I’m have a pretty keen interest in tech but I am worried I am getting old because I don’t even know what Rust is and can’t, honestly, really be bothered to find out…
Author Archives: Phil
As U.S. troops storm the beaches of Normandy, three brothers lie dead on the battlefield, with a fourth trapped behind enemy lines. Ranger captain John Miller and seven men are tasked with penetrating German-held territory and bringing the boy home.
After seeing this, Teddy Duchamp’s fiercely proud claim that his father stormed the beach at Normandy lands very differently.
And, despite your average American displaying almost religious zeal for them, and annual public displays of “remembrance” here in the UK, I still don’t think we respect our veterans enough.
★★★★
Hyperfocus, recommendations and inception
My son is 13 and, like me, he has #ADHD. One of the ways this manifests is extreme reluctance to engage with “new” things outside his current hyper focus. Fortunately, my brother is exactly the same, so I have some experience of working around it (though for decades we didn’t understand what we were working around). However, it can still be really hard when I want either of them to try something I know they’ll love. I have to time the recommendation perfectly, or perform some sort of inception, otherwise they bounce off the idea like a fly hitting a window.
Mostly this has been around playing video games. Despite the Venn diagram of our three VG interests almost being a circle, the chances of us aligning to enjoy a game together (for more than a single session) are virtually zero.
Recently, though, my struggle with my son has been with movies. For example, with Rob’s death, I desperately want to recommend he watch Stand By Me. It’s the perfect coming-of-age story for boys coming-of-age. I don’t even want to watch it with him. I just want him to see it and feel it in his own way and time. But I’ll have to leave him to find his own way to it, which, I think, is as it should be.
Rest in peace, Rob Reiner, and thank you.
According to my #wrapstodon2025, I’m a “Butterfly”, I “frequently replied to other people’s posts, pollinating Mastodon with new discussions”. Well, if that’s the case, I hope I did more good than harm.
I’ve been watching Pluribus on Apple TV, which I’ve enjoyed, but the problem is the main character is called Carol and now I have a dreadful Neil Sedaka earworm
Frank Cross is a wildly successful television executive whose cold ambition and curmudgeonly nature has driven away the love of his life. But after firing a staff member on Christmas Eve, Frank is visited by a series of ghosts who give him a chance to re-evaluate his actions and right the wrongs of his past.
The final monologue DOES go on a bit too long but it also bought a little tear to my eye. Further positives: the Ghost of Christmas Present just seems to get funnier the old I get.
★★★★
I’ve worked professionally with data for 20 years. Today I am working with literally the worst data set I have ever come across. It’s published every week by CQC. There are formatting errors or typos in either the filename or the headers every other week. Sometimes the order of the headers or the headers that are included change. It is virtually impossible to automate. For example: https://www.diffchecker.com/3Lhlr6SF/
I have a Christmas playlist playing on my tablet in the next room. So that when I leave my desk, and my focus headphones, I remember it’s Christmas 🎄#adhdhack
Bona fides for gaming on Linux
With Windows 10 going away, and my aged but honestly capable PC unable to run Windows 11, I thought I better give gaming on Linux a serious go in 2025.
Oddly, my original foray into Tux Tinkering ™ was inspired by boredom when I lived in Tanzania in 2001. I think it was Mandrake Linux? From 2003, I used Arch Linux and so system configuration became a past-time in itself. I did have a few attempts at gaming over the years. I played a few native games like Tux Racer, Frozen Bubble and Wesnoth but also managed to run stuff like Quake and Half-Life under Wine. (That’s actually the only time I have played, and finished, Half-Life.) But from 2005-ish, most of what I wanted to play was only available on Windows and, with the introduction of Steam (and the Humble Bundle!), it was just getting easier and easier. I was still tinkering with Linux for fun. I even got connections to our virtual desktops at work up-and-running via Citrix (which definitely WASN’T supported by IT).
But by the time our second child arrived in 2015, I had no time for tinkering and very little reason to even use a Linux desktop, with work being so Microsoft-centric. Fun time was extremely limited and stability was paramount and around then I started to look much harder at Workstation distros. I used Ubuntu for a bit but I think I decided to stick with Fedora from around 2019. I mostly used XFCE back in the day, but I did enjoy the “out of the box” experience of Gnome on Fedora. But throughout that time, desktop Linux was only used for the odd thing that was just too much hassle in Windows. Like anything to do with ffmpeg or any sort of bulk file management. I was still running Arch ARM on a Raspberry Pi, so I was still very much a Linux hobbyist, but gaming on Linux never crossed my mind.
Then, last year (I think), I heard from my (now teenage) son’s friend, that SteamOS is now based on Arch. And when my son got a Steam Deck for Christmas 2024, I started paying a lot more attention to how it works. I mean, I have to really. When your boy wants to run Marvel Rivals and he’s not using the right Proton build, you gotta dig into that! And I quickly saw that gaming on Linux as a main platform suddenly looks not only doable but almost straight-forward.
So, although I do have a year of updates on my W10 install, before it really goes away, I started looking at what I might do and I guess I’ll cover that in a new post.
Grindstone is a puzzle game where epic adventures are just your 9-to-5. It’s your job to mine grindstones from the Creeps that lurk on the mountain in over 250 levels of intricate puzzles and hazards, all in the hopes of saving up enough grindstones to take your family on a much needed vacation.
So, I got 3 months free on Apple Arcade with my new iPhone and decided to try and find the “hidden gems” in the App Store. It was surprisingly hard but I did find… Grindstone!
I’ve not played a colour matching game since Dr Mario / Dr Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine but I really like it 👍
Also on all-the-platforms!