Peter Beens
Political parties in Canada are collecting extensive personal data with minimal oversight, raising concerns about transparency and fairness in the democratic process. These parties are not subject to federal privacy laws, and they use this data to create detailed voter profiles, influence political choices, and sometimes discourage voting.
Continue reading “Canada’s Political Parties and Voter Data: A Loophole in Privacy Laws”
The Ontario Parks blog post discusses the importance of ethical wildlife photography, highlighting seven common issues photographers should avoid, such as baiting wildlife, trampling off-trail, damaging habitats, introducing non-native species, unsafe roadside manners, following wildlife too closely, and using recordings to attract animals. It emphasizes respect for nature and the need to minimize impact while capturing the beauty of wildlife and landscapes, encouraging photographers to practice responsible behavior to protect the environment and its inhabitants.
Read more here.
I love ChatGPT. I pretty much use it all the time now instead of Google. So when I turned to it to ask the simple question “When does spring arrive?”, I was met with this overly complex response:
Continue reading “What does Spring Arrive? (According to ChatGPT)”
I’ve created a new Custom GPT that will reduce text to just the keywords. The GPT is named Find Keywords and can be found at https://chat.openai.com/g/g-mL985wIE7-find-keywords.
Note that it requires a subscription to ChatGPT Plus. Unfortunately, OpenAI does not offer trial subscriptions, and subscriptions cost $20 USD per month. Personally, I find the subscription well worth it for both personal programming projects and for personal productivity.
Continue reading “New Custom GPT: Find Keywords – A Powerful Tool for Content Analysis”
My Pixel 7 Pro phone decided to stop charging wirelessly. I think I’ve exhausted any logical troubleshooting ideas I have so decided to turn the problem over to some AI chatbots before I bring the phone back to Telus while it’s still under warranty.
Following is a comparison of the different AI chatbots I used. As part of my troubleshooting prompt, it was important that the solution cite any sources that is uses. My prompt was….
Continue reading “Using AI Chatbots to Solve my Pixel 7 Pro Charging Problem”
I’m not sure what the original source is of fable this, but in light of the political bickering that seems to be pervasive nowadays, I thought it was worth sharing here. Thanks to my friend Doug for making me aware of it on Facebook, and thanks of course to the original author.!
The donkey told the tiger, “The grass is blue.”
The tiger replied, “No, the grass is green .”
The discussion became heated, and the two decided to submit the issue to arbitration, so they approached the lion.
Continue reading “The Donkey and the Tiger”
I was sad to hear of Myles Goodwyn‘s death. Myles was the lead singer of April Wine, a Canadian band that had quite an influence on my musical tastes.
Want to your open WordPress links in a new tab as the default? “External Links in New Window / New Tab” is your solution.
Google has a speed test webpage. (I’ve added it to my Google A-Z page.)
Continue reading “Ten Things I Learned – December 5, 2023 Update”
Need a quick program to encrypt or decrypt small amounts of text, such as passwords? Here’s a quick utility I wrote in Python using Google Colab, Google’s implementation of Jupyter Notebooks. You can run the program there or copy it to your own Google Drive first. Note that you’ll need a Google account to access it.
I personally use this utility to encrypt sensitive information in Google Keep, as shown in the screenshot below. I save the URL of the utility with the encrypted text so I can decrypt it quickly.
(For longer notes, I’d honestly recommend a proper password manager that can encrypt notes. I use the Premium version of Bitwarden, which I highly recommend.)
The instructions in the program should be adequate to run it on your own.
Bookmark it in your browser for quick access! (Ctrl-D on your PC or Command-D on your Mac)
I’ve seen all sorts of test cases for ChatGPT, with some responses being good and some bad. Just for the heck of it, I thought I would ask it for some serious financial advice:
With $xx in an RRSP and a current pension of $yy per month, when is the best time to take CPP? I am zz years old.
The answer was amazingly insightful, and pretty much matched up with my own thoughts.
If you’re in a similar situation, why not give ChatGPT a shot and see what it recommends. Remember though that it’s free advice, and shouldn’t be acted upon without a good knowledge of your financial situation and perhaps corroborating advice from your personal banker.
Your thoughts? Would you trust this advice?
ChatGPT is an artificial-intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched in November 2022. It is built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3 family of large language models and has been fine-tuned using both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques.
ChatGPT is available at https://chat.openai.com.
I received an email this morning from Koingo Software, a company I first purchased from in 2008. They’ve now branched out into selling software deals, many of which are quite good.
The deal that I want to share today is Microsoft Office Professional 2021, for both Mac and Windows. These are not subscriptions, they are a one-time purchase of $49.99.
The regular price is $349, so this is a great deal.
You can purchase the Windows version here and the Mac version here.
I’m not sure how long this deal lasts so you may want to act fast.
