Oh, right: the 3 “bonus” slides. See, at some point, it got in my head that a lightning talk at DevRelCon was 12 minutes. Hence the original “12 pitches” … pitch. I believe the good folks at MLH/DevRelCon when they told me that the lightning talk slot was always just 7 minutes. I guess I like creative constraints, even if they’re so tight I can barely move my chest.

The remaining three pitches, cut for time (and speaking oxygen):

Give them data nobody else has

• #treats
• #unique

This pairs with doing the work to know your reporter (#7), helping them count to a listicle (#2), and “Detail is the soul of narrative.” Find a useful data point inside the mess of analytics your company analyzes. “We see 2.3x more activations on weekends when the Eastern seaboard experiences a heat wave.” “We’ve seen a huge shift in customers that choose ‘privacy’ over ‘price’ in our onboarding survey.”

If you are in contact with a few reporters, offer it up to all the reliable names. If you’re keen to get coverage any which way, offer the most likely reporter a mini-exclusive. A little

Point them toward a rabbit hole

• #depth

This takes a certain kind of reporter. I certainly knew reporters who avoided rabbit holes, in favor of concise stories that could be researched and written by 4:58 p.m. But most reporters became reporters because they are curious. And showing them that there’s a whole little world down there, inside the specifics of your work? Quite effective.

Pets. Cute ones.

• #lazy
• #snacks

“Every story needs a dog. Failing that, an interesting human.” This paraphrased bit of William Blundell’s The Art and Craft of Feature Writing never leaves my head. It’s a long shot that your firm or project will ever have a real pitch to make involving cute animals, suffice to reach the bar of “Worthy of a press release.” And it’s tricky to frame it as anything other than a genially cynical ploy. But with the right relationship—built from all these other pitches and strategies—, the right reporter, and the right timing (holiday weekends?), you might get some discount humanization for your capitalist venture.

2022 wasn’t slow or reflective, near its end. Neither was 2023. Then 2024 came and went, perhaps because I was off my routine. Now 2025 is at its end, and it’s time to do something, anything, to put a notch in. It’s not easy, wrapping up all those years (9% of my life thus far!). It can feel unnecessary, this far beyond. But I’m doing it anyways.

In fighting this inertia, I’m faced with the big question: Why am I doing this? For myself, as a writing exercise? For my future self’s recollection? For some researcher, doing a Robert-Caro-depth biography on somebody, hoping I can provide details on this one thing or person I knew in some minor way, because I’m now too inifrm, or dead, to grant an interview? (If that’s you, good luck! Don’t let your subject ruin civil infrastructure for generations to come).

Whatever the reason, it’s time to get it done. Because it’s been nearly four years, I’m not going to detail each of them as much, but I’ll try to hit the major points. Twitter is dead to me now, and I do very little public posting, so no need to summarize that. But, sure, you can still have some pet photos.

• The big thing in 2022
• The big thing in 2023
• 2024 and 2025 (but not specifically)
• Job stuff
• I very much live in D.C. now
• Baking
• Espresso
• Bikes: ridden, fixed, and reviewed
• Repairs (and trauma)
• Raspberry Pi status
• Reading
  • On Sly Stone
• Gaming
• Travel
• Pictures of Pets

Hit me up with typos on Bluesky, by email, or by pull request, if that’s your thing.

The big thing in 2022

In the fall of 2022, my wife was getting back into jogging. She felt a pain in her hip, got a scan, and the doctors then wanted more scans. The scans showed cancer, early stages, that needed removing. We wanted to get the surgery done before the holidays, so she could recover during the holiday and new year break. It was supposed to be two, maybe three days in the hospital, then a few weeks of rest at home.

It was many more days than that, in that hospital. My wife’s parents watched our pets and our apartment while my wife was stuck there, and I spent most days with her in that hospital room, other than occasional trips home to shower and nap, or make supply runs to Target.

One day, my wife demanded I go to a nearby bar and watch part of a Bills game, just to get some non-medical-staff social interaction. I had often wondered before about just who shows up alone to watch sports at a bar, and now I have been that person. Be nice to that person, so long as they’re being cool.

It’s difficult to optimally time a cancer surgery, but, dear reader, I beg you: Don’t be in the hospital just before Christmas, if you can avoid it. If you must, make sure you know exactly when the cutoff is for ordering the Christmas dinner. Finding out it was 4 p.m., not 5 p.m., can become a catastrophic psychic blow. The food itself was never going to be all that good, but realizing even that little boon is gone can trigger a kind of last-straw collapse of morale.

While we were stuck in bracelet-and-visitor-badge limbo, and long after we arrived back home, friends and neighbors and family really showed up for us. I will always be grateful to have learned how many people are behind us.

That surgery and experience was a bad cap on 2022, and its after-effects lasted long into 2023. Right up until the next thing.

The big thing in 2023

My wife’s father was diagnosed with throat cancer, a rare mutation of it, in the spring of 2023. This was just after my wife had mostly recovered from her own cancer scare.

One doctor he visited told him to get his affairs in order. A doctor at a well-regarded cancer center said something similar. It took a lot of pushing and outright manipulation to get her father to seek a third opinion, but this doctor knew about an experimental chemotherapy trial for this specific mutation.

My wife, across an entire day’s worth of phone calls and web forms, found the one pharmacy near Albany that could provide these trial drugs. She drove through Northway rush-hour traffic to get there, 10 minutes before it closed that Friday for the weekend. Had she not made it, we’re not certain if he would still be with us, if his throat might have closed up entirely.

Every year of my life delivers some new, treacherous anecdote about how America’s healthcare scheme is not the best or even third-best version it could be. We just can’t get over it, this idea that to help everybody live better, even if they’re not “productive,” would diminish us as a people. I hope someone reads this post someday and it registers as history, not pretense.

Still, the treatment worked, and as I write this, my wife’s father is alive and testing negative for cancer. Before we knew that would be the case, we rented a home in Saratoga Springs for all of May 2023. There was a moment where we thought we might move back to upstate New York permanently, to be close by, but it ended up being just (“just”) one month.

The second-most important thing to know about this month is that it was the best month of my dog Howard’s life. The off-track-season AirBnB was so small that he was always near one of his humans. The couch was tiny and uncomfortable, and he loved occupying it with us. On the rare occasions we had a trip or outing that would have left him alone, his grandparents could watch him.

Most importantly, this house had the kind of fenced-in yard—bigger than the house itself—that my wife and I will probably never own. My wife and I would be working in the house, and he would come right up to us and drop a tennis ball next to our feet. Half the time, we’d take him up on a few fetch tosses. Dogs can be a steadying presence in tumultuous times.

2024 and 2025 (but not specifically)

These years did not have big cancer scares that made us question what was most important in our lives. Nice not to have a framing device, really. So I shall provide updates in broad categories, rather than run through the years themselves.

Job stuff

Or, the Major Thing that Came Up in March 2022, as Alluded To in the Introduction of the 2021 Review, and then the Other Major Things After It.

I changed jobs four times in the last four years. Twice or maybe twice-and-a-half times of my own volition, once on a fast pivot.

I left iFixit after 3 years’ time. I’ve summarized and linked my iFixit work in previous posts here, and friends and close family and coworkers there have heard tons from me about that work. It changed how I view the world, especially the things we buy and use, and it gave me my first glimpse outside of my mostly report-and-write career. I still believe it’s a near-universal good to read the manual, to better understand how your things are made and what that costs, and to ask why things cannot be fixed and made more fixable.

Leaving iFixit, I joined a one-person startup to make it two. Carbon Switch aimed to be a deeply researched and eco-conscious buying guide for people looking at renewable home energy. Heat pumps, induction stoves, community solar, things of that nature. Clean home energy and apliances was, in March 2022, a booming thing that seemed like the way forward (greetings from 2025!)

I joined, I sprinted for weeks to learn and write as much as I could. Then the bottom fell out of the online advertising sector, Google made one of its casually brutal SEO shifts that wallop a whole bunch of sites’ traffic, and what was planned as a slow-growth project suddenly felt like it was headed some unknown somewhere, fast.

During the resulting flux, I landed a job at Ars Technica. It was fun, challenging, weird, and nostalgic, writing in a “traditional news blog” style. Ars has a devoted “direct” audience, meaning people who visit the site directly, read articles about a few different topics, and often comment on them. This audience would call me out if I, for example, incorrectly cite a year when real-time strategy games largely transitioned into multiplayer online battle arenas (MOBAs), or make an off-hand anecdote about the speed of sound that contains a physics falsehood. But they would also reward you for a good line or two, and engage on topics too niche for most other sites.

And then, as of June 2025: Tailscale. That’s where I work now. I write for their blog, I help other employees write for their blog, and I pitch in words and thoughts and even some tech and media opinions wherever else I can. It’s more directly marketing and product-related than the writing I did at iFixit, but it’s quite different from almost every other job I’ve had since college. I’m enjoying the challenge.

I very much live in D.C. now

Since the big move to D.C. in 2020, I have moved twice. Once to a different apartment in southeast (“Hill East”) D.C., then into a house in northeast D.C.

My new house is much, much newer than my last house in Buffalo—like 140 years newer. But then almost all of the housing in the United States is newer than that Buffalo house. There are evenly placed studs, evenly applied insulation in the walls and windows, and enough electrical circuits that a hair dryer or printer warm-up doesn’t cause every light in the house to flicker. There are ethernet jacks in every major living and sitting room. I am absolutely spoiled, and I try to remember that when something irksome happens.

I have lived in D.C. five years, as of early September 2025. Longer than a fluke or a diversion. Can I say what it’s like here, now? Maybe. I’m still getting a handle on it. (Right now-now, during a period of federal intrusion into nearly every aspect of life and work in D.C., is, I hope, a statistical aberration).

It’s hard to make local friends when you work remote, in a city with so many people living here primarily for their career. You gotta be explicit about your friend-making efforts—straight-up telling dudes you just met that you want their phone number, because you’re eager to make friends. It feels terrifyingly direct, but it’s entirely necessary, because it’s too easy to escape any meaningful attempt at sincerity by just staring at your phone.

That’s true anywhere, right? Right. It helps that D.C. is a quick train ride or road trip to New York or Philadelphia, and, if necessary, a flight to pretty much anywhere, usually direct. I can keep up the relationships I have, and it’s not a huge effort to try, say, a weekend excursion to a board game conference, or host a remote game night. The relatively warmer weather has kept a casual bike-ride group I’m part of riding through much of the year. And there’s a lot of bar trivia in this town, which I intend to utilize further in the near future.

Here’s what I do have, as regards to D.C. resident cred:

• Opinions about biking and driving routes to most places
• Custom travel itineraries for guests who visit
• Mental rankings of the restaurants in the northeast, southeast, and southwest sectors (NW? I dunno, pick one of a thousand places)
• Museum picks and secrets
• A firm belief that it’s absolute bullshit that D.C. is not a state

Perhaps it’s the smaller stuff that really means you live somewhere, maybe even more than, say, owning the deed for land that contains your primary domicile. I wake up and check the Capital Weather Gang and local newsletters (The 51st, in particular). I listen to Citycast DC while making coffee. I take the Metro to places where driving would be easier, and bike places that are not as efficient, just to expanded my mental bike map and engage with lesser-seen parts of the city.

During the winter of 2024, my wife and I met a family friend for a Wizards (NBA) game downtown. The beers were $18. The owner of the Wizards and Capitals was in the middle of a fever dream idea to move the team to northern Virginia, and we both mocked and lamented it. We took the subway and bus home. It was unseasonably cold for DC winter (down to the high 30s!), but still just light jacket season for us. We asked our dog if he could remember what February was like in Buffalo. He did not respond.

Feels like we live here, is what I’m saying.

Baking

Besides the occasional granola, cookies, and rare cakes or pies, the most notable thing I worked on baking in the last three years has been bread. When we lived in Southeast D.C., it didn’t feel necessary to turn out great bread, because we were so close to Capitol Jill. But where we live now is a whole different thing, bread-wise. Also, I like messing with stuff.

I had previously messed around with no-knead bread without much success, then Cook’s Illustrated’s “Almost-No-Knead Bread,” which was better, though I still sometimes got a slightly raised disc of chewy whipped flour. At some point in 2023, I discovered that J. Kenji López-Alt had crafted a lengthy feature article (free Times link there), along with recipes for free-standing and sandwich bread, that offered a third way: Low-Knead.

