Three visual throwback-style games

Discovered two new games with intriguing styles that harken back to N64 / PS1 days:

  • “Say NO! More”

  • Felvidek

and was reminded of the existence of another old-school art style game that caught my attention some months back:

  • Void Stranger

Say No! More gave me strong Katamari quirkiness vibes. Especially when you meet your guide that teaches you methods of saying “no”. It’s a cute, and arguably effective way of conveying the self help advice of learning to protect your time and mental health by saying “no” more.

Void Stranger, as I understand it, is one of those games that is far more than meets the eye. That is, you’ll start playing expecting one thing, and as you progress find yourself experiencing something entirely different.

I chose to make Say No! More something I experienced as a total observer experience by watching a portion of the full gameplay someone made available on YouTube. I didn’t finish it. Leaving room for me to maybe pick up the game in the future.

I’m 50/50 on Felvidek as a purchase. Need to do a little more research on it, and perhaps a little gameplay watching to see if it’s something I could get into. Void Stranger has been on my mind long enough that if the right sale came along, I could see myself biting.

Vids

Say NO! More

Felvidek

Void Stranger

GMail filter not updating

Filters to tag newsletters is a visually helpful tool I make use of in GMail. To my dismay and frustration a couple of days ago, I found I was unable to save new newsletter e-mail addresses to a GMail filter I have set up.

Turns out the solution is simple enough:

  • Clear cookies.

  • Clear cache.

A heads up. I found I needed to wait something from a full minute, to possibly several minutes after doing the above steps. During that time when I clicked the settings icon in GMail I got zero response from the action. It was enough to send me back to the Google help forum to describe the new issue, but when I returned to GMail and clicked the settings gear again, everything worked as expected.

second impact [2023-12-17]

As I make a donation to the impactful QSAC, I had come across this short, beautifully shot, and important story told by an individual with autism. This is the kind of story telling I think more folks need to see.

I’m pretty it was in 2023 that I really found myself wanting to fall down the Radiolab archive rabbit hole. Having consumed all those episodes available on the podcast RSS feed provided to supporting members, I started to question whether those were really all the episodes.

Sure enough, I’d learned that there was far more to listen to in the oddly silo’d off Radiolab Classic feed. But even that wasn’t the full history of all things Radiolab. The RC feed I believe only went back as far as 2007, and Radiolab had it’s first “season” back in 2005. And there were episodes that predate Radiolab proper — back when the show was very experimental sounding, and was composed of seemingly regular WNYC/NPR episodes.

Thankfully, some fine independent archivists have done their best to collect all the possible episodes and some additional materials.

And so, I’m at ground zero, and working my through. I’m hyped.

The result of having listened to one of these archived episodes is I’m picking up listening to some Blues. Starting with…

second impact [2023-11-13]

Vampire Suvivors continues to have a strangle hold on me. I’m 40 some odd achievements away from completion. But I’ve been seeing that the devs are somewhat nice about dropping new updates to add more. So, I sure chose a good game for the first time in a long time to try and be a completionist with.

Baldurs Gate 3 has been calling. I’m trying to hold out until a Xmas sale. Hopefully I can do all the unlocks in VS by then 😂

Something that I haven’t been a completionist about are the many books I’ve started in the past couple weeks.

I started Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford as part of my journey to read up on AI / Machine Learning. And I think it was a great place to start as it’s a pretty level headed, and imagination-tempering work so far that balances out all the hype of the past several months.
Something that’s kept the steam going in my reading was the RFK Human Rights recent book club conversation on Crawfords book.

This was the unexpected smooth track I needed on this chilly Monday evening.

second impact [2023-11-06]

Some years back I turned to jazz when I was looking for some concentration music. Or just general chill evening tunes. That fell to the wayside as I switched it up to artists like Tycho. But here we are again. Lately it’s all about Hiroshi Suzuki.

With the original Pixel watch, I paired a film screen protector, and a “ring” case. Imagine what’s to the right, just without the built in screen protector.

With the Pixel Watch 2, I wanted to reduce the level of fear I’d felt around particularly pointed corners, and if I happened to be swinging my arm in my sleep near my bedside table. So I got this inexpensive full coverage deal.

Touch sensitivity is workable. But it cheapens the experience every time I hear the light thock sound of my fingertip touching the protector. A byproduct of the tiny gap that must exist between the protector and screen.

I’ll have to rethink this whole experience once I start seeing the matte coating on the bezel start peeling away.

Vampire Survivors continues to be the game to have my limited wind down attention. But came across the very visually intriguing Moonring.


