Sat May 17 2025

Sleep 0345 to 0845, 2 hr nap (7 hours)

• Bought Against the Darkmaster Bundle. At first glance layout and art and look are all quite polished.

Sun May 18 2025

Sleep 0345 to 0930, 90m nap (7-1/4 hours)

• Going to move my Twitch subscriptions to first of month and use my checking account debit card (for the 10 debit card uses per month requirement). Too bad there’s no easy way to do this though I guess every subscription service is like that except maybe American Express where you can change the billing date.

Mon May 19 2025

Sleep 0015 to 0845 (8-1/2 hours)

• Bought Treasures of the Troll King for Mörk Borg at $4 (60% discount). At least one review said this is an ok adventure for MB and I guess I’d agree that MB adventures can be heavy on layout/graphic design and one good idea but lacking in organization and adventure design.
• Apple released iPadOS 17.7.8 so hopefully will be able to play STFC on my iPad.

Tue May 20 2025

Sleep 0700 to 1200 (5 hours)

• So hard falling asleep last night so I finished watching the last two episodes of Netflix before the subscription expires.

Wed May 21 2025

Sleep 2315 to 0800, 30m nap (9-1/4 hours)

• C3+S Dinner. Porridge and Things. CSr forgot to add an extra serving of porridge so a bit sad but I had some and it was tasty as always. I got the sausage fried rice and CSr also got beef chow fun. And there was gai lan for vegetable dish.

Thu May 22 2025

Sleep 0230 to 0915 (6-3/4 hours)

• macOS Sequoia 15.5 released. After the last iPadOS update issue I think I’ll wait a couple of weeks and mark it in my calendar as a reminder.

Fri May 23 2025

Sleep 2330 to 1230, 0800 to 1300 (6 hours)

• I had this 1024-piece puzzle almost 40% done and then got on a roll and spent 6 hours last night finishing it. Total time 13 hours. I’m not playing this game again. The dopamine as you add each piece is too addicting.
• Ooh, another month of Netflix. Clashes a bit with last month of Disney+.

GOG is doing an Atari Spring Sale. The sale is mostly really old games and many I don't know their Atari association. These three though are from Atari or IP owned by the current Atari.

Atari Recharged Bundle ($21, 65% off) - "modern" re-imaging of classic games:

Asteroids: Recharged
Breakout Recharged
Centipede: Recharged
Gravitar: Recharged
Yars: Recharged
Black Widow: Recharged
Missile Command: Recharged

Crusade in Europe ($1.50, 80% off) - "Crusade in Europe is a classic real-time simulation game from the 80s designed by Sid Meier and Ed Bever. The first title in the "Command Series" of tactical wargames from Microprose, the game features real-time battles that test your skills as a commander."

It's too bad there are no turn-based war-games in the sale. This is close. I assume it's real-time but you can pause.

Across the Rhine ($1.25, 80% off) - "You've got complete operational control: from a single tank platoon to an entire American or German battalion. Become part of a famous unit, such as the US 10th Armoured Division, and follow it through actual WWII combat scenarios."

Tactical top-down view as you see your units slowly move and fight.

OSE Treasures 2 fixed price bundle goes along with the other OSE bundle. For $18 you get:

The Shrike (Silverarm, 167 pages, $29) - "A huge modular sandbox adventure set in an abandoned fragment of Hell"

Wyvern Songs (Swordlords Publishing, 112 pages, $15, Own) - "Wyvern Songs is an anthology of original Old-School Essentials adventures written by Brad Kerr". Four adventures.

The Dream Shrine (Swordlords Publishing, 24 pages, $10, Own) - "The Dream Shrine is a compact dreamworld escape-room adventure module for Old-School Essentials (levels 1-3) and Cairn."

In the Shadow of Tower Silveraxe (Gelatinous Cubism, 64 pages, $10)
Through the Valley of the Manticore (Gelatinous Cubism, 48 pages, $10)
The Scourge of Northland (Gelatinous Cubism, 68 pages, $10)

This one is nice although I own a couple of them. But now that it's two bundles I'll probably not buy either and instead spend it on the Sixth World Shadows bundle.

