Picard S1 was great. But then it was a character driven sci-fi drama that just happened to play in the Star Trek universe, while later seasons were essentially Star Trek. And I don’t like Star Trek (nor Wars for that matter).

Which is why me and people like me don’t care much what our relatives use :D

I think the majority of us also don’t want to play tech support.

Now the question is, has anyone here actually had wasabi?

But here’s the rub: That tangy paste served up at nearly all sushi bars — even the ones in Japan — is almost certainly an impostor. Far more common than the real thing is a convincing fraud, usually made of ordinary white horseradish, dyed green.

Japan doesn’t even produce enough to fulfill their own demand, I’m almost certain all Wasabi I’ve ever had was fake.

Is Reacher S02 out now?

Didn’t even start yet, it’s under my “upcoming” subheading ;)

Love, Death & Robots

Some episodes fall flat, but there are a lot of really cool shorts in that series.

Fringe

Amazing show, watched it twice, once by myself and then later again with my wife.

Currently, we are rewatching Continuum. It’s decent, but not as good as I remember. There are quite some writing issues and logic sometimes goes out the window.

We watched 3 episodes of “The Old Man”, but stopped because it was too much of an action show. We might check out “Blue Eye Samurai” on Netflix, a bunch of people on a Metal Discord were loving it and the trailer seems okay.

Upcoming shows that we plan to watch once their respective seasons are done:

• Invincible, we will wait till the whole season is out, as it’s weirdly split.
• Vigil is returning for Season 2, typical slow British crime drama mystery show, with tons of well-known people because there are only like 50 or so British actors doing these shows ;)
• Fargo, slightly comedic seasonal crime drama anthology, is returning for a 5th season. The last 4 were amazing, so I have high hopes for this one as well.
• Slow Horses, an off beat spy drama about bad spies. Not a comedy, though it has its moments. 3rd seasons of a show that is very much character driven.
• For All Mankind S04, we only recently started watching it. The series feels a bit aimless, but has very strong acting and characters, which carries the often weak writing.
• Reacher S02 is easy watching, funny and over the top action.

Indeed. I haven’t seen him in anything since, love it.

Was supposed to get my shoe inserts today, which I’d then be supposed to use instead of crutches. They didn’t arrive. No deliveries on Saturday, so still crutches until Monday. Yay.

RIP.

One of my favorite videos, The Pogues and The Dubliners on one stage together The Irish Rover

The huge amount of coffee and tea I drink (supplemented on the weekend by cola with alcohol) is why I really love those professional teeth cleanings :D

SELECT emotion FROM feeling WHERE happyness > 10

Got two more Unna’s boot (zinc oxide and calamine gauze bandage) applications and cooling my foot with frozen peas (recommended by the orthopedic doctor). X-Ray showed a small infection in the dorsum of the foot, and I got prescribed shoe inlays, which will be done on the 1st of December. Once I have those, I can finally get rid of the crutches.

My dancing class has to be canceled for obvious reasons, and our teacher said we can just start the advanced course over (we only had 2 of 8 lessons) next year, and if I can make it also come to the last class of the beginner course late December, just to get a bit back into dancing.

No exercise this year, and I’ll have to see how it goes next year. Fun.

Had something like this back in university. “We all did equal work on this project”. Professor: “So the better grade for CWagner and one less for the others because I don’t believe any of you” ;)

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.

Thank :) Just wish it went faster …

Ballroom and Latin American, so Waltz, Vienna Waltz, Foxtrott, Tango, Rumba, Jive, ChaChaCha, Disco Fox. Did that originally for 3 years as a kid in school, but haven’t really since, so when I started over with my wife we started in the beginner course. Back then, I also had a stretch of Boogie Woogie and Rock’n’Roll, but neither of those for long.

Oh, I am. I’m still walking with a crutch, have not been dancing this Sunday, and always wear foot stabilization bandages …

Aww, what a teaser. I was getting excited to check them out, until the last 3 words. Vocals are essentially mandatory for me, even if they are only used as an additional instrument (like in Berio’s Sinfonia from 1969), I still require vocals.

Hah, YW. The one album I bought was Sermon of Flames with I Have Seen The Light, And It Was Repulsive (Industrial/Noise Death Metal), and both Yearning: Promethean Fates Sealed by Fleshvessel (Death Metal Jazz Fusion?) and Determined To Strike by Sarmat (Technical/Math Death Metal) were under consideration

I mostly don’t care about labels. Though there’s some fun stuff at I, Voidhanger who only take really weird extreme metal bands on ;) Alas, mostly too weird for me.

While I do sometimes pick up older music, there are two issues.

a) I like having a chance to see a live performance. Now, with a ton of indie music I like, that chance tends to be low, but it’s still there.
b) If I like a band, I rarely like only one album. So I want more of that band. With old music, that chance is gone (unless the band still exists, or simply has a big backlog).

In general, besides personal recommendations (or very rarely when I’m out, but they mostly just play the same ~100 songs that they’ve played 10 years ago and everyone but me seems happy with that), I mainly stick to metal review sites, not because I’m not open to listening to other things, but because there aren’t many genres (industrial rock & folk rock are probably notable exceptions, if anyone has website recommendations for new releases in that area, I’m open :D) where I’d enjoy a whole album, and I’m not a singles person. The effort of going through hundreds of albums to find one I might like is just not worth it.

edit: Just in case it wasn’t clear, I don’t use streaming services, I only buy albums, usually on bandcamp.