After six seasons, The Crown, Netflix’s period drama about the Royal Family, has ended. I joined The Crown right before its second season aired and have been hooked ever since. I grew up during the Charles and Diana years so I was familiar with them but I wasn’t familiar with the Queen or the rest …
A Story of Keyboards
In October I came across an article on ArsTechnica about a kickstarter for a 1,200 page, two volume book chronicling the history of keyboards. While I had never previously been interested in the history of this device I use every day, I’m still a retro computing enthusiast and was naturally intrigued. After reviewing the campaign …
A Rubber Band and a Floppy Drive
I bought an electronic typewriter recently; I'll tell you about it later. What's important about this typewriter is that it includes a floppy disk drive to store and retrieve documents. I was disappointed to discover that the drive didn't work - it couldn't read or format a disk. I took the typewriter apart because I …
My New RAID
Tell me if you’ve heard this story before: I’ve done some casual research on a new product I want to get at some point in time, a Black Friday sale pops up, and boom I buy it at a discount. Well here’s one more. Remember my posts about my multi-tier backup strategy, starting with my …
My New Dock
I’ve had a Belkin Thunderbolt 3 Express dock on my desk for 5 years or so. I got it with my work Mac, a 2018 MacBook Pro, to enjoy the single-cable docking experience. It’s worked great with my personal Macs as well, providing power, a 60 Hz refresh rate on my 4K display, and enough …
My New Monitor
bought a 27” iMac in 2010. This was pre-Thunderbolt, and at that time, the 27” model had something called Target Display Mode which allowed it to be used as a monitor for another computer. This made it easy to work from home and was a primary enabler for my 2014 gaming PC purchase. It worked …
My New Gaming PC
My gaming PC arrived about a week after I ordered it. Setup was quick and easy, with Windows 11 being easy to get used to. My games were set up within a couple days and most utilities, except for one particularly annoying one, were setup as well. The case is ever-so-slightly wider than my previous PC …
My Next Gaming PC
I bought my current PC in 2014 to replace my aging iMac so I could play modern games at high frame rates with the highest settings. My initial build included an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 that could hit 30 - 40 fps at ultra settings and 1440p resolution. After adding a second GTX 970 and …
Sunflowers
I've previously described my love for Tulips with their easy-to-photograph profiles and interesting depth from above. I found a way to photograph lilies in a pleasing way and used focus stacking to create naturally unachievable depth of field this spring. Now I'm adding sunflowers to my list. My favorite part of flowers is seeing their …
Summer Games 2023
Now that fall has begun, it's time to reflect on the summer, on games specifically. I usually don't play many games during the summer; it's usually time to go outside and enjoy the beautiful weather and get some sun. Unfortunately this summer was an obnoxious mix of never-ending rain and hot, humid scorchers. As a …
Relatively Ambitious 