Cute Programmer is a Chinese romance/drama running 30 45-minute episodes.

Lu Li (Zhu Xudan) is a Computer Science major just graduated from university and desperate to work at a video game company owned and run by her crush Jiang Yi Cheng (Zing Zhaolin). But they never hire female programmers so with the help of her best friend Gu Xiaoqi (Guan Xin) she interviews disguised as a man and manages to get hired.

The first third of the series is Lu Li being a male computer programmer who just wants to be near Yi Cheng. Lots of comedic situations including using the wrong rest room, a team bonding trip to a hot spring (with separate male and female bathing areas), and Yi Cheng being strangely attracted to another man.

Eventually her secret comes out and we go into phase 2 where Yi Cheng's parents think he's finally found a girl he likes so they force them to get married. Yi Cheng makes it a secret marriage and she moves in with him and stays in a separate room. Enter a complication: Yi Cheng's first love Li Man (Joy Sheng) who also betrayed his company three years ago. Li Man wants to reconcile with Yi Cheng but he in return doesn't care and is even forced to reveal he's married to Li Man.

But because Yi Cheng and Li Man keep hanging out together and because she deviously puts doubts in Lu Li's mind, eventually Lu Li decides that her one-sided love and dedication to Yi Cheng will get her nowhere so she asks for a divorce and moves to another city (and she's pregnant with Yi Cheng's child but doesn't tell him).

In phase 3 Lu Li gets a job as network admin (making it hard for Yi Cheng to find her as he expects her to go into game programming like her old job). Lu Li is pursued by the owner Lu Zhengguo (Wang Weihua) who turns out was a classmate of Yi Cheng and their companies have a partnership for a movie so they eventually find each other again at a business dinner. Now Yi Cheng tries to win Lu Li back, who is hesitant because she wants to make sure he's not in love from regret, pity, or make up for being a bad husband.

Eventually he does win her back and they have a VR wedding. There are three other couples that form from various subplots. The End.

The first third is really good and the second third is fine. The last third is a bit weak because Yi Cheng pursing Lu Li does not come off as romantic. The other romantic subplots were kind of uninteresting. I feel let down by the last third of the series. Overall below average but the first third is quite good.

I have a month of Amazon Prime and have spent three weeks watching videos using the Amazon Prime Video App. Much like the Netflix app you can browse or search for videos and play them, although APV also shows you videos on other services or that are on Amazon Video for rent and I do find that annoying -- just show me the stuff I can play without spending more money.

In comparison APV is quite worse than Netflix. On my old iPad the UI is fairly laggy with perceptible fractional second delay as you use the UI, including when using video playback commands. My iPhone SE is newer and works fine so it's just that APV is not designed for older iPads, unlike Netflix which runs great on my iPad.

On the plus side, when I watched The Expanse (produced by Amazon for seasons 4 to 6) and paused it showed me a list of actors and their roles in the scene. Unfortunately when I watched some Asian shows that info wasn't there. Similarly when you view The Expanse episode list there is a little blurb for each but for Asian shows it's the same blurb over and over, which is the show description blurb. And that show description reads like a transliteration -- it doesn't read natural.

APV is rather aggressive stopping a show when you go out of the app and back in after a minute, so then you have to find the episode and restart viewing. Netflix I can go to another app for a few minutes and when I come back the video is still paused and I can continue (though maybe that means I'm holding one of the two viewing instances for the account).

APV has commercials. A pre-roll and one or two mid-rolls during a tv show. It's the usual television-style ads where the volume is at max no matter what you were watching. It also jarringly comes one without a fadeout/fadein -- I think it algorithmically tries to find the end of a scene and puts the mid-roll there. Sometimes a character finishes their sentence and commercial immediately starts.

As for content I'm not sure. The Expanse is great but it was a Sci-Fi channel show and it was good then also. I watched a Korean romance drama and a Chinese romance drama and they were fine though not as good as the ones on Netflix (but APV might have recommended less stellar fare to me). Both Asian dramas had good translations on par with Netflix. Still, the Asian dramas selection seems quite smaller than Netflix and I'm really into Asian romantic dramas right now.

In the end I wouldn't subscribe to Amazon Prime Video over other services. If you get it effectively free because you have Amazon Prime for the other benefits then it's worth it. But for me it's a pass.

