Faster DEQ

Faster DEQ

Oregon DMV and DEQ times were horrendous during COVID. They’ve improved but are still not as good as they were before.

There’s 3 ways to make your DMV/DEQ experience experience better:

  1. Schedule an appointment with the DMV for your paperwork. I can attest this is the best way to go if you need anything from the DMV.
  2. Check out the DEQ clean air testing webcams to see how long the lines are in realtime. Saves you from driving over and realizing you’ll never make it through over lunchtime.
  3. Go to a DEQToo station instead. These are alternate locations (car repair shops, gas stations, oil change shops, etc) that can run DEQ tests. You still need your entire DMV registration renewal form with sections 1 (insurance information) and 2 (signature of owner) completed to receive renewal tags.
Fishy credit card fraud

Fishy credit card fraud

A streamer set up his Nintendo switch to take input from his swimming fish. He then started Pokemon and let the stream run while the fish’s motion controlled the action. When the game crashed, the fish kept swimming so the input kept coming – except now it was feeding input into the game console menus.

Eventually the fish entered the Nintendo store and even bought something – exposing the users credit card information to the stream.

Whoops.

Kubrick wasn’t a psychotic perfectionist

Kubrick wasn’t a psychotic perfectionist

Straight from the horses mouth.

Some … more fringe film critics and fans believe that Kubrick was a crazed perfectionist. They suggest entirely every move he made was some calculated, inscrutable act of a god-like master. That never set right with me. I’ve worked with top industry experts before. Yes, he was very detail oriented and went to some extreme lengths to get what he wanted (lighting in Barry Lindon for example). But all of these were with a very clear technical or emotional goal.

One thing these folks usually point to is how he made some actors do dozens and dozens of takes to get exactly the right one. Kubrick says why here as clearly as possible. It was a practical (and very British) way of handling a real problem. Maybe it’s because they didn’t study their lines in the evenings and get plenty of sleep so they were ready.

By putting the actor out there and making them do the scene again and again, it makes them think about the lines. Instead of yelling at them, he made them work the lines out on-stage in take after take in front of everyone until they do what they should have done in preparation.

It’s a subtle but very effective way of telling actors do more work on their lines. Stand there in the hot seat, repeating your scene dozens of times in front of a whole crew staring at you, and perhaps it make the actor want to come better prepared the next time so you don’t need to do 50 takes.

Kubrick worked many times with Jack Nicholson, and the story goes that when Nicholson was doing his famous ‘You can’t handle the truth’ speech for A Few Good Men, he was practicing off set leading up to the take and ended up doing the 3-4 takes almost exactly with just as much intensity each time. He was ready, and could perform on command because he did the work before getting in front of the camera. Maybe he learned that working with Kubrick.

Michael Barnes lunchtime Halloween concert

Michael Barnes lunchtime Halloween concert

The Old Church Concert Hall holds a Lunchtime Concert Series. Every year about this time, Michael Barnes does a Halloween themed organ concert. He’ll be playing this year tomorrow on Wednesday Oct 21st at noon.

Above is a video from his 2022 concert – which often has many of the same tunes:

  • FUNERAL MARCH OF A MARIONETTE CHARLES GOUNOD
  • TOCCATA AND FUGE IN D MINOR J. S. BACH
  • SCHERZO FROM GRAND SONATA IN E FLAT (1866) DUDLEY BUCK, JR
  • KOBOLD (PUCK) FROM LYRIC PIECES AND EDVARD GRIEG
  • MARCH OF THE DWARFS (1899)

He is then joined by Gina Piroli to sing along:

  • HALLOWEEN SONG TRADITIONAL
  • HAVE YOU SEEN THE GHOST OF JOHN? TRADITIONAL
  • MIDNIGHT RENDEVOUS ROBERT T. DAVIS
  • ADDAMS FAMILY THEMESONG (1964) VIC MIZZY
  • RONDO ALLA TURCA WOLFGANG A. MOZART
Arc-Pro driver allows up to 93 percent of system RAM as iGPU memory

Arc-Pro driver allows up to 93 percent of system RAM as iGPU memory

Intel Panther Lake’s new Arc-Pro driver will let you set up to 93% of system ram as iGPU memory. This means if you have 64 GB of RAM – you can theoretically allocate up to 59.5 GB of memory. Since Intel Graphics Software 25.26.1602.2 and driver 32.0.101.6974, the old limit was 57%.

