Life is educational, and the tuition rates are starting to get to me.

Posted on November 6, 2026 by baudattitude

Before I start my rant of the day, I need to do something slightly responsible:

If you have come here because you have lost your Yamaha XMAX key fob and are currently stranded or just trying to figure out how to get your bike running again, go read this thread as it is the primary resource I used in the same situation and I feel you shouldn’t need to read the next several paragraphs of text before I link it.  Also, look up “Emergency mode” in your manual or scroll all the way to the bottom of this post where I have put a screenshot of the pages talking about it.

OK, moving on now:

I alluded to losing a family member recently.  This is the first time either my wife or I has lost a parent, and thinking about how we are almost certainly going to go through the experience three more times has been a challenge.  That’s not really a topic for today, though, because that is just a little TOO depressing.

Instead, I’d like to talk about how educational the whole situation has been, because I have had to learn about so many things that I’ve never really thought about.  It turns out that there are a lot of people who you will never talk to in your daily life but their job is to deal with the least pleasant aspects of what comes after your daily life.  Like, polite people come to your house with a stretcher and someone disappears and then you have a muted conversation in a somber office and at the end of it all you have official forms that you can give to banks to prove that someone is no longer around and you have a heavy cardboard box of ashes.

AND ALSO YOU NEED TO DEAL WITH ALL THE CRUD THEY HAVE BEEN HOARDING FOR DECADES BUT THAT IS NOT A TOPIC FOR TODAY.

It was when the funeral home called me to tell me that the box was ready for pickup that I had an idea that unfortunately led to another impromptu educational opportunity.

See, I’ve only owned a motorcycle scooter for about 8 years now, and neither of my parents had ever been in good enough health to be a passenger.  My thought was, I will go pick them up and they can come home in the top case and they will officially have had a ride on the bike.  These are the sort of weird things you think about.

So, I went out to the bike,  cleaned out the top case to make room, and rode over to the funeral parlor – about ten miles away.  When I turned OFF the bike, however, it made a beeping sound I had never heard before and the “lock” indicator on the dashboard flashed angrily in a way that was likewise entirely novel.

I tried to start the bike again, and it was completely unresponsive, and then I realized that I had last seen my keys when they were sitting in the lock of the top case, ten miles ago, and that said keyhole was now conspicuously vacant.

A visual guide. Do not be like me. Do not do this.

Putting two and two together didn’t take a calculator.  The sequence of events had obviously been something like this:

  1. While the keys dangling behind me in the lock of the top case weren’t SUPER close to the dashboard of the bike, they were close enough for the computer to recognize that the key fob was in the range where it would start the bike.
  2. At some point during the ride, the bumping and vibration of the road had made them slip out, but since the engine had already been started there was no need for the bike to check whether the fob was nearby.
  3. When I turned the ignition off, the bike did a check and screamed at me to let me know that I had been a blithering idiot.

The sum of this particular equation was that I was standing in a parking lot, ten miles from home, with a bike that couldn’t be started and couldn’t be secured because opening the seat to get my disc lock or chain needs the key fob and even engaging the steering lock, for all the good that does, needs the fob as well.

It was also nearly 4 PM at this point.

I understand that panicking is the last thing one wants to do in this scenario, but starting the recovery process with a few minutes of it helped to clear my head a little bit.

So. Panicking done.  Priorities.  I went into the funeral home and signed for the ashes.  Those came back to the parking lot with me.  It was now after 4.

The bike had come with two fobs.  The second was in my safe deposit box, in a bank that closed at 5 PM, that I might have been able to get to in that time… but only if I left a completely unsecured bike sitting completely in the open.  Oh, and I didn’t have my safe deposit key on me and the cost of drilling a safe deposit box open is, ahem, prohibitive.

The only thing that saved me was that, while I don’t have many friends in the world and even fewer that are anywhere nearby, the one who still DOES live nearby is the sort of person who asked absolutely zero questions when I texted them, in a panic, asking them to go collect my wife, get her to the bank so she could get something out of a safe deposit box, and get both to me at my current location, and do all of this in the next hour if they wouldn’t mind.

Also there was a frantic phone call home to tell my wife that someone would be arriving soon and whisking her off to a bank.

Normally I’d say “this is the kind of friend who would help you hide a body” and while this is probably the case it feels a little too close to home in this specific scenario.  Suffice to say, I owe them pretty much any favor they ask of me at any time in the future.

They even shared their location with me, so I could watch a little dot move across a map, with rush hour traffic serving to make my panic levels nice and spicy.

Thankfully, even with traffic it wasn’t TOO long before a black SUV pulled up, my wife in the passenger seat, and I traded her a heavy cardboard box for a new key fob, confirmed that it started the bike, and watched them disappear into the sunset – they WERE heading west, and it WAS setting, this isn’t just me being poetic – before I started retracing my steps, hoping against hope to see my keys winking at me from a gutter.

Spoiler: Nope!  I went back and forth along my route, the entire ten miles, several times that day and over the next week, with no joy.