Logging my journey through Practical SQL 2nd Edition

I picked up Practical SQL (2nd Edition), and my thinking here is maybe having breadcrumbs of where I’ve run into issues and hopefully found solutions, might be worth having around in the future and potentially be helpful for others on the journey.

Not the biggest bump in the road but…

After installing Pgadmin, and opening it up as the book said, I was not prompted to create a master password. Now, not the biggest problem one might think since I can probably just find it in the settings somewhere. But I’ve got to say, and I’m not too surprised here, there’s a lot going on with menus and submenus. So this should be fun to sort out. The other option is to just roll along and either I may get prompted to set it when I try to complete some action as I move along with the material.

Solution

Well then…

pgAdmin 4 uses the operating system password store by default to store the saved server passwords in desktop mode from version 7.2 onwards and Master password will not be required.

via. https://www.pgadmin.org/docs/pgadmin4/latest/master_password.html

second impact [2023-10-22]

After tearing through all available chapters of Kaiju No. 8, I picked up reading Akane-banashi a coming of age, shōnen manga that’s got me hooked after only the opening chapter. There are some manga that as you read beautifully convey a sense of physical motion, and emotion that you immediately have visions of how if (and hopefully when) they become an anime, they will hit even harder. One Punch Man, and certainly Ping Pong were two stories from years ago that did that for me. Kaiju No.8 and now Akane-banashi are some of the most recent. And sure enough a trailer for Kaiju No. 8 came out, and now I’m eagerly awaiting its release. And if Akane keeps up, I can’t wait to be able to re-experience the story in an animation.

Akane-banashi Volume 1 cover

This week I decided to make a rare mobile game purchase with Subpar Pool. I've not made it too deep yet, but if it recreates the challenge, and sense of accomplishment that What the Golf? did, I'll be satisfied.

Like most Nintendo fans this week, I’ve fired up Mario Wonder. Off rip, it’s got the same magic I felt when I popped in Super Mario World into the SNES and flipped that power slider up. What a great release to finish off the original Switch era.

Finally, I’ve strayed pretty far from continuing to read Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World on the new Barnes & Noble NOOK Glowlight 4 Plus.

I’m half way through, and perhaps the reason I’m not finishing it is because quite a bit of it resonates with my unintentional approach to the world as I’ve gone through life. (But an approach I’m grateful for, as this book lists many example about how it’s the broadly skilled and knowledgeable that can make differences in business and elsewhere.)

Superficial reading

This was eye opening for me because I feel like I will occasionally put what's being described into practice. Changing the lens - in my mind - through which I'm re-encountering information. Whether it be through more exposure to the subject matter in other moments, or just by sheer fact of having gone through the material once and having had a moment to digest consciously and unconsciously.

The Rough Corner

Started reading The Theory of Everything Else, and the forward alone hit hard:

There is a concept practised by Zen gardeners called ‘the Rough Corner’. The idea being that somewhere, in every beautifully tended garden, there should remain a patch of land left completely untouched, growing wild and chaotic so as to remind the gardener of how the universe intended it to look.

I believe we should all be cultivating a healthy Rough Corner in our minds. A small nook at the back of the brain that ensures we never fail to get goosebumps when we’re told a mad-as-hell idea, no matter how batshit it may be. It’s important to keep this Rough Corner ragged and free to grow as nature intended, because great things have been achieved by those who believe in weird ideas …

Adobe Digital Editions not recognizing NOOK

In the past I’ve encountered times where I will open Adobe Digital Editions, connect my NOOK to my PC, and find that ADE doesn’t recognize it. Here’s the work around I’ve found that works:

Open Adobe Digital Editions.

Connect your NOOK to your PC with a USB cable.

If you’re on a Mac, you’ll have to have the Android File Transfer Tool installed and open it.

If you’re on a Windows machine, you’ll find the NOOK folder in Windows File Explorer.

With Adobe Digital Editions opened, and Android File Transfer Tool or your File Explorer opened; Right click on the title you’d like to move, and from the details menu click Open in Finder, or the equivalent on Windows — likely open ‘folder/directory”.

With the Finder window or File Explorer window containing the Adobe Digital Editions content in it open, and the Android File Transfer Tool or Windows Explorer window with the NOOK folder visible, drag and drop the content from the ADE window to the NOOK folder.

With that, I was able to see it in my library on my NOOK.

Pixel 7 Pro does not connect to MacBook Pro

UPDATE

This is the fix I found:

Quit Google Drive — or any cloud storage (Dropbox etc) you may have running at boot.

Close — as in full close/quit — Google Chrome.

