iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 03/10/2026

Qing 清 era woodblock image of Princess Zhao of Pingyang 平阳昭公主 (d. 623 CE). Helped her father establish the Tang 唐 dynasty (618–907 CE). Like her brothers, Princess Zhao distinguished herself as an independent military commander, coordinating with their family and allies. Buried w/ military honors.

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 02/10/2026

About to wrap up the scifi short story collection 'Dangerous Visions'. I only knew about it because of a book on literary criticism named after (the sequel series to) it. Neither is perfect, but both are worth reading or perusing (some bits more than others).

hardcover copy of 'dangerous visions' by harlan ellison. cover is a holographic green

two books: 'again, dangerous visions' by andrew milner and 'dangerous visions'

1st page of foreword of 'dangerous visions', written by patton oswalt

first page of ch1 from 'again, dangerous visions'

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 29/09/2026

Credit where it's due. This planner inspired me with a public domain poem I put on my website and with a creative project that I can revisit every year. It's a bit pricey but worth it if needed/you can afford it.

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 28/09/2026

If you or a friend has access to a grill, do the thing where you grill them with the chives and garlic and chili peppers (maybe you can add ground pork or beef?). Have a bunch of people over, get them to bring meat and veggies and stuff, make a big deal about the eggplants... and feast :D

Picture of Chinese eggplant dish made by a restaurant.

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 27/09/2026

Some pages from a scratch notebook I copy definitions down in. Am inconsistent about it, but sometimes color code tones (idea borrowed from the Pleco dictionary app which color codes tones). #languagelearning #汉字

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 26/09/2026

To match the theme I threw a public domain painting of Napoleon (only vaguely reminsecent of the generals who supported the Song rise to power) and added a quote from the opening line of Sunzi's Art of War 孙子兵法, oddly poignant for citizens of a republic such as ours.

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 26/09/2026

Pages from a facsimile reprint of first few sections of a (reprinted) Song 宋 (960-1267 CE) era military manual, 'Comprehensive Essentials of the Martial Classics' 武经综要

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 26/09/2026

If calculated using traditional calendar methods, Mid-autumn Festival 中秋节, Chuseok 추석 秋夕 etc. were actually on Thursday, here in the USA. Of course, we traditionally celebrate based off of Beijing time etc., but kinda neat to think about celebrating it as a society in the USA, too.

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 25/09/2026

“Preludes” by Madison Cawein (1865–1914), one of Kentucky’s most famous poets. I digitized this poem and put it on my website as part of a public domain anthology compilation project, the *Bards of the Bluegrass: An Anthology of Classic Kentucky Poets.* coldscholarstudio.org/texts/prelud...

Screenshot of website with a poem, "Preludes" by Madison Cawein.

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 24/09/2026

All this talk about new tech "knowing" things or "teaching" or "learning" reminds me of smart tech from a century ago. Also books, writing, and visual art, but I digress...

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 23/09/2026

Zhāng Liáng 张良 (d. 186 BCE) was a Daoist military advisor to the founder of the Hàn 汉 dynasty (est. 202 BCE, fell 220 CE, with an interregnum in the middle). He was from a noble family of a state that was destroyed during the Qín 秦 unification of China under an imperial system. #history #China

Color painting of Zhang Liang 张良. Palace Museum in Beijing.

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 22/09/2026

Finally went to the local diner. Opened originally by a Greek immigrant family and still run by their descendants. Exploring places like this is an important post-move step. Makes it feel more like home here. 😏

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 21/09/2026

Happy Founders Day! (Sept. 21 is the birthday of Kwame Nkrumah, which is now a national holiday in Ghana. Nkrumah helped lead Ghana to independence from British colonial rule. Although he was an imperfect politician at times, he helped organize and lead an important movement in human history.

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 21/09/2026

Poem by Elizabeth Madox Roberts, excerpted from a public domain poetry anthology I am building.

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 21/09/2026

Random word from vocab review (which I do too seldom and inconsistently)

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 20/09/2026

Excerpt from the afterword of a short story in 'Dangerous Visions', a collection of Sci-Fi stories. Not everything in this collection aged well, but it's still worth reading beyond the historical literary/cultural value. Def appreciate the outspokenness of the authors. #books #literature #scifi

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 19/09/2026

Trying to use social media to develop an online presence is weird. Apologies if I sometimes am a bit acerbic, strange, or somehow annoying. My experiences with Bluesky have been sooo much more positive than with Twitter. Grateful for everyone here for being thoughtful, diverse, inclusive, kind &c.

Machine generated illustration depicting the OP's experiences on Twitter and Bluesky, respectively.

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 19/09/2026

동문선 东文选 Reprint of a volume from a public domain collection of traditional Korean literature (this volume has verse compositions). Made it to study and enjoy (though it's challenging and I need a dictionary and still wouldnt claim to really 'get' it yet 😂)

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 19/09/2026

We absolutely need to teach children about the shortcomings and dangers of reliance on AI. At the same time, we should be wary about demonstrating those shortcomings in a way that will no longer apply in months/years from now. (Misteaching is worse than not teaching imho).

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 18/09/2026

This article, "Do bumble bees play?" is worth a read for anyone with the time and energy. Available for free (just search for the title). #bees #animals #science #consciousness

Screenshot of article "Do bumble bees play?" with abstract and other info.

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 18/09/2026

Excerpted from an article by Ezra Klein in the NYTimes

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 18/09/2026

Experiment: create a decent OCR pipeline that uses free and offline software, particularly LLMs (language learning models). Results: Fairly decent (major uprade from using traditional OCR software by itself), but a single page takes 10-20 minutes each. This can be automated.

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 17/09/2026

I feel like my sloppy translations look more like Google Translate than Qwen's. Not sure how I feel about that.