So, while I could now start and ride the bike again, I was in the position of only owning a single fob.  Oh, and also I lost a bunch of other keys, but none of them were as important so they weren’t really occupying head space.

Replacing a fob at the dealership is… expensive.  A few hundred bucks.  I really didn’t want to spend that, and I didn’t want to explain the whole story to a bunch of strangers at the dealership.

(He says this, while explaining the whole story to a bunch of strangers on the internet.)

So I went looking for solutions, and found the thread I linked earlier, where a bunch of strangers on the internet talked about how to fix the situation I was in.

And this is where the Middle Kingdom came to my rescue, because it turns out that you can buy replacement fobs off AliExpress for like 30 bucks.  You need to be careful about getting the one that operates on the same frequency your bike uses, but thankfully there was an FCC ID printed on the fob I still had and that took me directly to a page on the FCC site that spelled it out for me.

The specific one I got was this one, but if you are in my situation you may want to do your own research.

Every fob comes with a little red piece of paper with a six-digit code printed on it.  I don’t know if there’s an official term for this, but I’m going to call it the prefix code.  Once the key is registered with the bike, this code can be used to emergency start the bike – so technically I was NOT really stranded in that parking lot, that’s one more lesson – and also can be used to register new keys.

The process of registering it is a bit tricky, and this is probably by design.  You need to press and hold the ignition button in a specific pattern to get the bike into a mode where it accepts the prefix code, and then you need to enter the prefix code by holding the ignition button while a light flashes and releasing at the right time, and then there’s an extremely narrow window at the end of all this where you can press a button on the new fob – a short press, not a long press –  and the bike will accept it.  Even with watching two videos on the topic – bless you, bike YouTubers – it still took me six tries to get the new fob accepted.

Also, if you didn’t hang on to that little red slip of paper you are absolutely done for.  Do not lose it.  Some of the horror stories I came across were from people who had bought their bike second-hand and not received the little red slip of paper.  Thankfully, any registered prefix code will work so technically I now have three options in an emergency.

So in addition to all of the things I am learning about what happens when you lose a parent, I also know how to program a key fob for a 2026 Yamaha XMAX 300.

And I am glad to have had the opportunity to learn these things, because I feel that people should take any opportunity to learn new things, but I can’t help feeling like the cost of some of these lessons is getting just a teensy bit unreasonable.

Oh, here’s that screenshot from the Yamaha manual I promised.  If you’ve been brought to this page because you are in the same situation I was in, I hope it’s helpful.

Yamaha XMAX 300 Emergency Mode

Yamaha XMAX 300 Emergency Mode

 

 

 

Posted in Scooters | Leave a comment

I am officially human.

Posted on November 5, 2026 by baudattitude

To be clear, I’m not especially opposed to the use of LLMs.  I’ve definitely started leaning on them pretty heavily to help me with scripting tasks and for questions like “In the latest version of macOS, where exactly DID Apple hide this option that I’ve used for years?”

I even work with a bunch of, let’s say, younger people who need to communicate with customers on a regular basis and the difference between the emails they write and the emails grammarly outputs after they push the “make this sound like an adult wrote it” button are… extreme.

For my personal writing, however, I feel the need to assure everyone that all of the wild takes and blatant misuse of language you find here are my own words.  I just haven’t known how to do this before.

Thankfully, someone mentioned an AI detector named “Pangram” in my vicinity recently, and while it doesn’t let you do MUCH for free it let me throw my latest post at it.  Unsurprisingly, it came back with a result of “the very idea that you think this text might have been written by AI is insulting to every computer on the planet, and you should feel bad for subjecting me to it”.

Which is fair.

Make sure to use a humorous and self-effacing tone and reference current controversies around AI use in a lighthearted way.  Include at least one spelling error.

 

Posted in random | Leave a comment

45 rpm in a 33 world.

Posted on November 4, 2026 by baudattitude

I should probably workshop my article titles a bit before I decide on them.

Like, I know that collecting records is a thing now – at least, whenever I go into a Barnes and Noble I am stunned by the number of $60 albums on offer – but are 45s still a thing?  Do the people spending that kind of money on a record know that they used to be cheap and that you could buy single songs for like 79 cents but they came on weird platters with huge holes that played at a different speed?  Does it really matter?

I like the title, and this is a vaguely music-related post, so it’s kinda thematic.  Moving on.

Today’s experience that I want to tell people about started from this thing:

This is a HiBy M500, or more specifically a “HiBy Digital M500 X Hatsune Miku” which is a Hatsune Miku-themed version of one of HiBy’s budget Android-based “Digital Audio Players”.  I use this to listen to music while working because, well, while it is theoretically a smart device and runs Android, it’s pretty clunky and not particularly well-suited to doing anything other than music playback – which it excels at.

The idea was that by using this as my music source, rather than using my phone, I would be less prone to distraction.

That would be lovely, if it worked, but this is MY brain we’re dealing with here.  It does things like glance over at the display of the player and think:

“Huh.  I wonder how I could take a screenshot?”

And I Google that and the answer is simple.  Power button + Volume Down button.  Nice.

This is kind of a funky device, though.  It doesn’t have a “Volume Down” button;  it has a volume knob.