Instead of doing nothing with the dough after combining ingredients, or just a few minutes of actual kneading, this had you coming back to the dough every so often to do a “stretch and fold.” I was familiar with this technique from another killer low-effort recipe, King Arthur Flour’s Crispy Cheesy Pan Pizza. Like that pizza, too, López-Alt’s Low-Knead places the initial (“bulk”) rise in the fridge, which takes the pressure off timing and guards against over-fermentation. After watching López-Alt make it in GoPro-powered first-person POV, I tried it, and then tried it again, and each time turned out pretty-good-to-great bread.

While on vacation with a group of friends, one of them decided to bring along their starter and all their bread gear, and every single day turned out at least one loaf of sourdough bread. I had somehow avoided sourdough during its pandemic revival. I remembered a respected baker in Buffalo expounding on Twitter, during that COVID-era yeast shortage, about why sourdough was a pain in the butt for people who do not own bakeries. It took more time and had uneven timings, there was flour waste in keeping it fed, and live cultures were fickle. I can appreciate it when a trusted professional tells me not to bother with something, even if I don’t always follow that advice.

That daily supply of fresh vacation sourdough got to me, though, with its tangy flavor, beautiful look, and consistent shape. The friend was happy to give me both a freshly fed starter and a Google Docs recipe. I kept the starter alive for a few weeks, then I fed, combined, stretched and folded, bulk fermented, shaped, proved, baked, and … disc. I tried it again and again, eventually getting a slightly puffier disc, one where you could maybe get a morning toast, if you sliced it diagonally.

I wrote about my sourdough experience, and breakthrough, at Ars Technica. Spoiler: much like Literally Every Other Hobby I’ve Ever Taken On, a big part of the solution involved a change in assumptions, a shift in understanding, and patience.

Espresso

I’ll try to keep this short, because you’ve already just made it through one lengthy description of a guy-without-kids hobby. But at some point in early 2023, I bought an espresso machine. I had researched, I had made a spreadsheet (Wirecutter habits are sticky), and I had gotten the counter space dispensation from my wife. I walked up the steps of the Capitol Hill rowhouse of the Facebook Marketplace seller, run the doorbell, and asked the guy which machine he was upgrading to, after selling this one. He smiled, and said it was a Linea Micra.

I have a Breville Bambino Plus, paired with a Baratza Encore ESP, so that I don’t need two different grinders for drip (regular) coffee and espresso. I spent a long time learning how to “dial in” espresso. It’s taken even longer to get halfway decent at steaming milk. With the help of r/espresso, James Hoffman and Lance Hendrick and Morgan Eckroth on YouTube, and a class at Vigilante Coffee in Hyattsville, I can reliably pull shots of Lost Sock’s Two Steps blend, and do a pretty good tree, flower, tulip, or monk’s cowl.

Bikes: ridden, fixed, and reviewed

As part of my gig at Ars Technica, I got to review e-bikes. My niches were non-aero, non-mountain, “city”-minded bikes. I wrote up a fixed-gear belt-drive semi-self-built oddity, a beautiful e-bike that barely looks like one, and my long journey with Swytch DIY e-bike conversion kits. It was a good gig, even if it can be torture to trim down the 500 thoughts you have about any given bike.

After years of apartment living and mostly recreational or errand-based riding, I have a drop-bar road bike, my first since leaving Buffalo. It’s a Bianchi, aluminum with a carbon fork. It feels incredibly light compared to my rugged hybrid with the DIY e-bike wheel. The pedals have clips on one side, and I have bought clip shoes. I have fought so long not to become this bike person, but the pull is too strong. You will (almost) never see a picture of me in Lycra on this blog, but just know that it’s happening.

The best bike thing I’ve done in the last two years is join The Bike House, a volunteer-run bike repair clinic. You show up, you get the tools out from the hardware shop that graciously stores them, and you teach people how to fix their bikes for a few hours. People donate if they can. It’s remarkable how simple something like this can be.

Helping at the Brookland Bike House clinic has brought me face to face with imposter syndrome. If I don’t know how to do something, I have to just say that, instead of watching a YouTube video in the corner or speed-reading Sheldon Brown’s site. But I do know how to do a lot of bike things, and I’m getting pretty good at explaining them in a way that helps people understand not just want is wrong, but why, and how you might fix it in the future.

My big thing is truing wheels. I legitimately love truing a wheel. I dove head-first into wheel building and truing when I rebuilt my Schwinn bike from the ground up, and it stuck. I haven’t done meditative practice or much zen reading in what has to be a decade. But walking people through tightening, loosening, checking, balancing, dishing, and, crucially, knowing when it’s time to stop and let go? It feels like I’m back on the mat again.

Repairs (and trauma)

Before I get to the big, awful repair I had to make:

• I got my Encore Baratza grinder working again, after its motor was repeatedly getting stuck.
• I disassembled and repurposed a Framework laptop into a “slabtop”
• I’ve made a number of smart-home-ish “fixes” to my current home; topic for another year, maybe. My favorite was the weird water heater journey.

Alright, let’s get into it. My second D.C. apartment came with a parking space. It was one spot in an open-air gravel pit that faced a two-car roll-up garage door. This is a strange but common thing in D.C. because of various zoning laws and alley realities. The door had a commercial-grade controller, and an infrared safety sensor that frequently got misaligned. If the door wouldn’t open, the fix was usually just nudging the beam projector a little, until it hit the reflector on the other side, and the safety sensor’s LED turned from red to blue.

One day the garage door wouldn’t work, either open or close, and there was no light at all on the beam or its receiver. I decided to open up the stamped-metal weather box that contained the controller and see what was going on in there. I took a couple screws off and noticed a lot of dirt (dirt?) in the box, so I brought a garbage tote over to catch it. When I finished opening the box, an abandoned bird’s nest fell into the bin. That’s strange! Probably won’t come up again.

I then tried to reset the opener, but because I had blocked the sensor for a few minutes with the garbage tote, it entered a fail state, and I needed to do some kind of deeper reset on the system. My friend Nick was visiting at the time, and we essentially read the entire 128-page garage manual PDF together, on our phones, in the driveway, until we could reset the fault codes and safety systems. Eventually, I realized that the beam mount was never going to stay in place, so I jammed a bicycle reflector directly in front of the beam, so that it always thought its path was clear. Entirely unsafe, but at least my neighbor and I could open the garage door after a windy day.

That was Act 1, the inciting incident, of the garage story. One lesson drilled into me from this ordeal is that if you see an abandoned bird’s nest somewhere, there may eventually be a future bird’s nest there. The next time I had to open the box, the door wasn’t working at all. That was because birds had created a new nest in there. A bird mother, seeking warmth, managed to get inside the weather box, then pry loose a single screw protecting the circuit board innards. The birds enjoyed the warmth of capacitors and voltage converters, up until their movements and various detritus destroyed the board.

And there were still baby birds in that garage opener box, when I discovered this.

A neighbor and I tried our best to transport the chicks to a safe place nearby, where their mother might reasonably find them, but I have no idea if that helped anything. I wasn’t the person who left way too big an opening for birds right next to electronics and moving chains. But displacing smooth-skinned chicks to make sure my car can get out felt awful. Normally I feel great after mastering an entirely new machine scheme and improving some aspect of it, but not this time.

Maybe this is just the urban version of running over a rabbit warren with your lawnmower. I don’t recommend either version.

Raspberry Pi status

We are at four Pis, folks. These little guys are:

• A Pi Zero 2W, hooked up to a Brother laser printer to provide better networking, phone printing, and remote access.
• A Pi 4, in the midst of a very long transformation into a hopefully helpful desk gadget (separate post, coming soon?)
• A Pi 3b, formerly a game emulation console and Pi-Hole server, soon to be shipped to my mom’s house to provide remote network access and occasional VPN endpoints.
• A Pi 4, obtained for work purposes (I swear!), currently providing a tiny test space for Docker containers and orchestration. Might have another job soon.

The first Pi 4 was retired as my Home Assistant server, mostly due to greater demand for performance (including some very light local AI model stuff), though also concerns about microSD card burn-out. Home Assistant now lives on a tiny HP “thin client” box that probably used to schedule appointments at a dentist’s office or something. It’s snappy, and it gives the most important app some breathing space.

Perhaps, by this point, you can see why I might have ended up at Tailscale.

Reading

Almost certain to miss something in recapping four years of books, but here goes.

Notably, over the past few years, my wife has requested that I stop reading non-ficiton in bed, because I can stay up far too late with a good topic. So there’s this gradual shift happening, where I sneak in my very long, incredibly detailed histories of arcane topics in audiobook form, during dog walks and dishwashing. It takes me longer to read fiction, as I fall asleep easily reading it. Friends tell me this is the reverse of almost everyone’s experience, and I truly have a hard time explaining it.

I recommend borrowing these from your library, in-person or through the Libby app, or buying from your local bookstore, or registering your local bookstore with Bookshop.org and buying there. Bookshop dot org also has DRM-free ebooks.

• Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber. Of all the books I read about the modern workplace, this one stuck the most. Helps that it does not overstay its welcome.
• The Path to Power, Robert A. Caro. This was essentially my bedside book for all of 2022. Unsurprisingly great.
• Newsroom Confidential, Margaret Sullivan. For one brief period, my boss’ boss, and now one of the most prominent chroniclers of what is actually happening at regional newsrooms, the former backbone of truth in everyday life.
• Titanium Noir, Nick Harkaway. I read three of this man’s books before I realized who his father was. This was my favorite, but they’re all good reads that take just about 1/3 the length to really set their hooks.
• Beowulf: A New Translation, Maria Dahvana Headley. I don’t own a tweed jacket, but I have now read three translations of Beowulf (Heaney, Tolkien, Headley). And I would read them again.
• Among the Bros, Max Marshall. A fast-moving, freewheeling yarn about something you had no idea was going on in South Carolina.
• Wool, Hugh Howey. The Apple TV version is Silo, and it has, of course, less worldbuilding and characterization. But I’ve enjoyed both.
• Joyful Recollections of Trauma, Paul Scheer. Highly recommend the audiobook, which Scheer reads, and which has extra bits.
• The Perfectionists, Simon Winchester. This book kept me riveted (pun?) for days on end, and was also pure melatonin for my wife on a road trip.
• Cults Like Us, Jane Borden. Dragged a bit in the last third for me, but it revealed a lot about the Puritan/American/expansionist mythos that explains why we’re like this.
• Playing Dead, Elizabeth Greenwood. It meanders a bit, feeling like a journalistic fishing expedition. But wonderful human stories about a topic that has always fascinated me.
• The Bright Sword, Lev Grossman. My favorite book of 2025. Who could have guessed I would love an even-more-magically-real take on Camelot? (everybody, everybody could guess)
• Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment, Jason Schreier. The whole story, the whole way through, or as close as we’ll likely ever get.
• Dune, Frank Herbert. Felt like it was finally time to read it. And, yep, I read it. One of those books that was really formative, but that doesn’t make it an easy read, decades later.
• Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, Melissa Maerz. One of my top 10 movies, and I just devoured this.
• Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin): A Memoir, Sly Stone with Ben Greenman. Sly Stone is an unreliable narrator of his own epic journey. Questlove’s documentary (Sly Lives!) is more revealing and insightful. But this memoir is entertaining, it has weird snippets of history, and the man’s signature wordplay. Also, he really loved cars, and that definitely comes through.

On Sly Stone

I dreamed of writing a Sly Stone biography, a “definitive” one, with something new and revealing to say, pretty much my whole adult life. No kidding—I have Google Drive folders with assorted hard-to-find articles and interviews about the man, his band, and especially the There’s a Riot Goin’ On era. With Sly’s death, and the two major works about him out in 2025 that are still riddled with open questions and inconsistencies and long periods of foggy unknowns, I’ve made peace with how this was probably an impossible task.

I would imagine that most writers and reporters can relate to taking it as a challenge, almost an affront, when someone seems to go to great lengths to prevent deep knowledge of them from existing in the world. The very good Kill ‘Em and Leave tackles this. James McBride pulls out as much as anyone can about another musical and cultural force who was black, popular, complicated, and confronting both personal and societal demons. “He didn’t want you to know him,” says the person closest to James Brown who wasn’t related to him (and he made his adult children schedule appointments to see him).