Machine generated graphic of a Korean literatus riding a small boat on turbulent waters with three oarspersons guiding it. Sky is cloudy and banks are perilous. (Generated from the text of the original rhapsody/poem).

Screenshot of a markdown file in Notepad++ with a line of Sinoxenic Korean poetry in Hanja with two translations, one labeled "Qwen" and the other labelled "Google Translate"

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 17/09/2026

Sometimes I feel like I'm just creating Rube Goldberg devices that require more time and energy than just doing it all the old-fashioned way. I guess it's more about the process than the results, but it's leaving me with a backlog of stuff AI can't do quite so well (at least not cheaply).

Machine generated illustration depicting a machine learning OCR workflow with a person, books, screens, mini-me's (including two robots and a person), cards with writing, &c.

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 17/09/2026

(Bookmarklet code) javascript:(()=>{const a=[...document.querySelectorAll('.mw-parser-output small[style*="--color-destructive--visited"]')];if(!a.length){alert('No commentary found');return}const h=a.some(x=>x.style.display!=='none');a.forEach(x=>x.style.display=h?'none':'')})()

Screenshot of Firefox edit bookmark with the "bookmarklet" described.

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 17/09/2026

Me to bot with a screenshot of Wikisource page of Guoyu 国语 (a pre-imperial Chinese narrative history): Does this website have an option to toggle commentary on/off? Bot: Not directly, but you can run some kind of script thingie to do that. Want me to make it into a bookmarklet? Me: Sure.

Excerpt from Wikisource page with an old Chinese text that contains an in-line commentary between words and sentences, written with a smaller, reddish font.

Excerpt from Wikisource page of old Chinese text with only the original (no commentary).

Snapshot of dialogue between human operator and machine assistant (ChatGPT) discussing how to toggle the commentary on Wikisource pages.

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 17/09/2026

Improvised comfort food (am a lazy, inexperienced chef with limited ingredients)

Closeup of a bowl of noodles in beef broth with pork and green onions. Stainless steel chopsticks, spoon, and bowl

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 16/09/2026

Arguably not as cool as the OCR project, but still helpful. Creating a setup where I connect to a more advanced open-source LLM model using the free-tier Groq cloud service (different from and 7 years older than the similarly named service). Plenty of issues with the translations as-is but cool.

A markdown file with Chinese from a Ming novel paired with machine-rendered English translations.

A screenshot of a powershell terminal with a transcript of API requests (or something like that).

A screenshot of a markdown file with the original Chinese tightly condensed and minimally formatted.

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 16/09/2026

Guess my system still has a few kinks to work out. Most are where everything belongs though. Not bad for a local, low-mid power (I guess?) system.

A screenshot of an .html page created as part of a machine-learning OCR transcription system that uses traditional OCR technology piloted by a locally run LLM (AI) model.

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 16/09/2026

Although crude and wonky, this system works surprisingly well. Local Qwen model runs open-source OCR software page by page and then checks the flagged the results. These then come back to me to correct and create datasheets, whereupon I do some, make a post about it, and then focus on other things.

Screenshot of an html page with crops of pages from the woodblock printed text. Crops contain a character that was flagged by the OCR software and reviewed by the AI assistant. A selection allows the user to choose the best character, input their own, or leave the box undecided.

Cover page of woodblock printed Vietnamese text written in Hán Văn. Red ink with floral borders around a box with vertically set 南國偉人傳 ("Biographies of Great People of the Southern State")

A page from 南國偉人傳 with the biography of 范篤 (Phạm Đốc，1513-1558)

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 15/09/2026

This tech is really amazing. Even if you can read everything easily on this image, being able to transcribe it this easily is pretty darn useful. （集古像赞）（明） Text (it's laudatory verse about the Yellow Emperor aka Yellow Thearch aka Huangdi 黃帝): 黃帝帝生神靈卓冠首出爰制器用爰造律曆天地萬物範圍曲成混沌既分漸登文明

A woodblock engraved portrait of the Yellow Thearch from the Ming era woodblock book "Collected Portraits of Ancients with Laudatory Verse" Ji gu xiang zan 集古像赞. Top contains the name and lines of verse, bottom has image of Chinese emperor figure with a hat, beard, and robes.

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 14/09/2026

That feeling when your AI assistant starts spawning lots of subagents you didn't expect. Even worse (imho) than it getting stuck in a loop. Granted, there are methods/cases where lots of subagents is great.

Illustration: "The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons," a famous 1789 Neoclassical oil painting by French artist Jacques-Louis David.

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 13/09/2026

Finding this feels like walking into the spells and wands store as a muggle. As a muggle, I will probably not be able to actually use any of it.

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 13/09/2026

阿弥陀佛！This book from a Japanese Buddhist organization can be ordered (free, last i checked) 1 per household. They are printed in English and other languages (including bilingual editions). This book (not this copy, an English one) made me a lifelong fan of Buddhism (among other traditions)

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 13/09/2026

Fun fact: Adam Smith (1723-1790) was an advocate for regulating the banking industry. (Wealth of Nations, Book 2, Chapter 2). I'm not familiar with economics but most people who parrot about him seem to be informed by stereotype (a form of delusion).

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 13/09/2026

one of a bunch of experimental private print jobs

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 13/09/2026

Yes, I believe that even if my attempt to use local LLMs sputters out, it will still have been worth the ride for what I learn about the technology and other things besides. Still hopeful that I just need to build the right machinery for this project (which is being pantsed more than plotted.

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西肯居士 (Adam) @coldscholarstudio.org · 13/09/2026

My experience with trying to use local LLM's is kinda like coffee. It's the same stuff whether you make it at home or get it in a cafe. Except at the cafe it's way fancier and they have all these nice things that make the coffee experience way different.