What I Watched

The Expanse (2015) (62 episodes)
Good Omens #1.1 (2019)
Cute Programmer (2021) (30 episodes)
My Roommate Is a Gumiho (2021) (16 episodes)
Fallout #1.1 (2024)
My Undead Yokai Girlfriend (2024) (8 episodes)

Fallout #1.1 (2024) [/] The story follows three people (separated in episode 1) two hundred years after nuclear war devastated Earth: Lucy (Ella Purnell), a Vault Dweller stepping out for the first time in order to find her dad, kidnapped by raiders; Maximus (Aaron Moten), a squire of the Brotherhood of Steel, and perhaps not militant enough for the job; and Cooper (Walton Goggins), an undead Ghoul who remembers life before the bombs fell. Turns out the retro post-apocalyptic Fallout world is nice to play in but not interesting to me as a television show.

My Undead Yokai Girlfriend s1 (2024) [/] Japanese romance-horror-comedy with eight half-hour episodes. Teenager Tadashi (Hayato Sano) uses a magic ritual to summon a girlfriend, Izzy (Ai Yoshikawa) who is actually a Yokai (demon) determined to behead the Five Spears and free her people from imprisonment. But in order to stay on Earth Izzy binds herself to Tadashi, then has to pretend to be his girlfriend and starts to develop feelings for him. But the show is more focused on Tadashi who is a bit more vacillating than I'd like in a character. Special effects are ok and although s1 is standalone there is a setup for a possible s2.

Solitaire Stories (2021) [/] A second solitaire game on Apple Arcade but unlike MobilityWare's basic functions this one puts more effort into it. There are lots of deck themes and each one has a story mode (with voice narration) so you can play with slowly increasing difficulty. For non-story mode quick play you can set difficulty and whether it's always solvable or not. Three game modes: Klondike, Spider, Tri Peaks. For a solitaire game this one is somewhat interesting.

Ajinomoto Chicken Gyoza Dumplings [+] Easy to prepare in medium heat and no oil needed as the dumplings have a special batter. Cooks in about 15 minutes and the bottom is a bit crispy. Pretty pasty by themselves (or maybe there is more salt than is healthy cause they do have a nice salty taste).

Trader Joe's Watermelon Cucumber Cooler [/] $3.50 for a half-gallon. Made from concentrate. Tastes fine with watermelon and maybe a hint of cucumber. If I water it down still tastes ok though it's not that sugary in the first place.

My Roommate Is a Gumiho iuniversitys a Korean romance drama running 16 episodes. Through happenstance university student Lee Dam (Lee Hye-ri) is entangled with Shin Woo-yeo (Jang Ki-yong), a millennial-old Gumiho (nine-tailed fox) who has spent 999 years trying to become human. Dam accidentally swalloed Woo-yeo's marble, which is used to absorb human energy. She moves in with Woo-yeo so that he can keep the marble safe. Also he eventually mentions that if he can't remove the marble she will die in a year.

It's a usual formula: two people forced to live together, one person is reserved and the other is more emotional, they slowly start to be attracted to each other. There is an inevitable romantic rival -- Gey Sun-woo (Bae In-hyuk), university playboy who finds Dam intriguing after she flatly turns him down. Dam's friends who don't know she's dating which is more complicated once Woo-yeo's takes a teaching position at the university.

My favorite part is Woo-yeo's friend Yang Hye-sun (Kang Han-na, who played the lead's sister/rival in Start-Up), formerly a 700-year old Gumiho who became human five years ago. She is portrayed as less intelligent, often getting words wrong and misunderstanding idioms, though I think that's more unfamiliarity with current culture. I like her developing romance with Dam's friend Do Jae-jin (Kim Do-wan) since she's model beautiful and he's rather dorky.

Overall it's a watchable series but not one of the best ones.

MacWhisper is a transcription app that can run standalone or in the cloud and it uses OpenAI's tech. I bought the Pro version (39 Euros) -- the free version you can only use a smaller language set (which still worked great when I tried it).

Set your default settings: Language (auto or specific language), Model (small, 500 MB; medium, 1.5 GB, large, 3.0 GB). Drag an audio or video file onto app window and it starts translating, eventually giving you an estimated time to completion. Since I bought it I use medium (free only has small) which translates at best x0.8 speed (i.e. a 4 hour file takes 5 hours) but it's more like x0.5 speed or slower if I'm doing light stuff on my MBP (last Intel version). AI translation is really designed to use an M1 or better CPU as they have dedicated neural engines. (Small model is about twice as fast so if you want speed use that in which case you don't really need the pay version.)

Once it's done you can export a raw text or a segmented text (with timestamps) or a MacWhisper file which I guess makes it easier to just load it and re-export without another transcription phase. There's also a capability of assigning speaker names, though I haven't tried it.

There's a batch mode though you have to set how it saves all transcription outputs (i.e. I can run a batch and have all transcriptions saved as raw text). One thing it lacks is ability to pause which I'd find convenient since when it's running it's at 850% CPU (Handbrake uses 1200% CPU though that does have a pause function).