It’s probably just as well that a white guy from upstate New York didn’t actually set out to discover the fundamental truth about why Sly “disappeared” or what “happened” to him after his high period. These are just about the best answers we’re going to get, especially at his generation’s age, from folks providing more nuance than I ever could. It has been strangely freeing to let go of this quirky idea, even if I’ll never stop being interested in the topic.

Gaming

I reviewed some games for Ars Technica during my time there. It was a mixed blessing. It could be absurdly fun to write about games, professionally, something I had long hoped to do. But it could also take the personal and the exploratory out of gaming, rushing to pack in enough of a 40-hour game to have enough of a sense of it for review (or even just “impressions”).

Here’s the highlights of what I played over the last four years. Almost all of it is on PC. Once the Steam Deck landed in my hands, the Nintendo Switch became what could be the last console I’ll own. We’ve had a great run, constrained marketplaces, but I’m reverting to form.

• Elden Ring. My favorite game of the last few years. I played more Satisfactory, but it didn’t leave the same kind of brain indent as this game. My first Souls-affiliated game, maybe my last, and I got lost in it like few other games since the way-back Zelda titles. Think that was the point!
• Satisfactory. I’m at 300 hours and I could do it again. I played at first for just a few hours to review it. Then I came back and made it nearly my whole 2025 in gaming. Explore, build, rebuild, optimize, obsess.
• Baldur’s Gate 3. Everybody is right about this game.
• Cyberpunk 2077. A big disappointment to me, playing it when it first came out, but the studio that made The Witcher 3 could not help but turn it around. Idris Elba in the DLC goes a long way to help that.
• Marvel’s Midnight Suns. Weird friendship-is-magic X-COM deckbuilder that was fun while I was playing it, and that I keep thinking I will replay at some point. It’s a lot of dialogue, if you’ve already heard it, is the barrier.
• Fights in Tight Spaces and Knights in Tight Spaces. Games that found me via Steam’s discovery queue, and I deeply enjoyed each of them for about 10 hours each.
• Sunderfolk. Playing this with my friends, online, session by session, was a wonderful treat. Just enough game to allow for talking and bonding, but not too much.
• Deep Rock Galactic (and the Survivor spin-off): Similar to Sunderfolk, a delightful shoot-and-shoot-the-breeze trip. The Survivor-alike is far better than it has any right to be.
• Tactical Breach Wizards. Because I was, technically, a GAME REVIEWER for a bit there, I can say that this game was the most underrated title I played. Except by me, because I loved it and said so.

  Travel

  I’m lucky to have gotten to these places throughout 2022-2025:

• Key West (our passports expired during COVID and we still wanted to go somewhere Caribbean-ish)
• Berkeley Springs, W. Va. (cabin getaway)
• Provincetown, Mass. (wedding)
• Asheville, N.C. (friend trip)
• Denver, Colo. (three times, three weddings)
• Philadelphia (PAX convention)
• Chincoteague Island (cabin getaway)
• Las Vegas (Killers anniversary show at Caesars Palace)
• New Orleans
• Chicago (Oasis show, on behalf of my lovely wife)
• Toronto (work trip)
• Cancun (work trip, somehow)
• A few times each: Naples, Nashville, Buffalo (once for the generational eclipse, Outer Banks, and New York City.

  Pictures of pets

  Apricot

  We lost Apricot in early 2022. Her heart was going fast, she was breathing heavy, and compassionate vets told me the surgery options were limited for a ~15-year-old cat. I sat holding her for her final moments. Apricot was the first pet I lost, beyond a childhood cat who died while I was away from home. I know she’s not suffering now, but it was a heavy experience.

Cork

Cork is 19 years old as I write this. His right ear is messed up from when it bruised and ballooned up and needed surgery. He’s real skinny, and he’s got the earlier stages of kidney disease, the kind that eventually comes for all domesticated cats. But he still loves laps, and is pretty clever and spry, considering all that.

Howard

14 years old (we think). What a goof.

Photo credit for Cork and Howard: Chaz Adams

Something to look forward to.

That’s my takeaway from another year of pandemic living: You gotta have something to look forward to.

A friend visiting your city, an unnecessarily long bike ride to obtain something you could have delivered, or just your own little Pancake Sunday. Something needs to break up the days. Something has to make tomorrow different than today, if only that something you’re looking forward to is one day closer.

I always thought it irrational when relatives would say, “Oh, Grandma So-and-So, she had to live until she could see her grandchild get married, she passed soon after.” I get it now. Before COVID draped itself over everything, any day could be different and strange (in a benign way—disasters did not defer to COVID). Most days weren’t that different, but there was no mandate or risk calculus enforcing routines, consistency.

Once every day was prescribed to be very much the same, the merest hint of variety multiplied in value.

I’m so thankful these days for an excuse to go somewhere new, break up my schedule, explore some new project, even if it’s just “Find a way to hang this picture”. I’m far less likely to say something isn’t “worth my time.” Time during a pandemic is mostly unflavored oatmeal. I’ll mix almost anything in just to taste something new.

If you spot a typo or formatting quirk, let me know by tweet or email.

• One full year in D.C.
• The Buffalo Bills
• Repairs
• Switch mods
• Raspberry Pi and other tiny computers
• Bikes \& e-bikes \& e-mopeds
• Baking
• Writing
• Reading
  • Books
  • Notable articles
• Games
  • PC
  • Switch
  • iOS
• Ugh, Twitter
• Pictures of Pets
  • Cork
  • Apricot
  • Howard

One full year in D.C.

I know more of the neighborhoods. I’ve taken some Metro subway rides. If someone asked me where to eat, drink or just stroll near my home, I have quite a few suggestions. I’ve lived through a full muggy summer here, and one of the coldest DC winters in a couple decades. I’m approaching the point where I can say “I live in D.C.” out loud and don’t immediately question it in my head.

The hardest part is making friends. I’m 41, I’m new here, I work remote from my home, there’s a pandemic, and D.C. is a city where a lot of people are on their way up or out. I’m lucky to have the Buffalo connections I do have, while they’re still here. But it’s like the jobs/experience dependency trick: the best way to make friends is to have friends, who introduce you to others.

The advice I read and hear most often is to join groups based on interests, and be a lot more deliberate in saying that you want to make friends. I can certainly do better. But D.C. is not like Buffalo. Showing up and showing interest isn’t such a rare thing. Right now it’s tricky to show up for any group project, but I spend a few weekend hours trying every month or so.

But I like it here. I’ll try harder.

The Buffalo Bills

I took an extended trip to Nashville, centered on a Bills/Titans game. It was a tighter game than it should have been, and the key play involved our quarterback slipping on turf. Walking back from the stadium, my friend Ryan willfully refused to be too mad about it. The team, and especially Josh Allen, were promising, he said. This was not one of those games from The Drought (and he should know).

It was the start of a mid-season rough patch. They regained their form and made the playoffs. I started feeling the excitement again. Hats and sweaters came out. Ryan’s zen tendencies would be proven wise, twice in two weeks.

The 47-17 win over the Patriots was both the first-ever perfect offensive game in (modern) NFL history and an exorcism of the Patriots’ 20-year hex on the Bills, cast primarily by Tom Brady. I was at home, yelling, hooting, anxiously awaiting something to break the streak, but nothing did. I was witness to the changing of the guard, with lots of ceremony.

The Bills did not win the next game. The consolation prize: it was arguably the most exciting NFL game of all time. It was the best one I’ve ever seen. I watched it at a DC bar taken over by the local Bills backers. I screamed at every unlikely touchdown catch, called out the response to the Shout Song, hugged people I didn’t know when it seemed like we’d clinched it.[^1]

As has happened before to Buffalo, the league soon after changed the rule that had arguably cost the Bills that game.

I didn’t get to see the Bills in the Super Bowl. Instead, I got to see the Bills win the sports world’s respect. No small thing, that. Next year.

Repairs

The biggest “fix” I made in 2021 was to my 2013 car. I wrote about replacing my awful Ford Sync system (and learning a lot about car wiring) at iFixit. Here are some other notable fixes from last year and how they went.

• Battery replacement, MacBook Pro 2017 - Excellent
• Battery and USB-C port replacement, MacBook 2016 - Excellent
• Screen and battery, iPad Air 4 - Fair (Screen/digitizer separation discoloration)
• Pixel 3 rear camera & battery - Excellent
• Clear the jam and etch new grind markings on pepper grinder - Good

Switch mods

After a live Switch teardown and rooftop repair workshop at The Verge’s 10-year anniversary in October, I ended up with four disassembled Nintendo Switches. I seemed to have all the parts to rebuild at least one full Switch, and it was one of the newer variety with better battery life. It was modified (“modded”) with a translucent green plastic back, and originally listed on eBay as unable to sync with right Joy-cons. I opened it up and, yes, someone had snapped the right rail’s cable. I replaced the rail and it connected Joy-Cons again—though it looked ugly, and half the screws were the wrong size. I decided to restore it and take it in a different direction.

I was a Super Nintendo teen, so that’s the style I picked. The kit came with a link to a YouTube video, featuring sped-up time-lapse footage of someone rushing through the job, like it was their twelfth kit that day. At one point the guy essentially yanks a Joy-Con’s delicate rail ribbons out from underneath the mid-frame, rather than flip open the tab holding them into their ZIF connector. I beg you, if you’re doing this kind of mod, check out iFixit’s Joy-Con guides, at least as a second opinion.

After transplanting the two Joy-Cons’ guts into new shells, nearly losing a runaway rail release button, and almost putting the home button in upside down, I had my Super Switchtendo.

This inspired my friend Adam to mod his own Switch with the same basic kit. He made it through, despite one cable snag. When he beheld his work, he realized it lacked the two-tone buttons and one-piece directional pad needed to fully re-align his being with the controller of his youth. Gotta admit, it looks snazzy.

This further inspired my friend Chaz to do up his own Switch, EU PAL-style.

Now that I had a Switchtendo, my original Switch was just sitting there, annoyingly non-modded. I asked my sister-in-law if she’d like to own her first game system ever, and if she’d like it to look any particular way. She picked out a mod, and I got to work. I discovered too late that a right Joy-Con from my pile of parts wasn’t syncing. Right Joy-Cons, even those with drifting joysticks, are multiple times more rare on eBay and other second-hand sites than left. Eventually I found one, swapped its parts in, and: pearlescent Shinytendo.

There are two more Switches in the pile. Every other weekend, there’s a quiet moment where I think about resurrecting just one more. Franken-Switches are addictive.

Raspberry Pi and other tiny computers

I got into Home Assistant right before 2021. I’ve tweaked it a few times since then, adding new gadgets and optimizing routines. I did not acquire any further Raspberry Pis in 2021, for which I commend myself.

I did, however, bring two other small, programmable circuit boards into my home.

The Tidbyt is a small wooden box with an LED matrix display that shows anything that fits. The default displays are pretty handy: time and weather, sports scores, calendar items, countdowns to notable future events. It has an API and SDK, and I’m determined to make something of them. My dream was an occasional update on how far the closest scooter, ebike, or e-moped was to me, but I didn’t find a good, reasonable-cost API for that. Working on it.

I bought an Adafruit Circuit Playground Bluefruit early last year. My first goal was to program it as a Pomodoro technique timer: 25 minutes of work, short break, repeat a total of four times, then long break. After a couple nights learning CircuitPython, and some help from other Circuit Playground owners on GitHub, I got there.

It plays two different Zelda cues (“Open a chest” and “Good discovery,” essentially) when pomos are finished. It does a little light dance of purple and blue when you complete all four. To me, it is perfect. I didn’t program 2-minute/15-minute break timers on it because, working from home, I like to get up, move around, and often get pulled into other stuff.

There’s so much more inside this little guy to make use of: temperature sensor, gyroscope, and, of course, Bluetooth. Someday.

Bikes & e-bikes & e-mopeds

I’m fairly certain I used to frown, facially or rhetorically, at ebikes. But, I would think, what about exercise! Simplicity! Just use more gears if the hills are hard! Similar egalitarian platitudes!

