Miscellany is the audio edition of the notebook at news.collver.biz — short essays and explorations on technology, faith, family, and whatever else has caught my attention, each one read aloud. Some of it is about building things; some about noticing them. From the desk, and the homeserver, of Rev. Dr. Albert B. Collver III.
Reading the feed…
On a Sunday in July 1861 the Union army broke at Bull Run, and the explanations traveled faster than the casualty lists. Dr. William Passavant announced the true cause in his Pittsburgh paper: the battle had been fought on the Sabbath. The reply from St. Louis ran one dry sentence — and then, when Passavant accused the editors of misquoting him, they printed his entire document in translation and closed with a doctrinal verdict signed in initials. An essay on fast-day sermons, false doctrine, and the habit of repenting of other people's sins. Read the essay, with crops from the original Fraktu
In 1845, a St. Louis compositor setting Der Lutheraner seated one letter upside down, and the word Gnade — grace — went out to the subscribers as Guade. Nobody caught it for 180 years. How hand-set type worked, how a turned letter happens, and how an AI correction pass that was taught to fix its own mistakes and respect everyone else's found it. From the essay at news.collver.biz.
Where does the general confession and absolution actually come from — and is the “Declaration of Grace” a lesser gospel? From the medieval Offene Schuld through the Nürnberg controversy of 1533–1540 (including the absolution formula Luther wrote in his own hand, February 1540) to the Dresden court chapel, the Missouri Synod’s 1856 agenda, and page 203 of Lutheran Service Book. Read the essay, with full notes: news.collver.biz Typeset PDF: misc.collver.biz/unto-each-one.pdf The Wittenberg letters, German and English: misc.collver.biz/wittenberg-opinions-parallel.pdf
How I got an open-source model to read my drafts aloud in a passable version of my own voice — for free, on my own machine. The ElevenLabs-cost itch, the fight to fine-tune Chatterbox, why some text-to-speech recites while the rest improvises, and the little CPU model that finally worked. Read, fittingly, in that very cloned voice. Read the full post: https://news.collver.biz/teaching-a-laptop-to-read-in-my-own-voice/ Try the live demo: https://voice.collver.biz
