Android gaming handhelds have reached a point where the software surrounding the games can be every bit as carefully considered as the hardware itself. You can have a beautiful frontend, complete with custom artwork, music, animations and everything else that makes browsing a game library enjoyable, but a convincing console-like experience involves more than just a good-looking home screen. It's also in the smaller interactions: what happens when you press the Home button, how running games are…

Sunday Asides #119 A huge, HUGE, congratulations goes out to Beyond the Gates for their wins at the 53rd annual Daytime Emmy Awards! Outstanding Lead Performer in a Daytime Drama Series: Actress - Tamara Tunie as Anita Williams Dupree Outstanding Emerging Talent in a Daytime Drama Series - Ambyr Michelle as Ambyr Thomas Outstanding Lighting Direction for a Daytime Program - "Beyond the Gates": Episode 104 Outstanding Hairstyling and Makeup for a Daytime Program - "Beyond the Gates": Episode 103…

On a Friday evening at 22:07 I created my first Grok Bot. It had no job yet. I asked it to connect my Strava. Nine days later I have 36 bots. That sounds like chaos. It isn’t, because the setup underneath is small. Two bots do most of the work. I talk to , and builds new bots. The rest are specialists with one job each. So this post starts with the base setup, step by step. I’d build the same one again tomorrow. After that come my own bots as examples, each one more specific than the last. The…

In short: I use iOS Shortcuts to run a Mastodon bot. I run a Mastodon bot that posts random quotes from The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. (The writing in that game is so charming!) I used to run it off a server, but for the past few days, it’s used an iOS Shortcut on my phone. How it works The bot is called Ulrira, named after a beloved Link’s Awakening character. Ulrira (the bot, not the character) samples a line from the text dump, then makes an HTTP request to post it. Here’s a…

November 1st—the Solemnity of All Saints—is among my favorite celebrations in the Church’s liturgical calendar. Only the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity and Corpus Christi (the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ) eclipse All Saints Day in significance for me personally. One of my favorite aspects of Catholicism is the beautiful reality of … Continue reading The Saints Who Helped Shape My Catholic Faith The post The Saints Who Helped Shape My Catholic Faith first appeared on The Simple…

Life is full of trade-offs, and some of the trade-offs involve relinquishing (part of) control for convenience. In tech, this can often be seen in using services instead of downloading software and using it locally. For example, I use Netflix or Spotify instead of maintaining my own media library. It’s much more convenient, even if it doesn’t have all the content I’d have, or isn’t laid out exactly as I’d prefer. A sneaky problem with relying more on services—thus relinquishing the choices and…

Quick tip: you can finally share emails to Reminders or other apps in iOS 27 if you have Siri AI enabled and available. To do this, ask for summary on the email and then use the triple dot menu at the top. It now has a share button.

As I am sure you are aware, the use of AI tools has exploded in 2026. In the retro computing area, people are using it a lot to create code for software, make utilities, drivers, music, graphics and videos too.It means that whole applications, games, drivers and graphics are being created with AI tools like Claude, ChatGPT, Suno, and many more tools.For example, here is a game I downloaded this week to try on my Amiga 1200 system, called Sparkpaw: The Stormstone quest.This game is clearly…

“Never explain yourself. Your enemies won't believe you, and your friends don't need it.” Elbert Hubbard

November’s Pylon of the Month is a first for the blog, because it’s part of a stage set for Beabadoobee’s Powerlines Tour. I grabbed the image from @danielprichardson on Instagram – he’s the man at 1826 Group behind the fabulous set design. It came to my attention when my eldest son noticed that Beabadoobee (@radvxz) had liked October’s Pylon of the Month and before you know it I was listening to her latest album (Pylon) on Spotify and in the Radio 1 Live Lounge. The onstage pylon looks to have…

I am currently, once again, in France for the next two weeks. But in just a few days the remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is dropping. And there's no chance that I will not play this game from day one. Luckily, I still had this All-in-One carrying case from JSAUX. I managed to pack the whole Switch 2 setup including the dock, the Switch 2 Pro Controller, one extra controller by GuliKit (that doesn't actually fit properly, unlike the Switch 2 Pro Controller; the sticks don't really…

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Today I had a lunch appointment at 1130 am. I arrived on time. The person was 40 minutes late. This person knows that I have arrived on time but still choose to be late without giving me any explanation. After forty minutes of lunch with this person, I decided to leave. Obviously, the person was not too pleased that our meeting was only 40 minutes. However, this person has to respect my time. This person proposed the time and I arrived on time. There is no reason for this person to be late.…

I remember the awe. I was 12; it was 1990, and the future arrived in a children’s magazine—advertised in Mickey Mouse, ordered as a mail-in for 29,95 DM: a Dick Tracy watch. It was a plastic replica with a fake leather band. The watch might even have worked, and it looked like the real one. Pressing the button made Dick Tracy speak. You couldn’t talk to anybody. I didn’t care. I wore it like a key to another world, because I saw a glimpse of the future in it: a world where you could talk to…