Sat May 10 2025

Sleep 0245 to 1045 (8 hours)

• DDO with DS and DW. Last night DW blew up a bit, which really for him is getting snippy. Guess he really wants to play DDO whilst I’ve been putting it and Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands off when there are only three of us. So we will be playing DDO as much as possible for the next few months.

Sun May 11 2025

Sleep 0445 to 1230 (7-3/4 hours)

• Called mom to wish her happy Mother’s Day. I thought we’d probably visit them for Father’s Day but later CSr and Steph said we’ll visit Sun/Mon Memorial Day Weekend.

Mon May 12 2025

Sleep 0400 to 1200 (8 hours)

• iPad OS 17.7.7 released and installed. Now whenever I quit/restart Star Trek Fleet Command it’s not logged in and goes to my Lvl 12 account from a long time ago. Then have to sign in to Scopely and load the cloud save so at least can get back to my game. But all badges and new user warnings seem to be reset so that’s annoying. On my iPhone with iOS 18.5 it’s working ok so I guess I’ll use my iPhone for now and hope Scopely has an update later. I guess there’s also the desktop app which I haven’t installed.

Tue May 13 2025

Sleep 0630 to 1230 (6 hours)

• Ran a load of the dishwasher and it didn’t flush enough water to get to the leak under the kitchen sink. I thought it had the time before that. Anyway eventually I’ll take a closer look and maybe duct tape will be enough of a patch.

Wed May 14 2025

Sleep 2330 to 0245, 0815 to 1300. (8 hours)

• Tweaked my back a bit reaching back to scratch my back. If I twist my torso or bend it sometimes I can feel it.

Thu May 15 2025

Sleep 0530 to 1300 (7-1/2 hours)

• I noted last Monday that iPadOS 17.7.7 update made Star Trek Fleet Command unusable. Now the update is unavailable and I guess there will be a new update later. I’ve been playing STFC on my iPhone SE and it’s been a bit rough. I like to use two screens but iPhone screen is so small that I can’t really focus on the small screen and on my iPad/MBP screens. Guess I should have waited to apply the update.

Fri May 16 2025

Sleep 0100 to 0900 (8 hours)

• I forgot you can do an iPad restore to go back to a previous OS version. Apparently only restore from the last backup to your Mac (not sure about iCloud saves) but I’m fairly sure I did backup before updating iPadOS. Restore does erase the iPad so you lose some data (and newly installed apps) unless that data was stored in iCloud… Mind you even if you have an encrypted backup (which stores login and other secure info) the backup doesn’t have the OS or apps. OS is installed from backup installer on your Mac and apps are re-downloaded from the App Store…. Unfortunately I guess I backed up after installing iPadOS 17.7.7 and unfortunately if an app is no longer on the App Store you can’t re-download it.

Bundle of Holding's OSE Advanced Fantasy variable price (currently $20) bundle contains:

Old-School Essentials Advanced Fantasy Player's Tome ($15) & Referee's Tome (own the latter) - this is equivalent to AD&D 1E Player's and GM's manuals.

Advanced Fantasy Reference Booklet - quick reference rules and tables

OSE Adventure Anthology 1 ($12.50) - "The Jeweler's Sanctum" by Giuseppe Rotondo; "Curse of the Maggot God" by Glynn Seal; "The Sunbathers" by Brad Kerr; and "The Comet That Time Forgot" by D.M. Wilson and Sarah Brunt."

OSE Adventure Anthology 2 ($12.50) - "Barrow of the Bone Blaggards" by Chance Dudinack; "Cathedral of the Crimson Death" by Diogo Nogueira; "Shrine of the Oozing Serpent" by Nate Treme; and "The Ravener's Ghat" by Brian Yaksha.

