Watched the defensive horror show of the first 10 minutes and then thankfully I had to go move my daughter into her new apartment, and missed the rest of another Spurs loss at home. So disappointing.

Stranger Things S5E3 Chapter Three: The Turnbow Trap 👍👍 Love how this season is taking it up a notch with every episode.

Stranger Things S5E2 Chapter Two: The Vanishing of... 👍👍 Liked this one even more than the first one as things ramp up and we get some new team-ups amongst the characters. Not loving Joyce and Hopper's respective efforts to sideline Will and El this season, even if it's completely well-meaning and solid parental characterization.

The Turkey Trot at Manito Park was really fun and a good first fun run experience for the girls. Family walkers lining up near the front, and taking up the middle of the road, was pretty annoying, though.

Was not expecting to wake up to the news that Michigan handed Gonzaga their worst defeat in Mark Few's tenure, a 61-101 defeat. I saw that the Wolverines had jumped out to an early lead, I just never anticipated GU would completely collapse like a cheap tent after that. Ike finishing with 1 point and 0 rebounds is all you need to know.

Stranger Things S5E1 Chapter One: The Crawl 👍👍 Episode one is back with a bang with all the characters we've come to love over the last decade. Seriously bummed out for Dustin right now though.

Planning to get in our first run in about a week and a half now that everybody is recovered. Want to be sure that we're still prepped to do the local Turkey Trot Thursday morning.

Went for an afternoon walk around campus and it's pretty frigid. Not below freezing or anything, but I'm not acclimated to winter temps yet and the windchill left me pretty frozen.

Intrigued to take another look at Pocket Casts since it's owned by Automattic now and open source. I've been somewhat dissatisfied with Overcast for a while.

I need to quit using cnn.com for headline news. Tons of their stuff is buried behind a paywall and I hate most of their opinion takes anyway.

Kind of surprised by how quiet the office is this morning. Slow start to the day or is everybody just taking the week off?

I was surprised how warm it was this morning when I had to move the Subaru out of our driveway so I could get my car out of the garage, but there was a very chill wind waiting for me at work! I fear that's going to be blowing in the cold weather we're supposed to get this week.

Stunningly bad North London Derby today as Thomas Frank sets up Spurs defensively like they're a League One side playing away in the FA Cup and Arsenal accordingly punishes them 4-1 behind an Eze hat trick (you really can't get any more Spurs than that outcome).

Really enjoying the Avatar the Last Airbender set so far. Avatar Jump-In has been pretty fun and I'm 3-0 so far in my first Premier draft.

It's been long enough since I set up my little home server without working on it that I forgot the password, but luckily I did record it somewhere. So I logged in and ran some updates.

Microsoft just open-sourced Zork I, II, and III. Great news for gaming history preservation.

Also learned that you can burn leaves from trees in the forge so now I want to try that too.

Didn't realize you can make coal by burning logs in a furnace until I watched a Minecraft newbie video this morning. That's the obvious day one method for getting torches and surviving your first night.

I was curious if Mojo, the pythonic systems language geared towards working with modern cpus and gpus has Apple Silicon GPU support yet. Turns out it's in the works but on the bleeding edge of development right now.

Heh, my supervisor was ten years-old when I started at Gonzaga!

Sites that specify a dark mode that is not dark piss me off. But that's the beauty of browser extensions like Noir.

There's a YouTube channel featuring daily drone shot coverage of the construction of Wrexham's long-awaited new Kop Stand, and it's completely fascinating. After preparing the ground for the last several weeks, they've got the piling rig in and have started doing test bores.

Fiddling around with Chatterbox definitely demonstrated how wonky pip and its whole utility ecosystem are. I can see how uv came about and why IndexTTS would prefer it for installation.

The USL League One Final was a real bummer for Spokane. Knoxville jumped out to a 1-0 lead before I even found the game on Paramount+. Spokane played really well the rest of the first half but didn't equalize, then gave up a cheap outside the box penalty (because no VAR) early in the second half and could never get on the board.

Figured out that cropping out the silence on my voice sample made a big difference with accurate Chatterbox TSS audio generation. Still haven't got it working with the Applei Silicon GPU yet, but have a promising alternative GUI project with extensive macOS package installation documentation to try now.

Took me forever to sort out all the pip package dependency nonsense on my mac to get Chatterbox TTS running, but Google Gemini was a ton of help and it's finally working. It's not as fast as expected so I think it's running in CPU mode currently. Still very cool!

The Chatterbox TTS Demo on Hugging Face is impressive, but it doesn't seem to be able to replicate my natural voice very accurately based on the samples I've provided so far. That said, given no context, I think most people would prefer its approximation to my own voice,though, because it's a smooth-sounding voice.

