By Roy Mathur, on 2019-06-16, at 00:09:55 to 01:04:00 BST, for Captain Roy's Rocket Radio Show, Listen
I was unable to breath through my nose, so podcasting was impossible. Now I know what a head cold is.
I bought this Boots tea tree cleanser for my itchy eye (269). It worked for a few days, and then it really didn't, and I ended up with a bleeding blister underneath my eye. See your doctor instead.
Remember that appointment (268) I was supposed to have about a month ago? Well, and you know my phone rarely rings, my phone rang. Almost a month later a person calls and says something about being off and now catching up.
I'm sad when I'm late taping a podcast no one pays me to do. Jobs where you actually get money? Come on people.
Let's catch up with the news, delete all the Chrome tabs on my phone, and write these notes up retrospectively. It's mostly seat of the pants this week. Lon Chaney or Charles Laughton? (The tabs, the tabs. Get it?)
Grrr... which is what I was going to do before I rage deleted the lot. Um... Let's sort of do some kind of show anyway.
It's never going to end. It's just one long depression and revenge tease, and I can't be bothered to get excited about it anymore.
And the radios are still buzzing. And I know the showrunner knows this is annoying.
I think they're just going to draw this out until it dissappears with a whimper.
I avoided it because it looked depressing, then succumbed to peer pressure and watched it anyway. It was depressing, but I found that I could watch it.
It was thoroughly absorbing and Jared Harris was great. Really good show.
I can't believe the Chernobyl disaster was that long ago. It seems like yesterday.
Cancelled after first season (no idea why), so I'm not even bothering.
Pity, because it was pretty good and heavy on the horror which I like.
I have cleaner, less disgusting stuff.
I cleaned my keyboard (see before picture on Twitter). I bought the canned air, but it is really easy to freeze your keycaps or drive the dust further in. Save your money---buy a microbibre flannel and dampen with water, or water mixed with a tiny drop of dishwashing liquid. You don't need alcohol. Shake the keyboard upside down, hoover it with the soft furniture brush attachment, wipe with the flannel, getting down right between the keys.
You can use the same type of dampened cloth to clean monitors and computer cases. I also rinsed my, never--before--used, plastic keyboard cover, and now try to keep my hands clean before using the keyboard.
My HP mouse broke. It just kept randomly activating the wrong windows.
My fingers had also melted through the rubber. I replaced it with a cheapo, but very retro Wyse mouse, I bought at a computer fair.
The show notes are still plain(ish) text. Look, no matter what HTML formatting I try, it's just not as flexible as plain text.*
So, what I'm doing now, is tidying up the plain text, so it looks much nicer. The line breaks also need to be in the right place and consistent, and I have to remove that terrible indenting I did early on, because I'm a coder, and I thought to deliniate sections with indentation---it was a disaster.
There's also the Unicode problem, because some of those plain text files are plain plain ASCII text created in Metapad, others were made in a Unicode aware text editor, and then there's DOS versus UNIX line endings... so much for the universality of plain text.
It's going to be a faff if I do make full HTML blog posts because remember that the ulitimate reason for these notes is to stuff them into an ID3v2 unsynced lyrics tag, which require very simple, clean, plain text... that no one will be able to see anyway because most podcast apps don't seem to display lyrics.
I did also toy with handwritten notes scanned and embedded as mp3 cover images, but then how does the non-techie end user see them at full size?
Mac Pro up to 28 core Xeons, 1.5TB RAM, 8 PCIe slots, 2 to 4 Radeon Pro Vega II Duo GPUs, upgradeable, and whereas pre-trashcan cheese grater Mac Pros looked vaguely cheese grater-like, even without creatively exercising your imagination, this one actually does look like a cheese grater. The base price is USD 5999 for an 8 core Intel Xeon 3.5GHz model, with 32GB RAM, 256GB SSD, and an Radeon Pro 580X GPU.
Apple Pro Display XDR 6K 31.6-inch monitor $4999. The stand is USD 999 or USD 199 for a VESA mount. Matte nano-texture is a USD 1000 option. It's probably worth it, but charging extra for the stand and the VESA mount is petty and ludicrous.
iOS 13 is more muli-tasking friendly, especially on the iPad. MacOS Catalina.
iTunes apps unbundled---I saw signs of this earlier when my iTunes podcast webpage started redirecting to a dedicated podcast page.
E3 happened between from 11--13.
Blah Keanu, Cyberpunk 2077, I didn't pay attention. Sorry, there's only just so much time and I was a bit sick.
I finally gave in, I tried buying some items from non-Amazon dealers and even saved some money because Amazon is not always cheapest, so in the end I caved. This is mainly because of a brand that only sells through Amazon in the UK.
While it irritates me no end helping Bezos, sometimes there is no realistic alternative unless you want to die for your ideals. I'm not a martyr, so...
I heard that the Sega Mega Drive Mini has announced the full list games it will ship with (c.42 region depending). It does not include some of my favourites, Mortal Kombat II, Chakan the Forever Man, Dragon's Fury, PGA Tour Golf, due to, one supposes, licencing issues.
Maybe someone will hack the system later and we will be able to add those games---much in the same way that the NES and SNES Minis were hacked.
Fingers crossed. It will cost GBP 69.99 in the UK, and we have covered it to death already, but you will be able to buy it at most major UK retailers, but to be safe, preordering might be a good idea.