Halls of the Blood King (own)
Holy Mountain Shaker (own)
Incandescent Grottoes (own)
Isle of the Plangent Mage (own)

So I own half of this already. Theoretically about 30% discount for remaining items (assuming those remaining items are at about 30% off during a sale) so worthwhile to buy.

Sixth Worlds Shadows bundle is for Shadowrun 6E. There is also a Shadowrun Sixth World Essentials bundle which I have all but one item (guess you can count the core book in the bundle which is a different city than the core book I have). This variable price bundle is currently at $41 and gets you:

Sixth World Companion (210 pp)
Hack & Slash (186 pp) - core Matrix rulebook
Body Shop (194 pp) - core augmentation rulebook
Shoot Straight (160 pp) - "provides runner-to-runner advice in a range of areas, from covert ops to con games to making sure you don't blow your big score in one place"
Shadow Cast (178 pp) - "explores 20 different character archetypes"
Emerald City (208 pp) - Seattle sourcebook; I suppose this may have repeated material from my Shadowrun core book
Astral Ways (186 pp) - metaplanar setting book
Null Value (146 pp) - "lists ten threats that can fuel campaigns, character development, and more"
Wild Life (194 pp) - core critter rulebook

Even at $40+ it's a nice bundle though sadly lacking adventures. Still, will buy it since I have the base bundle.

Sat May 03 2025

Sleep 0430 to 1100, 45m nap (7-1/4 hours)

• Christopher Sr was unavailable last night so we played Gloomhaven. Dave S was unavailable tonight so more Gloomhaven. I got my +1 attack so my rain of arrows does base 4 dmg (and usually +1 from my battle cards). A way to recover a burned card would be nice.

Sun May 04 2025

Sleep 0400 to 1200, 45m nap (8-3/4 hours)

• Noticed that Sonic Internet now has Sonic Mobile Communicator phone app so you can make and receive phone calls and view voicemails. A little janky in that it has its own login and settings (some on the app but most on the web site). Internet only of course but supposedly allows you to seamlessly move calls to and from cellular.
• Also there’s Sonic 10 GB Fiber. Not at my location and it’s a service upgrade but nice to see that it’s an option for some customers.

Mon May 05 2025

Sleep 0030 to 0730 (7 hours)

• California Climate Credit in this month’s energy bill ($58.23). I thought the purpose was to encourage people to buy energy saving things. But now that I read it the money from California’s Cap-and-Trade Program. Greenhouse gas emission credits that utilities buy to offset extra CA fees for emissions. A bit complex since at least some of those costs are passed to consumers and the Climate Credit offsets some of those increases. I guess it’s to encourage utilities to convert to green energy so that they don’t have to buy emission credits.

Tue May 06 2025

Sleep 0415 to 1215 (8 hours)

• Bought Shannon’s This is Free Trader Beowulf: A System History of Traveller on PDF. It was on Bundle of Holding for $8.

Wed May 07 2025

Sleep 0215 to 1030 (8-1/4 hours)

• Haven’t been able to view ADB discussion board for months. Finally remember to look in console and see that it’s an http page that loads http content and so Safari blocks the insecure http content (they’re using an old version of Discus though maybe the fault is in how it was setup rather than the software). Searching on line you used to be able to disable this security but not for current Safari. Alternative is to use Chrome which allows you to disable it. Guess for now I’ll live without.

Thu May 08 2025

Sleep 0530 to 1300 (7-1/2 hours)

• Been trying to install macOS on an external HD. When booting up from the external HD it eventually crashes during boot and kicks off another boot cycle. This is both using macOS installer to install or using Carbon Copy Cloner to duplicate the internal SSD (which itself uses an unsupported Apple utility). But at least with CCC all the data is there and if I need to use an old app I could CCC it back to the internal SSD. Would have to be some dire emergency for me to do that.
• Time Machine backup to Airport Time Capsule says I already have a backup, so it’s by machine id of some sort not by OS installation. For my non-Airport backups I’ll have different APFS volumes so won’t be an issue.

Fri May 09 2025

Sleep 2315 to 0045, 0500 to 1100 (7-1/2 hours)

• CSr not around so Gloomhaven with DS and DW. DS is getting pretty competent in this game.

