AI on The Total Token Vortex

Claude Usage Megathread

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 20:22:28 -0400

Came across this today:

Claude Usage Limits Discussion Megathread Ongoing

Interesting Tidbids
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From “B. CLAUDE CODE CLI WORKAROUNDS”: add this to ~/.claude/settings.json

Claude Token Burn

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 10:24:01 -0400

Where did all my tokens go???

Interesting Reddit post on r/ClaudeAI.

AI Summary
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This Reddit post from the r/ClaudeAI community discusses a widespread frustration: users on paid plans (Pro and Team) are hitting their usage limits “absurdly fast” when using Claude for serious technical work.

Claude Local Replacement

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 22:31:28 -0400

This post is highly work-in-progress; gathering thoughts and ideas for now.

Goal
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build a near-equivalent of Claude using locally served models using Ollama
evaluate how close or far they are from, say, Sonnet 4.6

Mise-en-scène
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Pieces:

Cli Tool for Ollama

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 21:25:59 -0400

Chat tools
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Did a bit of research (Gemini), and suggestions are:

oterm: best all around, for general chat
aichat: power-user choice, good for coding
mods: nice, but more pure CLI tool
elia: similar to oterm, but maybe better? If I can get it running…

oterm
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To install oterm, best to:

Trying Out Gemma4

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 19:03:22 -0400

Set up
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Google post: https://ai.google.dev/gemma/docs/integrations/ollama

Alas, needs latest ollama but that version is not yet out on Omarchy.

Interesting HN post: The Engineer’s Guide to Deep Learning: Understanding the Transformer Model

Tue, 13 Aug 2024 18:20:00 +0000

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40974193

gizmo's freeware

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 02:55:00 +0000

This is an excellent site containing reviews of best freeware in many categories.

Some notable reviews:

Totes 'Doorman/Gentleman' umbrella

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 22:42:00 +0000

I recently broke my favourite umbrella, the Totes classic black “Doorman” or “Gentleman” stick umbrella, and had a hard time finding a place to buy a replacement from.

Monday as first day of week in GNOME

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 02:01:00 +0000

A lot of approaches on the Net specify hacking the locale files; e.g.:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=813945

However, a far simpler and certainly less intrusive procedure is to simply modify default LC_TIME:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/6016/how-to-set-monday-as-the-first-day-of-the-week-in-gnome-calendar-applet

Specifically:

in /etc/default/locale add:
LC_TIME=“en_GB.UTF-8”
log out, then log back in

setting static IP in Ubuntu

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 00:46:00 +0000

By default recent Ubuntus (e.g., 11.10) use Network Manager, which makes things simple:

click network icon in system tray
Edit Connections
select the one entry that you see there (unless your network is not working)
Edit…
IPv4 Settings
From Method drop-down select Manual
the rest should be straight forward

If not using Network Manager to manage network connections, you need to edit /etc/network/interfaces and add (adjust to own network parameters):

cloning a github repo

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 00:41:00 +0000

Steps needed to download my repo from github to a new computer:

install git
generate SSH key
ssh-keygen -t rsa -C “your_email@youremail.com”
add public key to github keys associated with my identity
have ssh-agent forget identies
ssh-add -d
now reread new ones
ssh-add
verify ssh setup is working (see http://help.github.com/ssh-issues/)
ssh -vT git@github.com
clone repo
git clone git://github.com/maciekk/emacs.git

Note that did not have to do a “git init” or “git remote add”.

how to reset Furthest Page Read on Kindle

Sun, 31 Jul 2011 16:28:00 +0000

From http://www.kindleboards.com/index.php/topic,25545.0.html

Solution – Reset the Furthest Page Read
Use the same device for all of the steps below before opening the book on a different one, the below example is using a single Kindle
1. Set the Synchronization off on your Amazon Account (Go to Amazon -> Your Account -> Manage Your Kindle -> Manage Kindle Device Synchronization -> click the “Turn the Synchronization off” button to turn off the synchronization)
2. Wait about a minute, then exit & re-enter your book
3. Go to the beginning of your book on the Kindle
4. Sync to the furthest page. If it tells you that you’re on the furthest location, you’re good to go.
1. If not, select Cancel on the sync message, exit and re-enter the book to attempt the reset again. (I think that the Amazon databases have to get reset-thus the delay; in any case, it always works for me on the 2nd attempt)
5. Turn on the synchronization setting on your Account – your Furthest Page read will be reset to your new location.
6. On your other devices–if further along in the book, you will have to go to the beginning of the book, but once done the Furthest Page Read location will sync with your Kindle.

