I’ve played a lot of pickup soccer over the years, with plenty of players who were genuinely good. Not Messi good. Pickup good. Within that group there’s a tier of players who have the full trifecta: ball control, game intelligence, and communication. The ball seems to stick to their feet, and they always seem to have more time on it than everyone else. But even within that tier, only a few rise to being great. The difference is what they do with their skills. Great players lift the team up.…

I don’t think I’ve ever talked about this before, but there was a time in the 2000s where I used a Swedish keyboard. Apple used to offer a range of different keyboard options at checkout (at least in Singapore), and I chose Swedish. It had dedicated diacritic keys, and it was easy with the right Option key (known as Alt Graph elsewhere) to type accented letters. I thought it was awesome. Thesedays I’d sooner reach for a Japanese layout if I were to ditch ANSI, but I’m also intruded by the…

Spooky pumpkins outside a house at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, Oct. 31, 2023 (photo from Wikimedia) 31 October 2026 Happy Halloween! It’s time to get spooky! Scary pumpkins, spooky costumes, spookiest of all is how short tomorrow will seem when the sun sets an hour earlier. Sunset on 31 October 2026 in Pittsburgh = 6:18pm Sunset on 1 November 2026 in Pittsburgh = 5:16pm! Daylight Saving Time ends tonight on Halloween. These two events coincide on an irregular basis from 5 to 9 years apart. The…

The Lenovo ThinkSmart View CD-18781Y is an Android-based smart display originally sold for video conferencing. I repurposed two of them as desktop and music appliances in The Lenovo ThinkSmart View, Rebooted. Resources CategoryDateLinkNotesAndroid2026ThinkSmart View LineageOS InstallationGuide to installing unofficial LineageOS 15.1 (Android 8.1) on the Lenovo ThinkSmart View, including recovery and sideloading; flashing carries a risk of bricking the device Firmware2023ThinkSmart View firmware…

📷 287/365 - Lonely but standing strong

I like the early mornings in fall, just before we're forced to change the clocks yet again.It's dark and quiet, and the sky takes its time revealing what the day will bring. This morning it's a wool blanket of grey cloud. I haven't checked the weather, though I'd guess rain.The rumble of cars and empty trucks on Main, their trailers rattling, doesn't start until just before light. It's almost as if everyone gives the dark a little more time before speeding off to Tim Hortons to grab what they…

Like 1 in 5 people, my feet are different size. Are yours? Right 1 size bigger? L: EUR 45 / US 11 / UK 10 | R: EUR 46 / US 12 / UK 11 If these are your sizes: congrats you’re my shoe twin! If you play football (soccer), I’d like to send you a free pair of Nike boots (cleats)! (See How for details) other sizes / sports Fill the form on ShoeFits.me and I’ll try to match you up with your ‘sole mate’ to help you both get right fitting boots by Xmas. I estimate we’ll need at least 40 submissions to…

Defense worker Daniel Ellsberg seeks to publish a series of classified government documents detailing the true nature of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Good TV movie starring James Spader, Claire Forlani, Paul Giamatti and Alan Arkin about the Pentagon Papers, a report about the US involvement in the Vietnam War. Four popcorns. To see all 15 photos, visit the article page. This article was originally published at: https://andrei.xyz/movies/the-pentagon-papers/

Pay no mind to the pile of cards and drawings from my daughter underneath. Look at all that bland, uniform white text against the sea of Nintendo Switch red, only broken up by a few Steelbook cases. I can only think of one other spine treatment more horrifying than this soulless display. Six years ago when I got a Super NT for the first time, I set out on a little project to protect my entirely loose SNES cart collection. I bought these BitBoxes and printed art for them. Seeing them in nice…

One of the best things about the retro gaming community is how games that have spent decades largely forgotten can suddenly find themselves back in the spotlight. Sometimes it's because somebody has discovered an unreleased prototype, or managed to get an obscure title running on completely unexpected hardware. Other times, it's simply because a handful of enthusiasts have decided that a game deserves to be experienced by people who couldn't previously understand it. That's exactly what's…

Writing is how I express myself. It allows me to explore new ideas, meet different perspectives, and figure out what I actually think. Constraint is freedom: it supports creativity. Every playground needs its rules, just as every writer needs a toolbox. This blog post serves as a reminder of what writing means to me: what I use it for, how I approach it, and why I write. It's a living, breathing page that will evolve alongside my needs and tastes. Have funWrite about the things that genuinely…

By Christopher WilsonSelf PublishedOSELevels 4-6 The Astral Bazaar has been experiencing “godquakes;” rumblings from deep within the very petrified corpse that the bazaar is constructed upon. The characters are thrust into an extraplanar mystery, tasked with determining the very nature of the dead god and what can be done to save the city that floats in the Astral Sea! This is 121 pages of junk. The hook is sixty pages long and then there’s thirty pages to describe about thirty locations. It…

I’ve always been a sucker for horror where the thing the person’s life is built around is forever ruined. In this case the bro is an actor and his good looks are kinda destroyed. Thought it would be a lot worse in terms of body horror but aside from surgery scenes it is all done almost comically. It was such a fun movie to watch though. There are stakes but not much portrayal of psychological trauma. Probably the funnest DC cinematic universe movie I’ve ever watched. Also I don’t know if I’m…

Appropriately enough for Halloween I got another session of our family Tegel Manor game done. Session RecapTrying to get to the tower the trio explore the adjoining bedroom to the huntsman's one, finding a fancy shield and a corpse of a lady animated by a golden fungus. Deciding not to stick around too long to see what it can do, the group duck into one of the wardrobes, which happens to be a secret hallway leading up to the staircase into the tower. However they first explore the study next to…

From a Batman comic, a description of a nice place to live: The top of the Pierre Hotel, where the triplex at the top was listed at 125 million dollars in the 2010s and sold for 44 million: Photo by Beyond My Ken.