Moving to D.C. changed that. Buffalo was a reasonably flat city, whereas D.C. has real hills. Biking in Buffalo was good-intentioned secondary transportation, while here it’s my primary, and best, way to get around. [^2] D.C. has a lot more intersections and traffic than Buffalo. And the summers in D.C. are as hot and humid as you’ve heard. I’m not prudish about sweating, but sometimes you don’t want to arrive somewhere drenched, or change clothes multiple times a day.

More significantly, my wife bikes to work here. She faces all those same challenges, plus hauling her work devices, paperwork, a change of clothes, food and drink, and other necessities. I wanted to encourage her, so I helped the best way I could: falling down a deep rabbit hole full of esoteric tools and knowledge. I bought an e-bike kit. I replaced her front wheel with one containing a small motor, ran the cables, and stuck the battery on top of her rear rack.

The wife got a DIY electric commuter out of it, and I got the background for a Wirecutter feature on building your own ebike. I just recently converted my own bike, using a Swytch kit. My belt-driven, internally-geared setup precluded more powerful or esoteric options. Also, I don’t really have a commute, and I’m not hauling a lot of stuff long distances—I just wanted relief for the hottest days, or when my bad knee feels particularly bad. And, sometimes, just to cruise around on a magic boost.

A lot of opinions and digressions had to be cut out of that Wirecutter post. There are ebike enthusiasts who believe the only reasonable ebike is one with a mid-drive motor that can run faster than 20 miles per hour for hours, without pedaling. There are mountain bike types maximizing for torque and carrying 20-pound extra batteries in their backpacks. Most folks looking for something to simply even out tough hills, or boost their typical get-around range, aren’t posting on Reddit threads or arguing in comment sections.

Wading through all of that reminded me of, well, every DIY project I’ve gotten into, from Android ROM flashing to home coffee roasting to smart home automation. Everyone brings their selves and their situation to a hobby, but nobody has the time to really explain themselves before offering up opinions.

For the moment, I’m glad that my wife and I got new experiences without having to buy wholly new bikes. It was better, as Walt Whitman/Ted Lasso put it, to be curious, not judgmental.

As an addendum with no particular transition: Last year I also got to ride shared electric mopeds, like the Revel and (now seemingly defunct) Lime bikes, a few times. There are limited use cases where I want to go somewhere only within the city, without much or any cargo, while it’s warm enough not to freeze my hands off.

But, golly, are they fun when you can make it work. “Work” sometimes literally, because roughly 1/3 of the units are either drained, missing a helmet, or simply broken in some way. And yet, I’ll keep trying them out when I can.

Baking

Clockwise from top left: German chocolate cake (made for myself for my birthday), chocolate babka, crumb-topped apple pie, and shortbread/brownie stack.

I did not bake nearly as much in 2021 as in previous years. It was another year of mostly staying inside, and I don’t have a lot of friends nearby to gift with excess sweets. I did pull off four pans of babka from the excellent cookbook A Good Bake, both cinnamon and chocolate. And I made a few batches of the shortbread that Apple claims is the origin of Ted Lasso’s gifts for his boss. Big hits, both.

Writing

Mostly stuck to writing for iFixit last year, besides the DIY ebike post and some long emails.

Reading

Books

I don’t use GoodReads, and I typically give away or donate books immediately after finishing, so this list is somewhat incomplete. Working on non-Amazon-owned tracking in the new year!

Parable of the Sower: Deeply moving. It never stops amazing me that this book was written in 1993. It’s too modern for comfort.

The Secret Life of Groceries: Informative and enjoyable, if somewhat slowly paced. I appreciate that the author read his own audiobook. It made you realize that, not only does he stand by his sometimes page-length footnotes, he treasures them.

Foreverland: An economic story told by an expansive heart (and is someone I casually know online).

Notable articles

My Time with Kurt Cobain: I haven’t engaged much with Cobain, or Nirvana, since shortly after his death. Thinking of that time puts me back in that mid-teens mindset: angry, depressed, hopeless. This was a bracing, well-controlled exposure to that time and place. Raises more questions than it answers, but that’s how it goes.

The Notorious Mrs. Mossler Is there a Skip Hollandsworth story in Texas Monthly I won’t read, on principle? So far, not yet.

The Rise and Fall of an American Tech Giant Kodak made a blip in pandemic news when it seemed like it was might help make COVID drugs. It was a great moment to re-examine what “innovation” companies were like a century ago, and what they meant to their cities.

There are a dozen killer paragraphs, among them this excerpt that hits me right in my upstate NY sternum:

Like any city, it has cultivated grand and sometimes silly self-mythologies. Once called “Flour City” in honor of its status as the country’s leading producer and distributor of flour, Rochester was renamed “Flower City,” supposedly because of an abnormal concentration of garden nurseries, which remains a point of confusion for residents 150 years later. As a child, I was told that the Genesee River, which cuts through the center of the city, is the only river on Earth besides the Nile that runs north. (It turns out that a lot of rivers run north). Rochester has an arched aqueduct, just like Rome, and an abandoned subway system full of ghosts, and it once had a famous daredevil, who survived jumping from the top of Niagara Falls but died jumping from the High Falls along the Genesee, in November 1829, with a crowd looking on. (In the spring, legend has it, a block of ice enclosing his corpse turned up on a suburban riverbank).

Games

2021 was my year of roguelike deck builders and Western RPGs.

It was also the year that I sold my almost brand-new GTX 3070 at cost to a friend, a couple weeks after buying it, because I knew they were going to get more use out of it than me. I streamed most games I played via GeForce Now (the card came with a free year of it). With a gigabit fiber connection, it was a viable platform, so long as I didn’t run out of games I found intriguing. It would be neat if game streaming were an option for more people.

PC

Hitman 3: More of the same? Yes, and it’s great. Dartmoor, Berlin, and Chongqing all belong in the Hitman Level Hall of Fame.

Divinity: Original Sin 2: By the end I loved it, but the game could have done a lot more to explain itself during early stages. The tactical battles were a treat.

Disco Elysium: Game of the year for me. Please don’t play this game if you don’t enjoy reading good writing, on a screen. If you do, it’s a joyride. I still hear a half-dozen strange catchphrases from this game in my waking life. “You know what you need to do: Rebuild Communisim. Now is the time. Only you can do it.”

Prey: I, a person for whom the game System Shock was a personal development milestone, did not know that Prey was a spiritual sequel. On that level, it succeeds, and well worth the extremely deep discount I paid for it. Need to devote some time to trying out its roguelike DLC, Mooncrash.

Control: Dig the story, the acting, the mood and feel, and the feel and development of the powers. But I hit a couple hard difficulty walls, and the enemies are (by nature of the story!) a bit same-y.

Monster Train: A fun game you can either pick up and play, run by run, or dig into and master across multiple builds/classes/strategies. My favorite of the roguelike deck-builder class.

Roguebook: Enjoyable, and a bit of a twist on the formula (with map exploration and some interesting classes). But the replay is not as strong as Monster Train.

Wildermyth: Would be my game of the year, if it had just a bit more variety to it. For a game made by a team of about a dozen, it’s astounding. The semi-procedurally-generated quests/battles/abilities, the writing (both adaptive and linear stories)—all top-notch. You will feel things about your randomly generated young archer with the arm made of star energy, as she ages, falls in love, loses her love to battle, and finds her second act. Sniff.

Switch

Griftlands: Developer Klei entertainment gets right of first refusal in my library. I loved Don’t Starve and Invisible Inc. This one is (surprise!) a roguelike deckbuilder, set on a dystopian-ish colony planet. It’s a great airport/free-moment Switch game. You can negotiate or fight your way out of every situation, and there are real pay-offs to choices you make, positive and negative.

iOS

Overboard: Fun discovery. A time-loop game where you definitely are the killer on-board a cruise for the wealthy, and must cover it all up by the time you arrive in port. Game design is Interesting Choices, and this is a doctoral thesis in them.

Ugh, Twitter

For no monetary gain and almost no reward, I continued feeding Twitter’s API in 2021. Here are five selected tweets, with the most-ish likes/faves/whatevers, minus work stuff.

(Previous tweet is re: this and then that)

I miss my friends and family. I’m desperate for change in my schedule. The masks work, and I wear them, but I resent their space in my daily thoughts. If all goes well, I should be vaccinated this week, after finding the right website and driving a long way out of town. That’s about a year and a quarter gone to isolation. A vaccine doesn’t change everything, but it eases the deadly concerns. Then what?

I didn’t have it as bad as some, or even most. I was employed by a supportive company. I had housing, a loving partner, three pets, no kids. I didn’t lose somebody unexpectedly. I even moved across the country. I’m an aging nerd, so last year didn’t strip me of wild parties, crowded events, or cool bars. So what did I lose?

What was stripped out of 2020 was possibility, spontaneity, choice (beyond takeout). The feeling that any day could involve a new space, a new acquaintance, a new part of town that’s actually open, an event that isn’t a video call or a delivery. I’m not talking parties, I’m talking driving a friend to the airport. Getting stuck in some town for a family obligation or work trip, then discovering the secret good place to eat there. Sitting at someone’s kitchen counter and hearing about their awful neighbor. That stuff.

Now it’s time for the next phase, where, after vaccination, things still aren’t like they were, and you wonder if they ever will be. But at least I can feel like some inconsiderate jerk on the sidewalk can’t kill me, or infect someone I pass by later.

That’s where I’m at. That’s why this thing arrives three months later. I had to think of a novel way to say how bad 2020 was. Now here’s the rest of it.

If you spot a typo or formatting quirk, let me know by tweet or email.

• Moved to DC
• The Buffalo Bills, of All Things
• Repairs
• Board Repair School
• Raspberry Pi
• Bikes
• Baking
• Writing
• Awesome Buffalo
• Reading
• Games
• Ugh, Twitter
• Pictures of Pets

Moved to DC

I wrote last year about leaving Buffalo after nearly 20 years. What about the other half of that, moving to DC? Because of the pandemic, I only have a skewed impression, a few anecdotes. I don’t live in a city that’s fully awake yet. But I’ve got some early impressions.

The days leading up to the move were more stressful than anything I can remember. We lived in a big Victorian house in Buffalo. We spent 11 years filling its attic, basement, backyard, garage, and closets. We were moving to a 2-bedroom apartment. We knew some bigger things had to go. Why else would I make a 3D model of the new apartment based on the floor plans and video walkthrough, measure all our furniture, and see which items fit?

Except our apartment building gave us a larger, penthouse-level floor plan, and insisted it was the same layout as our second-floor unit. Whoops.

Clutter is a bunch of decisions you haven’t made yet. When you buy a house, you sometimes take on the indecision of the previous owner. Your parents and relatives and friends, seeing you with all that empty space, add on their own deferred decisions, too. Acquiring stuff is one decision, getting rid of it is at least two: first the call on keep-or-go, and then sell, give away, donate, or trash.

I frantically texted my friends who had moved out of Buffalo homes before. What’s the county dump like? Will it really be open at 11 a.m. on a Wednesday? What if I don’t have a paper utility bill to prove my residency, will they take a printed-out copy of my emails? One pictures their last days of moving as tearful goodbyes and wisful looks back. There is some of that. But there is also praying that someone nearby has a hammer drill that’s charged, because yours is drained, and someone bought your dining room table but the last hex bolt holding it together is stripped to Hell. They just messaged that they’re 10 miles away.

The bright spot of this never-ending cortisol binge was discovering the joy of your local Buy Nothing group, and selling things on eBay like you have nothing to lose. I was so inspired by this discovery, I wrote a rant about personal responsibility that maybe a dozen people read. But I stand by it: sell or give away your stuff often, with an almost careless disregard for getting “the right price” for it.

Liz and I now live in Southeast D.C. It’s not what most people think of when they think of the city—it’s not the part with the White House or the museums or the stadium or where the hip young staffers live. But it’s perfect for us, as we get our bearings and learn how things work. We’ve done some D.C. things, taken some great walks and bike trips, and smiled at the mild winters they get here. I’m going to pick out one complete “Visting Upstate NY” outfit–coat, hat, gloves, boots, the whole deal–and the rest of my heavy layers are headed to charity.

I like how rich the bike culture, bike-share systems, and scooters are here. At some point I will probably appreciate the public transit. The food options are plentiful, the Eastern Market wonderful, the beer much better than Ryan Nagelhout said it would be. But, again, this is a city that’s half asleep under the modern, rolling, soft quarantine. I’m eager to appreciate more than what you can get with a credit card, an app, or a 15-minute walk.

