis­ap­pointed. The cor­ners aren’t crisp, the lines aren’t straight. Frankly, it looks like it was drawn by a two-year old.
<h3>Solving the Issue</h3>
<img src="/images/pen_plotter_drawing_hilbert2.jpeg" alt="The final attempt at a Hilbert Curve">
It worked! Now all the lines are pre­cise, crisp, smooth. The biggest is­sue is that the marker it­self ro­tates as it moves. That would­n’t nor­mally be an is­sue, but the marker is chis­eled, so it re­sults in vary­ing lev­els of pres­sure on the white­board.
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
This was a re­ally cool pro­ject. I learned a lot. I am not very ex­pe­ri­enced with ro­bot­ics, so this re­ally chal­lenged me. I in­tend on con­tin­u­ing work­ing on it. I want to add the abil­ity for the pen to lift off the can­vas, and re­ally so­lid­ify the marker holder. Most of all, I look for­ward to tak­ing my pro­jects into the real world.

In which I go through the process of designing, building, and testing a vector graphic pen plotter.

In which I go through the process of de­sign­ing, build­ing, and test­ing a vec­tor graphic pen plot­ter.

I Designed my Own Pen Plotter

<h1>The Easiest Way to Run LLMs Locally</h1>
<img src="/images/llama.webp" alt="A Goofy Lookin&#x27; Llama">
<h2>LLMs</h2>
Unless you’ve been liv­ing un­der a rock for the past year, you al­ready know what LLMs are.
If you do hap­pen to be one of the lucky few un­aware of the cur­rent hype around these things, I’ll go through it real quick.
A large lan­guage model (or LLM) is a sta­tis­ti­cal model ca­pa­ble of “predicting” a sub­se­quent word or let­ter, given a body of text.
Es­sen­tially, it is a com­puter pro­gram ca­pa­ble of ﬁll­ing in the blank.
If you let it pre­dict the next word, then feed the re­sult back in, you can get some pretty hu­man-look­ing text.
<h2>Let’s Be Clear</h2>
I hold a lot of skep­ti­cism on the prac­ti­cal ap­pli­ca­tions of LLMs as a tool.
As a blan­ket rule, I never use LLMs or any sim­i­lar tech­nol­ogy in my ed­u­ca­tion.
I know some peo­ple ask LLMs ques­tions like “explain the fun­da­men­tal the­o­rem of cal­cu­lus to me like I’m ﬁve.”
While they may get good re­sults for ques­tions, I do not want to lean on them as a crutch.
Col­lege is not only an op­por­tu­nity to learn the raw ma­te­r­ial, but also an op­por­tu­nity to learn how to learn.
If we know any­thing about LLMs, it’s that its abil­ity to an­swer com­plex ques­tions break down as you move to more spe­cial­ized classes.
Which is all to say: I did not in­ves­ti­gate this with the in­ten­tion of us­ing it as a tool, I just wanted to play around.
<h2>My Circumstance</h2>
I use <a href="https://archlinux.org/">arch, btw.</a>
While I en­joy the level of con­trol it pro­vides, I don’t think it’s for every­body.
This is partly be­cause some things are quite dif­ﬁ­cult to set up.
For ex­am­ple, GPU sup­port is lim­ited and ﬁnicky, es­pe­cially if you run an Intel Arc card, like I do.
While it works per­fectly for some apps, like <a href="https://www.blender.org/">blender</a>, it does­n’t work so well for other things.
My card only has 3 GB of VRAM, so it would­n’t be able to ﬁt most mod­els any­way.
So when I took on the task of run­ning an LLM on my lo­cal ma­chine, I started at look­ing at CPU-only so­lu­tions.
Initially, I tried to raw-dog <a href="https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp">llama.cpp</a>.
That worked but only so.
The com­mand-line in­ter­face left a lot to be de­sired, and the process of down­load­ing and load­ing var­i­ous mod­els was te­dious and con­fus­ing.
<h2>Ollama</h2>
That’s when I dis­cov­ered <a href="https://ollama.ai/">Ollama</a>.
Installing it was as easy as run­ning:
<pre><code class="hljs language-bash">sudo pacman -S ollama
</code></pre>
To avoid wast­ing re­sources on mul­ti­ple in­stances of each model, Ollama uses a server ar­chi­tec­ture.
You can start the server by run­ning
<pre><code class="hljs language-bash">ollama serve
</code></pre>
Then, you can down­load an start chat­ting with a model with:
<pre><code class="hljs language-bash">ollama run llama2
# Or:
ollama run mistral
</code></pre>
<h2>That’s It</h2>
That’s it!
It re­ally is that sim­ple.
Again, you might have no rea­son to do any of this.
Es­pe­cially if you are happy with the pri­vacy night­mare that is OpenAI, Google or Anthropic, or if you al­ready have a sys­tem that works for you.

It saved me enough time, I had some to share about it.

It saved me enough time, I had some to share about it.

The Easiest Way to Run Llms Locally

harper_for_firefox

<h1>Harper for Firefox</h1>
<img src="/images/harper_chrome_ext.png" alt="The Harper Firefox Extension">
There’s a great deal of over­lap be­tween those who use Harper and those who use Firefox.
Foremost, they both value pri­vacy.
Which is why I’m so thrilled to say that Harper has an of­ﬁ­cial plu­gin for Firefox.
While there has been an un­of­ﬁ­cial one for <a href="./harper_for_firefox_through_spellbolt">a while now</a>, this is the one that fully de­serves the Harper la­bel. It’s ours, through and through.
It’s still early days, so if you run into prob­lems, feel free to open <a href="https://github.com/Automattic/harper/issues/new/choose">an is­sue</a>.
If you’d like to in­stall it, pay us a visit on the <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/private-grammar-checker-harper/">Firefox Add-on Store</a>.

There's a great deal of overlap between those who use Harper and those who use Firefox.

There’s a great deal of over­lap be­tween those who use Harper and those who use Firefox.

Elijah Potter

Harper for Firefox

Other Stuff

The Best 25 Bucks I Ever Spent

I Designed my Own Pen Plotter

The Easiest Way to Run Llms Locally