Yesterday was Halloween. We normally do not celebrate it here in the Netherlands but despite that there are still a few parties you can go to, and that is precisely what me, my sister, and her friend set out to do. I was a banana. It got a lot of laughs, many people pointing at me and saying nothing more than "banana", and it made me glow with happiness inside. I felt like myself, the banana was an extension of who I was. It was very fun, would recommend to everyone. Eventually I met another…

I feel like October flew by, yet it was a good month, full of family, sport, parties, and entertainment. In this issue, let’s look at the five books (two of which are about memory), how I continued my Hitchcock marathon, and the new album by The Tangent. I’ll also discuss my opinions on Control Resonant. -- Read More

At this point, I should have made might it clear enough that Readwise Books is the center of my reading life. It's where I read my books and track my reading, and it's the engine behind the /reading page on this blog. But it's not where I actually listen to audiobooks. For that, I use audiobookshelf (ABS) in my home lab and listen to them (mostly while driving) with an app called Absorb. (Use Prologue if you are on iOS.) But since I still wanted to track my audiobook listening in Readwise…

I do not weep because my best friend died; I weep because I have to go on living without her. – “Day of the Dead 2025” Every year on this day I remind my readers about the inevitability and goodness of Death, and the passing of my beloved friend Grace has not changed that. Unlike the powerful and privileged men who embrace childish fantasies about life extension or even immortality to assuage their fear of the dark, sane, mature minds do not whine and stomp their feet in protest of the fact…

301/365 Mugdock flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license

Friends and strangers! Through November I am hosting the RPG Blog Carnival, and I would like to invite you to contribute! The theme is Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, and your contributions can be anything related to it, from your procedures and practices for creating and running them to random tables for generating and populating them to actual adventuring sites. In OD&D Gary and Dave describe underworld and wilderness as places of adventure, peril, and treasure: ... the referee must draw…

Once upon a time there was a nonprofit organization that encouraged people to write a 50k-word novel in November. They had a catchy name and thriving community that focused not on quality but on quantity. The time and place for polish would come later, November was simply about grinding the words out.The community thrived and those who conquered the lofty task received accolades and (sometimes) prizes. Every year was a fun way to see ideas come to life and the struggle of trying to write 1667…

To experiment with network stuff, I was using UML-based network labs. Many alternatives exist, like GNS3, Netkit, Marionnet or Cloonix. All of them are great viable solutions but I still prefer to stick to my minimal home-made solution with UML virtual machines. Here is why: I didn’t want to use disk images. They take a lot of space and they have to be maintained. They also become cluttered, especially if you try to reuse them across several labs. They are also difficult to share. I want to be…

A while back, I was lured in by the discounts offered by AliExpress, ending up with two ALLPOWERS VOLIX P300 Power Stations. While sporadic bench testing seemed to show them working just fine, it seems that the solar sharer offer and regular use have begun to expose some “cracks”. One of my two stations refuses to consistently charge quickly, falling back to about 82W charging rate for the majority of the time. Along with a comment from a reader indicating the USB outputs likely have high…

reMarkable MCP in Go A follow up to Amp + reMarkable: I rewrote the reMarkable MCP server in Go. It’s on GitHub: go-remarkable-mcp. The big win for me is memory usage. The repo has the full comparison but the short version is: Small PDF read/render/export: Python 193 MiB, Go 32 MiB. EPUB + nine Markdown renders/uploads: Python 245 MiB, Go 71 MiB. This matters for my Amp orbs. As memory matters for all things cloud. We pay in memory and CPU. I converted this from python to go so that the limited…

Recently, I was very impressed by 10 Years, 10 Adventures, a collection of ten WebGL-powered animated travel maps featuring 3D terrain, animated elements and trip narration. So, for today's #30DayMapChallenge, I decided to try creating something similar: a 3D map of Cap d'Antibes, which I recently visited in the South of France.My interactive 3D Map of Cap d’Antibes lets you fly around the peninsula, discover some of its best-known landmarks and view the route of an incredible coastal walk. The…

Listen up, fans of interesting sex challenges. This week’s guest blogger has a kickass idea for you. He’s written some fabulous guest blogs here before, including a delightful piece about where he wears his wedding ring, what a prostate orgasm feels like, and his quest for the perfect butt plug. So I’m delighted to welcome […]

I knew beforehand that the 31st of October would be a day where I couldn’t expect much from my body. I figured that after flying in on Friday I would just be tired. All I wished for was to go to a pub in the afternoon, drink Guinness and listen to live Irish music. But I felt good in the early afternoon, I was aching to go out and one of the places I wanted to visit was at 7 minutes walking distance: Christchurch cathedral. It was GORGEOUS! This is one of the pictures I took, of the bridge with…

Ah… the good old days when Flash was everywhere, autoplay was fun, and we allowed our web browsers to load and cache web pages in the morning before we start work, just because the internet was not fast enough. ~ Link: Pac-Man’s siren call, by Marcin Wichary, Unsung

Last week nrepl.org got a makeover. The docs moved to docs.nrepl.org, and nrepl.org itself became a landing page that explains what nREPL is and how its protocol works, with “wire windows” showing real exchanges between a client and a server, as EDN or as the bencode that actually goes over the wire. Reading about a protocol only gets you so far, though, so the page now also has a “Try it” section with a real nREPL server running right in your browser. There’s one in this post as well! In the…