Wrangling the ones and zeros. Dreaming of the mountains.
I used to say that I sell my time for money. But recently it increasingly feels like I sell my life for money.
Go and look at a tree stump. Count the rings. Each of those was a summer of that tree’s life. Trees aren’t made of cellulose, they’re made of time.
And if you’re reading this, so are you.
Herewith some rather startling art produced by a latent diffusion model implemented in a Colab notebook from @multimodalart. In each case the caption is the phrase that I gave the model to use as the seed for generating the image. I have to remind myself that these images didn’t exist until I generated them today.
I started with a few “X in the style of Y” runs:
Then I tried a few more ambiguous phrases:
I particularly like the final one.
I’ve played around with quite a lot of ML-based stuff over the last couple of years, but the relative ease with which I was able to do this has me kind of shaking my head in disbelief. We’re a shockingly long way from MNIST now.
Via The Checkpoint newsletter
Sunset over Rhoscolyn at 6pm on 25th September 2021.
I recently bought an Galaxy Tab S7+ tablet to replace an ancient and failing laptop, and on a hunch that it might stop me from being distracted by my phone. I’m very pleased with it, although I’m still not sure whether its had a positive impact on my tendency to stare at my phone.
But man does it come loaded down with a lot of crap. I don’t need a Samsung contacts app – the google one is perfectly adequate. Same with calendar and photo gallery. And I don’t need text messaging and phone apps. And I certainly don’t need two personal assistant apps (yes, you Bixby). And of course most of them can’t be uninstalled – because someone at Samsung thinks I want their particular form of value add.
So of course I decided to remove them anyway. This post describes the process. But before that:
Warning! Doing what is described here could cause data loss, device instability, and/or could brick your device completely. Don’t copy what I did unless you understand the consequences and accept responsibility. I can’t be held responsible for your choices.
The first thing I did was quickly remove components of Bixby that are integrated into the user interface, using the steps described in this article on Android Central.
It is possible to uninstall “uninstallable” apps using adb – the Android Debug Bridge that is part of the Android platform tools. So the first thing to do is to download and install the tools on a PC or Mac. Make sure the bin directory is in your path. Then enable developer mode on your Android device and connect it to your PC via USB. I’m not going to explain how to do any of this: if you don’t already know then I think it’s fair to say that you really shouldn’t be contemplating any of this.
The command to uninstall an app or package is adb -d shell pm uninstall --user 0 <packagename>
The --user 0 switch runs the command as the device’s root user, which is necessary for some of the apps I uninstalled.
So all that we need to do now is determine the package names for the apps we want to uninstall. There are probably a few ways to do this, but I found that the easiest way was to install an app such as APK Extractor, which lists the installed apps and their package names. I didn’t extract any apks with it, and I uninstalled it later.
Then it’s just a matter of running the above command using the names of the packages that you want to remove. Here’s the ones I removed:
| Package Name | Description |
| com.samsung.android.calendar | Samsung Calendar |
| com.samsung.android.app.routines | Bixby Routines |
| com.samsung.android.visionintelligence | Bixby Vision |
| com.samsung.android.bixby.agent | Bixby Voice |
| com.samsung.android.bixby.service | Bixby Service |
| com.samsung.android.app.notes | Samsung Notes |
| com.samsung.android.app.notes.addons | Samsung Notes |
| com.samsung.android.beaconmanager | SmartThings |
| com.samsung.android.oneconnect | SmartThings |
| com.samsung.android.dialer | Samsung Phone |
| com.samsung.android.messaging | Samsung Messages |
| com.sec.penup | Penup |
| com.fluidtouch.noteshelf2 | Noteshelf |
| com.sec.android.app.popupcalculator | Samsung Calculator |
| com.sec.android.app.myfiles | My Files (1) |
(1) Uninstalling this package makes it possible to install Google Files. I have no idea how that works.
The above is very much a minimum set. There are still bits of Bixby and other packages installed but they don’t seem to intrude on my experience of using the device and it seems a lot cleaner now. As a device I really like it.
Once again: this is what worked for me. Your experience may differ. I hope it is useful.
Inspired by this post on the Ordnance Survey blog, here is my attempt at a Tolkien-style map. I chose Castleton for no reason other than it has a castle and a river.
To create the drawing I used Krita and a Wacom One graphics tablet. I initially tried to hand letter it but the results were poor. The font I ended-up using is Pete Klassen’s beautiful Aniron font, which I downloaded from here. It is described as “free for personal use” and I hope my usage respects this.