writing effective Thank You notes

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 20:20:00 +0000

From:
http://www.thank-you-note-samples.com/how-to-write-a-thank.html

Here’s how to get started:

Dear [Name of person]. If “Dear” sounds too formal to you and you know the person well, you can get away with “Hi”, as in “Hi Michelle!”
Thank you for the [description of gift] [name of gift].Example: Thank you for the fuzzy brown scarf.
At least one sentence about the item; something you did with it, a reason you like it, when you plan to use it. Ideally, make the sentence 2 parts, like the example below. This makes the note feel more sincere.Example: It matches many of my clothes and I know I’ll use it on my trip to Iceland.
Tell the giver you appreciate the thought or time they put into it and the occasion for which the gift was given.Example: It was so thoughtful of you to think of me on my birthday.
Mention something about the giver such as family members or something happening in their lives.Example: Best wishes to Tom and the kids. OR Have a great time in Maine next month. I look forward to hearing about it!
Sign off. “Love” is fine for family members and close friends. For others, some choices are “Yours Truly”, “Regards”, or “Warm Regards”.
Sign your name. Don’t make this an autograph scrawl; neaten it up so you they know it’s you.

blocking Flash in Chrome

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 01:06:00 +0000

Interesting post, seen on https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cdngiadmnkhgemkimkhiilgffbjijcie:

You don’t need any 3rd pary extension to block flash anymore. To enable Chrome’s built in Flashblock type ‘about:flags’ into the address bar and hit enter. Scroll down to the botton and enable ‘Click to play’, then restart your browser. Now click the wrench menu > Options > Under the hood > Content setting > Plug-ins and select ‘Click to play’ from the right hand side. You can use the Exception button to whitelist specific domains.

setting up googlecl in Windows

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 01:19:00 +0000

Some instructions here:
http://publicint.blogspot.com/2010/06/setup-googlecl-on-winxp.html

However, it seems newest versions of the googlecl tool come pre-built. The only issue was I was missing MSVCRT71.dll file. This can be obtained for Windows 7 here:
http://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/fix-msvcp71-dll-and-msvcr71-dll-missing-error-in-windows-7/

BenQ W9000 service menu / overscan

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 04:21:00 +0000

I found that on my BenQ W9000 projector, when feeding it 1280x720 signal from my computer (for when my gfx card cannot handle the full 1900x1080 at reasonable framerates), and using the Anamorphic mode to scale image to full display area, a fair bit of the image was being cropped. Turns out this has to do with “overscan” setting, which alas is not accessible from regular projector menu. However, it is modifiable if one enters a secret “service menu”. For this projector, to enter the service menu press:

using multiple routers at home

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 14:53:00 +0000

http://forums.linksysbycisco.com/linksys/board/message?board.id=Access_Points&thread.id=11089 The above forum thread discusses how to setup multiple routers at home. In particular, the thread is by someone in a similar situation to my own, where the cable modem comes with a wireless router already, which are setup in the basement, and wants to add a second router on second floor of house for better connectivity. The solution:

fountain pens

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 14:00:00 +0000

Went on a “fountain pen bender” this past weekend. Found tons of interesting things. Here is a bag of them:

http://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=8175 : index of pen reviews
http://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=39354 : index of ink reviews
http://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=58316 : fade test of inks
http://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=11808 : Fountain Pen Network FAQ
http://www.richardspens.com/ : Richard Binder’s fountain pen site
http://www.richardspens.com/?page=ref/anatomy-vac.htm : Anatomy of a Vac.

Lamy Safari pics:

interesting vid: open-mindedness

Wed, 20 May 2009 01:10:00 +0000

http://www.dailymotion.com/user/totocacapouet/video/x8uei4_openmindedness_tech

Vista wifi troubles

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 02:51:00 +0000

go to start menu and type cmd in the search bar and open cmd with administrator rights 1.type netsh winsock reset and hit enter….nevermind if it sais something about an error 2.type netsh int ip reset and hit enter…. 3. restart you computer…and the error should be gone and the internet working what you just did was a TCP/IP stack repair

research notes from DSLR hunt

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 15:53:00 +0000

Camera reviews at dpreview.com:

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/nikond80/
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/nikond90/
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canoneos450d/ (Canon EOS Rebel XSi)