“I wonder if holding Power and spinning the knob down a notch will do the same thing?”

And that worked.

And if that were all it did, this would have been a much shorter story.

It didn’t JUST take a screenshot, though.  It displayed a thumbnail of the screenshot with  a little share icon next to it.

I tapped the share icon to see if I could get it from the Android DAP over to my iPhone, and there were a couple of options: “Bluetooth” and “Quick Share”

You can’t share photos to an iPhone over Bluetooth, full stop.  Quick Share gave me a handy QR code to scan that took me to a web page, it didn’t work out in the end either.

At about this point, you (the reader) might be making helpful observations like “gosh, you seem to be very distracted by this thing that is supposed to reduce your distractions” but I assure you, dear reader, that we are just getting started.

So.  I have a screenshot now, and there’s a possibility of more, and now I’m invested in getting them off the DAP.  Naturally, my mind goes to cloud services, so I downloaded Google Photos from Google Play.

Google Photos couldn’t see the screenshot I’d just taken of my screen, but it DID show me a bunch of photos that I had taken during the year or two when I owned an Android phone.  That kept my attention for a minute or two, but they also made me realize that syncing photos to Google, even if I could figure out how to do it, wouldn’t be very useful considering how many photos I had already synced to the cloud 15 years ago without ever realizing it.

I stepped back a bit at this point, because I felt I needed to recalibrate, and I realized that it was silly to employ a cloud service for this task when I had a rather nice NAS already being used for syncing screenshots from all of my devices into one central place.

Now, Synology has a “Photos” app that is designed for the specific task of syncing photos to their NAS devices, but it didn’t seem quite right.  I didn’t want to set up a photo library on the NAS, I just wanted them on my iPhone and / or my Mac.

Synology Drive, their general-purpose file sync utility, seemed much better suited to this task, and after a little tweaking I had my phone screenshots copying up to the Screenshots Team Folder that all of my other devices use as a network destination for screenshots.

This worked, after a very minimal amount of tweaking.  Task complete!

Well, kinda, because my brain isn’t about to let me stop there.

Having gotten this far, why couldn’t I get these images the rest of the way and get them automatically imported into Apple Photos?  

That seemed like a great plan.

I’m pretty sure my employer would not have thought so, at this point, because I’d long-since abandoned any pretense of getting any work done until I’d figured this out, but I justify this sort of thing by pointing out that a good deal of the value I provide is in being able to attack problems like a… like a…

“what’s the name for a group of piranha, anyway?”

…like a school of piranhas.  I attack problems like a school of piranhas, which is to say that there is a lot of flailing and splashing about and probably a lot of pain and at the end of it all I have dealt with the problem that was brought to me.  That is the value I bring to the organization.  Sometimes solving extremely random tech problems is just part of the process.

It is somewhat questionable whether they would see it in the same way, but that’s the sort of philosophical question best left in the theoretical.

“where was I?”

Oh, right.  I’d gotten screenshots from the DAP to automatically copy up to the “Screenshots” Team Folder on my NAS.  I just needed them to get into Apple Photos and then I would be done.

Now, I’ll beg a little forgiveness at this point, because I’m still kind of stuck in old habits and it took me a little bit of searching the web and reading 11-year-old Reddit posts and 15-year-old blog articles before I realized the proper way to attack the problem was right in front of me.

I haven’t always had the most polite words for Siri, but the steps she had me walk through here were perfectly functional and resulted in the desired effect.  Any screenshot taken on the HiBy M500 goes into the Screenshots folder, and now any screenshot that hits that folder will be copied into Photos automatically.

So, yeah.  This has been your view into the apparently-this-is-how-ADHD-works-mind of a middle-aged guy who can’t just leave well enough alone.

 

Posted in homelab, random | Leave a comment

2026 Wasn’t the year of the Linux Desktop for me, and it was a good thing.

Posted on November 4, 2026 by baudattitude

That may be the single most clickbait title I’ve ever written.  Before you get out the pitchforks and torches, it’s only a good thing because it let me avoid a supply-chain attack that could have made for a very bad day.  Linux gaming and Linux in general are in the best place they’ve ever been. On with the story!

For some background, until about a year ago I was a daily NIKKE: Goddess of Victory player.  Actually, I was playing three mobile games at once AND logging into World of Warcraft and between all of that and the biological demands of eating and sleeping and the financial demands of holding down a 9-5 job I wasn’t actually doing anything else with my life.

So I dropped two of the mobile games a year ago and got myself off the WoW treadmill about six months back.  I’m still playing Genshin but even that is mostly fifteen minutes a day to log in, do my daily commissions, and throw resources at characters to make numbers go up slightly.  I have a lot more time in my life.

I have booted up NIKKE a couple of times when there were big story events or interesting collaborations, and there’s another big one happening right now that wraps up the first story arc.

Yes, the game has been running for like four years and is just getting to the end of the first story arc.  For a game ostensibly about staring at jiggly robot butts, it has a lot of writing.

So, I patched the game in preparation for setting aside a few hours to see how that ends.

