Just this guy, you know?

My good friend Icarus has started a podcast! A spin-off if you will, from his blog Not as Grumpy as He Looks.

More importantly, I’m on the first episode! We talk about board games, randomised combat mechanics, I attempt to talk about EVE after a couple of glasses of wine and, we discuss how perfect the latest Sabaton album is. You can find it over at Soundcloud.

I played No Man’s Sky for the first time today. It’s alright. I can hear the internet scream “BUT DAVE! WHERE’S THE HOT TAKE? WHAT ABOUT THE BRAND?” Deal with it.

I came into NMS knowing pretty much nothing about how it all works or really what it is. So if you want to watch the first 40 minutes of me faffing about and being awful at computer games, see the video below (Note to the reader from a more recent Dave: as of 2024 that video no longer exists).

I’ve got a love hate hate relationship with Halo 5. I am inexplicably invested in a series where the main character emotes less than a block of cheese. Since Halo 3 I’ve been hooked. The teenage power fantasy of being that power armoured super soldier still appeals and probably always will. I’ve played all the games to some extent and 10 months after Halo 5 was release it’s about time I wrote some words about it.

It’s that time again (just over a year in fact), I’m attempting to be organised. Well at least have a plan about what I’m doing. I probably should look back at what worked and what didn’t from the last attempt.

Pomodoro timers? Well that depends on what you’re doing really doesn’t it? I started using them as part of finishing my dissertation and they rocket. The app on my Pebble watch really helped me stay on track even if I did have a lot of waiting for calculations to run. I think this is primarily because writing my dissertation was an entirely solitary process. I wasn’t marching to anyone else’s drum so I could take those regular breaks. They don’t gel well with working at a company (yeah I do that now). Meetings get in the way, getting/giving help, not appearing to slack off. So that isn’t continuing.

I’m keeping it. I’m not sure I need to say more really. It’s an excellent device with some flaws in the software that fingers crossed will get fixed.

In the last week I’ve been using it as much as I think I used my laptop and tablet beforehand. Writing these posts, Chromecasting stuff to the TV, tweaking and updating servers. It’s handled everything very well. The battery life is great. Especially as I’m using it more like a laptop and my Lenovo has about 2 hours of light use in it.

I’ve had the Pixel C for three days and I have to say I love it! I’ve done all my non gaming “computing” on it. It’s handled it really well!

Browsing the web has been really nice. Obviously some websites are just intrinsically shit like Tesco but everything else has worked well. On occasion I’ve accidentally clicked a link when I meant to scroll which was quite annoying but it just takes a bit of time to get used to touching a tabtop screen. A very nice surprise was that CTRL+T opens a new tab in Chrome.

The Pixel C arrived today. I read a new review that was quite disparaging about it this morning (before I had mine). Like most reviews it complained about flaky keyboard and WiFi connections, poor app experiences and general poor performance.

Well, I’ve been playing with it for two and a half hours so far and as far as I can tell these problems don’t exist! Or at least I’ve got the magic Pixel C that doesn’t suffer from the problems reviewers seem to find.

I’ve wanted to replace my laptop for some time now. It’s a Lenovo U300s from 2012 and it has done a valiant job. I’ve tried countless Linux distros on it, done mountains of University work on it and lugged it all over the place.

These days my usage has changed. I don’t code on it. I don’t need to take it to University to do work. I use it to browse the web and to administer the few servers I’ve got running. I can do all of this from my tablet, at least in theory.

On Saturday I finally went to a tournament at Patriot Games in Sheffield. I double booked myself so missed the Regionals there early this year.

I took a bog standard Pre-Paid Kate deck and a HB:EtF Mega Server deck which ultimately was there to score out but hoped to pull of a Marcus Batty and NEXT Gold combo. I took Kate because she’s so damn reliable! Up until the morning of the tournament I was going to take a connections Andromeda deck but changed back to my Kate deck purely because she gets set up faster. Kate is even better when you remember to trigger her ability.

My friend Ben and I went to our very first Netrunner tournament on Saturday. It was being run by Quinns (the one from Shut Up and Sit Down) in the Loading Bar in Dalston.

The day started off at 06:30 and getting a 08:29 train from Sheffield to LONDON. That went swimmingly. A lovely woman sat next to us and was fairly interested in Ben’s last minute deck building. We got some food and headed to Dalston. We foolishly didn’t check the engineering works and the tube took us one stop before we had to walk.