● 08.16.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 17/08/2023: Old Phone Morning Project

Posted in News Roundup at 6:47 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• I have been thinking hard about getting one for a year already, but until now my black corduroy flare pants will have to do instead.

• To be honest, I agree! I’d wear a skirt (but not a dress) in the summer for sure. There are ways for a man to ditch the shorts and wear a skirt, but if you don’t want to make too strong a statement the garment’s cut will have to be different. I have a sulu from Fiji that I like to wear some times, but not often in public. The sulu evolved from the traditional grass skirts that Fijian men wore pre-British colonization, and it doesn’t really look too “””feminine”””. It’s very straight, and it’s more like wrapping a towel around your lower body and securing it with a belt than a ‘normal’ skirt.

• Kilts have been mentioned as well, and while I’m totally all for kilts and have considered getting a few, I think that’s missing the point. The original topic was dresses. As in the totally feminine, not at all masculine all in one piece ensembles associated with Disney princesses. Kilts are not that. I associate the Kilt (with a capital K) with Scotsman carrying two handed swords into battle, or at the very least tossing small telephone poles across a field to prove their masculinity.

• I’m not trans. I’m a pretty masculine guy in appearance. That said, I’ve never been conventional. I have no problem with defying gender stereotypes and totally support anyone else doing the same.

• Greetings, comrades, to another episode of food science: the boring stuff. Herein we explore water, red lentils, and salt. The base is 100g of red lentils, which is about half a cup, good for a portion of a meal, and pretty easy to weigh the salt against: 1% salt is 1 gram of salt, 2% is 2 grams, etc.

• A good friend has informed me that my gopher post “re:…the maxim of Arkham (luxferre)”[1] didn’t quite make sense in several ways. I’ve thought on what he said for a few days, and I’d like to revisit a few points. I’m doing this here rather than in our personal correspondence, because my initial comments were public and I don’t wish for them to be misconstrued by anyone who may have read them; and, because the subject is interesting to me and I’d like to keep it open.

• Got a strange phone call this morning. It was a man claiming to be the father of a friend. I haven’t seen this friend for a couple weeks. The man said that he had been talking to my friend this morning, and that my friend was suicidal. I told him I would check into it, and hung up.

• I texted and left a voicemail for my friend, texted a few of his family members that I know, and even talked to the folks at 988.

Recreation

• i am again consistently completing short runs in the 3 to 5 km range.

• there are two flashes close to where i stay when in marston. quite flat and in nature with link paths to marbury country park and the trent and mersey canal.

• Something is living in my garage.

• I think it’s a rabbit. That’s small comfort: the poop is round, and small. I’m very familiar with what rabbit poop looks like, because the critters are often in my backyard, in my vegetable garden, or hanging around the bushes out front.

• And I say “I think” because they’re smaller and harder than normal, not the bigger pellets I usually see outside. So maybe it’s not? But it’s not the shape you get with a mouse or a vole, either.

Photography

• I have been wondering about a tree/shrub which I had previously classified as a “mystery tree” (see my August 2 2023 post).

• [...]

• Reading in “Alaska Trees and Shrubs” (2nd ed., Viereck et al), it appears to be a “Resin Birch” (betula glandulosa Michx.). I thought paper birch was the only birch found in interior Alaska, but apparently resin birch is quite common throughout most of Alaska. I had little trouble finding more of this plant, once I knew what I was looking for. It tends to be found on moist ground, however, so one must look near ponds or places where water-runoff tends to collect.

Technology and Free Software

• I am now 7 years in my current job (Head of IT in a small company), a job that i really liked for the most time, but in recent months there are creeping ever more thoughts in my mind that it is turning sour. So, i am currently evaluation my options in which way to move on.

• We’ve had a family mobile plan with Verizon for a number of years now. The service wasn’t bad, but the price kept creeping up no matter what we did. It always amazes me how companies these days are so willing to punish their long time customers with higher rates while offering a much better package if you should “switch” from another service. Seems like a really backwards way of doing business to me. Anyway, due to my SO being a first responder we qualified for an AT&T special plan that will prioritize her phone if the lines are crowded. The best part is that it’s a pretty good savings, and not just an introductory rate. We should be able to save money for years to come, so we switched.

• One of the annoying things about the switch is that we were unable to carry our current phones over due to being carrier locked. I’ve always hated this practice. It’s a totally non-subtle way of locking you into your current carrier. Well, FU Verizon, because even after putting four new phones on a payment plan we’re still saving $50 a month. But I hate to see the old hardware, which still has plenty of life left in it, just sitting in a drawer. Her phone, and my daughter’s, were new enough to trade in. That leaves mine and my son’s. I’ll be trying to think of something cool to do with his, but this morning I put mine to use with a nice simple project.

Internet/Gemini

• My recent job have been developing a very fast TTS system for our internal use. I can’t share too many details about it because NDA. But I do want to share some findings while messing with our system. – My boss is ok with me sharing these findings. We are looking to open source it soon anyway. It’s not a breakthrough or anything. Just well engineered and fast – To make our model perform better, our system first converts the input text into the International Phonetic Alphabet. That is then fed into the speech synthesis model. Me with some basic phonetics training thought to myself, IPA is supposed to be universal. Can I, in principle, train a model in English. Then force it to speak Esperanto by feeding it the corresponding IPA? More far fetch, can I make it speak Japanese or Chinese?

• Kinda. But not really.

• The International Phonetic Alphabet is a writing system that allows us to write down the sounds of human languages. It’s not a language itself. It records the sound of the spoken language itself. For example, the sentence “I would just like to interject for a moment” first get converts into `aɪ wʊd dʒˈʌst lˈaɪk tʊ ˌɪntɚdʒˈɛkt fɚɹə mˈoʊmənt`. The IPA letters look weird. But if you squint hard enough, you can almost see how it spells out the pronunciation.

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