Here’s the thing, though.  I patched the iPad version of the game, not the PC version, because after I dropped all of those mobile games I started filling my time with more traditional single player games and I got tired of the way I couldn’t just boot up a PC game and jump right into playing it without first dinking around with settings for a couple of hours.

At that time, I bought a PlayStation and have mostly neglected my Steam library since.

I thought I was just being lazy, and admittedly this is true… to a point.

Getting back to NIKKE though, the PC version is distributed by Level Infinite, and they were compromised in a big way last month.  Someone managed to pull off a supply chain attack that inserted a remote access trojan and data exfiltrator into the embedded web browser used by Level Infinite launcher to display launcher assets, and because it ran before the actual game started you could get yourself compromised just by the act of booting the launcher to patch the game.

Said trojan does all kinds of fun* and exciting** things, like stealing passwords, session tokens, and crypto wallets.  It probably does more stuff, but I won’t get into the full list.

The short version is that it’s a bad time for anyone who got this dumped on them.

Even when running under WINE, where you’d expect the application to be sandboxed, it was able to pull off an attack because apparently WINE makes your home directory, or at least your Documents folder, visible to applications running in the bottle?  I did not know this previously and am not sure how true it is, but it seems plausible.

Anyway, I booted my computers that can still boot Windows into Windows and checked whether they still had the NIKKE client installed and whether they showed any signs of having picked up the unwelcome visitor.  It appears, fingers crossed, that I am clean, and that this is a case where being lazy didn’t just save me some time spent tinkering around with settings but also saved me days of changing passwords and having uncomfortable calls with my bank.

One saving grace to the whole thing is that NIKKE players have built a community tool to check for the threat’s presence and are sharing information on how it works and how to know how badly you’ve been pwned.

I’ve also seen a take that shows that there is a possibility for humor even in very trying circumstances, and I wanted to share it.

If you’re not familiar with the game’s story, there are evil robot invaders from outer space that are trying to kill all the humans and in desperation the humans invented powerful – if rather bouncy – combat cyborgs to fight them off, and a lot of the plot revolves around what happens when these cyborgs start asking for things like “rights”.

Further complicating things for mankind is that NIKKEs can become corrupted and suddenly your  bouncy combat cyborg is trying to kill all the humans.  Dealing with corruption and the aftermath of corruption is a major part of the storyline.

So, when criminals exploit a flaw to sneak code into the game launcher that is supposed to be your faithful servant that updates your games and suddenly it is stealing your bank details instead, well…

They’re calling it the most “Lore Accurate” hack ever.

 

 

* not actually fun

** not actually exciting

 

Posted in PC Gaming, videogames | Leave a comment

Proof that I really don’t look at my stats page much.

Posted on October 31, 2026 by baudattitude

About a week ago, I made a post in which I mentioned that while traffic to this blog was fairly low, at least it was consistently about a hundred people every day which I felt was pretty good for a blog that is mostly one middle-aged guy rambling about whatever game he’s most recently played or whatever piece of technology is currently making me miss the days when I still had hair to pull out in frustration.

And, as part of that post, I got curious about WHERE these visitors were coming from and one thing led to another and I realized that Google had not been indexing the site for at least a decade.

Anyway, I fixed that.  Here are my site stats from Google for the last week.  These are not super impressive stats but at least I exist on Google again.

And just to bring this home, here are my site stats from Google for the last twelve months.

So I really do NOT know where the people who find this blog are coming from.  Other search engines?  Random RSS feeds?  The mind boggles.

The Google Search Control Panel doesn’t let me pull much more historical data.  It let me pull numbers from July 1 2025 to present, and I won’t bother with a screenshot because it was exactly the same.

If I was actually trying to get traffic, I think this would go down in history as one of the greatest own goals of all time.  Absolute peak.

 

Posted in random | Leave a comment

It’s the end of October. I should play a spooky game.

Posted on October 29, 2026 by baudattitude

If we look back to last October, I decided that it was seasonally appropriate to make a serious attempt at coming to terms with the Resident Evil series, as it’s one of those long-running series that I’ve never managed to click with and when I see a series with that many games I get curious to find out what people see in it.

I didn’t particularly get on with the first game in the series, but once I got to the modern remake of 2 it was off to the races and didn’t stop until I’d played through Village and preordered the then-upcoming Requiem.

So, this October I thought I’d do more of the same and get on with some more spooky gaming.  I had a whole list planned out… and then there was a death in the family and I suddenly had a ton of responsibilities, and getting sucked into a bunch of games didn’t seem as important.

I did make an attempt to play the remaster of Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse, since I hadn’t played it since the fan translation of the Wii game.  It didn’t go well.  It turns out that I don’t have patience to spare and it’s a game that demands patience.

Nonetheless, with about a week left in the month I decided that I was going to play SOMETHING.  So I walked over to my game shelf, scanned the spines and decided that I was going to play a Kirby game because I’d bought it in Japan and had never played a Kirby game for more than a few minutes and he turns into a car or something and it’s very cute and…

…and then I put it back and picked up Maid of the Dead instead.