I use this to transcript Twitch VODs. Accuracy is pretty good. It can detect music and put [music] or even [high energy music] and it seems pretty good about filtering out background music. It can detect languages and put [Polish speech] and I assume would translate it language is set to Polish.

The app i think is a one-person developer and it's in active development with multiple updates per month. I think without an M1 or better Mac it's too slow to be useful unless you're patient.

I also tried Aiko which also uses OpenAI tech though not sure which language model size -- maybe medium based on it's speed. Aiko has almost no customization options though on the other hand it's free and available on the Mac App Store.

Good Omens #1.1 (2019) [/] I saw the first episode. British show based on Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's novel. The demon Crowley (David Tennant) and angel Aziraphale (Michael Sheen) team up to secretly stop Armageddon because they both like humans and civilization, such as it is. In the first episode the duo spend years trying to influence the young anti-Christ to be a good, or not so evil, person but turns out they got the wrong boy... It's a British humor comedy and I think I'd find it more entertaining reading the book because the first episode didn't do it for me.

Trying #1.1 to #1.3 (2020) [-] Half hour British sitcom. Nikki (Esther Smith) and Jason (Rafe Spall) are a London middle-class couple who find out they can't have children so they try to adoption (and I suppose eventually succeed). It's done four seasons so I guess it's popular but the comedy really didn't work for me.

Justinian: Emperor, Soldier, Saint (2023) [/] History book by professor Peter Sarris about the Byzantine Emperor Justinian, his life and accomplishments. Sarris covers Justinians religious reforms and laws as well as expanding Byzantium to its greatest extent. I read almost half the book and it's an easy read. Lots of detail but not dense. I had to return the library book and it wasn't interesting enough to check it out again.

Ball Park Franks [-] Haven't had these in a while. They are cheap hot dogs that really need condiments. Overall I'd rather get more expensive sausage goods.

Ball Park Hot Dog Buns [-] Cheap white bread buns. Frozen then toasted works fine: outside is toasty inside is steamy warm. At least the eight buns matches the eight hot dogs in the franks pack.

See You in My 19th Life is a Korean romance/drama running 12 episodes.

Yoon Joo-won (Kim Si-a) is a young girl who recently started remembering her seventeen past lives. This has made her a weirdly mature and world-weary 12-year old. But she befriends 6-year old (or so) Moon Seo-ha (Jung Hyeon-jun) and becomes enamored. Unfortunately on his birthday they are involved in a car accident and she dies.

On to her 19th life when a young Ban Ji-eum (Park So-yi) starts remembering. Unfortunately this time her family is one where mom ran away and dad exploits her talents. She runs away and finds Kim Ae-kyung (Cha Chung-hwa), who is the now middle-aged niece of her 17th life when she was Ae-kyung's beloved uncle. Ji-eum convinces Ae-kyung of her reincarnation and ends up living with Ae-kyung.

Fast forward and now recent college grad Ji-eum (Shin Hye-sun) is ready to find Seo-ha (Ahn Bo-hyun, who I've been watching in Military Prosecutor Doberman) and kindle an adult romance...

The first episode is setup which is somewhat interesting. Then once the adult Ji-eum comes on the scene it gets really interesting as she is a driven character who is superbly skilled due to her past lives and supremely confident that she will win Seo-ha's love. It's the female lead that initiates the romance which I guess is not that unusual in K-dramas but still nice nonetheless.

The second half gets a bit more muddled as we find out that there is a reason, which Ji-eum doesn't know, that she keeps remembering her past lives. Also turns out that re-establishing relationships with previous life people ends up doing those people harm due to mystical karma. In order to save her loved ones: Ae-jyunh, Seo-ha, and her Joo-won's younger sister Cho-won (Ha Yoon-kyung, who played the lead's best friend in Extraordinary Attorney Woo).

I like hyper-competent characters who know a lot more than they should. Vaguely reminiscent of Star Trek scenarios where Kirk and Spock go back in time and they become advanced knowledge visitors to distant (i.e. modern-day) Earth. When those secrets are revealed is great tension and more so when the audience knows the secret.

Anyway, I really liked this series and recommend it.

Battle Cry of Freedom is a United States history book by James M McPherson covering from the early 1800's to the end of the US Civil War. It is part of the 12-volume Oxford History of the United States series (9 of 12 volumes published).

This is not a military history book. Although McPherson covers the wall well enough and devotes some focus on major battles this is more a book on the culture and politics. A lot of time is spent on the pre-war years showing how the country evolved into basically two separate regions. Contrast on how the slave economy took over in the South and how manufacturing and big cities took over in the North East. Lots of quotes from various speeches and writings to illustrate various attitudes and at least gives the Southern viewpoint a little legitimacy.