Halfway through one month of Netflix and I've watched:

The Sound of Your Heart (2016) [-] partly watched
Lovestruck in the City (2020) [/]
The King’s Affection (2021) [/]

And aim to finish watching:

Boss & Me (2014)
The Story of Pearl Girl (2024)
Welcome to Samdal-ri (2023)

2025-05-19: Also will finish At the Moment (2023)

I moved my server from Mac mini to MBP Intel since I was using it also as a media server. Since then I've moved my music and videos to my MBP M4 and the MBP Intel has started doing some heavy processing around midnight for an hour or two. I researched and maybe it was Spotlight indexing Bootcamp partition but even with that excluded the task run hard when I was trying to sleep. So I decided to clean install macOS.

First I wanted to move the existing install to an external HD. Trying to install macOS on an external HD comes up with an error because Macs for several years now are by default setup to ignore booting from an external drive (security feature). You have to boot into Recovery Mode than run a utility to turn it off and with that utility you can also change OS verification — by default older unsigned macOS are not allowed to boot since they might be compromised without any security updates; that is if there is a more recent supported macOS that runs on your machine.

But on booting from external HD it kept crashing and rebooting by itself. Even using Carbon Copy Cloner 6 (which uses an Apple APFS utility) to clone to an external HD still had that problem.

I had totally missed that with APFS you can have multiple volumes on a device and each volume can have its own macOS install: Use more than one version of macOS on Mac. I created another volume, ran macOS installer and installed in that volume and everything worked. Mind you my MBP Intel has an 8 TB SSD so trivial to do. On my MBP M4 with a 512 GB SSD I might be able to pull it off (currently using 200 GB of my SSD). Anyway, you use Startup Disk (or reboot with Option key) to change to the other macOS.

Also the other thing is that booting macOS from an external HD and USB 2 connection is rather glacial. I can see why everybody says modern macOS requires an SSD.

Sat Apr 26 2025

Sleep 0315 to 1115 (8 hours)

• Christopher Jr’s birthday party at Beresford Park. They had a magician/balloon animals woman and her assistant. Also a bouncy house and lots of pizza.

Sun Apr 27 2025

Sleep 0300 to 1200 (9 hours)

• Fri and Sat we played Gloomhaven. I’m eyeing adding +1 attack to my rain of arrows (not the actual name as rain of arrows is a different card). It’s 150 gold though.

Mon Apr 28 2025

Sleep 1045 to 1630 (5-3/4 hours)

• DDO Cormyr will be opening up for everyone April 30th. It’s the only 64-bit server and I guess that allows it to handle more people simultaneously. When I was playing Cormyr last month I didn’t see better performance but I guess maybe less lags and freezes is the advantage and that’s hard to tell.

Tue Apr 29 2025

Sleep 0700 to 1330 (6-1/2 hours)

• Had a bit of diarrhea in the evening which made it hard to get a late night nap before Nemo started streaming at 0100 PDT.

Wed Apr 30 2025

Sleep 2300 to 0130, 0845 to 1515 (9 hours)

• Bought Coyote and Crow bundle. Declined on Hellboy Expanded Universe bundle because mostly about peripheral characters I don’t care about.

Thu May 01 2025

Sleep 0115 to 0900, 1200 to 1400 (9-3/4 hours)

• Wanted to unban two Discords I temp banned (which allows you to bulk delete the last few hours of their messages). But couldn’t find them in Server Unban List via search. Turns out we have too many entries in the list (11 pages) and maybe I could have found them by scanning but the list is not in urban date order or alphabetical order. Instead I unbanned the 8 pages of deleted_user_xxx accounts which I guess were all bot accounts banned by Discord. Then I was finally able to search for the two users.

Fri May 02 2025

Sleep 0145 to 0945 (8 hours)

• For my birthday Christopher Sr took me to lunch (I chose Potato Guys) and a movie (I chose Thunderbolts). Both were good.