I miss Buffalo, believe me. But there’s a lot that is exciting about this big new thing.

The Buffalo Bills, of All Things

I am a lifelong fan of the Buffalo Bills. My parents claim that my third and fourth words ever spoken were “Go” and “Buffalo”; my dad put me on the floor in front of the TV during Bills games and nudged me to say it. When I was 10, I had to go to bed before Super Bowl XXV was over, but my dad woke me up. “Kev-boy,” he said, “The Bills are about to win the Super Bowl. Come watch. Don’t tell your mother.”

The Bills did not win that Super Bowl. I lost a 25-cent bet to fellow third-grader Matt Kline; I had to skim lunch funds to repay it. The Bills also did not win the next three Super Bowls they appeared in. The Bills have never won a Super Bowl. There are 12 teams that have never won the NFL championship, but it feels like the Bills most never won it.

Being a lifelong fan is not the same as a steadfast supporter of the Bills. I attended roughly one home game a year when I lived in Buffalo. The experience ranged from the high of a 31-0 season-opening rout of the Patriots in 2003 to the 6-3 Browns-Bills purgatory of 2009. The Bills went 17 years between playoff appearances, which is most of when I lived in Buffalo. The Bills subsumed and devastated talent and churned through coaches. Drunken deaths and falls and idiocy were more newsworthy than the team itself, until 2017. That’s when the Bills benched their competent starting quarterback in favor of maybe the worst quarterback of all time.

Beyond the snarky spectacle, I stopped paying attention. Then, this year, against all odds and expectation, things changed. Quarterback Josh Allen got much better, a rare NFL feat and almost impossible Bills outcome. The Bills’ coach made some brave play calls. The games were vibrant, kinetic, fun. We beat the Patriots twice last season, the first time since 1999. The Bills made a playoff spot, and then made it further.

It got to the point where, at my Monday morning work meetings, I was providing Bills playoff updates. In slides.

The Bills did not make or win the Super Bowl. But, for once in 21 years, I was hopeful for the next season. Not hopeful if we draft a miracle quarterback, or after we fire this stupid idiot coach, or if a certain other quarterback is injured. This actual Bills team, next actual football season. I was very grateful for this fun and optimism last year.

Repairs

I did a lot of little repairs before I sold my house last year. My favorite was filling in a bit of rotted wood on the front step. The step layout was complicated enough that I wouldn’t have been able to cut new boards for it in time, nor hire anybody during a pandemic. A patch and paint would have to do.

I didn’t understand what two-part epoxy was until this job. It’s like a real-world Minecraft material: you create a block of solid, featureless material that fills in for other stuff. You can sand it, carve it, or paint it. When I finished, you could barely tell there was ever a soft spot or hole in the wood. It was a three-inch hole that felt like a 100-yard victory. And, as with most repairs last year, it made me wonder why it took me so long to figure this stuff out.

In more familiar projects, I gave away a Nintendo Wii and games to a father with two kids who was really glad for it. Before he picked it up, I fixed one of the non-responsive controllers. Turned out it was just leakage from a leaking battery, requiring thorough contact/board cleaning with 90% isopropyl alcohol. The hardest part was keeping the buttons and little rubber gaskets from falling off and rolling away.

I also replaced the last of the old sconces on the walls before our home showings. There are things I’ll miss about our very old Victorian, but plaster and tightly-packed cloth-covered wire with no real markings? That’s someone else’s fetish.

In the new apartment, I have mostly added things: two ceiling fans, a wall-mounted TV, a Container Store shelving rack. Maybe my biggest project was switching the direction the door opens on the dryer. I had to find the manual online and use a Torx screwdriver from my iFixit toolkit. Now our hands don’t scrape on the closet wall when the clothes are dry.

Here’s one fix from last year you can watch me struggle through: swapping out the drifting joystick on a Nintendo Switch Joy-Con, with my iFixit coworkers.

Board Repair School

The coolest thing I did last year is attend Practical Board Repair School at iPad Rehab. iFixit paid for me to attend classes at Jessa Jones’ microsoldering/data recovery school just outside of Rochester, NY. I wanted to learn more about how devices work, at a level deeper than screens and batteries.

I wrote three posts about what I learned:

• Background, multimeters, thermal cameras, schematics
• Melting a display port, replacing chips, fixing my friend’s Pixel 2
• Why it’s easier to fix iPhones, weird Chinese parts, graduation

One of my favorite moments is realizing I’ve explored the next layer down of something. I’ve been a check-the-settings nerd most of my life, which is one level down from most people. I have spent many hours with Android ROMs, automation apps, kernel hacking, rooting, and the like; another layer down. Until I worked at iFixit, I didn’t really know how regular humans could pop the screen off a phone and replace the battery, but I caught the bug quickly. Once you’ve got a device open, you see this circuit board, with dozens or hundreds of little bits, tiny copper lines running between them … but, surely, if something goes wrong here, you’re sunk.

But you can fix that stuff, too. It’s all wires—tiny wires embedded in a board, maybe, but still wires, wires that might be disconnected, overloaded, damaged by water. Even the mysterious chips connect to the board through what are, lots of little wires. There are schematics, showing you where each wire goes, and how much charge it should carry. With that knowledge, you can get the power back to where it belongs.

You can even train people like me, with my not-so-great hands and English degree, to fix these tiny wires. Fixing a single micrometer-wide wire or replacing a $2 chip could save a $1,000 phone from the recycling shredder. Without the schematics, the spare chips, and the economic incentive, it doesn’t happen. But when it does? It’s mystic resurrection.

Raspberry Pi

I converted my Pi 3B+ from an unused retro games emulator to a Pi-powered Home Assistant hub. Now it provides me a convenient little panel to control, monitor, and automate my smarthome stuff and speakers. Love it.

The other Pi 4 serves up external storage to Plex and a network share. It is supposed to redundantly back them up (with rsync) every night, but I don’t have that quite working yet. One thing I discovered about Raspberry Pis: they don’t throw a lot of power to their USB ports. You have to externally power a drive, especially an old spinning-disk drive, if you want it ready for access.

Bikes

Back in late 2019, I bought a (refurbished, on-sale) Kickr Core bike trainer, so I could put my road bike to use in the Buffalo winter. Sure, the manual says it’s only for bikes made in the late 1990s, with enough frame/hub width to fit properly. But, with enough cold setting and effort, I could make a 1983 Trek 500 fit, right?

The answer is technically yes but also painfully, yes. I did a few weeks of Zwift, but felt like something was always slightly off with the gearing/resistance. I spent more time with wrenches than fellow riders. I learned a lot, but eventually stopped trying so hard to prove my retro-grouch worth.

One nice result of that failed experiment: I finally gave Seymour Schwinn (1988-2018 R.I.P.) a proper goodbye. And by “proper” I mean dismantling and organ-harvesting. During my last session at GoBike Buffalo before the pandemic, I transplanted his combination brake/shifters, derailleur, and a few other pieces onto that 1983 Trek, Theodore. I ran new cables and routing, did a new bar tape wrap, and got Theodore ready for short, doomed career as a winter trainer.

Once the move to DC was underway, I knew I had to downsize to one bike. My flat-bar Norco bike has a rack, fenders, Marathon Plus tires, a weather-resistant geared hub and belt drive. It was a tougher, more veratile city bike. So I put the rear wheel back on Theodore, cleaned him up, and donated him to GoBike Buffalo. He sold pretty quick. The description was something like “Classic style, great condition with quality upgrades,” which made me feel things.

Before we left, I made my final Ride for Roswell, at least as a Buffalonian. I raised the most money I’ve ever raised, perhaps because I told people I would stop bugging them. Instead of putting in dozens of miles in a Lycra kit, I rode with some friends to a few breweries around the Old First Ward. It was one of the nicest days in 2020 I can remember.

Since the move, I’ve relied on DC’s Capital Bikeshare for 95% of my rides. I have taken the Green Machine out for cargo hauls or locations inconvenient to bike hubs, but rarely. I’m sure the local bike enthusiasts have lots to complain about here—that’s just how it works. But I’m still in my biking honeymoon phase. I drive so rarely I have to set a reminder to start the car every so often, so the battery doesn’t die.

Baking

Clockwise from top left: Eggnog cheesecake with gingerbread people (Pastry Love); Kvæfjordkake (North Wild Kitchen); Chocolate-Glazed Mint-Frosted Brownies (Cook’s Illustrated Baking); Orange-Almond Pudding Cake with Chocolate Ganache (Pastry Love); Funfetti angel food cake (Pastry Love); Lemon pudding cake (NYT Cooking); Homemade Hostess-Style Cupcakes (Bravetart); Lemon Layer Cake with Fluffy Toasted Almond Icing (Cook’s Illustrated Baking). Center: Lemon meringue cupcake (Pastry Love).

I did a good deal of stress-baking in the first three-quarters of 2020. I baked a lot more bread, but no sourdough. I don’t like the flour churn or timing enough to keep a starter fed; that’s just my preference.

I made as many crispy cheesy pan pizzas as time and blood pressure allowed. It’s a recipe so good, so empowering, and so pefectly adapted to having some extra time at home, the NYT Cooking section had to write about a recipe not their own. Also, King Arthur Flour is an employee-owned B Corporation, with a good and consistent product. I buy King Arthur flours, Domino sugars, and Land O’Lakes butters, if I’m able.

If your phone looks like mine, you come across a lot of posts and stories that make impressive bakes seem like they’re powered by positive vibes and great lighting, not trial and effort and deeply useful failure. So I want to share some counterbalance, a collosal collapse of bakery, an utterly awful oven product I made: Green Tea-Ginger Marshmallow Shortbread, a.k.a. Lime Matcha Disaster Cake.

I was feeling restless one weekend (in 2020, huge surprise) and found this recipe. I had the basic ingredients (you can make superfine sugar in a food processor), including candied ginger, from my granola recipe. I needed matcha powder and unflavored gelatin, but I figured I’d find them at Safeway, or Harris Teeter, or Whole Foods.

I found neither unflavored gelatin packets nor matcha powder. I found instant matcha, which I figured was pretty much matcha powder, or close enough for a recipe. And I found lime Jell-O. Lime was one of the flavors in this weird little cake, anyways; I’d just cut the weight of sugar listed on the box out of the other sugar. This felt quite precise and clever. I adapted the directions to my cold-setting Jell-O, then stashed it in the fridge until dessert time.

Three things became apparent after the first bite:

• Lime Jell-O is not a flavor to try and “sneak” into anything.
• Without boiling water, instant matcha is not going to mix into anything, and instead settles between the shortbread and marshmallow in a thick layer (you can see its dark green in the image nearby).
• A combination of raw matcha granules, shortbread, hyper-sweet lime Jell-O, and even more sweet candied ginger is not modernist cuisine, it’s just bad.

My wife took one bite and said no, thanks. Me, I love Sour Patch Kids, believe they are proof God loves us. But this was a lesson from perhaps that same God. I had terrible stomach pains after eating one small square.

Did I eat another square the next night? Yes, and I once again felt like I’d been smacked in the gut by a bag of candied lawn trimmings. I scraped the whole rest of the pan, an entire Sunday afternoon of planning and shopping and baking, in the trash. The recipe itself might be fine, if you have the right stuff. But I hope I remember this catastrophe the next time I refuse to acknowledge my sunk-cost baking obsession.

Writing

I mostly wrote things for iFixit last year. Besides the board repair school posts (linked in the Repair section), my favorite posts were a rant about Amazon’s e-waste problem, and a deep dive into the Nexus 5X/6P boot loop that nobody asked for.

I also wrote about Leaving Buffalo on this site. I quite liked it, and so did many others. It reminds me why I maintain this pile of code you’re looking at.

Awesome Buffalo

It was my last year as a trustee of Awesome Buffalo. It was a different kind of year, meeting virtually for most of the year and re-evaluating which projects would make Buffalo more “awesome.” People were hurting for work, for food, for connections. Indoor events and large gatherings were a no-go. Every community needs art, mirth, and togetherness, in addition to funds, infrastructure, and civility. It was a tricky balance.

