This is an interesting, quirky keyboard from an interesting, quirky company that is well-executed except for the configuration software. It’s got a retro vibe to it. Part of that is the case material, which is polyetherimide (PEI). PEI has some interesting properties in this application. It’s not nearly as common as PBT or ABS for keycaps, but it has some interesting properties: High stiffness and excellent dimensional stability. High heat resistance (far beyond anything a keyboard will see).…
Ty Finck considers the favorability of 20 things over the years. I love making charts to visualize life, and this is a fun exercise to consider.Reply via email
I meditate before bed every night. My default mental state is ... stressful. Just this semi-constant tension and anxious thoughts that go with it - what could I have said differently, what am I doing tomorrow, mistakes from years ago, etc etc. Before bed, I'm very tired. But I'm almost incapable of falling asleep without this meditation, because I lie down and the tired is overpowered by the tension, and my mind just never settles down, and then I get restless legs and my body won't settle…
Went to see the musculoskeletal specialist this afternoon about my bad back, which was doing much better today until he gently poked at my lower spine to see where it hurt, and then it hurt again. It’s nothing major, thankfully, and it should continue to improve. I have a 5 page PDF of gentle exercises for my core muscles to try. Let’s see if I can do them for a more than a few days before I forget. This was one of those moments where I was reminded that I don’t leave the house very often and…
Stephanie talked me into signing up for the Bellahouston Park 10K, on the 22nd of August, right as I finish Couch to 5K. Her reasoning: I won't run it well, but that's exactly why it's useful. A number now, however rough, is something to measure everything else against by the time I stand on the Paisley 10K start line next summer.
A perfect late summer salad: Small cubes of watermelon. Small cubes of cucumber. Crumbled feta. Chopped mint. Toss together in a bowl. Enjoy.
The Magic-Lantern Murdersby Carter Dickson, John Dickson CarrGenres: Crime, Mystery Pages: 269 Series: British Library Crime Classics Rating: Synopsis: On the eve of his wedding to Evelyn Cheyne, who he met and fell in love with during the course of The Unicorn Murders, former spy Kenwood Blake is summoned to Devon by spymaster Sir Henry Merrivale, and asked to take part in an undercover operation. Despite being assured he’ll be back in London in time for the wedding the following morning,…
I realize I have spent a lot of my time writing about videogames here, and not focusing much on most of my other hobbies. I guess I just want to ramble about something different today, so why not? The other day I saw a post on a reading group I found in some mainstream social media platform that shall remain unnamed, and it was all about how great The Night Land and The House on The Borderland by William Hope Hodgson were, but what I found most intriguing was how many people were fans of these…
There's this thing that starts to happen when you get older. Young people look at you like you're mad. Young people who are wearing exactly what we wore when we were young. Kids, we've just learnt that baggy jeans aren't worth it. You trip over them, they get ripped, they soak up water. We've been there. It doesn't bother me. Because if these kids are lucky they too will one day be forty and eighteen-year-olds will look at them like that. Then they will know. Ageing generally doesn't bother me…
Radio calisthenics (ラジオ体操, rajio taisō; literally, "radio exercises") are warm-up calisthenics performed to music and guidance from radio broadcasts. Originating from the United States, they are popular in Japan and parts of China, North Korea and Taiwan. — Wikipedia If you've ever read my Now page, you know I try to keep myself in shape with the bare minimum of less than 5 minutes of stretching every day. Emphasis on try, because I end up skipping several days if I don't put my mind fully into…
I belong not to the people but the soul of my home. These rocks, paths, shaped by tides and greed. I belong to the cracks of solitude on a shore of clashes, silent witness of hollow present pursuits. I surrender to the mast, steadfast, mighty. I bow to the boom, swifting, aching. Posterity, the remnants gliding to collapse, I challenge plenitude, I dare to return.
One of a series of 26 small canvasses from Group 1. Primordial Chaos by Hilma af Klimt (1906-7, Oil on Canvas, 52.5×37 cm). A major exhibition of works by Swedish artist Hilma af Klmit (1862-1944) will start in October (2026) and run until January (2027) at the National Gallery of Ireland.
From Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor, by Christine Kuehn (Celadon Books, 2025), Kindle pp. 160-161: There was intense pressure to intern the entire Japanese population of the island—160,000 men, women, and children. Hoover and President Roosevelt, fearing an uprising, wanted a crackdown. Surprisingly, the man who stood in their way was the straitlaced conservative Robert Shivers. He fought it tooth and nail,…
I completed another of my 40 before forty list last week and fulfilled a childhood dream in the process: I went up in a hot air balloon. Shane bought the balloon vouchers for me for Christmas last year, and after redeeming the vouchers with Wickers World we had repeatedly tried to book evening flights, but each time they were cancelled because of unsuitable conditions. It turns out that hot air balloons need surface wind speeds at or below 8mph to be able to safely take off and land! However,…
I sometimes think about how our infrastructure slowly corrodes.
I saw Dan Deacon for the first time last weekend, and man does he put on a great show. The fans were genuinely kind and fun, very good vibes. No small feat!
