this week is starting off with what i can only assume is a sinus infection, so that’s not ideal. i’m also down two grandparents, which likewise is not ideal
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It’s my birthday tomorrow! A friend just called me: “Someone sent me these weird AI pictures of Jeff Goldblum and for some reason that made me realize that it’s your birthday tomorrow. Happy early birthday!” I think that’s going to be my favorite birthday greeting from now on.
Happy (early?) Birthday!
Thanks!
Online shopping the last 48 hours has been incredibly productive and money-saving! Aside from B&H, I didn’t use any large retailers either. Pretty happy about that.
Bad, the PVVV, a far-right party, won the elections here in Netherlands. I woke up to the news that they won 37 out of 150 seats (2nd largest has 25 seats). Geert Wilders is such a… nationalistic, short-sighted, opportunistic, loud-mouthed, Putin loving… asshole! Sorry, I really need to get this out of my system.
Thankfully they’ll still have to form a coalition with other parties and I really hope they’ll fail. Either that, or they spend a few months in government and show how ridiculously inept they are and let the cabinet fall.Ugh, yours sounds even worse than ours.
We just elected a centre-right party that needed to go into coalition with our most right-wing party, who are libertarians, and our most populist party. They finally formed yesterday and now we have a government that is going to destroy the environment and decimate social services.
I’m just tired, sad, ill, disappointed, and so very alone. That’s all I got this week.
I’m sorry. Just wanted to give you a virtual hug if you’d like one.
Having an okay holiday with my parents and sister. Had a good talk with my sister about some of our shared frustrations with our parents
Today is my birthday.
My mom has small cell lung cancer and is halfway across the US with my older brother. She has been mentally deteriorating for a while and they forgot my birthday. I get it because there is a lot going on with her disease, it’s just hard to see her so broken that she forgot.
My favorite food is artichokes and no store had them in stock, so I’m just gonna have steak and squash instead. Was at least hoping this would be an upside and now it’s not lol
IDK. It’s been an okay day I guess, I feel bad for my mom mostly. Getting older is hard.
Hey birthday buddy, sorry to hear yours is crappy this year. I hope you get to see your mom again soon.
There’s way too many similarities between my dead-end call center job, and my new assistant director gig. It’s all sales, always has been. This job is better, and I’m happier, I place too much of my self value into jobs and money. I’ve been learning kotlin for a few months now, and I’ve created a (buggy) version of pong that runs on my phone! Its only a hundred lines added to the main function, but it (kinda) works and I made it with no tutorial. Ha!
I just told a Catholic coworker that I’m work mentoring that if she ever wants to have weird atheist conversations, I’m here.
In my defense, she reminds me of when I was a weird almost ex-Catholic.
I just worked my last day at a company I have been at for ten years. It’s a weird feeling but it has really gone to shit so it was time. Luckily I have a new job starting soon and things are moving along with paper work and other supplies like laptop, monitors, etc. it’s a hybrid position, Two days in the office, three working from home. Other than that, Thanksgiving at the SOs parents house. They always make amazing food.
Tried to go for a nice relaxing bike ride today but got jumped by someone’s off-leash dog. No injury but came very close to being thrown off the bike. The owner blamed me for not getting off my bike to walk it calmly around his dog even though it was a bike-friendly pathway and was marked as such.
Here’s hoping the rest of the week goes a bit smoother.
off leash dogs are the worst. i’m a huge dog lover, but put your dog on a leash! i don’t care how well trained your dog is, they’re not a robot, so unless it’s a leash-free zone… and even then, they’d better be under voice control.
I have family members that have owned poorly trained dogs, and have been around places with aggressive dogs. Ive also met many people with “oh dont worry he’s friendly” dogs who then are not friendly.
I love dogs, but I always have a respect and caution around dogs I dont know.
As an aside there was one time I was walking around a walking path in a park when around the bend comes a fairly large dog trotting down off leash at a reasonable clip. I was initially agitated that the owner would let their dog off leash especially at the pace this dog was moving and kept waiting for the owner to also cross the bend. They never did and as my eyes focused I began to come to terms with the fact that this was a coyote and we got off the path to let it scoot by and it paid us no mind.
