Brian Jackson
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jaxz.in
Brian Jackson
@jaxz.in
Day job: Platform Engineering Supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic

24/7 job: Father of two amazing teens, husband to an amazing wife, son and brother

Helping to make Star Wars, like Vader Immortal, Tales from the Galaxy's Edge, The Mandalorian, Ahsoka
New Home Assistant card I made last night. As a salaried employee, display the dollar amount I’m effectively donating back to my company in free labor when I’m at my desk over 8 hours. Resets daily.

This may come off as if I’m disgruntled, but it was only about real data of a thought experiment!
October 16, 2025 at 2:58 AM
ILM did a lot of incredible work on this movie. I got to work on nearly all stages of visual effects on this one, from preproduction and virtual production, to post-production. I’m proud of how my team helped bring another story to the Tron universe. #pinchme
October 13, 2025 at 4:06 AM
I made my own cocktail, which I shall dub the Bermuda Bramble! 1 oz of Gosling’s Black Seal Rum, fresh blackberry soda made from my backyard wild berry syrup, and a squeeze of lime. 🍋‍🟩 I’ve made some clunkers in the past but this is frickin’ delicious. #yum #cocktails
August 16, 2025 at 8:07 PM
I’ll be in Vancouver at SIGGRAPH this year. My second SIGGRAPH and my first time in Vancouver! Let me know if you’ll be there too! #siggraph
August 2, 2025 at 12:39 PM
Adult money perks, I get to buy a new Nintendo console to fulfill my childhood wishes. I might let my kids play with it too.
June 5, 2025 at 7:38 PM
Ending a week of travel watching the first episode of Andor Season 2 and spotted my name. The novelty of having my name in a Star Wars production has not worn off. #pinchme
April 26, 2025 at 2:26 AM
My part done, my wife likes to do all the painting and caulking!
April 6, 2025 at 11:07 PM
My Sunday project on the honey-do list. Faux board and batton in the bedroom. #diy
April 6, 2025 at 7:36 PM
I got a walking treadmill for my desk and it’s great. The thing no one (including the manual) talks about is the static electric buildup. I had to buy an antistatic band because I keep glitching my monitor and audio equipment with discharges!
March 24, 2025 at 11:31 PM
Update, I’ve got my Davis weather station data flowing into Home Assistant every few seconds instead of every 5 minutes. I did an end-run around their cloud service and I’m intercepting the equipment’s wireless signal using a USB radio and a Raspberry Pi. Pushed to HA over MQTT. #homeautomation
March 18, 2025 at 6:43 AM
Nothing quite like the dopamine hit when a home automation project suddenly starts working. Tonight I got a Raspberry Pi with a USB software-defined radio running a radio receiver program in a Docker container capturing live weather station readings from my backyard.
March 11, 2025 at 5:11 AM
I’m in the “meteorology is my hobby” phase of my life. #davisinstruments #weather #hobbies
March 1, 2025 at 9:56 PM
A coworker said I look like I work at Orange County Choppers until I open my mouth. I’ll take it. #beard
February 27, 2025 at 9:32 PM
Pretty wild that I can model a new built-in media center in Fusion 360, export it to USD, and use AR in iOS to walk around it in the space I’m going to build it. #augmentedreality #cad #fusion360 #maker #woodworking
February 24, 2025 at 5:40 AM
The reflection of moonlight on the iced-over snow is really beautiful this evening.
February 18, 2025 at 5:20 AM
Learned I can get a Katz’s pastrami delivered, so we’re eating good tonight!
February 8, 2025 at 8:36 PM
Bye bye Alexa, I’ve got a fully #selfhosted voice assistant! Whisper for speech-to-text, Llama 3.2 for the conversation agent, Kokoro-84M for text-to-speech, and #homeassistant connecting them all together behind their new Voice Preview device! All running on my home network on a mix of OS and GPUs
February 2, 2025 at 7:10 PM
Today's creation, a cozy Christmas Village in #TinyGlade
January 26, 2025 at 4:29 AM
I can’t get anything done when we’re home alone. #dogs
January 21, 2025 at 7:08 PM
Recreated my IRL house in #TinyGlade.
January 20, 2025 at 2:05 AM
If only they had hired Cambridge Analytica instead. Joking aside, we are not a land of the free if we are not free to assemble. Most social networks are built to bait us into engagement, but I still believe it is our right to use them to assemble peacefully in a virtual but shared space.
January 19, 2025 at 4:01 AM
Having fun in #tinyglade, a zen-like diorama game. Work in progress recreation of Cinderella Castle from Walt Disney World.
January 18, 2025 at 8:36 PM
Almost finale time! #SkeletonCrew #StarWars
January 15, 2025 at 1:39 AM
I converted my old Windows gaming PC into a Linux machine learning sandbox. Now I'm hosting my own LLM with Ollama and Open WebUI and Llama 3.2 performs well even with my 5 year old Radeon GPU. And I can access it from anywhere thanks to Tailscale so I might end my ChatGPT sub. TBD #selfhosted
January 12, 2025 at 10:54 PM
I get excited when my colleagues release one of these reels. Even more special when I get to see one early. Seeing this memory yesterday, geeking out about ILM before working at ILM, it reminds me of how lucky and special it is for me to have a job that I quite literally dreamed about. #pinchme
January 11, 2025 at 4:53 PM