moddedbear.com

It’s been a few months since my post on leaving Gmail which sparked a lot of discussion on Hacker News. Email isn’t the most exciting topic in the world, but I figured I should give a little update on how things have been going after the move to Fastmail since so many people saw the original post. The quick version is that I think I picked right with Fastmail. You can find cheaper email hosts out there. I’m sure they’re great too, but I’m really happy with Fastmail’s value considering all I’m…

A few weeks ago I finished reading Leviathan Falls, the ninth and final book in The Expanse series by James S.A. Corey. I started the series all the way back in October 2024. Not long before that, in May, is when I got my first e-reader to try to get into reading a little more seriously. I’ve read plenty of other books since then, but The Expanse has been somewhat of a constant for most of the time I’ve been reading. Now that it’s finished, I can confidently say it’s my favorite series I’ve…

I mentioned that my wife’s MacBook died in my last post. Yesterday it returned to the land of the living in the dumbest way possible. Before I explain, you have to understand something. This thing was dead dead. Completely unresponsive to any and all input, including the recovery key combos. I let it sit on the charger for a good long while. No change. I took it off the charger for another good long while. No change. Making it Apple’s problem Apple will do a free diagnostic if you take your…

For some reason my family has phenomenally crappy luck with Macbooks. Our second one in three years just died, right as my wife was needing to put together some slides with it. The thing is completely and utterly unresponsive, suffering the same mysterious fate as its predecessor three years ago. But that’s a story for another day once I have a chance to dig more into it. The main thing is that we were down a computer and my wife still needed something to get work done on. I decided to test out…

Let me tell you a story I go to check my email in Gmail’s web UI. I see a few new messages regarding feedback on a project I’m working on. I click through to read one of them and the first thing I’m greeted with is a message summary I didn’t ask for generated by a language model. I focus the message box to draft a reply, but there’s already one there. It was also generated by the language model. I delete it, replacing it with my own. Afterward, I go to compose a new message. A colorful…

I was featured on Hyde’s Over/Under series this week! Go read it and check out the rest of the series while you’re at it. Each week, Hyde interviews another blogger to get their opinions on five different topics and answer a few other questions. This week it was vinyl, Kobo, Keychron keyboards, Ray-Ban AI glasses, and cupcakes. Over/Under #64 with another bear: ModdedBear — JP

Ocarina of Time is one of those games that gets talked about so much that I’ve sort of always felt like a fake gamer for never finishing it, even nearly 30 years after release. That changed last weekend and I would now like everyone to acknowledge that I am, in fact, a real gamer. I played it on Steam Deck with the PC port Ship of Harkinian which is hands down the best way to play it these days. It’s extremely customizable (almost dauntingly so) so you can really tune the game to your liking…

I wanted to quickly highlight a new blog discovery platform I’ve just learned about called Bubbles. It uses a community voting system similar to sites like Reddit, Hacker News, or Bear Blog. Signing up is super easy since you just log in with a Fediverse account (with read-only permissions). I think it’s an interesting alternative to other blog aggregators which typically only show you the most recent posts. You can also sort by new posts in Bubbles, but the ranked view seems like it’ll be ni...

You might’ve already heard a lot about it by now since it’s gotten quite popular the past few months, but I have some things to say about the XTEINK X4 and how it’s become one of my favorite gadgets. If this is the first time you’re hearing about it, the X4 is an affordable mini e-ink reader roughly the size of a 2010-era smartphone. It sort of feels pseudo-retro in that way.

Gonna be honest, I didn’t see this coming just a few months ago. Through some connections I recently had a freelance game development opportunity come up. I like an excuse to start a new project (while trying to ignore the ever growing number of unfinished ones). Game development has always interested me for a long time, so I figured this was too good to pass up. And just this last week we submitted our first game to the client! I learned a lot along the way and it was a blast.