FACT75: Peter Saville, New Order, Power, Corruption & Lies, 1983, via wikipedia I’m not sure I have anything to say about them yet, but I’ve been looking at Peter Saville’s color code from his New Order album covers, which he developed with Brett Wickens. Back cover of New Order, Power, Corruption & Lies, 1983 via discogs The outer two rows of the color wheel on the back of Power, Corruption & Lies is the key to deciphering the one- or tw0-color blocks that represent both the numbers 1-9 and…
Today's hat tip goes to one of a favorite comedian and wordsmiths from my misspent youth, the guy who recorded My Son The Nut, the great Allan Sherman (1924-1973).Here's Allan on the popular daytime program The Mike Douglas Show. Love Allan's appearance on Jay Ward Productions' Fractured Flickers.Allan was a frequent guest comic on The Dean Martin Show.Well, whatdaya know - found The Allan Sherman Show (1968) on Internet Archive - yippee kayyoh kayyay!
I read the James Bond novel Seafire while on a business trip. This is from 1994, which is late in the John Gardner era — he only wrote one more original Bond novel after this one.It was…okay. I've never loved Gardner's work. Here’s my review.
It remains too hot. The heatwave is enduring, although luckily it has never quite reached the heights of earlier this year where the humidity made my sleepy Cotswold cottage feel like a sauna. But it has remained warm and basically didn't rain at all during July which seems bad. The soil is dust. We look to the skies and dance. Life The biggest thing that happened this month is we got a new cat. Her name is Betsy, she's two years old, tiny and very cheeky. It's nice having a creature in the…
Will Dormann made a nice post with Firefox settings that a security-/privacy-conscious user may want to enable: If anybody else is making the switch to (or back to) Firefox, there are a few settings that a security-/privacy-conscious user may want to enable: Enable the Block AI enhancements toggle to disable all AI-related nonsense globally. Disable Telemetry & Data Collection. Disable "Firefox Home" Use "Strict" tracking protection Enable HTTPS-only mode Bonus: In about:config, set:…
Yesterday, I turned 30. 12 years into adulthood. A new decade of life. A new decade for World of Matthew. I’m working on several projects. From repairing tech to designing new parts for this website. Waiting for parts to finish repairs on the WH100-XM5 (pretty much finished but waiting for T7000) while I have ordered a AMD BC 250 for a few projects involving GPU compute and gaming (going full “ghetto” with keeping costs other components down).
Peter Davis1 delivered the Graduate English Address as a Harvard Law School graduate at Harvard’s 2018 Commencement. His speech is titled A Counterculture of Commitment. The defining characteristic of our generation, says Davis, is keeping options open to the point that commiting to something—even trivial like watching a whole movie—becomes strange. We are stuck in infinite browsing mode, not only in our devices but for everything in our lives. It’s OK to keep our options open but if we want to…
This week was mostly conversations — new scope, new people, a lot of catch-ups. When you step into a bigger job, the temptation is to start deciding. The better move is quieter. Four things I was reminded of. First listen 1. In a new mandate, your first job is to listen, not to fix. Most of my calendar this week was one-on-ones and intro meetings. I went in with topics, but the goal wasn’t to land opinions. It was to understand how the work actually flows and where people feel friction before I…
Having arrived back home with no particular difficulty, I am actually kind of relieved that studios are still giving The Odyssey and Spider-Man a bit of space, so I can watch some suddenly-good baseball and write movie reviews. I opted to skip The Samurai and the Prisoner at Fantasia once I saw that it was booked at The Coolidge Corner Theatre; so I'll get a chance to catch the new one from
Kroyer, Hip, Hip, Hurrah! 1888, Gothenburg Museum of Art, SwedenImpressionism was at first a French art movement, starting in the second half of the C19th. Impressionist techniques included visible, thick brush strokes of pure colour, creating a vibrant effect, and capturing the essence of the subject matter rather than focusing on minute details. Impressionists often painted outdoors to capture the effects of sunlight on their subjects, favouring natural poses and domestic scenes, creating a…
This week I am reviewing a wild card read, as I was not quite sure what to expect. Antony Carr (1916-1995) wrote five mystery novels during the 1950s. Online information is limited but two of his other mysteries appear to be A Comedy of Terrors (1955) and The Man in Room 3 (1958). The title for Candles of the Night is derived from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.
It’s been a while since I’ve tried making a game. I write little ideas down in my notebook here and there, snippets or ideas that I think might be fun to do something with, but it’s been I think two years since I’ve made a finished game, my last one being Monarch’s Flight for the NES. So I was pretty excited when a while back I got an idea in my head, and started playing around with a concept in Gdevelop. The idea started off as an homage to Paperboy, a game I used to love playing on the NES…
In Port Tennant, Swansea, in the late 1950s, Sunday school was not negotiable. You went to school, you played endless games of Kick the Can on the patch of wasteland we called the Bank, and on Sunday you were scrubbed, buttoned into something uncomfortable, and marched off to the Ebenezer Gospel Hall on Wern Fawr Road. Nobody sent you there out of burning religious conviction. You went because it was expected, and because it bought the grown-ups an hour's peace. The hall was squat and smelled…