While this is really cool (and something that should have been done a decade ago when integrated graphics was first a thing), the reality is that the memory is the slower system clocked DDR4/DDR5/LPDDR memory with all the corresponding bandwidth and latency limitations. So, do not expect your models to run very fast – but they might actually run for a change.

Claude CLI alternatives

Claude CLI alternatives

Xiaomi’s MiMo AI team has open-sourced MiMo Code, a terminal-native AI coding assistant that the Chinese electronics giant says outperforms Anthropic’s Claude Code on key agentic coding benchmarks. (Article)

MiMo Code is available now on GitHub under an MIT license, and installs with a single terminal command (curl -fsSL https://mimo.xiaomi.com/install | bash) on macOS and Linux or via npm (npm install -g @mimo-ai/cli) on Windows.

While supposedly beating Claude, on the official Terminal-Bench 2.0 leaderboard maintained at tbench.ai, OpenAI’s Codex CLI running GPT-5.5 scores 82.2% — roughly nine points above MiMo Code’s self-reported 73% — and OpenAI’s own GPT-5.5 announcement claims 82.7% on the same benchmark.

Marathon Nun

Marathon Nun

Sr. Stephanie Baliga is famous for running the Chicago Marathon every year to raise funds for her order.

As a teen, she was a division I runner with the University of Illinois, and was one of the fastest in the country. She planned to become a professional athlete until a foot injury her sophomore year led her to discern another path. She joined the Franciscans of the Eucharist in Chicago in 2010 at age 22.

Sr. Stephanie completed her 15th consecutive year running the Chicago Marathon this past Sunday, October 11, raising funds for her order’s Mission of Our Lady of the Angels. She and the 192 runners on her marathon team (with another 30 running the half) brought in $579,589, setting a new record.

All funds go to her order’s mission, supporting its food pantry that feeds 3,000 to 4,000 families each month, as well as other outreach programs the sisters operate in an under-served Chicago neighborhood. She has raised more than $3.2 million since she founded the team in 2011.

This is how you get skynet

This is how you get skynet

An Intel patent application published on August 6, spotted by Patentlyze, describes an orbital data center architecture that moves some of the computing used to operate massive satellite constellations off the ground and into space. The architecture proposes a two-tier satellite network in which a small number of more powerful satellites in higher orbits manage large constellations of relatively simple satellites in low-Earth orbit.

Link

Nogero Trail

Nogero Trail

It’s no secret that Oregon is not doing the best right now. It currently has one of the worst performing school systems in the country (despite decades of plenty of funding they are looking to close up to 14 schools due to funding mismanagement and declining population). Oregon is now near the top in the country in unemployment rates. Add to this the livability problems of some of the highest rates of mental illness, homelessness, a failed legalization policy of drug use that turned parts of downtown into an open air drug dens that has resulted in massive spike in homelessness, deaths, and crime. Oh – and don’t mind the 2nd highest tax rate in the country.

So, maybe it’s time to leave – like a lot of their most important workers are doing.

Enter cracker_barrel_69 who created Nogero Trail – the Oregon trail backwards to Missouri. You load up at an REI garage sale of used equipment, and then maybe get robbed before you even leave town (car breakins are a pandemic in Portland). Perfect.

Hahaha this is amazing. 80% of my stuff got stolen while I was trying to load it up at REI

WE SURVIVED THE NOGERO TRAIL! We bought a big house for a fraction of the price in Missouri. That was fun thank you!