The politics evolved as the slavery issue came to dominate agendas and cause the Whig party to splinter into a couple of parties. One party was very anti-Catholic and therefore anti-immigration because most immigrants at the time were from Catholic regions. Eventually though the Republican party got lucky in an election and got enough of a coalition of Whigs, Northern Democrats and others to become a major power and elect Abraham Lincoln.

This kind of treatment continues during the war years. There are lots of politics on each side with war and peace factions. Not a huge amount on international efforts to make the Confederacy a legitimate state. A lot of stuff on how each government handled war-time governing and military organization. The battles themselves are more important on their larger effects than the battles themselves.

It's an interesting book and good history, though not the kind of book I'd keep in my library. I listened to it on audio book format read by Jonathan Davis. Almost 40 hours and Davis has a pleasant enough diction. I think this is the 2003 edition which is a bit abridged.

Underworld (2003) [+] Modern-day urban fantasy. Selene (Kate Beckinsale) is a Death Dealer, the elite warriors of the Vampires. When she finds some werewolves hunting a human, Michael Corvin (Scott Speedman), her investigation uncovers a conspiracy aimed at the vampire elders... This was such a low budget film with excellent CGI and special effects that still ups today. Interesting characters and good back story (that gets its own theatrical film).

The Beekeeper (2024) [/] Jason Statham medium-budget action film. Adam Clay (Statham) is a reclusive hobbyist beekeeper who is friends with his landlord but when she commits suicide after being defrauded by online scammers he decides to go after the scam company and wreak bloody vengeance. Turns out he's a retired Beekeeper, an extra-governmental organization created long ago to protect the USA with no oversight from the government... Lots of 1 vs lots fights where Clay rarely uses a gun unless it's from an opponent and then only momentarily. There is a bee motif but actual bee attacks never occur.

The Ausperg Affair (2012) [/] Written by Nick Marsh this is a short story novelization of a Call of Cthulhu session prequel to Horror on the Orient Express. From the POV of one of the characters it is suitably ok and was a bonus add-on for the Express Diaries novel. The characters attend an auction where there is a gruesome murder and they are asked to investigate on behalf of the auction house. Since it's POV from one character it is the only one that is sort of developed while the other four are rather vague.

Gao Viet Kitchen, San Mateo [/] Dined in. 4 Item Banh Hoi ($46) ok; Mr. Gao Fried Chicken ($29) it's a dine-in only item, pretty big chicken (like a quarter chicken), not really a crispy fried style; Shaking Beef - Bò Lúc Lắc )$32) this was pretty good, steak chunks and thicker noodles; Crab Noodle ($25) also fairly good, has crystal noodles. I guess in the end maybe too upscale of a Vietnamese place. Decor is nice though often I see a bit of a line to be seated.

Rao's Homemade Marinara [-] Maybe I'm used to Trader Joe's marinara now but this one was a bit sour and not appealing eating with just pasta and parmesan cheese. About twice as expensive too.

Masters of the Air is a 9 episode dramatization of the 2007 book by Donald L Miller, which is about the 100th Bomb Group flying as part of the US 8th Air Force in WWII.

There are three major characters, all pretty much present from beginning to end: Gale "Buck" Cleven (Austin Butler, who I just saw in Dune: Part Two playing Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen) and John "Bucky" Egan, both good friends and B-17 bomber pilots; and Harry Crosby (Anthony Boyle), navigator on a B-17 and later group navigator so he stayed behind in HQ.

For the first two they go on missions, Bucky is promoted to group commander, Buck and his bomber go missing, Bucky is shot down and ends up in a POW camp with Buck. So through them (and others) we get to see bombing missions and fending off German fighters (quite exciting sequences but really only see a lot of action one or two episodes) then life as a prisoner in a Luftwaffe POW camp (enemy airmen got put into camps run by the German air force, which was significantly laxer than a the German army or SS) to eventually liberation.

Crosby's journey is different as he is England most of the series. You get a bit more of the HQ stuff. He has an affair with a British WAC. He's wracked with guilt as he sees his friends go missing.

There is maybe half an episode focusing on the 99th fighter squadron, the Tuskegee Airmen. Three are shot down in a mission and end up in the same POW camp with Buck and Bucky.

My biggest problem with the series is all the characters that are in varied places and the narrative is rather fragmented. The bombers fighting their way through scenes are great and for the most part the CGI is good but I guess the last half of the series doesn't really have good bomber combat scenes.

Overall I liked the series and it started out strong but kind of tailed off as the series progressed.