Lens reviews:

http://www.the-digital-picture.com/Reviews/Canon-EF-S-17-85mm-f-4-5.6-IS-USM-Lens-Review.aspx
http://www.photozone.de/canon-eos/181-canon-ef-s-18-55mm-f35-56-is-test-report--review
http://www.slrgear.com/reviews/showproduct.php/product/355/cat/all (Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 Di II …)
http://www.slrgear.com/reviews/showproduct.php/product/349/cat/31 (Sigma 17-70mm f/2.8-4.5 DC Macro)
http://www.slrgear.com/reviews/showproduct.php/product/136/cat/11 (Canon EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM)
http://www.the-digital-picture.com/Reviews/Tamron-17-50mm-f-2.8-XR-Di-II-Lens-Review.aspx (Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8)

Shopping links:

inline images in Gmail

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 18:30:00 +0000

Officially inserting inline images in Gmail is not possible. However, there is a workaround:

Open Google Docs in a new window, open a Word Doc. Insert the picture you want from your computer. This converts it into rich text format. Now you can click on the picture in Google Docs, Copy it, then paste it into your gmail compose screen.

info for Honda Civics

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 01:44:00 +0000

Interesting forums http://www.8thcivic.com/forums/

and in particular

http://www.8thcivic.com/forums/civic-coupe-sedan/ Also, brochures for my Civic ‘08 can be obtained from: http://www.hondaalberta.ca/models/6-2008_civic_sedan_brochure.html

(Windows) file managers

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 14:36:00 +0000

Comparisons

File Managers

Total Commander

Windows STOP messages

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 21:28:00 +0000

I just had Windows reboot out of the blue (no BSOD, just as if I pressed RESET). Looking at the system event log it seems Windows ran into trouble: Event Type: Information Event Source: Save Dump Event Category: None Event ID: 1001 Date: 12/11/2007 Time: 3:19:32 PM User: N/A Computer: SKYNET Description: The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x100000d1 (0x00000000, 0x00000002, 0x00000001, 0xba940dc2). A dump was saved in: C:\WINDOWS\Minidump\Mini111207-01.dmp. For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp. A useful website detailing the STOP codes: http://aumha.org/a/stop.htm Also of interest is the KB article on dealing with the minidumps: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315263

Java links

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 18:07:00 +0000

Java 6

OpenGL in Java

the water charlatans

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 15:49:00 +0000

This post is a cautionary tale, and a snapshot of all the relevant information I gathered in the process. It so happened that one day I get a phone call from a company “that deals with water quality”, and they claim that Cathy has done a survey with them, and has won some prize worth over $xxx (as a “thank you”). They wanted to know whether they can swing by sometime, drop it off, and do a free water test for us. As Cathy wasn’t home, I couldn’t check with her whether this was legitimate, so I said, what the hey, come on over. I was interested in the water test because I was wondering earlier whether we were suffering from excessive hardness of water here, but that’s another story. 6:30pm, the representative shows up. Sets up in the kitchen a row of plastic drinking cups, as if preparing for an elaborate shell game. Each cup is made to hold water from various sources (distilled, tap, Brita filtered, and various bottled waters in our house). He pulls out an upright binder with what seems like “informational material”. Oh oh, red flags start going off in my head! First test is using a TDS (Total Dissolved Solids) meter. Distilled water obviously gets a very low reading. Tap water is higher. The readings for bottled water shoot up to 265. The “gentleman” claims that this reflects the amount of junk and pollutants in the water. In actuality, this is totally misleading. See here for a full skinny on TDS measurement. It’s a bit of a misnomer, all it really does is detect charged ions in water, most of which are from the (benign, or even beneficial) hard water salts dissolved in the water (Calcium, etc.) The 265 p.p.m. figure for the bottled water was meant to impress and frighten us, but inspecting the label for the bottled waters in fact explicitly states that the expected mineral content in the waters is about 290 p.p.m., so if anything, the TDS reading for these waters was in fact a tad low. I had a pretty strong sinking feeling at this point, that we’ve been conned into a sales pitch. The final touch was when the guy pulled out a precipitator test device for next round of testing. I’ve heard of these being used for scaremongering, and a quick check on the Net (I excused myself to grab my tea from upstairs) revealed to be the case, and also turned up this interesting tidbit (government forbade this particular company to do chlorine testing without getting certified; I presume they were scaring residents with yet more deceptive tests). Anyhow, in short, the company was Glacier Water Treatment Systems of Newmarket, Ontario. They sell water distillers for homes. Links explaining the bogus nature of the precipitator test:

modifying the 'look-in' buttons in standard file dialog

Fri, 24 Aug 2007 03:34:00 +0000

Standard file dialogs under Windows (2000 and higher?) have a set of five big buttons down the left side which you can click to be directly taken to the corresponding directories. It’s called the “Places bar”, and the buttons might be called “look-in” buttons. I went in search of how to modify them, as the default set was uterly useless to me. Here are interesting things I found:

notes: Martin's sugs/research on startups

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 20:38:00 +0000

useful: CS course “Business of Software”: CSC2527F M6-8, M8
useful: http://paulgraham.com/
good read: Hackers and Painters, by same
good read (slides): The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson

hard water woes

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 18:17:00 +0000

I’ve been having issues from the start with my shaving brush quickly becoming hydro-phobic after one or two shaves. I suspect one of the main culprits is hard water, although apparently Markham/Toronto has decent water. Here is a site that gives the water hardness of various towns around the GTA: http://www.justwater.ca/town.html Also of interest is a forum post about “Calgon”, and water softener agents in general: http://www.mothering.com/discussions/showthread.php?t=68131 Here is the particularly interesting bit of the thread:

Sacha Chua

Sat, 28 Jul 2007 19:23:00 +0000

I didn’t realize that Sacha Chua has come to UofT, and is currently on the verge of completing her Master’s! Her blog is here: http://sachachua.com/notebook/wiki/today.php It’s been a while. Last time I exchanged emails with her is when she maintained the Emacs planner mode, which I used at the time.

Interesting links on starting a company

Sun, 10 Jul 2005 05:59:00 +0000

How to Make a Million Dollars* important books on topic from above talk* Web Knowledge Equals Wealth

YubNub

Fri, 08 Jul 2005 03:19:00 +0000

A (social) command line for the Web: YubNub.org Additional related and interesting links:

most used commands* installation* description

current issues with Thunderbird

Thu, 07 Jul 2005 00:52:00 +0000

no support for “delete attachment” from email; I tried Attachment Tools extension as a workaround and it nearly destroyed my inbox! I think this functionality is coming in the next release of Thunderbird though…
the “getting stuck” problem on moving an email with attachments to “Sent” folder; seems to occur whether using an IMAP or local folder for this!!!

BlitzGrok: bookmark consolidator

Mon, 04 Jul 2005 17:00:00 +0000

UPDATE: screw it, just use del.icio.us… much better concept!

bookmark bridge only Explorer and Mozilla-based bookmarks? no, in recent version I saw mention of Opera & KDE… NOTE: one could also use Firefox first to import Opera & Konqy bookmarks…* bk_edit no longer developped/maintained* online-bookmarks needs web server, MySQL, PHP* tengis* goem* bmsync* bookmarksync

'getmail' mail fetching program

Sat, 02 Jul 2005 03:16:00 +0000

I should check out “getmail” and try using that instead of “fetchmail”. See: link link

BlitzGrok: produce

Thu, 30 Jun 2005 05:36:00 +0000

FRESH FRUIT extract from: link Now that fresh fruit season is here, you may need some tips for buying and storing fruit to maximize it’s ripe, flavorful period. Keep in mind that “ripeness” is not a unitary standard, in other words it means different things to different types of fruit:

AI on The Total Token Vortex

Claude Usage Megathread

Interesting Tidbids #

Claude Token Burn

AI Summary #

Claude Local Replacement

Goal #

Mise-en-scène #

Cli Tool for Ollama

Chat tools #

oterm #

Trying Out Gemma4

Set up #

Interesting HN post: The Engineer’s Guide to Deep Learning: Understanding the Transformer Model

gizmo's freeware

Totes 'Doorman/Gentleman' umbrella

Monday as first day of week in GNOME

setting static IP in Ubuntu

cloning a github repo

how to reset Furthest Page Read on Kindle

writing effective Thank You notes

blocking Flash in Chrome

setting up googlecl in Windows

BenQ W9000 service menu / overscan

using multiple routers at home

fountain pens

interesting vid: open-mindedness

Vista wifi troubles

research notes from DSLR hunt

inline images in Gmail

info for Honda Civics

(Windows) file managers

Windows STOP messages

Java links

the water charlatans

modifying the 'look-in' buttons in standard file dialog

notes: Martin's sugs/research on startups

hard water woes

Sacha Chua

Interesting links on starting a company

YubNub

current issues with Thunderbird

BlitzGrok: bookmark consolidator

'getmail' mail fetching program

BlitzGrok: produce

Interesting Tidbids
#

AI Summary
#

Goal
#

Mise-en-scène
#

Chat tools
#

oterm
#

Set up
#