You can see the 2020 projects by starting in February 2020 and clicking through the year with the “Previous Project” link in the upper-left). I’m particularly proud to have been an advocate for Colored Girls Bike Too.

If you’ve got a Buffalo-area project that could use a small boost of cash to make a big difference, apply for an Awesome Buffalo grant. If you want to help make Buffalo more awesome, contact them about becoming a trustee.

Reading

Some people read a lot during COVID isolation. Not me. I think I’ve never read fewer traditional books than in the last year. I’ve never subscribed to more publications, or read more words, but read fewer books. It felt important to support good work, real journalism, and have access to well-considered news and thought. But, books? I dunno, not last year.

Books I did actually read:

• Rust: The Longest War - If nothing else, I learned that “Beer was made for cans, and cans were made for beer.”
• Made to Break: Technology and Obsolesence in America - Lightbulb conspiracies, GM as the progenitor of the modern consumerist psyche.
• Alien III: An Audible Original Drama - Based on William Gibson’s unproduced screenplay for this movie, one of many! It was perfect for a drive to and from the Adirondacks. I can’t remember a moment of it, but I was glad to hang out with Bishop and Ridley again.
• Uncommon Carriers - Loaned by a friend with very good taste. McPhee’s style seems very much my kind of thing, but a couple of the chapters in this collection of stories didn’t click with me. Some just felt like they had too much detail about a setup that hadn’t hooked me yet. Or I just don’t enjoy boat stories, maybe.
• Every book in the recent season of Boss Fight Books - Minus Final Fantasy VI, which is not out, but add in Postal and Red Dead Redemption. I read Majora’s Mask most closely, because I helped with an edit/review copy. I’ve only actually played Red Dead Redemption out of these games, but I enjoyed all these books.

Some of the best longer or just more interesting articles I read in 2020, via my Pocket account. This excludes stuff about the president at that time, which was important reading but which nobody needs to revisit now:

• The Vampire Ship - The story of one ship full of heroin and nearly every life it ruined.
• Injured? - Cellino v. Barnes, and it’s lit.
• What Happened to Val Kilmer? He’s Just Starting to Figure It Out - Deeply humanizing and reflective and tremendously weird.
• All the Logistical Problems of That NYMag Sex Diary, Cataloged - Shannon is a treasure. I will one day have weird nostalgia for pandemic moments like this, when something deeply stupid took over the discourse..
• A Student Debt Researcher Fucks Me Up With America’s Broken Promises - Sometimes the best headline just says it like you feel it. My inner vision got continually wider as I read.

Games

I dug into some games last year, huge surprise. Here they are, in rough order of favorite-ness, for each platform.

Switch

Hades

Everyone I know with good taste in games loved and recommended this game in 2020. It’s not actually my exact type of game—I don’t have the hands or brain or maybe temperament for an isometric hack-and-slash these days. But there’s so much finely considered art on display in here that it’s almost harder to not like and try it a bit.

My unwritten, unpaid essay about video games in 2020 is that this game came out the same year as Cyberpunk 2077 so we could all learn important lessons about what really matters in a game.

Stardew Valley

I started working on my wife’s farm in this game in late 2019. Obviously, we had time to get back into it and do some more farming, mining, trading, and even stupid, useless fishing. Nothing really changed, this is an epochal game that continues to get better.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons

I have friends who still check in on their villages every day, nearly a year later. I dig it. This game arrived just as the pandemic was shutting down everything you could do, everyone you could see. The news was so oppressive, the outlook so bleak … and here’s this place where your biggest problem is that you can’t find this one kind of tree you need to build a bookcase.

I remember the complaints about how klutzy the online island-visiting system was. I think now about how we, in hindsight, might appreciate a system where only people who really wanted to see each other could visit, for just a bit at a time, without the outside world intruding. We each had a little space without news, advertisements, concerns about being “productive,” or Zoom cameras. It was a good space.

PC

Half-Life: Alyx

I know what I looked like in a VR headset. And it was a huge pain in the butt to triangulate the motion-sensing gear on my wife’s desk, where the powerful PC was located. I had to upgrade my processor and motherboard to play this game at reasonable fidelity, which led to hours of second-guessing and RMA purgatory.

It was worth it. This game was a wild swing by Valve, one that a lot of people couldn’t play and still can’t. It was fun as Hell, scary as anything, and stuffed with wonderful voice acting. Oh, and visual detail and level design that felt real in a way that seems goofy unless I put the googles on your head.

There are times, even now, when I need to grab something—a remote, a cable, hand sanitizer—where I will feel a small but real impulse to flick my Gravity Gloves and catch the thing as it flings toward me. Is it sad, longing to return to a world created by two lenses inside a shoebox strapped to my head? Does it say something about last year? Shut up, yes.

Alyx might be the only game I’ve played that makes holding and using a gun feel less empowering. You go through the real motions of unloading and reloading and aiming with your hands, which, surprise, takes a lot more work than a mouse or gamepad suggest. Your aim probably sucks, and you waste ammo out of fear. You are constantly caught off-guard. You don’t become a superhuman killing machine in Alyx; you survive as a young woman trying not to get mauled by highly dextrous monsters.

I had to give back the headset I borrowed before I moved. I will probably get back into it. I think about it more than I ever thought I would.

Hitman 2/3

I last played Hitman in 2017. I picked up Hitman 2 on sale, and it clicked. Because each Hitman game overlays its new mechanics and tools over the old levels, it made me rediscover the original levels. Hitman 3 was technically a 2021 release, but who cares, it was really the fifth quarter of 2020.

You could play this game forever, if you dug escalating challenges and quirky targets. I’m not a 100%, all-the-achievements type, but this game brings it out in me. I want to try and hit every target in just my original suit, or snipe three disparate targets from the same treehouse or radio tower, or figure out how to electrocute this one guard with an aquarium. This Groundhog Day Murder Simulator clicks with me.

Return of the Obra Dinn

Now for something completely different: a 1-bit nautical historical murder logic puzzle. The mechanics might be unwieldy at first, but once you catch the rhythm, it’s an engrossing game with a killer aesthetic. There are a few images and moments in this game that will stick with me a long time. I’m being vague, because experiencing this game without a lot of preparation is a big part of the fun. That, and the soundtrack.

Slay the Spire

It feels dangerous to even mention this game again, after I finally called it quits at some point last year. I own the game on Steam, GOG, and Switch. I refuse to add up my total hours played. This game was so mean to me and I loved it.

Shenzen I/O

You design and code microcontrollers for a supplier in Shenzen. You learn an actual programming language and arrange circuit paths to do this. You are all but required to print out a reference manual and keep it in a binder nearby. You develop concerns about what exactly you are making.

It’s wonderful. I had to step away from a particularly gruesome problem (a change-making machine for a Chinese theme park), but I’ll be back. I have no doubt I will be making my way through other Zachtronics games.

Zachtronics gives away their games to public or non-profit schools. That page, where they list the potentially objectionable content in each game, is its own marketing page. Infinifactory is “probably one of our less kid-friendly games, as the story is told entirely through voice recordings attached to the spacesuits of people who died while building factories for the aliens who abducted them.” Students playing Shenzen I/O “may acquire an increased sense of the ridiculousness of modern capitalist society.” Sometimes you just find your people.

Tetris Effect

I mostly watched my wife play this, because she’s exponentially better at Tetris than I am. Te music, visuals, and pulse of this game are so good you might happily watch someone else play it. If you have good headphones, or a decent sound setup, it’s hard to say it’s not worth it. It is, after all, Tetris.

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus

More of the same, but that’s a good thing. Surprisingly good writing (minus some uninspired gags/tropes) and voice acting, decent shooting, no stupid final boss battle. It’s a good time, shooting Nazis.

XCOM: Chimera Squad

It would take pretty awful reviews, or ransomware, for me not to install and try out an XCOM game, expansion, or (in this case) spin-off. It’s not bad. It’s a bit of fun while I wait for 3, it spins some interesting characters and interactions out of very little subtext, and it’s defintely worth the double-A-game price.

Wasteland 3

I finished Wasteland 2 in 2017. Back then, I said it was “A bit wonky, a bit fetch-quest-y, and the ending was,) it was okay.” I’m here to report that Wasteland 3 was … very similar. The premise was interesting, the original music pretty good (until you hear a few tracks too many times), and the combat and inventory systems much improved. But the knee-jerk nihilism grates after a while. My friend Thorin complained that the ending shoehorns your long-ago decisions into somewhat manipulative Unexpected Consequences, and he was right.

Would I pre-order/back a fourth version of this game? Maybe. Where are we at with herd immunity?

Gwent

Enjoyed playing a few rounds of this against other humans, and Slay the Spire gave me a good training in deck building/pruning. But it felt overwhelming, so I fell off.

Cyberpunk 2077

I was very excited for this. So much so that I found and bought a new GeForce graphics card for it, in 2020 (its own meta/overhyped game). I was jazzed for the aesthetic (minus the Orientalism, if you can even separate it). Most importantly, it was from the makers of one of my all-time favorite games, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. That game was a triumph of writing, dialogue, and storytelling, nestled inside a decent RPG.

I have played one hour of this game.

It was simply hard to play, even for just one hour. It had bug and glitches, a fatiguing attitude/viewpoint, and tutorial missions that weren’t exciting. Style-wise, it felt played-out before it really got going. Further dampening enthusiasm was the entiretey of the global press rightly declaring that, not only is this game not good, but it’s exploitative, it demoralized and taxed the people who made it, and the development company lied about its readiness.

So I uninstalled this huge game-as-a-metaphor-for-the-year and will maybe check back on it later in 2021, after many patches. Or not.

Ugh, Twitter

Defying all advice and logical outcomes, I logged into Twitter and sent messages multiple times in 2020. My most popular tweet was a picture of early pandemic takeout lasagna. There was some good news about recycling pizza boxes (you can). And I made a weird goof about podcasts.

There were two other notable tweets that people seemed to like:

Pictures of Pets

Cork:

Apricot:

Howard:

But I cannot stand using a dozen apps, with interfaces ranging from “overdone” to “awkward” to “semi-translated barely cohesive spyware,” to manage the stuff. And I do not want to memorize very specific phrases to yell at Alexa. And, if possible, I do not want to feel like I’ve surrendered all privacy just to turn on the humidifier 30 minutes before I go to bed.

I found a solution. Yes, it involves a Raspberry Pi—okay, you got me. But you make the Raspberry Pi do this one thing, and you end up with a single place to control it all. You get a dashboard with all the switches and dials and readings. Like this one:

Click for larger image

This is Home Assistant. If all you want is switches and monitors for all your stuff, in one app, it can do that. It does that better than Google Home, Alexa, or HomeKit, I think. As you can see above, I’ve got switches for my Hue lights and Wemo outlets, readings for my SmartThings sensors, and media controls for Sonos speakers, a soundbar, and the TV.

Looks good on a phone, too.

Oh, but you like to get deep, huh? Home Assistant’s got depth. My lights don’t just turn on in “the morning”—not even at “sunrise.” They turn on when the sun is at a specific angle over the horizon, based on civil dawn. My lights blink whenever someone’s battery level goes below 30 percent. My Home Assistant is also a DuckDNS client and a private WireGuard VPN host.

And I’m not even close to the deep end here. I’ve seen people in forums and subreddits using Home Assistant for presence detection, camera monitoring, having your speakers announce people’s arrival, and lots of other stuff. Do you get a little jolt when you see the phrase “YAML file” or “Zigbee”? Can you see Stack Overflow pages in your mind? You can get into Home Assistant, believe me.

I’ll walk through a basic setup in this post. You could also rely on the first two pages of the Getting Started guide. There are lots of web guides to Home Assistant; I’ve read many of them. But at the end of 2020, many of them also seem a bit dated. I hope I can provide some context, and encouragement.

Get Started

You might be asking yourself, “Is this one of those posts that’s full of terminal commands?” It is not. You will download an image, write it to a micro SD card, load that card into a Raspberry Pi, boot it up, and then use a browser to control everything from that point on.

The worst-case scenario is that you decide that Home Assistant isn’t worth it, so you’re stuck with a leftover Raspberry Pi. Sorry, that’s not really a punishment. Sorry that I tricked you into buying the world’s coolest video game emulator, network-wide ad blocker and privacy tool, personal VPN, and backup personal computer. Truly, I beg your forgiveness.

