I came across this YouTube video which showed that one can generate images locally even from USB drive (Video at the end)

As I might have mentioned earlier, I have a decent machine. It is an Intel i9 with 32GB of memory. So I thought I might give it a try.

The project claims that it works on Windows, Linux and Mac OS, when I tried this on my Mac machine, I found out that only Apple Silicon is supported. ¹

Spokenly

I came across spokenly via this YouTube video

At first I was reluctant to install it assuming that I will need to create yet another account just to use the app, but that was not the case.

They have two completely free options: First one where Whisper and Parakeet models are used locally. There are other models that can be run locally, but the size of these models keeps growing bigger and bigger.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, I listed my site on bubbles town.

What that meant was my posts could be discovered from bubbles town.

Bubbles Town has the nice feature of upvoting the blogposts that one likes.

Now those upvotes are shown near the top of each blog post on my own website. ¹

If you have a login on Bubbles town, you can upvote the posts you like there.

My kids were using Zorin OS 17 on their very old Pentium laptop with 4GB of memory.

I understand that it is already an older version of Zorin. But it had started to feel very sluggish.

Kids use it mainly for browsing, but opening the browser itself takes really long.

But that is after they already wait - what feels like a long time - to see the login prompt ¹ after powering up the machine.

This is one of those options you don’t know exists till you need it (or sometimes you don’t know even when you need it because you were too afraid to ask lazy to search)

When I started using mac almost a decade ago, I used the built-in screen capture shortcut. It works very well.

Initially I only knew about capturing the entire screen. I would then crop it to the desired area.

Then I learnt that I can select the screen area at the time of capture itself.

Neat!

If I want to add some markup - I would do that separately, after the image is captured.

I grew up reading this Indian comic book named after this character. The comic was originally in Hindi. Eventually, they also made an animated series based on this comic (Also available on YouTube)

Chacha Chaudhary is an intelligent old man. He solves everyday problems with his wit. He also has a sidekick called Sabu (muscular humanoid alien from Jupiter - Don’t ask!)

There was a line oft repeated in the comics :

It is always good to “reduce your bills”. So when I found out, that Codex CLI works with local models ¹ (via Ollama) I immediately tried it. ²

After installing Codex CLI, I was exploring its features, and noticed it has tons of plugins.

I was intrigued to know Google Calendar plugin works with Codex CLI It has things like daily brief which seemed interesting. ³

But my joy was short-lived.

As I followed the steps, it asked me to Install on ChatGPT first.

Yet another main characters from Star Trek Lower Decks

D’Vana Tendi Brad is another Junior officer aboard USS Ceritos. She is Orion - the race which was once considered space pirates. (In the cross over episode, Boimler and Mariner had to convince Capt, Pike that Orions can be scientists too)

This time I tried yet another drawing program called Infinite Painter.

This is closer to Tayasui Sketches (which I loved on macOS - on Android it was misbehaving, and severely restricted) It has all the tools required for sketching/drawing/painting.