These are games only GOG offers sine they're all old and on Mac run via DOSBox. Turns out there are very few Mac-compatible games exclusive to GOG.

Echelon (1988, $1.50, 75% off) - a futuristic flying simulator where you roam an alien planet shooting aliens, finding artifacts, and rescuing people.

Elvira Horror Bundle (1990/91, $8, 20% off) - the only $5-$10 choice. Combination of first-person fantasy dungeon rpg with point and click puzzle solver. Never really read the description but it and the reviews make it seem interesting.

A Kiss For The Petals - Maidens of Michael (2018, $19.25, 45% off) - the only $10+ choice. Yuri visual novel with some nsfw material.

Apple Music is doing a 100 Best Albums list. The first 20 are out with comments on why each was picked.

#100 Robyn: Body Talk - I don't have this album so should check it out.

#96 Lorde: Pure Heroine - I have this one. It's really good.

#89 Lady Gaga: The Fame Monster (Deluxe Edition) - Lady Gag is one of those really popular artists that I've never really listened to. Maybe I should start.

#85 Kacey Musgraves: Golden Hour - Haven't listened to new country music in maybe decades. Not sure this is the one to restart this as it's described as "ethereal country pop".

Sat May 04 2024

Sleep 0530 to 1515 (9-3/4 hours)

• So iCloud.com syncing even with macOS Safari doesn't work. First sync goes through but next one gets stuck "Saving..."

Sun May 05 2024

Sleep 0815 to 1430 (6-1/4 hours)

• Bought the five Ars Magica 5E bundles for $134.

Mon May 06 2024

Sleep 0715 to 1445 (7-1/2 hours)

• Decision tried to charge my CC for Strategy & Tactics subscription but since it's Apple Card and two months later the security code had changed. Guess I'll have to order it online myself.

Tue May 07 2024

Sleep 0200 to 1045 (8-3/4 hours)

• In TV app it's hard to tell which Apple TV+ movies are originals vs temporary content. Going through the list you can kind of tell since the temporary content is mostly famous movies but they're not split up from original films so I use Wikipedia's List of Apple TV+ original films.

Wed May 08 2024

Sleep 0715 to 1400 (6-3/4 hours)

• Dinner at C3's. Delivery from Avenida (Philippine food). It was alright but too pricey.

Thu May 09 2024

Sleep 0030 to 0315, 1000 to 1400 (6-3/4 hours)

• DDO Astral Traveler's Coffer is the third such offering. Each maxes at 8k DDO points (approximately $40 if you buy DDO points in bulk). I bought all three because I have a lot of spare DDO points and really want the 30 extra shared storage slot each offering provides. I may buy the next coffer to get my account to 400 shared storage slots and at that point I'll have 18k DDO points which I should save just in case.

Fri May 10 2024

Sleep 2330 to 0100, 0615 to 1045, 1700 to 1800. (7 hours)

• Dave S, Dave W and I played DDO, finishing Threnal at R2.

Tesla M3 with 82 kWh battery. At $0.686 per kWh Tier 2 usage it's $57.63 to recharge battery / 341 mile range = $0.169 per mile.

Toyota Camry Hybrid 2007 city driving I'm getting about 35 mpg at $5.45 per gallon (my local Chevron) = $0.156 per mile.

So an EV wouldn't necessarily save me much. Low usage outside of the four months of Summer (so I stay at Tier 1 electricity usage) it would be $0.140 per mile. My electricity usage is such that I can do two full recharges and stay at Tier 1 so that's 12.7 miles per day of driving.

Really more of an advantage if you have solar panels and a house battery. EV maintenance cost is less (though replacing parts is quite expensive for a Tesla).

After today's announcement of new iPad Air and iPad Pro these are my current thoughts.

Airport Time Capsule --> AmpliFi Alien Router ($380 for router only)

Used to be Linksys Velop AX4200 WiFi 6 Mesh System ($250 for 1 unit). I like that AmpliFi has a screen so you can see status and it has a built-in VPN. Lack of USB port for printer doesn't matter since my current printer uses WiFi. Neither router supports WiFi 6e.

Drobo 5c --> None

Now that I stopped using my Drobo I don't really miss it. Instead of plugging in one device to access all my external media I plug in one HD at a time but the way I have it setup my main data is on one 14-TB HD and the other 14-TB HD is for archival stuff I rarely read. I then do weekly syncs to backup 14-TB HDs -- I don't really need immediate sync that a RAID system provides.

iPhone SE 3rd gen (128 GB) --> same ($480)

I'm still paying off my iPhone SE so don't expect to replace it for a few years.

Apple Watch s7 (44mm) --> Apple Watch SE (44mm) ($280)

Remains the same. Again I hope not to need replacing for a few years.

iPad Pro 10.5" (256 GB) --> iPad Air 11-inch (M2, 256 GB, Wi-Fi) ($700)

Used to be iPad mini (256 GB, Wi-Fi) ($650) but that's 2-1/2 years old so until there's a new iPad mini my emergency replacement is the just-released iPad Air. My iPad Pro is 6-1/2 years old and still works fine so don't expect to replace it any time soon.

MacBook Pro --> MBP 14-inch (M3 Pro, 11-core CPU, 14-core GPU, 36 GB RAM, 2 TB SSD) ($3200)

Previously it was configurations that came to max $2500 with tax so now I'm upping it to $3300 with tax. But this is a faster configuration (strangely 36 GB RAM is max but that should be as good as my current 64 GB RAM Intel MBP) and 2 TB SSD is minimum (1 TB for Mac, 1 TB for Windows).

My current MBP is 4 years old and works fine. I do use 4 TB space on my Mac partition but I think I can offload most of it if I had to.