I didn’t know much about it that wasn’t obvious from the cover art.  It had maids in it, and the title kind of implied zombies.  I couldn’t even remember buying it, though it seemed like the sort of thing I would buy.

Fortunately, my wife filled in the missing piece there.  Apparently she had seen it on Amazon or somewhere and decided it looked relevant to my interests and had sent me a link to it.  More evidence that marrying her was the best decision ever.

It opens with a dramatic story of two friends caught in the middle of a zombie outbreak with one tragically sacrificing themselves to save the other and the pathos is only slightly diminished by the careful use of camera angles so you can see up one of their skirts.

You know, some opening scenes just set the entire mood for a game.

When it finally got to gameplay, however, I realized that this was the SECOND game I’ve played this year with the exact same concept, which is a huge time saver as I can simply reuse a lot of my previous post about Wedding Witch.

Enter Wedding Witch Maid of the Dead, which is Vampire Survivors but with boobs.

Full disclosure: I haven’t actually played Vampire Survivors.  I’ve played a fair number of games that were reportedly inspired by it, but not the original.  They’ve all struck me as “Robotron:2084 but with a skill tree”.  Which is fine, because Robotron:2084 is one of my favorite games of all time.  I have spent a lot of quarters trying to save the last human family.

So is Wedding Witch Maid of the Dead just “Robotron:2084 but with a skill tree and boobs“?

Yeah, probably.

To be clear, there’s no actual nudity in the game.  It’s degenerate, but not to the point where you couldn’t play a quick game on the living room TV with your parents visiting.  I mean, they’d probably be pretty disappointed in you.  But would they be any more disappointed than they already were?  If you’re the kind of person to buy Wedding Witch Maid of the Dead, probably not.  They’ve already given up.

OK, that was fun, but I should probably stop there as the two games are very different.  Whereas Wedding Witch is a very story-light game that’s basically a roguelike, Maid of the Dead has a lot of story and a set number of pre-designed levels.  I don’t think there’s any of the randomness you expect from a roguelike at all, and rather than a single rather undefined character you have a whole cast with their own quirks and motivations who are all trying to survive in a Zombie-infested Akihabara and coincidentally thwart the evil plans of Legally Distinct Umbrella Corporation.

This extends to having a Legally Distinct Ada Wong as one of the antagonists.

It’s an 8-chapter game, with most chapters having four levels, and the first few give you a slow drip of information about the zombie virus and why your maid army is the only hope for humanity as you slowly build out the army from a single pink-haired klutz and her heroically-self-sacrificing friend to a full cafe of heavily-armed tactical maids.

There’s also an adorable mad scientist with glasses.  PEAK.

In between rather long – and fully-voiced! – visual novel style story segments, you do a lot of shooting zombies that drop experience points that you can spend on upgrades to shoot zombies better, and at the end of every mission you are scored on how well you did and you can buy some permanent upgrades for your maids to take into the next level.

I will say that the scoring seemed very lenient.  I only ever saw two scores: S-rank and C-rank, with the C-rank coming only when I was overrun by zombies and failed a mission:

There’s also a little mini-game around reversing the effects of the zombification virus on the characters, and I will not post screenshots as it’s the bit of the game you would probably feel least comforable playing with anyone else watching.

One thing I would have liked to see in the visual novel segments was some Live2D-style animation.  The character sprites have mouth movements and some different facial expressions, and the character bodies have a couple of states depending on whether they are armed or not, but that’s about it.  I’ve played a few of Qureate’s other games and they used an E-mote system for sprite animation, but those also tended to have only one main character to animate so it may have been prohibitively expensive to apply to a cast as large as this game has.

Anyway, the first five chapters are all about you recruiting your troops before the final build to the climax, and then level 6-1 is where the game says “We’ve given you everything you need, do you know how to use it?”, because the difficulty spike in that level and the next was quite jarring.  It took me a few attempts to get through the levels in chapter 6, and at one point I went looking for some advice because the strategies that had gotten me that far were not working.

I will sum up the advice, as follows: invest heavily in drones.

After that chapter, though, the difficulty drops way down and it’s a breeze to the final confrontation and some well-deserved credits.

My save file said I spent 12 hours in Undead Akiba, and I enjoyed all of it.  There are a lot of side stories to unlock, so you could spend a few more hours reading, and there’s a survival mode that I expect is just to see how long you can last.  It’s 20 bucks on the Switch eShop or on Steam, and I feel it gives you a lot of game in your game for that money.

 

Posted in Switch, videogames | Leave a comment

I assure you, this was of critical importance.

Posted on October 25, 2026 by baudattitude

I’m about six months shy of twenty years of posting stuff here, and about a hundred people – or, more likely, random web crawlers – stumble across one or another of my posts every day.  That’s not exactly huge, but it’s still kind of flattering.  Hopefully, most of them have found whatever it was they were looking for when they came here.

It’s also been a little over nine years since I changed the header at the top of all of these posts, and I figured it was about time.

