Sunday, April 30, 2023

A bit of the lookback, a bit of the now

 As per tradition, the Russia-Ukraine fight goes on, with much of the action currently around one town that neither side is willing to give up on.  Russia's "Wagner group" private army was recently complaining about not getting the ammo they need, though, so that's a promising sign.

Here at home, the weather's nicened up a bit, so I've got plenty of work in and out of the house to take care of... so of course, I decided to take the time to look back over some of my old posts (basically, 5, 10, and 15 years ago).  Some take-aways include posts that haven't aged well (for example, it was easy to mock antimicrobial pens in pre-COVID days), movies I'd forgotten I'd seen, and the fact that, originally, my plan was to post once a week or shut down the blog.  Facebook took a bite out of that, I'm sure (and have I mentioned I recently dropped Facebook when they re-activated the Orange One's account?), and there just isn't that much interesting in my life going on to make a weekly post worthwhile... so, since this blog costs me nothing, we'll just keep going with the "monthly or so" schedule I've arrived at for now.

On the electric car front, I should have my charger hooked up in my garage next week... buried electrical and run length will make for a pricey install (more than $5000 after GM's credit), but it's just too convenient to pass up.  That, and it'll pay for itself over the years... for those of you wondering what the fuel cost saving are like, based on the past month of use vs. the month of gas purchases for my old Yaris, I've calculated it out to be less than one quarter of what I would have spent otherwise.  That's if I was charging at home all the time, of course.  Up to now, I've mostly charged at the level 2 charger at work, which costs me nothing.  Contrariwise, if I were charging solely at fast-chargers, the per-kWh rate on those equals or exceeds what the cost of gas would be, from what I've seen.  So, basically, EVs are great if you have someplace to charge them while they're parked, not so great (economically) if you have to rely on fast-chargers to meet your needs.

On the games/Steam Deck front, Steam did just have a Spring Sale, which triggered my inflation-adjusted cheap-bastard guidelines for getting a few games off of my wishlist (for the record, that's 50%+ off for a resulting price under $20, any% off for a resulting price under $10).  One of those that's made it onto the Steam Deck is a game called Slipways (Compatibility: Playable), which is a sort of space-empire puzzle game (that I have declared to be sufficiently different from Tiny Civilization that they don't share the same "niche").  It basically gives you the 4X game experience, without the eXtermination bit, resulting in a game that takes just a few hours to complete (mainly because you have an in-game time limit for how many turns you can take).  I had to crank up the interface scaling to make it work well on my TV, and I don't know how well I'll be able to see it in handheld mode, but I have high hopes for now.

And that's about it for this time, I think.  See you in a month or so, hypothetical reader!

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