I’m not sure if it’s a Google issue or some system level conflict with Mac OS, but hopefully it gets fixed soon. But… it’s been about a year or more now I’ve been dealing with this.

I'm finding the same issue is true for the Pixel 8 Pro as well.

For months I was unable to get my MacBook Pro (M1, 2021) to mount my Pixel 7 Pro using the Android Transfer Tool. I could get numerous Barnes & Noble NOOK’s (which run Android) to connect with no issue.

The solution: Quit Google Drive. Simple as that. Now, I might give it several seconds after you click the menu bar icon, click the settings gear, and click quit. Otherwise you might still encounter failed mounting.

Source: https://support.google.com/pixelphone/thread/196346342/pixel-7-file-transfer-not-working-mac?hl=en

Updated "Listening to"

Perhaps fitting to wait until the end of the first month of the year so there’s an actual build up of tracks, but I threw my You Have My Attention 2023 on the Listening To section of the site.

Also got my Essential playlist on there now; Which is the playlist for all the tracks that I’ve had on heavy rotation over the years.

Physical security keys for Apple ID: A lesson in the need for meticulous notes

Always fond of a service enabling the use of physical key 2FA to protect my accounts, I was thrilled to see Apple ID now has the option. I set a task reminder in my calendar to set it up, and something I expected to take 5 minutes became probably a 45 minute to hour long ordeal.

I attempted to set up the keys on my iPad but kept getting prompted for a PIN to unlock my security key. Confused, I switched to the MacBook to find the same prompt. This led me down a forum rabbit whole in which some folks say a whole bunch of users accidentally set a PIN and don’t realize it thanks to bad wording by sites, and the only way to fix it is to reset the key which means having to re-set up a bunch of accounts to work with the key again.

But one other user, having spoken to Yubico support said it’s likely a false request. No pin had been set up, but the service prompts for one, and the work around is to use the Yubico Key Manager application on you desktop or laptop to turn of the FIDO2 interface.

While I was ecstatic to finally set up the increased protection with the keys, I was left with a strong warning that I need to be keeping better ( SECURED ) notes on which services I have making use of the keys. Ideally a singular note with a rundown of everything.

The Home Team, Broadside, and Honey Revenge

Gonna see some truly great bands with infectiously catchy tunes this year!

Admittedly Honey Revenge is the main reason I bit the bullet on tickets. I found them on TikTok and was enamored with Distracted for so long. And then they dropped Ride and Rerun and I could only think about how much I wanted to support them! I copped a tee in lieu of a concert ticket. But weeks of on and off again thinking about experiencing them live… I got in just as the venue it low tix levels.

I’m psyched. And now finding myself falling further down a hole of listening to more of The Home Team and Broadside’s discography.

Realtime Inequality

https://realtimeinequality.org/

… in the last two decades income grew just 3.1% for the bottom half of US Americans, but a whopping 35.4% for the richest ten per cent.

Bruh.

Bonus link: Why the Super Rich are Inevitable | https://pudding.cool/2022/12/yard-sale

4000 weeks. Or when I found the perspective shifting moment of my week.

https://leebyron.com/4000/

I’ve lived “two thousand eighteen of them so far.”

That’s likely a majority of the weeks you’ll see. The psychologist Erik Erikson suggests that at this phase of life you focus on the virtue of care. Spend your weeks “making your mark” by intentionally nurturing things that will outlast you, raising children, mentoring others, becoming involved in your community and organizations, and creating positive change that benefits others.

Learning sign language

For the past several years I’ve had an interest in learning sign language but inevitably found myself getting lost in recommendations for apps or services to use. Some resources looked far to basic. And while I am a complete beginner, I wanted something of a challenge in terms of steepness of learning material increasing at a rapid pace. Basically I didn’t want to go through a course having only learned the alphabet.

I’m excitedly sharing the below resources I found now at the beginning of 2023, as I’m more committed to trying to learn than ever:

Beginning with the article that pointed me in the direction of the resource I’m really eager to get embedded in, Wired magazines article 6 Free Ways to Practice Sign Language Online ( https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-learn-sign-language-free/ )

Apparently Bill Vicars course ( https://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/lessons/lessons.htm ) is well known, and having only just begun the first course, I feel like it’s going to be a joy to watch, take screenshots, and learn. I will say however that in some moments things can feel very fast. Vicars has a student in the video who seems to be learning along with you and they will sometimes express having forgotten a sign they just learned, so it’s comforting to know they will stumble just as much as I (you) likely will.

As ever, I wanted to make it habit to come back to this post and fill it out with more content and commentary unless something is super deserving of an individual post.