The old header, here, was a photo of a segment of my games shelf taken back in 2017:

And this is roughly the same part of the alphabet today:

Here’s a bigger version, if you’re curious and want to read spines:

As recently as a year ago, this would have been rather less interesting.  Sometime in the middle of 2018, shortly after the release of Dark Souls Remastered, I decided that I was done with collecting physical games, would sell most of the ones I owned, and was going to be a strictly digital gamer going forward.  And, with the exception of buying cheap Japanese and Asian releases of Nintendo Switch games, I even managed to stick to that plan.

I mean, yes, that’s a pretty big exception.  My only defense is that the yen exchange rate has been quite nice if your paychecks are issued in $USD.

You would think, then, that Sony’s announcement that they were killing physical media in 2028 would have had me smug in the notion that the world had finally gotten around to catching up to me, but it had entirely the opposite effect.  I’ve been getting new releases on disc and even buying some slightly older releases for cheap.

Fortunately, I have no interest in rebuying all of the Saturn and Sega CD games I owned once upon a time.  When I sold off THAT particular collection, well over ten years ago, I was gobsmacked at the absurd amounts of money people were willing to pay.  I did not have any inkling that the real absurdity had yet to begin.

I try to avoid looking at what a copy of, say, Panzer Dragoon Saga or Keio Flying Squadron sells for these days, because the last time I looked I discovered that both are well past “new motorcycle scooter” territory and flirting with “used car”.

That level of madness has not, fortunately, affected PS4 and Xbone games… for the most part.  I’m glad I picked up Gravity Rush 2 when it was like $40.

Looking at the old header, I count 30 games, and about six of them came into my life, sat on a shelf, and left my life unplayed.  That’s a little embarrassing, but at least that’s 80% “I bought this thing and actually played it” which is something.  The new header has 45 and, well, I’ll work on getting to at least that 80% mark at some point. Probably after retirement.  Many of them are duplicates anyway.  I need to stop buying Fatal Frame II.

Also, I have a 3D printer now.  I’m sure 3D printing was a THING back in 2017 but it definitely wasn’t at the “want thing -> look up on Maker World -> push button -> thing appears” level of accessibility that it is now.

Furthermore, a decade ago I would not have measured dollar amounts in terms of how much scooter it could afford me.  That’s a notable change in my outlook on life.

I’m impressed that WordPress continues to be a thing that exists and where I can continue rambling at the internet strangers who come this way.  I know that the actual WordPress SOFTWARE is still a thing, but I half expect them to get rid of their blog hosting gig at any time.  I guess if and when that happens I’ll need to decide if I should move this to a dedicated host or start a Substack or something.

Followup: After mentioning that probably only web crawlers even visit this site anymore, I got curious enough to go to my Google Search Console, which I haven’t logged into in some years, to see exactly who was visiting and why.

It turns out Google hasn’t been indexing me since WordPress moved all hosted blogs over to https.  In 2016.  So, anyone who HAS been coming here has been coming here looking for very old articles indeed.  I’ve corrected that, and maybe there will be a resurgence of people looking for helpful information on, uh, whatever the topic of this blog is on any given day.

 

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In which, delusions meet metrics

Posted on October 20, 2026 by baudattitude

So, like a lot of people these days, I always have a phone on or near me, and eventually there was a smart watch and a sorta-smart scale (it reports my weight to the phone when I get on it every Monday morning, I’m not sure if that’s really “smart”) and I have the health app on my phone linked to the EHR at my doctor’s office so those are all talking back and forth. My bank watches my credit score, Amazon and Walmart know what I’m buying, Steam and PSN know what I’m playing, YouTube and Crunchyroll know what I’m watching… in general I just have a lot of devices that are keeping track of what I’m doing at any given time and it’s all being logged in ways that are sometimes more helpful than others.

So, when my insurance company sent me an email offering to send me a little monitor to stick on my car window that would sync to my phone and check my driving patterns and maybe cut my rates, I figured one more set of metrics was a good thing.  After all, I barely drive since moving to full-time WFH back in 2019 and I haven’t been in an accident in 30 years, I must be a safe driver worthy of some healthy discounts.

Well, the little white box arrived and got synced to everything without too much fuss, and after a few days of letting it monitor my driving I opened the app expecting it to say extremely nice things about me.

This is not the screen I saw at the time.  This is the screen I see TODAY.  The screen I saw at the time had recorded 10 trips and both my “Steady braking” and “Smooth turning” scores were in the 30s, which is very bad indeed.

My initial reaction was to be rather upset.  After all, I’m a good driver, right?  It must just be being picky.

Then I noticed that I could review every trip it was tracking and that it would helpfully put up little icons for every “event” used in scoring and it was, well, humbling.  Lots of “oh, yeah, I did kind of stop hard for that yellow light when I didn’t need to” and “I mean, sure, I take that cloverleaf exit a LITTLE faster than the sign suggests I should, but I like the way it feels…”

In short, it wasn’t wrong.  There were a lot of places where I was driving a little recklessly, where I’d been driving a little recklessly for years, and even if it was only being done when there weren’t other cars around the app doesn’t know that it was safe at that precise moment in time.  (Yes, this is my flimsy justification.)