Let’s get into it.

Get a Pi and some stuff

As I write this, you can run Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi 3B or 3B+, or a 4B. You could also use a Tinkerboard, Odroid, or Intel NUC. If you’re reading this long after fall 2020, or if you’re not sure about compatibility, check the installation page. Note that the easy, default installation takes over your whole Pi and does not give you a desktop to work with; everything is managed through a web broswer. There are ways of running Home Assistant in a Docker or installed on an already configured Raspberry Pi but I’m not getting into them here. I like the simplicity of a tiny device, doing one job, plugged into ethernet.

My Raspberry Pi 3B+, inside an NES-style case, force-fed ethernet.

If you’re buying a new Pi, you should probably buy a kit rather than just the board. You want a power supply and case at a minimum. Some kits come with heat sinks—nice, but not strictly necessary. You’ll need a micro SD card, too; some kits come with one, or you can buy one. Home Assistant says you should get one that is rated Application Class 2, one Pi enthusiast says, with charts, that it doesn’t really matter. I say, if you have a micro SD card already, use it, but go ahead and buy a good one if not.

You don’t need a USB keyboard and mouse, or even a micro-HDMI cable or dongle, though having those isn’t an awful idea for future Pi projects.

Oh, and, yes, an ethernet cable. A Home Assistant setup, and a Pi in general, works a lot easier if you can plug it into your network using an ethernet cord. For most people, this means setting it up near their home router. If you don’t have a working ethernet cord to plug in, you can follow step 4 on the Installation page to set up Wi-Fi. The setup isn’t too bad; it’s the chance for Wi-Fi hiccups that’s a pain.

Flash it

Balena Etcher is great software. Download it, install it, open it on any computer, Windows, Mac, or even Linux. Download the right Home Assistant image for your Pi. Connect your micro SD card to your computer. On the left-most side of Balena, pick the downloaded image. In the midddle section, choose the micro SD card. Hit the Flash button, and let Balena do its thing.

When you’ve got your card flashed, put it in the Pi. Plug the ethernet cable into the Pi (or put the USB stick with the Wi-Fi setup in it, or modify the SD card with the Wi-Fi details, detailed in step 3 here). Plug in the Pi’s power cable, and when you then plug it into the Pi, it will boot up (a little orange-red light near the power cord shows activity). Then, do nothing.

Set it up

Here’s where it might seem weird. On most Raspberry Pi setups, you want to have the Pi connected to a TV or monitor, and have a USB keyboard and mouse ready to walk through an initial setup. You wait until you see a big Raspberry on the screen. Home Assistant, once it installs and boots up, is managed through a browser. You don’t see anything on a TV or monitor.

Follow Home Assistant’s setup guide to access your Home Assistant through a browser. The guide at Pi My Life Up has more screenshots and some tricks to try if your browser doesn’t show a setup screen.

When you get to the screen showing the devices and services Home Assistant sees already, set up as many as you can then. It’s helpful to have some objects to work with when you’re first designing your panels.

Some stuff will set up without any help at all, some will require username/password authentication, and some devices might be a royal pain in the butt. My SmartThings stuff required the creation of a webhook inside Home Assistant. My Logi camera required that I ask the Logitech developers personally to open up an API spot for me, through a Google Form (!). I still haven’t heard back on that one.

Anyways! Set up what you can, hit “Finish” at the bottom of that page, and, BOOM, you’ve got your first dashboard, full of badges, cards, and entities inside each card.

The Basics: Control Your Smarthome Stuff

Don’t edit this “Overview” dashboard

Here’s something confusing about Home Assistant: the first dashboard you see, “Overview,” is not the one you should mess with. “Overview” is a kind of omni-dashboard, updated by Home Assistant itself, showing you everything Home Assistant can work with and organize: rooms, scenes, devices, and weird little details about each thing. Rather than mess with Overview, you should create a new panel, make it the default, and have Overview to check in on as you make changes and add things.

Instead of trying to edit Overview, head down to “Configuration” in the lower part of the left-hand control panel, then scroll down to look for “Lovelace Dashboards.” You’ll see “Overview” as the only option here. Click the big “Add Dashboard” button in the lower-right corner. Give it a title, make sure “Show in sidebar” is toggled on at the bottom, and click “Create.” (Don’t worry about icons right now, we’ll get to that in a bit). Your new dashboard will look exactly like the Overview dashboard. Click the three overflow dots in the upper-right corner, choose “Edit dashboard.” You’ll get a warning that Home Assistant is currently maintaining this, but it’s fine. You’ll probably want to toggle the “Start with an empty dashboard” option at bottom, then click “Take control.”

Now you’ve got … nothing! Click the “+” button in the top bar to create your first “View.” You’ll probably only want one view, so just name this “Basic” or “Default” or whatever, then hit “Save.” Now you have an “Add Card” button on your otherwise blank dashboard. Click it.

It’s time to think about what you want to do with your Home Assistant setup. You can organize your stuff however you want. You could group all the lights, like I have, or you could group them by room, so it’s easy to turn off, say, all your living room lights, all the downstairs lights, etc. You could group all your temperature sensors with your thermostat control. It’s up to you.

You can add stuff either by choosing a pre-designed card, or pick the “entities” in your house and toss them in as a starting point. It may take some experimentation to figure out exactly which things you want in each card. Keep in mind that an “entity” is not a device, it’s one aspect of one device. Many things in a smarthome will have more than one entity attached to them. My TV has an entity that is just a power switch for the TV itself, as well as a media player entity that lets me control volume, pause playback, and such.

I think it’s easier to start off by searching for entities. Generally, if you want more detailed control of one thing, select it alone, then click “continue” to see a suggested card.

Or select a few different entities, and let Home Assistant create a multi-entity card. I like to enable the “Color icons based on state?” control for most cards.

It’s easy to add too many controls to your home screen. Keep in mind that you can tap any entity to get more detailed controls.

You can also create more specific views. For instance, I can create another view, “Lights,” that shows the dimming controls and big on/off buttons for each one.

You’ve got the hang of it now. You can always come back to this editor screen and add or remove entities from cards, change card types, and, as you’ll see below, fine-tune the look and feel of everything.

Icons and badges

For most entities, Home Assistant has a default icon that makes sense and looks spiffy. Lights show light bulbs, switches have little lightning/power bolts, battery levels show batteries. But you might want to customize them, to better know at a glance which is which, or just scratch your customization itch.

Let’s fix up this card I have for Tile Bluetooth trackers. By default, every Tile icon is a square made up of four smaller tiles (clever!). But let’s say I have one on my keys, and one in my wallet, so I want a quick-glance distinction between them. Click on the entity you want to change, then click the gear icon in the upper-right corner of the detailed view that pops up.

There’s an “Icon” field, but it’s … text? Yes. Home Assistant has you choose universal icons from the Material Design project. Head to that site, choose the “Cheatsheet” option on the top panel, and Control/Command-F search the page for the icon you want. I liked mdi-wallet on there, for example. In Home Assistant entities, you replace the - with a colon, :. So I enter mdi:wallet in the Icon field, and it should show up just after you type it in and hit enter.

Besides cards, you can also set up a shelf of permanent badges at the top of your dashboard. You can see them in the “Overview” dashboard: a whole bunch of little circular tiles at the top of the window. To add them to your own dashboard, navigate to it, click the three-dot menu, choose “Edit Dashboard.” Click the pencil icon next to the view you want to edit. One of the sub-sections is “Badges.” That’s what those text-only circles are, Badges.

The thing to keep in mind is that you can’t manipulate any of these Badges. You can click them for more detail; that’s helpful for temperatures, battery levels, statuses, or things where you want to click to see more detail.

Once you’ve got your dashboard set up and looking good, you’ll want to make it the default dashboard you see when you log into Home Assistant, or open the phone app. In the sidebar, look for the bottom-most option, with your name or username on it. Click it, and in the “Dashboard” section, click and change the default from Overview to your custom dashboard. While you’re in this section, you can also choose a dark or light theme, tweak the color scheme, and make other changes.

If you stopped here, you’d have an efficient little server and webapp that lets you control all your smarthome stuff at once, from your local network, using a no-nonsense panel you designed yourself. Not bad!

Me, I did not stop there.

What Else You Can Do with Home Assistant

For the built-in things you can explore with Home Assistant—Scenes, Routines, Areas, Scripts, Tags, People tracking—you should rely on the official Home Assistant documentation. It’s good.

I’m going to briefly note here the stuff that I’ve packed into my own Home Assistant, and some tips on how I got them working.

Install phone/tablet apps

The iOS and Android apps for Home Assistant aren’t just a quick way to get to your web panel, though they are that, too. They’re also a way for Home Assistant to send you notifications about smarthome things. You can even make those notifications actionable.

My favorite part, though, is that, if you grant the permissions, Home Assistant can use the data from your phone. I can’t even fit all the things your phone can report back to Home Assistant in one screenshot, but here’s a few highlights (with some variance between iPhones and Android):

• Battery level (%), health, state (charging, not charging), charging type (wireless/wired)
• Wi-Fi network and LTE connection
• Floors ascended/descended, steps walked, and other fitness stats
• Location, last update

Install File Editor, Samba, and other add-ons

If you’re going to dive deeper into Home Assistant, you’ll need to edit some config files. Head into the Supervisor menu in the left-hand sidebar. Click the “Add-on Store” heading (or the storefront-style icon). Look or search for “File editor,” then click and follow through to add it to Home Assistant. After it’s done installing, you might want to enable the “Show in sidebar” option on its “Info” page.

You can also install a Samba add-on, which would (theoretically) allow other computers on your network to find your Home Assistant and browse or edit its files. Samba is a finicky protocol, but it’s there if you want it. If you know what SSH is, and can securely set up access for yourself, that’s an easy add-on, too.

Move your logs (and back up your system)

Home Assistant is a server. As such, it logs everything that is happening, so that you might spot problems and tweak performance. That’s fine, but most people run their Home Assistant from a micro SD card inside a Raspberry Pi. Micro SD cards die faster with frequent writing.

I can’t say for certain whether this will matter for you. But once you have your Home Assistant set up, it’s not a bad idea to slow down the card burn. You have a few options:

• Use a USB stick for your Assistant’s storage. This rather intenstive post explains how
• Buy a class A1 or A2 micro SD card, since they are rated to last for years with gazillions of writes.
• Do what I did: cut down what is logged, shorten the time logs are kept, and move your logs to the system’s memory. Since your Assistant is always-on, you can still access your logs, and they won’t impact your system RAM much.

You’ll want to install the File Editor add-on mentioned in the last section to monkey with configuration.yaml. Before you do that, you should must take a snapshot backup. It’s a couple clicks to recreate all the connections and settings inside your Assistant and download it from a browser. Do it before any notable monkeying around, running updates, and every so often, just because.

In your Home Assistant sidebar, click Supervisor, then the “Snapshots” tab at the top. Give your snapshot a name (maybe with a date, too, like 2020-12-29-Home-Assistant), password protect it if you want, and make it. Click on any of your snapshots in the gallery on this page, download them, put them somewhere safe.

Okay, now that you’ve got a fallback in case a typo in a config file ruins everything (kidding! kinda!), open up that File Editor from the sidebar (or Supervisor->Add-on Store, File Editor, Open Web UI if it’s not there). Click the file icon in the upper-left corner when the editor opens. Click configuration.yaml from the list.

In your configuration file, there should be a recorder: section header. Underneath that header, but indented two spaces, add db_url: 'sqlite:///:memory:', as suggested by this helpful Reddit commenter. Later in that same thread, he suggests purging your log files after 3 days’ time, and excluding the really esoteric stuff Home Assistant logs, like when the position of the sun changes. So here’s taylen123’s example recorder segment in configuration.yaml, pasted from their comment:

recorder:
  db_url: 'sqlite:///:memory:'
  purge_keep_days: 3
  exclude:
    domains:
      - automations
      - weblink
      - updater
    entities:
      - sun.sun
      - sensor.last_boot
      - sensor.date
      - weather.home
      - weather.dark_sky

Save the file when you’re done (the red “disk” button in the upper-right corner). Make sure you’ve got your snapshot backup downloaded, then reboot your Home Assistant (Supervisor->System->Host System->Reboot). If it works … nothing changes, really. You might check on your System Metrics every so often to make sure your RAM usage is okay. On my Pi 3B+ with 2 GB RAM, I’ve rarely used more than 24% memory.

