Inside AWS, re:Invent starts sooner than you’d expect and you end up working on it for longer than you’ve planned. Through treachery and cunning, I avoided going for years. There was always someone else to pass my ticket to until 2024, when there wasn’t. After an extended professional breakup, which I initiated, Las Vegas and I were back together again. I swore the place off years ago after too many other tech conferences, but Vegas and its infinite hotel beds are inescapable.
Finished watching: Sean Combs: The Reckoning Season 1 📺 In life, people rarely get what they deserve. But the measure of a person is how those around them have fared, and the broken souls interviewed here have not fared well at all.
Bluetooth on MacBook Pros is garbage. With the M1 I thought the weakling radio was a gen 1 thing. But we’re years in and I had to plug a USB-C cable into my headphones for a stable connection tonight. The common thing across models? Broadcom radio. Apple can’t dump that supplier fast enough.
Software subscriptions made developers lazy. Adobe was always an oddball when selling packaged software, but they got incredibly lazy once they could farm subscribers. Cancelling subscriptions is my new hobby.
I was scribbling away with a Bic ballpoint pen earlier when I asked myself “Where did this come from?” It’s an interesting tale of Marcel Bich buying the patent from László Bíró. Using Swiss watch technology for the ball point and new ink chemistry to improve the flow. A marvel of engineering.
Simply put: this new update will override your previous settings, and Gemini AI will have access to your Phone, your Messages, your WhatsApp, and your Utilities to “help you”.
Gmail’s dropping POP3 support in January ‘26, so I logged in to check how it was doing fetching mail from my ancient ISP email account. Turns out the provider shut it down last year and I never noticed. So long POP3, you served us well.
Watching: The Mighty Nein Season 1 📺 Hundreds of hours of Critical Role improv compressed into 8 episodes results in generic tropes instead of developed characters. Give me a reason to care. And that modern dialogue? It will date fast.
When it comes to entertainment you’d enjoy, these days it’s probably buried three levels deep on a streaming service you don’t subscribe to.
“Dracula: A Love Tale” presents a visually appealing but ultimately shallow romantic narrative that fails to capture the depth of female empowerment found in the original story.
Possibly the worst-organised but best-written Dungeon Master’s guide in history. A player wants to do something? Gary has a table you can roll against for that.
Orson Welles' docudrama “F for Fake” explores themes of authenticity in art through the charming yet deceptive stories of fraudsters, blending soulful monologues with moments of self-indulgence in a creatively low-budget production.
Now that all my players can read, this evening was spent watching them panic in HeroQuest. “Why did you open that door?!?” Welcome to 1980s board games, kids.
Television adaptations of Stephen King’s works often struggle with character development, but the engaging cast in the new series The Institute provides a refreshing take on familiar themes.
Two atmospheric horror movies I enjoy at Halloween are Prince of Darkness & In the Mouth of Madness. Both by John Carpenter. Science meets evil in the first, man destroyed by cosmic horror in the second. There’s this delicious sense of growing dread in both. Recommended.
The show fails to deliver a compelling supernatural spy thriller, lacking tension and engaging storytelling, ultimately making it unworthy of viewers' time.
The hidden cost of business travel. I just dropped €200 updating my tech kit (USB-C cables, travel adapters, battery packs). And that was optimized for minimal gear. Tech tax is real. M1 MacBook Pro to soldier on for another year.
Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines 2 - shiny but soulless. The original was crufty code with genuine storytelling and fun. Fan mods kept it alive for two decades. Both had torturous development, but only the first will be remembered.
Critiquing vibe coding misses the point. Vibe coding is today’s Visual Basic for people who prioritize results over programming craft.
WiFi 8 silicon testing has started, but consumer devices are years away. Most home WiFi problems aren’t about speed. They’re reliability issues. WiFi 8 focuses on stable connections. If it delivers consistent performance, that’s what we actually need.
