Stupid Cold, Stupid Hat

Two weeks ago, I bought stupid hat on Amazon. Prior to stupid hat I had a blue, slightly less stupid-looking hat with a patch on it from Meow Wolf. Then I lost it, and I don’t want to buy another one from Meow Wolf because I have hopes of finding the one I lost. So instead I went on Amazon and bought a temporary replacement. The new hat is oversized, and the color is “Heather Black.” More on those two things in a moment. For Christmas, Mason bought me a stocking cap from OU. I like it very much, but… (read more)

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Super Bowl LV

On Sunday, Susan and I sat down and watched the Super Bowl. I watch the Super Bowl every year, regardless which teams are playing. The Super Bowl contains the two best teams, the best commercials, and the best halftime performances. If I only watched one NFL game each year, it would be the Super Bowl. Sometimes on Super Bowl Sunday, Susan will prepare a bunch of food. Rotel cheese dip, meatballs, pigs in a blanket and homemade sliders are yearly favorites. This year, Susan picked up Chinese food and Morgan made chocolate chip cookies. Saturday I had two friends over… (read more)

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Review: Old Skool USB HDMI Capture Device

I’ve been streaming games on Twitch (twitch.tv/RobOHara) for a few months now, and I am constantly adding software and hardware to my little bag of tricks. One limitation I’ve had is that I haven’t been able to pipe video from real consoles and computers directly into my computer. For a lot of streams emulation is fine, but to show off things like the MiSTer, THEC64, or any of my newer devices that output HDMI, I needed a capture device. Most of the devices I’ve seen for sale cost around $200, which is more than I was willing to spend. Recently… (read more)

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Bananas and Red Sauce

There’s something inherently American about Chinese buffets. I’ve never been to China so I could be wrong, but I’ve always suspected “bananas in red sauce” is a dessert more likely to be found in Tennessee than Tokyo. I’ve shopped at more than one local Asian market and never run across individual cup servings of ice cream. You know what they do sell? Bags of chicken feet and containers of blood. But not at the buffet. There’s nothing disgusting at the Chinese buffet — no chicken feet or “snake surprise” — only meat that tastes like candy and bananas covered in… (read more)

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A New Toy Enters the Ring: The MiSTer

After waiting almost a year, I finally decided to buy a MiSTer FPGA computer. If talk of cutting edge FPGA computers doesn’t interest you, I’ll spare you — it’s okay to skip this entry. FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) computers are fascinating little devices. Most computers contain CPUs with their code permanently etched into them. An FPGA has no code of its own; instead, “cores” are flashed into the chip. Imagine a magical car that could instantly change from a van to an SUV to a sports car with the press of a button — and that every day, people… (read more)

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My Highlights (and Lowlights) of 2020

At the end of every year I write a post summarizing the year’s highlights. I gather most of those highlights from blog posts and Facebook updates I’ve written. Unfortunately in 2020, I wrote the least amount of blog posts in a year since I started blogging almost two decades ago. And, unsurprisingly, roughly half of the posts featured the word “COVID.” In January of 2020, Kobe Bryant died. I remember thinking when it happened that it might be the biggest celebrity death of the year, and possibly the biggest sports-related story of the year. Little did I know what 2020… (read more)

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Google News Headlines: Christmas Day, 2020

Capturing today’s headlines from Google News for future reference. Large ‘intentional’ explosion damages downtown Nashville Christmas morning Explosion felt for miles rocks downtown Nashville, called ‘intentional act’ Multiple roads closed following explosion in downtown Nashville Recreational vehicle explodes in Nashville in apparent ‘intentional act’: Police Donald Trump Christmas Eve Tweets Attack Mitch McConnell, Stimulus, Twitter House Dems urge Trump to sign COVID relief bill Aid Holdup Threatens Another Blow for Already-Shaky U.S. Economy With Brexit, the U.K. Finds Sovereignty Doesn’t Necessarily Mean Getting Its Way How the E.U. and Britain struck a Brexit trade deal and what it means The… (read more)

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What I Watched and Read in 2020

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s post about importing my movie list into Google Sheets, I present to you my list of everything I watched and read in 2020 a little early this year. If I happen to watch or read anything between now and New Year’s, they will go on next year’s list. MOVIES In 2020, I watched 110 movies. That’s almost exactly how many I watched in 2018 (111), less than I watched in 2017 (127), and more than I watched in 2016 (82). There are 52 weeks in a year, so 110 is just barely over 2… (read more)

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Vacation Project: Movies to Google Sheets

For the past five years, I’ve been tracking every movie I watch, every television show I watch, and every book I read. I set a few parameters for myself when I started — I only track movies I watch from start to finish, entire seasons of television shows, and books I finish. I don’t track sporting events like basketball and football games or individual episodes of television shows I catch while couch surfing. I’ve been keeping the list on a standard webpage and I’ve been doing the HTML code by hand. Not only has the page become a long unmanageable… (read more)

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Lunchbox Shelves

Since moving into my new home office, Susan has been nudging me to unpack my lunchbox collection and put them back out on display. I enjoy looking at my old lunchboxes, and we agree that having them stowed out in the garage inside moving boxes (where they’ve been for two years now) isn’t bringing anyone any joy. A few weekends ago, I decided to spend a day building new shelves for my old lunchboxes. After doing a bit of measuring I determined I could fit three shelves between the top of my bookshelves and the ceiling. The wall is 15′… (read more)

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