Discoverability Is Only Solved If You Can Be DiscoveredKev Quirk’s post about SocialSpec raises a reasonable question: what does another specification actually give us that an RSS feed, an About page, and a blogroll don’t already provide? I share his reluctance to add more maintenance to a personal website without a clear benefit. Publishing should not require a second hobby in protocol administration. I also understand his criticism of the initial client being an iOS app. If the pitch is that…

Back on Christmas Day 2024, I posted a very brief ‘happy holiday’ with a photo that included some of the quilled ornaments that I gave to all my coworkers as holiday tokens that year, alongside these three darling miniature sweaters: And even though I made a note to post about them later, I completely forgot until yesterday. So, here we are. ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ I didn’t take pictures of the sweaters in progress, because honestly? I finished each of them in a hurry–even struggling a bit, because tiny:…

dbrand. Idiot proof screen protectors. Wish I’d known about these three years ago. I’m still going strong with my iPhone 15 Pro, which has some scratches and I keep telling myself, ‘it’s all wabi sabi my friend, chill.’ But then the other part of my brain cannot chill and wants to go back in time and get myself a dbrand screen protector.

Another year, another box of pumpkins in the supermarket, another killer on the loose in a Scream sequel, and more dubious PropUptheBar Halloween nonsense. Sticking in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, this post features a pub that doesn't look at all creepy and possibly isn't haunted. Business as usual, then.The Old George is a contender for oldest pub in the city, the historic coaching inn dating back to 1582. It's set back from the street on its own cobbled yard accessed from Cloth Market or High…

Just a few links this month, but still worth sharing. For future me, if nothing else! Niche Museums lets you find tiny museums near you. I'm keen to see Jukebox London next time I'm in The Smoke, and The New York Earth Room and Rex's Dino Store when I pop over to the Big Apple. RemoveMacAI is an open source app to de-bloat macOS by selectively turning off Apple Intelligence, analytics, ads and pop-ups. It only works on macOS 26+ so I've no need for it yet (I'm holding onto Sequoia), but I'm…

“Spiders don’t socialise. Spiders don’t work together. Spiders don’t hunt as packs. Spiders don’t use tools. Spiders don’t organise large structures. “Because if they did, we’d all be dead.” — As it turns out, this isn’t quite correct. Some spiders do work together! They’re called social spiders, and they cooperate to build large webs that can hold dozens or even hundreds of spiders at once. There aren’t a lot of them. There are over 40,000 species of spider, and only 20 or so are social.…

Tension is good, mostly. It is the pull that gives meaning to all art, and thus to life itself.Anyone who is never tense about anything ever, has no payoff to look forward to.Even the most easy-going happy movie, will employ various forms of tension-building to make the movie entertaining. Tension can be as blatant as introducing a problem that a character has to solve, or as subtle as giving the viewer the sense of, "Where is this going? What is going to happen next?"A good DJ is a master of…

My friend here in athens runs a sci-fi book club, and although my greek isn’t good enough to partake in the chats, I do often pick up the book the group is reading. This month’s book is this very weird sci-fi horror novel. The story follows an english couple, one of whom is the director of the uk “Antimemetics Division” – a government (?) department in charge of dealing with inexplicable phenomena, giant sea walking monsters, a god in a rock that makes you forget how to ride a bicycle, things…

The whole is never just a sum of the parts. There are lots of things that I find to be disgraceful only when taken in aggregate. But any individual instance of it seems okay, and so I look odd when I object to any of these things.Mobile notification soundsModern car aestheticsMost boxy streetwearTechnology meetupsThat Pop Psychology Writing VoiceApartments in BangaloreThis is the classic problem where every party involved is mostly making reasonable decisions for themselves, but it really…

This week has seen Adam (my friend and blog host) doing more work on my site, and to my joy, I can now schedule posts again! This makes life a lot easier and will make sure my posts go up on a schedule, instead of just “when I get to it”. Thanks again to him for all this! Books acquired this week I wasn’t expecting to get any books this week, I must admit… but I’d forgotten that I had a pre-order in for the twelfth volume of the Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint manhwa, and I didn’t reckon on those…

At the end of September, as I looked at the late October events, I decided that I would like a witch hat. I briefly thought of making one, even looking up patterns. But I found this hat for less than ten dollars, I decided not to spend time sewing.I wore it Tuesday, which I wrote about in this blog post, and I wore it again yesterday. We had a Halloween party for English and Humanities majors and anyone who might be interested in our major--which is to say everyone.I didn't take pictures of the…

Happy Halloween folks I didn’t think I’d be painting or posting today but here we are. I built this little Ork watchtower a couple of days ago from the base up and just made it up as I went along. It was fun and sort of took on a life of its own haha. I imagine it, and its crew of two, to have been completely forgotten about. Left on some desolate and barren wasteland desert planet a very long time ago. They can’t even remember getting there themselves but they know they need to man the tower…

The dark is bright with quiet lives and steady lights undimmed Halloween seems to be creeping up on Christmas in the crass commercialism stakes, even here in England, where the tradition is less strong! Halloween itself simply means the eve of all Hallows, and All Hallows is the Christian feast of All Saints, or All Saints Day’ a day when we think particularly of those souls in bliss who, even in this life, kindled a light for us, or to speak more exactly, reflected for us and to us, the…