The monitor just sees those extra G forces that make that curve feel more exciting and makes a little note to the effect that I probably shouldn’t be looking for “exciting” when I’m just going to the mall.

At least I don’t tend to speed or over-accelerate, I guess.  And I don’t use my phone when I’m driving, though I’m sheepishly admitting here that I will occasionally glance at my wrist for a notification.

In the trips SINCE, now that I am paying a little more attention to things like stopping smoothly and maybe not chasing that centrifuge feeling through the curves, my score has been slowly improving.  I’ve still had a couple of dumb turns, which I’ll admit to, and one case where I legitimately needed to slam on the brakes because someone pulled out of a drive-thru, but the app is starting to give the meatbag behind the wheel a little more affirmation.

Maybe I’ll even earn that premium discount I thought would just happen on its own.

 

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New challenge: Making Oticon hearing aids work with an Apple TV.

Posted on October 19, 2026 by baudattitude

Several months ago, my wife got cool bionic ears a pair of hearing aids made by a company named Oticon.  I don’t have the exact model number at hand, but I understand they’re very good and even work as a stereo pair and are designed so you can use them with your mobile phone or tablet.

I’m not sure, come to think of it, whether they have a microphone built in.  Presumably they must if you’re supposed to be able to use them with a phone?

They’re also listed as compatible with Macs, though we haven’t tried that, but are expressly incompatible with the Apple TV.  I’m not sure why; maybe there’s some Bluetooth standard they don’t support.

Oticon’s solution for this, and indeed for all other conundrums involving hearing aids and your TV set, is a little box called the Oticon TV Adapter, a small box with optical and analog audio inputs that pairs to your hearing aids and routes television audio to them.

It’s unobtrusive, works off a simple 5V USB adapter, and the process of pairing the hearing aids to it was one of the simplest things I’ve ever done when it comes to wireless devices.  You turn them on, lay them on top of the box, it blinks at you and then you set your hearing aids to a new “program 3” that exists alongside the existing two programs that the hearing aids come preset with.  It’s very straightforward in what it does.

Problem is, it needs audio in from somewhere, and that somewhere would normally be the television.

Naturally, I make things more complicated than they need to be, because I’m using HomePods with our Apple TV instead of the TV speakers or a traditional speaker setup.  I also use the eArc channel on the TV to feed audio from the PS5 back into the Apple TV so it can output game audio to the HomePods.  There is nowhere in this chain to tap into with the Oticon box.

Like I said, complicated.

For a while, I was doing this little dance where we’d tell the Apple TV to use the TV speakers instead of the HomePods, and there was a cable hanging off the headphone jack of the TV and this went into the analog inputs of the TV Adapter and if we wanted to hear TV audio we just unplugged the headphone cable and if we wanted to hear audio from the HomePods we went back into Settings on the Apple TV and set the audio output back to HomePods.  It was annoying, needlessly manual, and just a lot of friction when all she wanted to do was sit down and bing some Netflix.

Then we replaced our TV set, and the new one didn’t have a headphone jack so the little dance didn’t work any more.  I tried to make things work with the optical out from the TV, but I couldn’t get the desired solution, which was one in which she and only she could hear audio.

It took me several days to figure out an answer, it was dead simple and I feel stupid for not considering it before.

Several manufacturers make tiny boxes that are designed to turn non-Bluetooth speakers into Bluetooth speakers.  Here’s the one I decided on (this isn’t an affiliate link, and I have no connection to the company, so this isn’t an endorsement beyond the point of “it works for me”): 1Mii B06+ Bluetooth Receiver, Hi-Fi Wireless Audio Adapter, Bluetooth 5.3 Receiver with 3D Surround aptX HD aptX Adaptive for Home Music Streaming Stereo System what a mouthful.

I synced this to the Apple TV as if it were a pair of Bluetooth headphones, ran an RCA cable from it to the analog inputs on the Oticon TV adapter, and… it just works.  Like, there’s a button in it and you hold down that button and a blue light lights up blue to let you know it’s working and audio feeds into the TV adapter and out to the hearing aids and when you’re doing you hold down the same button and the blue light turns off and the HomePods automatically take over again.  The button is kind of small and recessed, so I put a little bumper thing on it to make it easy to press in the dark.  Again, not an affiliate link and not an endorsement.

It’s honestly so simple that I didn’t even think it was worth mentioning, except that I did quite a lot of web searching on this issue and never saw it mentioned.  So, maybe someone will stumble across this post in the future and it will be useful.  That’s my hope, anyway.

Random thought: Do people still say “TV set”?  I guess if you’re old enough to need hearing aids you probably still say “TV set”.  I’m going to leave that in.

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Adventures in International* travel.

Posted on October 18, 2026 by baudattitude

I love visiting Japan.  This is unlikely to be a surprise to anyone who’s read any previous posts on this blog, or really to anyone who even glances at the header image.  I acknowledge that I am very weeb-coded.

I don’t, however, love airports.  I’m not quite as nihilistic as the Douglas Adams bit on airports from his Dirk Gently novels, but they’re not really places I want to spend a lot of time, especially when dealing with security lines or the ruinous prices American airports ask you to pay for food.  I’m also not fond of the constant squeeze in economy class.

