I haven’t had any new post ideas recently, so I thought I’d do a misc post with a bunch of things thrown together.
I rebuilt the stairs in my house recently. There was some water damage that appeared to caused primarily by a impermeable landscape fabric I used, which prevented water from evaporating near my house. The water caused wood touching the concrete foundation to get wet and stay wet, which eventually rotted the staircase which was attached to the concrete. I demoed and rebuilt the staircase in a single day while the kids were at daycare, but in a rush the stairs aren’t as level as they should be. It should be enough until we decide what to do long term with the area. I’d like to remodel the area to have exposed concrete instead of drywall, and I need to replace the stair treads anyways with something other than the OSB I’m using now.
Last night I played the new video game “Twelve Minutes.” I was intrigued by an IGN review but what caused me to pull the trigger was an article talking about how Hideo Kojima was praising it and comparing it to “Inside,” another game I liked. I played with my wife watching for about 4-5 hours last night. It’s a good game to play collaboratively. That reminds me of Girlfriend Reviews, one of my favorite YouTube channels. I tend to enjoy games that are fun for a second person to watch, so a lot of their reviews align with my interests. They recently reviewed “Zelda: Skyward Sword,” a game I never played on the original, so I picked that up and started playing it as well. My biggest gripe is not having a dedicated stick for camera control (you have to hold a button down to use the right stick for camera). I don’t really enjoy motion controls in this setup (I do enjoy VR separately though, but it’s been a while since I’ve played anything on VR).
Talking about YouTube channels I enjoy, Summoning Salt came out with a new video on the history of Super Mario 64 16 Star World Records. It’s great that a documentaries on speed run histories can be so entertaining to watch. Multiplayer games are often told in the moment, but single player speed run history can be told over the course of years or decades.
Tesla had their AI day this last week. I skimmed parts of the video. The humanoid robot seemed a little out of place and it didn’t sound like there was a clear goal for it, so that was interesting. The Dojo supercomputer part was news to me, but the skeptics point out the lack of the lack of standard measurements/benchmarks being taken. I’m also a little skeptical that they would be able to sell it as a service given their software and service ecosystems seem very closed off. It is nice to see them make large bets.
I also changed my email provider to Migadu. My previous provider decided to close up shop (not sure why). I hit Migadu’s receiving quotas pretty quickly on the trial tier because I subscribe to a bunch of mailing lists, and while they said they could raise the limit, I decided to set my own MX record and just use them as a smart host. I’m happy with the service so far. I previously talked about setting up email this way with separate send and receive channels, although I used SendGrid as an example. Most people providing smarthost as a service are generally targeting companies sending bulk email. But I think this is a good balance of the sysadmin work involved with hosting my own smtpd/imapd versus getting the benefits of sender reputation, DKIM, SPF, DMARC, etc. I miss out on spam filtering, but oh well.