- My wife and children are staying at her parents’, enjoying the neighbour’s swimming pool, bat-watching and the local carnival. C bought a second-hand guitar which Grandpa is teaching him to play. Meanwhile I’m back home working hard, and on the plus side getting some evening quiet time with the Switch and TV all to myself.
- I loved the first two episodes of Alien Earth. Its dystopian, cyberpunk Earth fits well with the Alien universe. There’s a familiar, slowly building tension with the naïvety of the unknowing humans.
- Mickey 17 was a bit disappointing, however. I enjoyed the novel it was based on (and its sequel) and while the film loosely follows the plot, it missed the mark with its changes.
- The council’s web developers changed their terrible bin collection page again, breaking my little script that scrapes the data and produces a subscribable calendar. Before AI, this task would irritate me. Now I just ask the friendly AI agent to fix it and a few minutes later it’s done.
- Also in AI news, I had a play with ChatGPT Voice for the first time. It’s impressive. In contrast to assistants like Siri or Alexa, I was able to have a fluid conversation. Its tone and speaking style feels so human-like. I’ve added a shortcut to my iPhone lock screen.
- On Sunday I had three over-ripe bananas and an hour to kill, so made some banana bread. I followed this recipe but using dark brown sugar instead of white. Success. Not too dense, not too crumbly. It went down very well with a cup of tea before the football.
- Talking of which, the Premier League is back. Arsenal hung on to a 1-0 lead to beat Manchester United away. In the old days winning away against United generally meant Arsenal won the League. 37 matches to go…
- Ludicrous Display is back for another season of Fantasy Premier League. After winning all my mini-leagues last season, I’m quite relaxed about it, but my eldest is determined to beat me. Standards must be maintained.
