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  • 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.

  • Had a mental breakdown over the weekend. Ended up spending a day on self care, and I think I'm going to start working towards making some changes in my life, cause this isn't working for me.

  • 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!

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • It has not been a bad week. It has been over two weeks with no self-harm thoughts and I can’t express how happy I am about it. Of course, my brain still insists on waking me up in the middle of the night to give me a highlight reel of my past fuckups, but I’m coping.

    I’ve also been learning to accept that one of the most important persons in my life is now gone and that’s it. It’s okay, though, I’ve been doing fine enough without her and the thought of not talking to her ever again doesn’t terrify anymore.

    My deload week at gym has been ok. It’s easy and light, which I’m slowly learning to appreciate. My body feels great when it’s not so fatigued by constantly lifting heavy weights. Keeping tabs on my diet has been paying its dividends as I see my BMI going down week after week. I’m a few pounds away from no longer being considered overweight. Oh yeah, I also managed to do my first pull up!

    All in all, it’s been a positive week. I’m hoping that the horrible events that took place earlier this year are now firmly behind me and won’t come back to haunt me. God, I really fucking hope so. It was hard, folks, it was really fucking hard.

  • I finally got the planned-for-three-straight-weekends-but-always-thwarted strut channel install done on my van today. This means the next project is finally solar, at which point I hit planned baseline for this housing choice. Last day at work was Friday, and I'm taking this week to do van stuff, move out of the warehouse and try to put feelers out for groups aligned with a recent course correction on the career front. Feeling pretty good about my projects and finally admitting to myself in no uncertain terms that I can't do a bullshit job anymore.

  • My weekend started with my car battery dying while I was far from home. It was midnight, freezing cold, and I was in shorts and a tee-shirt. Not fun! Apparently my battery hasn't been replaced since 2017, so that's terrific. Thankfully I was able to get a jump (after waiting two hours for a tow truck), and got home safe. Aside from a new battery, I think I'll probably also invest in a portable jumper in the future. Y'know, just in case.

    In other fun news, I've got a little over a month to finish three essays and study for a huge test that I've already failed once. Beyond that, though, I'm fine.

    • A few years ago this happened in a row to my roommate, myself, and my significant other. I bought one of those portable battery chargers, tested it to make sure it worked, and then kept it in my car for just in case.

      It came in handy once or twice but I was already home so it just was slightly more convenient than cables. I like to think it will be useful and save my bacon one day, but I also have a dread feeling that it will just be dead or no longer functional on the day I finally need it and am away from home.

      • It feels like one of those things that I'll constantly keep ready just in case, only to forget to charge it the one time I actually end up needing it.

  • 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!

  • Brilliant. Gave my wife £50 as she was going to do some shopping with her sister and I said I'd pay for lunch.

    They didn't have lunch but she spent over £50 on wrapping paper and 'gift bags' even though we have loads at home 😒

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