One wild thing that occurred to me about Pluribus is that the hivemind should absolutely have the ability to simulate Carol's dead wife, Helen, with any of its members. They have all of Helen's internal memories, everyone but Carol's external memories and impressions of Helen, and the acting capabilities of the best living actors in the world.

My Personal Voice turned out pretty good. It's recognizably me, but still clearly a computer and kind of hilarious depending on what I write for it. The one bummer is it's an Apple Silicon only feature so I can't use it on most of my macs.

TIL: macOS has the ability create a custom Personal Voice if you have an Apple Silicon mac! i had to try it out of course. You record yourself reading 150 different sentences and then the software transforms it into a voice file of some kind. Very intrigued to see how it turns out.

Figured out how to change the pronunciation of some family names and Minecraft usernames in Speech to Text on macOS. Cougra9, Eawyn, and Skullena are now pronounced like I expect.

Played Minecraft with four of my kids at once for the first time ever. It was pretty awesome. It was impressive to see how fast my son, Houston, could craft stuff and establish our base of operations. I mostly focused on making basic cosmetic stuff and adding stairs and a window to our base.

MLS owners vote to flip schedule to European calendar start in late summer take winter break in Jan/Feb and finish in May. Wonder if the USL mens leagues will follow suit since their Women's Super League led the way with this.

TIL: maple bars are basically a Pacific Northwest thing and donut shops in other parts of the country might call them long johns if they even have them.

Impressive, the second episode of Pluribus addressed my previous complaint and continued to be pretty mind-blowing with the reveals. 800 million+ deaths to complete the takeover is pretty awful, and all the other unjoined humans being okay with the situation doesn't surprise me.

Pluribus is absolutely wild. Just watched the first episode, and I'm completely intrigued to see where this story goes from here. My only complaint after watching episode one is that the group mind didn't deploy in more orderly fashion. The chaos was cinematic, but not in line with how orderly and systematic people that have joined the group mind appear to be.

Cold and foggy morning. Glad I'm working from home in my office today.

Marvel Zombies is pretty good two episodes in. Dystopian with a fair amount of humor and a fun selection of random characters. A fun watch as long as you expect everybody to die by the end, and are okay with that.

Watching the replay of Spurs vs. Man United, even though I know how it turned out. Xavi has played well and I'm pleased with what Brennan Johnson has been doing on offense- some good runs and crosses. Richy continues to disappoint.

Working on updating a few of my older of my older macs to Sequoia 15.7.2. It's pretty annoying how much Apple continues to push Tahoe in the macOS Software Update interface.

Slow start to the day today, but appreciated being able to sleep in a little. Got my 750 words out of the way and have tomorrow scheduled as a day off, as I'll have no technology at hand while I'm on the road. I'll get back to it Sunday.

Packing for our anniversary getaway. Mostly ready to go already, but I do have all morning tomorrow if necessary as I took the day off.

Slow Horses S5E6: Scars 👍👍 Great wrap to the season. Definitely enjoyed this one and some wild backstory reveals about Jackson Lamb. Despite hating every moment of his time in Slough House, I wonder if River eventually appreciates that he's been learning from a master all along.

It's raining pretty hard now. Went for a quick fresh air break and immediately regretted not having a hooded jacket or a hat (which I bring almost every day).

I've been thinking about reclaiming my Minecraft account from my son Nathan for quite a while so I can play with the girls. I just need to buy a cheap license he can associate with his email account.

Tried out FM 26 on a few different Macs last night. A 16GB M1 Mac Mini worked better than my old iMac with a discrete 4GB GPU, but it wasn't as big of a jump
in capabilities as I hoped it would be. Think I'm going to test on my work M4 mini soon just to satisfy my curiosity on what Mac hardware can do.

Testing Sequoia 15.7.2 updates as you do.

At this point it feels like Spotify for Creators is probably the simplest way to host a podcast if I want to make a go of putting one out in the world. I still have a few ideas in this regard.

Two decades ago, I thought Dick Cheney as the VP running the show for W was one of the worst things to ever happen to the executive branch of the United States, and then ten years ago, the Republican party said, "Hold my beer."

Word from Ally Gold is that Djed and Micky came in unprompted this morning and apologized to Thomas Frank for blanking him after the Chelsea game. Glad to hear it, and a stark reminder that cameras will always capture your worst moments when you're under the lights.

Humongous come from behind 4-3 penalties win for Spokane Velocity over Georgia Tormenta tonight. They'll be hosting Portland Heart of Pine in the semis so the ONE Spokane Stadium fun will continue.

Fun night of trick or treating with the kids. Last house on the street we go over to after our neighborhood, said she was Hornet's biggest fan so that was cool for S. We had four impressive costumes from the Hollow Knight games.