I was recently recommended a YouTube video by a channel called “水ラーメン” which translates to “water ramen.” The video was of some Japanese guy buying a package of supermarket prawn and rescuing them (since they were still kinda alive). It was a good recommendation, because the video was so strange and interesting that I ended up watching a few more of his videos after that.
I’m not exactly sure why I got this recommendation, but my best guess is that I watched a few videos from some other guy who rescued a supermarket lobster (named Leon).
Since we had our solar panels and backup battery installed like a year ago, I’ve been somewhat obsessed with eking out as much efficiency from the system as possible. This meant that I’d be constantly monitoring the weather (for cloud cover), battery levels, solar panel output (and snow coverage) and the power consumption of the house. While I actually do enjoy paying attention to all of these things, it’s also something that takes up a lot of time and effort. Since I’ve been trying to automate anything and everything that I otherwise do manually, I thought I’d take on the challenge of setting up a solar power manager for my house.
Let me give some context first, though! Ever since I was a Computer Science major back in the early 2000s, I’ve wanted to have an IM bot that I and other people could talk to. I remember using some really simple software that relied on string matching to provide responses, and turned it on for my AOL screenname whenever I was away. This led to some fairly entertaining misunderstandings when my friends thought they were talking to me when they were really talking to my bot. The default fallthrough response was “Sometimes I just don’t understand you!” This is all to say that I have some experience in trolling people with bots.
I’ve been using Google Antigravity as my main AI-powered IDE for the past month or two. But something tells me I’ll probably switch soon, as Google keeps making it less and less useful. In the meantime, though, I’ve added a ton of new features to my blog, and I figured I’d write about some of them.
I saw a note in my daily AI newsletter about a new TTS model that was out. I spent a better part of the day testing out its capabilities and attempting to do some fine tuning on it.
I’ve had a goal for a pretty long time to add audio versions that people can use to listen to each of my blog posts. But rather than narrate them myself, I wanted the audio to be computer generated. Not only that, but I wanted it to sound like I was actually doing the narrating. So far, any of the models that I’ve tried to accomplish this haven’t lived up to the high standards of quality that you’re used to seeing on my blog. So did Qwen3-TTS finally make the grade?