Mac mini --> upgrade MBP

I think at this point the expectation is that if the Mac mini dies I should replace my MBP and use the old one as a server. My Mac mini is 6 years old (and a 2014 design) but still works fine for my modest server needs.

Sat Apr 27 2024

Sleep 0445 to 1315 (8-1/2 hours)

• Looks like DriveThruRPG classic UI is dead as I can't seem to switch back to it.

Sun Apr 28 2024

Sleep 0800 to 1100 (3 hours)

• Humble Bundle - Fallout RPG and 2D Miniatures Encore. Most of this $18 bundle is the Wasteland Warfare miniatures game with almost half being STL files. A few RPG items: Wasteland Warfare RPG and two adventures. Not worth buying for me.

Mon Apr 29 2024

Sleep 0000 to 0130, 0800 to 1445 (8-1/4 hours)

• (Windows) Microsoft Edge new tab shows so much content. Even after you disable it all there is still a search box that uses Bing, which you can't change. You can set the default search if you type in the address bar and you can make search box use address bar (i.e. when you type in search box the cursor and typing goes to address bar) and that's the closest you can get. A little weird that you start typing in one place and it automatically types somewhere else.
• (Windows) Trying to use iCloud Notes. It loads data fine. When you edit a note it wants to sync changes up fairly often but only the first sync works so I can read the note on my iPad and see the first word or two inserted; if I paste in a paragraph as my first edit then it'll sync the whole paragraph. It's done this with Edge and Duck Duck Go (which turns out uses system web framework so on Windows it's basically Edge engine), Brave, and Chrome so at this point would be using iCloud Notes as mostly read-only.

Tue Apr 30 2024

Sleep 0030 to 0530, 1130 to 1330 (7 hours)

• (Windows) Installed Steam DDO. DDO wants some DirectX 9.0c libraries (otherwise it doesn't run) and I'm using Windows 10 with DirectX 12. If you web search for "microsoft directx 9.0c download" the first hit is for DirectX End-User Runtime Web Installer which installs older DirectX libraries used by legacy applications. Once installed DDO ran fine.

Wed May 01 2024

Sleep 2330 to 0900 (9-1/2 hours)

• This weekend all MLS games are free so will be aggressively watching them since there'll probably only be free for a few days after broadcast.

Thu May 02 2024

Sleep 0030 to 0130 , 0700 to 0900, 1530 to 1830 (6 hours)

• There's been tree trimming of two trees that are leaning towards the next building. There is one apartment between me and the trimming and it's pretty loud. AirPods Pro help a little but certainly the AirPods Max were great at noise cancellation.

Fri May 03 2024

Sleep 0045 to 0445, 0700 to 1030 (7-1/2 hours)

• Didn't see the SPF record that Dave added. Did it myself with help of his notes and seems to work.

We use Gmail as our mail servers but that's a different domain than tgd-inc.com. A few days ago I got a bounce since our domain doesn't have a DNS SPF record, which basically says that for our domain mail from these servers are fine.

I sent an email to my Yahoo account and the header has:

Return-Path: 
Received-SPF: none (domain of tgd-inc.com does not designate permitted sender hosts)
Authentication-Results: atlas315.free.mail.ne1.yahoo.com;
 dkim=pass header.i=@tgd-inc-com.20230601.gappssmtp.com header.s=20230601;
 spf=none smtp.mailfrom=tgd-inc.com;
 dmarc=unknown header.from=tgd-inc.com;

I did an nslookup to see what Google has set up (v=spf1 is the line we want).

% nslookup -type=txt google.com 
;; Truncated, retrying in TCP mode.
Server:		8.8.8.8
Address:	8.8.8.8#53

Non-authoritative answer:
google.com	text = "facebook-domain-verification=22rm551cu4k0ab0bxsw536tlds4h95"
google.com	text = "docusign=05958488-4752-4ef2-95eb-aa7ba8a3bd0e"
google.com	text = "onetrust-domain-verification=de01ed21f2fa4d8781cbc3ffb89cf4ef"
google.com	text = "v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all"
google.com	text = "docusign=1b0a6754-49b1-4db5-8540-d2c12664b289"
google.com	text = "webexdomainverification.8YX6G=6e6922db-e3e6-4a36-904e-a805c28087fa"
google.com	text = "apple-domain-verification=30afIBcvSuDV2PLX"
google.com	text = "google-site-verification=wD8N7i1JTNTkezJ49swvWW48f8_9xveREV4oB-0Hf5o"
google.com	text = "globalsign-smime-dv=CDYX+XFHUw2wml6/Gb8+59BsH31KzUr6c1l2BPvqKX8="
google.com	text = "MS=E4A68B9AB2BB9670BCE15412F62916164C0B20BB"
google.com	text = "google-site-verification=TV9-DBe4R80X4v0M4U_bd_J9cpOJM0nikft0jAgjmsQ"

I added a tgd-inc.com DNS TXT record with "v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all" then tried a test email. This is also what Google Workspace Admin Help says for SPF record and I guess that's how Dave has our stuff setup with Google.

Sent email to my Yahoo account and header looks good:Return-Path: 
Received-SPF: pass (domain of tgd-inc.com designates 209.85.210.178 as permitted sender)
Authentication-Results: atlas220.free.mail.ne1.yahoo.com;
 dkim=pass header.i=@tgd-inc-com.20230601.gappssmtp.com header.s=20230601;
 spf=pass smtp.mailfrom=tgd-inc.com;
 dmarc=unknown header.from=tgd-inc.com;

Here 209.85.210.178 is mail-pf1-f178.google.com.