Author: Quentin Pain
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Music Modes
If you stick with just the white keys on a piano (C major), you can create pretty much any sound or emotion you want. The reason this works depends on the note you start with, or perhaps just as importantly, the note you return to for each musical phrase you create. Here are all the…
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How to plot a novel using a spreadsheet
I have started, but never finished, a novel many times. This is because I prefer to write as the muse takes me, rather than to any formula or plan. This, of course, is not the way to write a book. At the very least it will cause your editor to develop early stage dementia trying…
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Do photons die?
Here’s a transcript of a chat I had with the Ollama LLM on photons and our perceptions of life. By the end, it gets highly philosophical. But we start with the science. My prompts are highlighted in a quote box in italics, everything else (apart from these opening paragraphs) is produced by Ollama. You can…
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How to Write and Test Code for PHP: Master Standard and Advanced Test Frameworks
Some programmers write code in a random kind of way as they don’t have clear goals in mind for whatever it is they’re writing. This is fine if you’re working on something new and are not sure which direction it’s headed, but for a serious application, writing test classes for every major part of your…
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Getting Started with Laravel 10: Your Quick Guide
[NOTE: Laravel is updated every year, so Laravel 10 came out in 2023 and Laravel 11 in 2024. It’s usually fairly easy to update to the next version of Laravel, so you needn’t worry about the version you start with as long as it is fairly recent – up to 2 versions ago is usually…
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Conversation with an AI on freewill
What started out as a simple discussion on the ancient Greek concepts of nomos vs phusis, that is, human created law vs natural law, turned into something far more interesting, and that is, the question of whether freewill exists. The consequences of there being no freewill has a devastating effect on whether persuasion is even…
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Object Oriented Programming using PHP and Design Patterns: Efficient Techniques Explained
When I first started programming in 1981, the idea of software design patterns had yet to be invented (that happened 6 years later in 1987 by Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham), but it wasn’t until 1994 that the seminal book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software was published. That book changed my, and many…
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The Complete Guide to Building Your Own ChatGPT: Achieve Full Control and Customization
In recent years, chatbots powered by language models like ChatGPT have revolutionized the way businesses and individuals interact with technology. With their impressive ability to understand and respond to human input, these models have become integral in various applications ranging from virtual personal assistants to customer service platforms. For those seeking complete control over their…
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Website Strategies for Content Generation 2023
What is Content Marketing? There are so many myths about content marketing, so I’m going to spell it out in the simplest possible terms right here and now: write the best possible content you can. That’s it. Spend as much of your marketing budget on the best possible content and you will attract the best…
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Facebook Cover Photo, Group Header Image Size And Other FB Graphics
*** UPDATED WITH THE LATEST CHANGES August 2021 – Quentin Pain *** READ FIRST Sometime in early 2021 the group header changed again. You’re welcome to read everything below (to show how tricky this is), and you’re welcome to search the web to find a better answer, but I’ve tried and none are available (there’s…