โ๏ธ Week Notes 046
๐ // Nov 9, 2025 - Nov 15, 2025
Cold rainy November week overall and hard to believe we're already at the halfway point of the month with the holiday just a week and a half away. Unfortunately lots of under the weather people at my house this week with lots of stuffy noses, coughs, and general fatigue. I've faired pretty well so far personally, with occasional stuffiness and unusual bouts of sneezing on a few days.
๐๏ธ Technically our last day at at Steamboat Rock State Park was the beginning of this week so I'll just reiterate what a great anniversary getaway weekend it was with Mary. Very relaxing and scenic, with minimal technology intruding, and lots of quality time together.
โฝ๏ธ Spokane Velocity did it again with another late-game come-from-behind goal in extra time and win on penalties 5-4 against Portland Heart of Pines. Really proud and exciting moment for the team and Spokane soccer community.
๐ฅ My son Nathan had his Marching Band Awards night Wednesday and received the Most Improved Award for the drumline. He worked really hard last spring just to make the drumline for the first time as a senior (he only started learning the drums as a sophomore). He played Bass 5 (the largest bass drum) all season and the drumline even took first place in one of their competitions.
๐ก More refrigerator drama at the end of the week as our refrigerator inexplicably started overheating and the alarm alerted us just before bed. I figured I needed to finally replace the evaporator fan motor, but got the freezer door off and discovered it works just fine. Partially disassembled and cleaned the fridge after that and then it started working normally again. Was sure I was going to have to replace the flap control unit that controls the flow of cold air from the freezer, but glad to be wrong for now.
Watching
๐บ Pluribus ๐๐ Absolutely wild premise and execution for this new Apple TV Sci Fi show from Vince Gilligan of Breaking Bad fame. Three episodes into this tale of humanity becoming a global hive mind and what that means for the 13 people still stuck (safe?) on the outside, and I have no idea where it will go, but I'm fully onboard for the ride.
๐บ Marvel: Zombies ๐ Impressive animation, kind of fun in a very dystopian way, but ultimately not really my thing.
Playing
โ๏ธStarted playing a new Minecraft world with Houston and my three younger daughters. I haven't played in years but had a lot of fun just building stuff and doing cosmetic polishing while they ran around exploring, gathering, and crafting. I think we're probably going to play pretty regularly for a while.
โฝ๏ธ๐ฎ Didn't play any FM, but thought about it a fair amount.
๐งโโ Didn't play any Magic Arena either, Avatar the Last Airbender comes out next week which I'm looking forward to and Houston did the pre-release yesterday and had a good time despite having bad luck. Looks like it's going to be a really good limited set which is music to my ears.
Listening
- ๐ Mainly the usual Spurs and Football Manager related podcasts, but less than usual as we're on international break and I just wasn't into podcast listening too much.
Projects
๐ง We have an old Lenovo IdeaPad laptop that I set up with Windows 10 so the kids could could easily play PC games when we got it as a hand me down a few years ago and it's been driving me crazy ever since. It runs bafflingly slow for having an ssd, inexplicably shuts off wifi (and has no obvious manual switch), and now Windows 10 has been end-of-lifed anyway. So I'm putting Ubuntu-MATE LTS 24.04 on it to see if it's remotely worth keeping at this point.
๐ I discovered you can make custom Voices in Accessibility on Apple Silicon Macs by reading 150 sentences aloud while the utility records them and then letting the utility process them into a Voice file. I heard reports of it taking original M1 class processors several hours, but my work M4 Mac mini was able to complete the process in about an hour. The result clearly sounds like a recognizable but computer generated version of my voice which I found cool and hilarious. The bummer for me is that I can't use it on any of my many Intel Macs.
๐ I've been thinking about doing a short run (6-10 episode seasons) science fictional podcast for a long time that would be a one man show (me, unless I dragged my kids or Mary into it somehow) and one component of it has always been me playing off computer generated voices. So I'm very interested in figuring out ways to use Apple's voices and making new custom ones of my own.