To me, there’s concentration and there’s flow state. Concentration is more of a manual process where I intentionally ignore distracting events. It involves building a structure that can hold up to bumps and it’s hard work. Flow state is a groove where distractions melt away and only the task remains. One can turn into the other, and and depending on how your brain works they can both be fragile.
Mine’s around somewhere, too. I didn’t do a lot of gaming on it, but it was a very solid media streaming box for the time.
I enjoyed my Ouya back in the day.
Postman was great! The book is worth a read, too.
My family was religious enough that they made it super clear that Santa was fake. Us kids still got little gifts “from Santa,” but they were of the stocking-stuffer variety. All other gifts were from specific people. As a kid I liked getting stuff, but the more important thing about the holiday was spending time with family, and them showing their love. Gifts was one way to show, but spending time, preparing meals, and just being present without worrying about other life issues also did it. It is the thought that counts, but you have to show that you’re thinking about them. Honestly, your kids might appreciate not having to pretend they still believe in Santa. As other people have said here, don’t catch your kids in the crossfire. If there’s something they’re really looking forward to, get it for them, but label it “from Dad” or Mom and Dad if you’re feeling generous. If they don’t have their hopes on something, a trip or experience might be good. Not sure what experience fits both a 6 year old and a 12, but I assume you know your kids better than I do. As for the rest of your family, they can stick it. They don’t seem interested in participating in the holiday, so don’t include them.
Aleve (naproxin sodium) is the only OTC painkiller that reliably works for me. So first I take one, and if that doesn’t work after an hour or so, I take another and a nap.
Raytracing is still very computationally intensive, and doesn’t have enough market penetration to make sense on most modern games. Devs need to implement two solutions: a raytraced path and a raster path. The game needs to be fully playable in both, across a wide range on hardware. The largest install base for most games is still console, where RT barely exists. So RT is generally relegated to eye candy for high-end PC. Which makes it a marketing feature, not a game feature.
It’ll be interesting to see if that changes with the PS5 Pro. I expect we’ll see more first-party titles support it, but not much else until the next real console generation.
The worst thing about standups is that about once a month I catch a problem early because of what someone says. The tradeoff doesn’t feel worth it time-wise. But it keeps me from skipping them.
I got a Viture One on sale last Prime Days for $300. I also have an Xreal Air 2. The Viture One has a better case for traveling - it has a separate compartment for the cord - and it’s better if you want to share it because it has focus controls on the glasses. But I’m still trying to get the nosepieces into the right place to get full top to bottom clarity. The Xreals need a prescription lens insert, but that means they’re better if you want to use them as real glasses, and the nosepiece is more comfortable and adjustable. The case can hold the cord, but there isn’t a separate compartment so there’s a risk it’ll scratch the lenses. I can’t recommend the Xreal Beam accessory, the battery life is really short.
I picked up a set of AR glasses for my last flight and was surprised how much of a game changer they were. I plugged them into an older Samsung phone and the Samsung Dex software let me switch the main phone screen off. This gave me something like 9 hours of video time on a larger screen that I could watch in any head position, with shows I brought myself.
Different species. Jar Jar is a Gungan, the lady is Queen Julia of Bardotta.
A Sega CDX was my CD player for a while.
I’m not super bothered by Tue copyright issue - the copyright system is barely serving people these days anyway. Blow it up.
I’m deeply troubled by the obscene power use. It might be worth it if it was a good tool. But it’s not.
I haven’t gone out of my way to use AI anything, but it’s been stuffed into everything. And it’s truly bad at it’s job. AI is like a precocious 8-year-old, butting into every conversation. And it gives the right answer at about the rate a ln 8-year-old does. When I do a web search, I then need to do another one to check the AI’s answer. Or scroll down a page to get past the AI answers to real sources. When someone uses it to summarize a meeting, I then need to read through that summary to make sure the notes are accurate. And it doesn’t know to ask when it doesn’t understand something like a proper secretary would. When I go looking for reference images, I have to check to make sure they’re real and not hallucinations.
It gets in my way and slows me down. It needed at least another decade of development before being deployed at all, never mind at the scale it has, and it needs to be opt-in, not crammed into everything. And until it can be relied on, it shouldn’t be allowed to suck down as much electricity as it does.