Leaking meters and flying shower curtain rods

Today was not as expected of the typical Monday, time change or no. It began with, well aside from getting up with the sunrise, lots of water. Turns out that the old unused water meter over the hot water heater decided to spew water everywhere. Today was mostly not fun in that regard.

For bonus points reaching that point where I tell the dogs, either I go take a shower and make some lunch or I’ll pass out and hit the floor, of course I end up hitting the floor ^_^. The tub was so wet from the cleaning up, and neutralizing a spider, that I ended up taking a nice slip.

Ejected from the shower screaming, “Aiieeeeeeee” and hit the floor on top of the shower curtain. On the upside putting the shower curtain rod back up was less of a pain in the arse than I remember, and my rear end is still harder than the bathroom floor.

On the positive side the dogs napped really well after everything was done.

Tags and categories

An upside to moving platforms, is now I have a system with independent ideas of tags and categories.

I’m thinking that this could be a useful means of separating more specific searchables from broader topics. Something that as time and variety have gone on, I’ve tended to avoid with everything crammed under Blogger’s idea of labels.

Alternatively it could just be a pain in the arse.

Theme updates

While still considered provisional, I’ve updated a few things.

  1. Color scheme
    • For starters, something inspired by the green phosphor style of monochrome monitors.
    • Debating between this retro direction and more contemporary tighty-whitey typography.
  2. Side bar
    • Archives added to side bar.
    • Categories added to side bar.
  3. Pages
    • Privacy Policy sorted over.
    • Think I’ll stuff these in a menu at some point.

Yes, the 2018 iPad Pro has aged well

https://9to5mac.com/2023/03/02/2018-ipad-pro-2/

I’m inclined to agree with much of this. The 2018 model came into my group of hardware and started running circles around my other devices, particularly my third generation Core i5s.

Right now the only good reason I see to upgrade are support for secondary displays and perhaps thunderbolt. Features I desire in my tablet but that aren’t worth the price of a new iPad when everything else is dandy.

Well, if you discount that the base 64GB of storage is getting less roomer, the battery is aging, and I’m sometimes tempted by the idea of an cellular capable iPad. Those are all interesting points, but still sufficient for the time being 😛

Signs of getting old

Random things that make me feel like I’m getting old: having seen entire generations of hardware make the transition between hot, sexy, powerful computers and being the oldest equipment this side of a dumpster.

Also, it’s probably a good thing that I don’t have room for a server rack in my closet.

New website, same address

Migration from blogger is nearly complete. I think the only real content to be migrated are my static pages, and that should be wrapped up later this week. Theme related details are provisional and may be monkeyed at my leisure.

A key new awesomeness comes with this migration: HTTPS all the things! Well, at least that are hosted here!

I’ve set my feed burner’s original feed to the new source. I apologize if the migration interferes with anyones newsreader, and recommend that you migrate accordingly.

  • Old RSS: https://feeds.feedburner.com/spidey01
  • New RSS: https://blog.spidey01.com/feed

The old feed should continue to function fore the foreseeable future, in as much as Feed Burner does. Any bookmarks to the raw spidey01.blogspot.com address should be updated to blog.spidey01.com or spidey01.com, feel free to go HTTPS if ya do because I am.

The canonical address has been blog.spidey01.com for quite a few years, after all.

Future Plans: Moving My Blog

Something that I’ve had in mind for a while since the end of Google Photos being such a nice free storage system, and again since there was no luck with HTTPS: migrating away from Blogger, again.

Details are still being planned, but I expect this to occur sometime in the near future. Accessing things by blog.spidey01.com or even spidey01.com, should continue to work (and gain HTTPS). Anyone using the raw blogspot address will probably not see a lot more posts once the transition point.

FeedBurner will probably get pointed at whatever the new feed source ends up, but left as is beyond that. But no idea how that will deal with the wider migration, and FeedBurner isn’t exactly known for a lack of bugs these days.

Why am I planning on migrating platforms? Well, it’s a fairly simple set of reasons:

  1. Lack of support.
    1. While Blogger was once one of the top blogging platforms, at this point I imagine that it only continues to exist because it would cause more trouble for Google’s own blogs to migrate somewhere else than maintaining the system.
    2. Google’s never been very forth coming with details here :P.
  2. Tablet experience
    1. I prefer share -> post to share -> copy -> switch apps -> goto web page -> create new post -> paste.
    2. Google has done such a fine job of maintaining their own app that it no longer exists.
    3. Likewise, APIs and things for third party clients are increasingly pissed on from what I can observe.
  3. HTTPS
    1. haven’t had any luck combining my custom domain with my taste in TLS, and I’m basically done dealing with what passes for Blogger’s documentation and UI :P.

SIGNALIS – Survival Horror Done Awesomely

It’s relatively rare that a contemporary game invokes so much feeling of games like Resident Evil or Dino Crisis, yet don’t become overly difficult or annoying. Much less, one that tends to have a more entailing story than DooM or Zombie Master.

SIGNALIS on the other hand….wow. Not really into the pixel art inspired style, but I love the choice of a quasi top down twin stick approach (and tank controls for you gluttons out there). It even tickles my inner wonders for how much our future has in common with Blade Runner.

By and large though, I think SIGNALIS is the closest I’ve experienced to the original Resident Evil since the original Resident Evil and its Director’s Cut on the original PlayStation. One thing I also love, is that it draws a similar balance: there is plenty of opportunity to prefer running past and dodging the monsters out to eat^H^H^H slice your face off, and a fair enough supply of ammunition to shoot your way out of hostile situations. But both talents are advised given the ratio of enemies and ammunition. You can run past or blast most enemies, but certainly not all the enemies.

While the door animations thing in RE was somewhere between dull after its zillionth door more than suspenseful, the occasional first personification of puzzles and certain environments are neat. Somehow it manages to invoke both that classic survival horror genre “What the fuck am I supposed to do with this?” along with keeping it simple enough that the back tracking is not extreme, and like good ol’ RE, often if you explore everywhere it’s likely that some clue or solution will eventually present itself.

Being a fan of Metal Gear Solid, I also rather loved the radio frequencies bit :).

Since the games use of German exceeds my limited ability at reading it, and I’m unable to read the occasional Chinese characters that pop up; I’m also quite happy that the game manages to be quite friendly to those of us who can’t read All The Things ™ in the art language and need translation; or at least, with some effort there is usually enough English available that it isn’t a problem. More often you’ll be asking yourself what can you do in a puzzle than needing to worry about translation.

Also, did I mention it was great fun? Well, at least if you enjoyed some of the survival horror games around the turn of the millennium.