Most dog owners say “hes friendly” Hes friendly with you🤦♂
I agree on out-of-control dogs being a problem, but it goes both ways. Mine wait by the roadside when I tell them to (and we always make a show of it so the oncoming people can see we’re aware of them), and we still get yelled at by a lot of dickwads on bikes even though they have 3/4 of the road to themselves.
And frankly, keeping a dog where it can’t run and play off-leash on a regular basis is animal cruelty.that’s voice control, which is fine (assuming it’s a leash-free zone).
Sort of. Switzerland doesn’t have leash-free zones per se - there are places where a leash is mandatory or recommended, everything else is the owner’s responsibility. The law basically just says “make sure your dog does nothing stupid”.
sounds like leash-free zones to me with voice control! most public places in the states are leash required. those that aren’t require dogs to be under voice control, which it sounds like your dogs are doing a great job of.
here (in the states) letting a dog off leash is really inadvisable because there are too many risks (cars, other unruly dogs, etc.). i’ve never felt like it was animal cruelty since we have plenty of places to run around in safe zones, like a big yard or dog parks. i also train my dogs for agility competition, and none of the dogs i know are allowed off leash unless it’s a fenced in area.
could totally be a cultural thing. in the rural areas in the states, it’s much different. my childhood dogs were rarely on leash because cars weren’t a danger and we had 36 acres for them to run around.
Still walking with a crutch because of my ankle :/ This whole thing started last week Friday, so I feel like it should be healing faster, thinking about visiting my GP to take a look.
But I must say all the OpenAI Drama (check /c/technology if you missed it) is actually amusing me quite a bit, so that’s helping.
Some great personal news, a project that has been in various stages of planning since early 2020, but until recently never advanced much beyond that is finally happening:
Got the last part for my Alexa-Replacement prototype yesterday, the cheap USB speaker. So now I have a PI Zero 2W with a speaker and a microphone array, streaming audio to my Home Assistant setup, which does wake word detection and everything else.
Right now I can turn the lights on/off (built-in feature), and ask for the weather using my own outdoor sensor (requires only templating), but I’m also currently writing code to enable me to do unit conversions from American fantasy units to real units. I only need a few ingredients for volume to weight, hard and soft cheese, flour, and butter, so it’s not too much work, and other units are then just straight conversions.
I already tested that it can stop playing music upon detecting the wake word. After that I need to set up timers which seems a bit clunky by default, so it might require some custom code as well. Right now, I’m using Nabu Casa cloud (the company for the open source project Home Assistant) for STT, TTI, TTS audio processing (as I’m paying them anyway, mostly to support them), but the J4105 CPU HA is running on should be powerful enough to do all that on device to be completely local and internet independent. I’ll then also experiment with doing wakeword detection on the Pi Zero instead of the main server and see if that improves latency.
Once everything is done, I’ll replace the kitchen echo, and start getting the parts to replace the living room and bedroom echo dot (the bedroom one will also need a time display with auto-brightness, that might take some work), and then I’ll finally have local voice control.
The current look is not amazing, but in the kitchen and living room, I can hide everything but the speaker and microphone, and for the bedroom I’ll need a different solution anyway because of the screen.
we’re trailer camping in the west virginia mountains for a couple of nights before heading to my sister’s house. my niece is turning thirteen this week, and i’m excited to hang out with her because she thinks i’m the “cool aunt” which is what i always hoped to be.
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It’s been a long time since I’ve commented on these weekly check ups. I’m so sleepy… But for the first time in over a month, I feel caught up in a good chunk of my schoolwork. Can’t wait for break!
I accomplished a lot this semester but I just can’t process it yet. I’m too much in the thick of things, blinded by stress and exhaustion lol. Overall though, pretty hopeful. Things look bright.
Hope everyone is doing well, and/or things get better soon!