So, in the last few years, I’ve put some effort into making the process less awful, starting with doing enough flying and spending enough on my preferred* airline’s mileage card that I’ve gotten a bit of a boost in status and can more easily get better seats.  I also have lounge access which is a great perk and solves the food problem and we will not discuss the yearly fee associated with the credit card that gets me this access.

When I say preferred*, by the way, I recently looked at a statement and realized that the reason I have a flier account with them in the first place is that they’re the airline my company used when they would send me places back in the 90s.  So I’ve been flying them for 30 years based on what some HR person decided back then.

So that’s great, but none of it addresses the security lines which are the first source of stress when embarking on travel.

Shout out to Minky Momo for teaching me the word “embarkation”, by the way, though until roughly 10 seconds ago I thought it was spelled with a C.  Anime is educational, y’all.

To deal with those, there are a couple of “Trusted Traveler” programs, and since one of the benefits of my ruinously-expensive credit card is reimbursement for the application fee for Trusted Traveler programs I decided that it would be a good idea if my wife and I could both breeze through security using them.

So, we sent in our applications, got our “conditional approval” emails, and were suddenly faced with the problem of the final step, which is scheduling an appointment for an interview to finish the process.  This isn’t easy to do, because there aren’t a ton of offices where we can get this done anywhere near us and the appointments are booked months in advance and difficult to get, especially if you want to schedule two interviews on the same day.

But, there’s a loophole.  You can do what’s called “Enrollment on Arrival”, which is where you get an interview when you’re returning from parts foreign.  No scheduling needed, just show up with your conditional approval and documentation and sit down and wait for a CBP agent to talk with.  If you find yourself in our situation, I recommend this.  If you live in a major city with an international airport and can schedule an interview locally… maybe do that instead.

Hence, our plan:  We would fly up to Vancouver, which is technically international in that Canada appears to still be a sovereign nation and get our interviews done in the tiny piece of the Vancouver airport terminal that is officially US soil.  All in one weekend, so I wouldn’t need to miss work.  What could possibly go wrong?

Well, it started with damn near missing our flight thanks to a massive security line, which would have been a terrifically ironic turn of events, but somehow we made it on to the plane and landed in Canada and made it to our room at the airport hotel.

I mean, the AIRPORT HOTEL.  Getting to watch planes from the hotel room was pretty neat and the soundproofing was impeccable.

My wife had stayed up all night out of an abundance of caution, so she immediately crashed – that’s probably not a good word to use in reference to anything near an airport, come to think of it – leaving me with nothing to do but explore a strange city’s train system.

Serious kudos to Vancouver for having pretty decent transit, at least from my limited experience.  I had a little trouble getting from the Canada Line to the Expo Line, but that was entirely on me and my inability to notice signs.  I went aboveground instead of realizing that I should be connecting underground, and spent a little time trying to find the next station from the wrong layer of the map, as it were.

I at least got a brief walk around Vancouver’s waterfront and some pictures of neat buildings.

No idea what these are.  Would be hilarious if they were for some really utilitarian process and I’m just taking pictures of, like, a water treatment plant or something.

Why do some of the most evil corporations, ones I interact with on a daily-to-weekly-basis, get the coolest looking towers?

I eventually did figure out the Expo line and took it to a video game store that had shown up on the first page of Google results, which isn’t the best research method in the world but paid off on this occasion.

Just look at that window.  This is a store that commissioned an artist back in like 2001, when someone might have thought that Ulala belonged on the same couch as Chun Li, and has just stuck with it through the years. It’s glorious, and the stock on hand was pretty impressive as well.  I’m not sure anyone will pay Modern Retro Prices for a Vic-20 RAM expansion cartridge, just as one example, but if you’re the target customer for that they have a couple in a glass display case, with enough other rarities that I think everyone is guaranteed to see at least one Holy Grail for their own collection.

I was sorely tempted to drop like $120 USD on a collector’s edition of “Food Girls”, because it’s a quirky little management sim that I quite enjoyed, but common sense prevailed and I just bought a few very cheap Xbox 360 games.

I don’t know that I’ll ever be back to this little corner of Canada, but I’ll make it a stop if any future trips do bring me this way.

The next morning we packed up, headed down to security, got to US Customs and were directed to some modestly-comfortable chairs to wait our turn for an interview.  The space isn’t terrifically private, though they do try to at least give the person being interviewed a little space, so I was hearing just enough of the interview of the person before us to make me worry because she was being absolutely grilled about every little thing on her application.  The officer spent the best part of an hour on her before sending her on our way, and I braced for some serious bureaucracy…

…and then our interview was “give us your fingerprints.  Do you still live on X street? Your cards will be in the mail in two or three weeks”

It was, well, rather anticlimactic.  I AM NOT COMPLAINING.

In the end, it felt like a very good use of a weekend.  I’m sure that the 20 or 30 minutes per trip it saves us on future air travel will eventually add up to more than the time we spent on the process.

 

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