Blog

The thoughts, opinions, happenings, and just plain ramblings of a seemingly boring person.

New Mobile: Google Pixel 5

Categories Geekery, Technology

The two-and-a-bit year cadence of getting new phones continues! My previous phone, the HTC U11+, has performed admirably over the past two years, and for the most part, still is. It's been a great phone, especially for the multi-day hospital stays I've had over the past few years.

However, as seems to be the pattern with my phones, at the two-year mark little things start to creep in. With the U11+, its screen would sometimes show weird hues after touching it, and also leave horizontal lines that would take a few seconds to disappear. Very distracting.

Although I've been … Read more →

Arsenal Win the FA Cup, Yet Again

Categories Football

Last night, for the fourth time in seven years, Arsenal won the FA Cup. It's almost becoming tedious with the ease at which they win it 😜. 14 times in total now, they should just rename it the 'Arsenal trophy' 😄

Once again, Arsenal were the underdogs, but once again they proved the odds and the pundits wrong.

They again defeated Chelsea, with the same 2-1 scoreline as 3 years ago. Other than the first 10 minutes, Arsenal were well worth the win. Nothing went right in the game for Chelsea. They lost three players to bad injuries, and conceded … Read more →

1 Year Post-Transplant

Categories Life
Framed picture saying 'Welcome home' with a diagram of a human liver with Lego pieces overlaying the left lobe.
Something Des and the kids made for me after coming home from the hospital. I received a partial liver (the other part of the donor's liver went to a child), so the Lego part is 'under construction' because it will mostly grow back.

Today marks one year since I had my liver transplant. It's hard to believe a year has gone by already, but looking back, a lot has happened in the past 12 months.

I commented to Des that it feels like the transplant wasn't that long ago, but other events, like getting on the NBN, seemed … Read more →

The ‘R’ Word

Categories Life

There's one word that fills an organ transplant recipient, or potential transplant recipient, with dread: 'rejection'.

TL;DR: I've just experienced an episode of rejection of my transplanted liver, but I seem to be coming out of it ok 🙂.

Before starting on the transplant process last year, I thought that organ rejection was an all-or-nothing thing. I thought that if rejection happens, it was like: 'well, good luck, go back on the list and hopefully you'll have a better time with another organ'.

That's not actually the case. Apparently, rejection is a common thing in the first … Read more →

Migrating to VS Code

Categories Technology, Work
Friendship ended with Atom, now VS Code is my best friend

I should probably add a disclaimer to start this post. At the time of writing this post, I work for GitHub (and by extension, Microsoft (who own GitHub)). As a GitHub employee, I have no more insight into Atom's or VS Code's development or roadmaps than any other member of the public. Both Atom and VS Code are developed as open source communities on GitHub. All opinions in this post (and more generally on this blog) are always my own.

For the better part of the last 5+ years, I have used Atom as my editor of choice … Read more →

Ori & Remote Play Sequels

Categories Gaming, Geekery, Technology
Ori and the Will if the Wisps

Ori and the Blind Forest is one of my favourite games of the past five years. I've played through it multiple times, and even purchased it a second time (as the Definitive Edition) not just to get more content, but to also give an extra bit of money to the devs (I had bought the original game with a heavy Steam discount).

I have always played the game using Steam's "Remote Play" feature (previously called "Steam Home Streaming"). The game runs on my Windows gaming PC in our study, but I play the game on my living room TV … Read more →

NUC Replacement: Nvidia Shield TV Pro

Categories Geekery, Technology
Nvidia Shield TV Pro

We've been using an Intel Celeron NUC for the past four years. It has served as a Plex client, a (buggy) Steam Home Streaming (now called Steam 'Remote Play') client, and occasional console emulator machine.

It did an admirable job over that time, but it was time for an upgrade. Windows Updates became an annoying – and on the Celeron – a time-consuming distraction. Steam Remote Play was buggy on it, and Plex had announced the intention to deprecate their desktop clients (I was using OpenPHT, which has also been mostly abandoned). Plus, the hardware wasn't keeping up … Read more →

New Keyboard: Logitech MX Keys

Categories Technology

Logitech MX Keys

In the time since my last post on getting a keyboard, I'm now on my second one since then. 😆

The Corsair Strafe that I was using since 2015 started stuffing up at the start of last year, with flickering lighting and key double-presses. It is quite disappointing for these Cherry switches to only last ~4 years.

At the time, I still wanted mechanical switches, and nothing came close to the silence of the Cherry MX Silent Reds. So I got a ten-keyless keyboard which I liked the layout of: the Fnatic miniSTREAK.

I really loved the smaller … Read more →

Why I Have Always Hosted My Own Blog

Categories Geekery, Internet, Rants, Technology

I started this blog in 2004. Since that time, there have been a lot of changes in writing and publishing your own online content.

To give a bit of perspective, back in January 2004, WordPress had only (by a matter of days) hit 1.0, and still wasn't really a thing yet. Back then, it was really only Blogger (newly acquired by Google), or older services like LiveJournal that allowed you to have a blog. To give even more perspective, even MySpace wasn't really a thing yet.

So, in the 16 years that I have maintained this blog, I have … Read more →

2019: Year in Review

Categories Life

So, nothing much happened in this past year, ey? 😂

Of course, this year can only be seen through the lens of the massive event in my life that was my liver transplant.

Now that we are also at the end of the decade, you could say that this whole decade has also been largely defined by my illness (diagnosed in 2010) and it's now hopefully-permanent solution (the transplant).

So, 2019 has been a massive rollercoaster of a year. I started a new job right at the beginning of the year, and only a few months into … Read more →