the flying squirrel

A Long-Delayed Podcast Update

A long time ago, I used to keep readers of my blog informed on what podcasts I was listening to. I’m still listening to podcasts. I never stopped!

The last time I did a proper podcast update was 2008 The last time I mentioned podcasts at all was when I bought my first Android phone in 2012.

But first, a player update!

I had to retire my venerable favourite Doggcatcher because it was getting crashy and wasn’t being updated. I’d been using that since 2012. Antennapod does the main thing I want, which is put the podcasts in chronological order, not sorted by series. Your basic river of news, but in audio form. The one thing I haven’t figured out how to do which Doggcatcher did, is delete the episode when I push the skip-to-next-episode button. So I end up with a bunch of undeleted podcasts taking up space if I’m not careful. Otherwise, thumbs up so far. And being open source is nice.

I don’t have a commute anymore, but I’ll put on podcasts when I’m doing the dishes or driving or working on the house or something.

New Year; New Bullets. 2025.

Well, 2025 is the year I turn 50. That feels like a big number.
I got myself a Steamdeck for Christmas. I mean, a combination of Ellen and my parents getting it for me, in what has become creating Christmas gift-giving accounting. But it’s mine now. I like it.
I got the LCD version because I couldn’t really justify an additional $200 for the OLED screen. If I’m missing out, I don’t know it. It’s great.
The house isn’t done yet. We got hung up on bureaucracy, mostly. But we waded through it and we’re out the other side, so things are happening again. That’s nice. I’m fairly confident we’ll actually be able to move in this year. Maybe I’ll post photos. Would you like to see photos?
I started the work to migrate this blog off WordPress and onto (unless I get even more frustrated) 11ty. It’s not as plug-and-play as I would like. But I do think the flexibility it gives me will pay dividends. I guess. I’m not convinced anyone is reading this.
I did turn off comments a long time ago. So it’s not like anyone can tell me otherwise. Hit me up on Mastodon!
Hot on the heals of the Steamdeck, I picked up Dragon Age: Veilguard. I may need a whole post for my thoughts on that. It does feel nice to be rummaging around seedy, blood-stained basements in Thedas again, tho.
I’m not really looking forward to 2025 for reasons you might be able to guess on your own, and probably aren’t looking to me to get into too deeply.
As of May, Ellen and I are living together. Unfortunately, we’re living together in the house her parents are renting that she’s allergic to. That’s not great. But I’m glad we’re together.
The little guy is delightful as ever. Although I did just have to deal with a half-hour tantrum about wanting to keep wearing a very wet diaper. (Yeah, he should be toilet trained by now, but we’ve been holding out till we’re in the new house which will have no carpets).
Doctor Who was mildly disappointing but generally in line with my expectations of Russel’s showrunning. So it’s fine. I like Ncuti as the Doctor. I wish other people wrote for him more. But that’s been true of all Russel’s Doctors.
Star Trek: Lower Decks was pretty much the best.
I had high expectation for The Acolyte and was mildly disappointed (not that I thought it was bad and I’m sad it was cancelled, but I was hoping for a bit more).
The Skeleton Crew is exceeding my expectations, tho. That thing is great.
I guess I mostly watch very old franchise television.
I’d like to find ways to spend more time with friends this year. I’m not going to call that a resolution because calling it that pretty much guarantees I won’t do it out of spite.

Christmas Mixtape 2024

Alternatively: YouTube Music Playlist

It’s that time again! Grab a cup of cocoa, relax and enjoy some festive music to keep you warm on a cold winter night. And strap in, chummer. Maybe we’ll even jack into puterspace between the sleighbells and carol sings. Those flashing lights on rackmounted servers are just as festive as those on snow-covered trees.

Cover image is Christmas Tech Tree by siulzz. Liner notes under the cut.

Playstation Played Out?

There’s been a shift. I can feel it. Things are changing. Nothing will ever be the same.

A very long time ago, I got a Playstation. Actually, my parents got it for me near the end of my university career when I was generally pretty miserable. I played some games. It was fun.

A few years later, I got a PS2. That died, but I got another one. The second one died in the middle of my Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas play-through.

(I vaguely recall finishing that, but I’m not sure how. I didn’t get another PS2, and the PS3 I got didn’t have backwards compatibility. I guess I can play it on my phone now…)

(Second aside, I kinda miss my old blog. I definitely miss friends reading along and chiming in on my nonsense. I turned off comments a long time ago, because ugh, but you can always hmu on mastodon…)

I held off a bit on the PS3 because it was stupid expensive at launch. I asked my parents to buy me one for Christmas when they stripped out PS2 support and dropped the price a bit. (I got them a Wii about the same time…).

I held out about a year before buying a PS4, eventually lured by the call of Dragon Age: Inquisition.

I haven’t bought a PS5 yet. I’ve been kind of assuming there would be an attractive mid-gen hardware refresh like the PS3. Or even a game I just needed to play like the PS4. Neither has really happened. The mid-gen hardware refreshes came out, and they introduced a “slim” model that actually raised the price. Then they just announced the PS5 Pro, which is like $1000 and doesn’t seem to be that much better.

I’ve never been that much of a self-declared “gamer” or anything, but getting a Playstation and playing games on it is something I’ve been doing for a rather long time. And when I switched over to Linux (something like 17 years ago), my whole thing was that it didn’t matter that I couldn’t play games on my computer. I’ve got a Playstation for that.

And Nintendo consoles too, but they’re kind of a different thing in my head.

The interesting thing is now I can actually play games on my computer. I just did a hardware upgrade on my desktop that has the side benefit that games play really nice now.

Valve, as much as I’m not super-keen on their DRM, has been putting a lot of resources into making sure I can play games on my computer. And I’ve got a few hundred games in my Steam library already, without even really trying.

So the conclusion I’m rapidly coming to is maybe I’m not a Playstation guy anymore. (And yeah, it feels like an identity thing). And maybe I’ll just put the money I’d planned to blow on a PS5 towards a Steamdeck instead.

Featured image is 64/365 PlayStation generation by Ninac26

YouTube Channels I’ve Discovered Via My Two-Year-Old

Look. I’m well aware of Raffi’s admonitions about screentime. Sometimes you need to distract a kid long enough to get things done. We can’t all be perfect parents, okay?

The little guy’s relationship with YouTube has evolved quite a bit over his short existence to date. We started off in the YouTube Kids ghetto, with your Sesame Streets and your Teletubbies and your Cocomelons and your holy trinity of Ms Rachel, Blippi and Meekah. YouTube Kids, tho, is a terrible interface. And as he’s started to develop interests beyond nursery rhymes and alphabets that YouTube Kids was wholly uninterested in satisfying.

I’ve made a channel for him under my account, so he can have his own subscriptions and playlists and history. That is to say, so that I can have that for him. I’m calling the shots here, although his interests and preferences are asserting themselves more and more.