Set Up External Access

You can use Home Assistant when you’re on your home network, and that’s fine. You might not need access to your server when you’re away from home, or you might have another solution, like a VPN (which is easy to install with Wireguard). If so, you never need to dive into this murky realm.

But if you do need to open up Home Assistant, whether for access or to enable a webhook or something else, you want it to be secure. The easiest way to securely access Home Assistant from any device, anywhere, is to pay $5 per month to Nabu Casa. Nabu Casa is a sponsor of Home Assistant, they’re very serious about security and data privacy, and their service makes enabling remote access and all kinds of hardware access very easy. It also unlocks some cool text-to-speech stuff.

Like it says on their site, using Nabu Casa means:

You don’t have to deal with dynamic DNS, SSL certificates or opening ports on your router.

But what if, like me, you hate yourself, you value victory over inanimate objects more than your free time, and you “love” a “challenge”? Then let’s get into it!

My setup was probably different than yours: router, ISP, home network setup, etc. But the broad tasks for enabling remote access are:

• Give your Home Assistant/Raspberry Pi a static IP address on your home network.
• Get a free DuckDNS account.
• Install the DuckDNS add-on in Home Assistant and configure it (I didn’t need to do the port 80 configuration suggested by this guide, but your results may vary).
• Open a port on your router and forward it to Home Assistant’s static address and the Home Assistant port (8123).
• Connect to Home Assistant now through that DuckDNS URL and whatever port you forwarded to HA: something.duckdns.org:1234 or whatnot.

The best advice I can give on this process is to avoid any rabbit holes you see about connecting to Home Assistant securely on both your internal and external network. Once you set up an external URL with a valid certificate, Home Assistant cannot serve up a valid certificate for your local network connection. You might find some posts suggesting a setup using the nginx add-on to create an SSL proxy. But, listen, you just wanted to control your lights and thermostat, right? That way lies madness.

Just bookmark and connect to your Home Assistant through your DuckDNS address, and then donate to DuckDNS and Let’s Encrypt for making the web secure for everyone, including you and your weird home automation project.

You might want to harden your Home Assistant security if you’re opening it up to outside access. I liked Kiril Peyanski’s suggested two-line addition to configuration.yaml, which locks out IP addresses after 5 incorrect password attempts. It’s also a good idea to turn on multi-factor authentication for log-ins. Home Assistant itself might not be a prime hacker/griefer target, but it’s an always-on computer attached to your network, so lock it down.

By all means, let me know if you:

• find any issues with my Home Assistant advice
• spot any typos or dead links
• have some cool Home Assistant stuff to show off

I hope you enjoy this tiny computer project at least half as much as I have.

Some people, upon learning how we’ve lived our lives, are unable to conceal their chagrin on our behalf, that our lives should be so limited, as if experience so geographically circumscribed could be neither rich nor satisfying. When I assure them it has been both, their smiles suggest we’ve been blessed with self-deception by way of compensation for all we’ve missed. - Richard Russo, “Bridge of Sighs”

I have sold my house in Buffalo, NY. My wife and I and our pets will be moving to Washington, D.C. as soon as paperwork allows. I have lived in Buffalo for more than 19 years, longer than anywhere else, including my hometown. What a strange post to be writing. Let’s start with how I got here.

I came to Buffalo for school. The University at Buffalo is one of two state colleges that accepted me and my inconsistent high school efforts. It was a 2-hour drive from my family, which felt like a nice medium distance. The campus seemed very big, in large part because the hop-on, hop-off bus tour made the school seem more inside the actual city than it was. Before the campus tour, I had never been to Buffalo; I only heard about it during Super Bowls, and when my friend Eric missed school because his family was stuck here during a blizzard.

via WikiMedia Commons

Most importantly, it was a sunny day when I toured. Many people I’ve talked to about their college-picking memories mention the big difference a single day’s weather made on their decision—when choosing their home for four years of their life. My wife says she rejected one school almost entirely because it was gray and raining when she toured. Now here I am, writing about my nearly two-decade experience in Buffalo, a city … not known for its sunny days.

After some initial flailing at various majors, I sunk heavily into the student newspaper, The Spectrum. The summer after my senior year, I landed an internship at The Buffalo News. I rented an apartment across the street from Kleinhans Music Hall.

I was in that apartment when George W. Bush visited the concert hall to talk up the Patriot Act. Secret Service agents interviewed my landlord and me a few days before the visit. They told us to stay away from our windows. I, a dumb young man who thought he was crafty, raised a retractable blind just enough to peek at the incoming procession. A man on the roof of Kleinhans, carrying the longest gun I have ever seen in person, flung me a “down” gesture, while two other snipers simultaneously turned toward me. I must have stayed prone and still under that window for at least three minutes, just laying there, thinking about being killed because I wanted to see W get out of a black SUV.

I got to stay at the News as a long-term temporary, filling in for other reporters’ absences. Eventually the News Guild noticed, and demanded the News either hire me as a full-time reporter or send me away. For years afterward, I blamed the Guild for my exile, for stunting my career. Now I wish I knew who forced the issue, because I would pay their bar tab. Stay strong, News Guild.

I went to the Sandusky Register in Ohio for a bit. I almost didn’t come back to Buffalo. A fellow Buffalo News intern had recommended me to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, where covering Walmart’s headquarters might lead to a much bigger gig, maybe at the Wall Street Journal. My girlfriend in Buffalo made it clear that she would not follow my blind faith in newspaper meritocracy, and definitely not to Arkansas. She had stayed in Buffalo for law school in large part because of me; it was my turn to show some commitment.

So I stuck with my future wife. An editor at the Niagara Gazette hired me over the phone, telling me it was “time to do some great writing.” When I arrived, I discovered that editor was fired, replaced by a company man from Community Newspaper Holdings, Inc. CNHI is as fun to work for as its name implies, and as committed to covering local news as Alabama’s pension fund allows. I remember a meeting where the publisher, addressing the staff in the cafeteria, tried out three different explanations of how our new health plan was actually cheaper for employees, so long as nobody got sick.

There are some people I worked with whom I can never fully repay for helping me survive the Gazette. Same with the Sandusky Register. You shouldn’t have to work illegally long hours in demoralizing conditions to form tight bonds, but it happens. I still talk with some of them. The rest should know that I remember, or at least cannot forget.

While I worked at the Niagara Gazette, I lived in an Allentown apartment above the “June 2 Model & Talent Agency,” which does not really exist. I don’t have the space or mandate to get into all the stories of living there. There is, however, a story about an Ice Cube Tray Invoice some friends hear about after a couple of drinks.

Eventually, I realized the Buffalo News was not simply playing hard to get, or waiting for me to write the most insightful feature on a Tonawanda vape shop. I noticed a goodbye post from an editor on one of my favorite blogs, then worked up the nerve to email Gina Trapani at Lifehacker. She gave me a try-out, then hired me, mentored me, restored my confidence. I’ve worked online and remotely ever since, which allows me to better support my wife wherever she needs to be.

We got married in 2007. We rented half a house on Franklin Street in Allentown for about a year. We came close to buying a small house on Ashland Ave., then I got extremely cold feet. There was a 9-month detour to Rochester. Then we needed to move back to Buffalo again in mid-2009. This time, we wanted to buy a house.

My former copy editor at the News also did real estate, and showed us a bunch of houses here. I stood on the porch of this house in the early evening and called my wife at her job in Rochester. I told her it was worth driving out to see it, right then. Part of the reason we actually got this house is because the seller’s agent forgot to put a time and date on an open house announcement. Don’t let people tell you the real estate market makes any sense.

We ended up living in this house, in Buffalo, for 11 years after moving back. We both did a lot of Buffalo things. You can tell, because, as with many small or mid-size cities, everything has Buffalo in its name¹. I was part of TEDxBuffalo, BarCamp Buffalo, Ignite Buffalo (the O’ Reilly version, not the incubator), OpenCoffee Club Buffalo, CoworkBuffalo, and Awesome Buffalo. I wrote for Buffalo Spree, and even the Buffalo News. I spent time at GoBike Buffalo and Creative Mornings Buffalo. My wife was president of the board at Housing Opportunities Made Equal, a volunteer for Say Yes Buffalo, an adjunct professor at University at Buffalo Law School, and, just recently, president of the Western New York chapter of the Women’s Bar Association of the State of New York.

The only part of meeting Mayor Byron Brown I remember, from when he declared “TEDxBuffalo Day” in Buffalo, was explaining how a Pebble watch worked.

Mostly, we just lived here. A few relatives would always ask when we saw them if we were “still in Buffalo,” as if we got a flat tire in 1999 and our tow truck never came. Either of us could launch a spirited defense of Buffalo’s unique merits, its history, or even—with a lot of context and footnotes—its weather.² We would cringe when local media flaunted the city’s appearance on a suspect list of “10 Best Places for Millenials to Buy a Chill Home” or whatever. There might be people who live in cities not compelled to defend them like a gangly friend on the schoolyard; not many live in Buffalo.

One of my Wirecutter coworkers moved to Buffalo with their partner in the spring of 2015, to escape the skyrocketing costs of Brooklyn. Part of why they moved was that I and another coworker vouched for the city. Ever since, I have been trying to validate that endorsement, showing them the area, talking up its origins, its oddities, and even its major, noteworthy problems (most of them rooted in racial segregation and extremely short-sighted planning). It’s been a blessing to relive my city through someone else’s experience of it. Even if they really dislike the local pizza style.

Photo credit: Buffalo News (though I can’t find the original now)

And now it’s time to go somewhere else. My wife has an exciting new job, and I’m ready to try something new with her. It’s going to be a very quiet goodbye. Because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, there will not be a party, or “one last” drinks or meals, or visits to favorite restaurants, ice cream stands, festivals, charity events. We will have to make our own catharsis before the movers show up.

Here’s a first attempt. I wrote most of this post sitting in the same spot where I once sat writing a different post, shortly after moving into this house, when we had only just set up a couch, TV, and internet. The couch and TV are different, and so is the laptop. But the mostly quiet dark, mitigated by the streetlamp on the corner and the cobwebs around it, feels exactly the same.

22 years after my parents first dropped me off at UB, I am moving on. I am glad it was sunny that one day.

If you spot a typo or formatting quirk, let me know by tweet or email.

• New Job
• Repairs
• Raspberry Pi Nonsense
• Bikes
• Baking (Plus a Granola Recipe)
  • Kevin Madison Park Granola
• Writing
• Lifting
• TEDxBuffalo
• Awesome Buffalo
• Ugh, Twitter
• Reading
• Games
  • Switch
  • PC
• Pictures of pets

New Job

I left Wirecutter and started writing at iFixit in April 2019. It’s been a fun ride so far. I’m researching copyright legislation, touring recycling plants, cultivating sources and tipsters, interviewing Pebble hackers, and messing with all kinds of terminal apps, circuit diagrams, and PDFs I shouldn’t have.

Working at iFixit has changed my understanding of consumerism, recycling, product design, the legislative process, and, of course, what people can fix. As such, I tried to fix more things than I normally do.

Repairs

Helping a friend replace the battery in a Big Jambox at Community Beer Works, because neither of our wives wanted us drinking and scattering parts in the dining room that night.

Here’s everything I can remember trying to fix in 2019. I think it’s important to be honest about expectations with DIY repairs. Some things you can fix yourself, and should try. Some things make you wish for the days of repair shops, which are only gone because we let them go.

• Replace battery in 2014 Chromebook Pixel: Success
• Replace water-damaged Pixel C tablet screen with screen from bricked parts-only Pixel C bought on eBay, clean corrosion on logic board: Success
• Replace battery on Big Jambox: Mixed (Battery was replaced, but something else may have been wrong with it: wouldn’t take a charge after working once, then wouldn’t even work plugged in.)
• Replace battery in MacBook Air: Success
• Replace headlamp on Ford C-Max with used $150 junkyard part, instead of $550 dealer part: Success
• Replace battery in friend’s iPhone 6s,7 Plus phones: Success
• Replace screen on iPad Mini 2nd gen: Mixed (Had to order new LCD panel after prying out an obscene amount of sticky glass)
• Replace keyboard in Chromebook Pixel 2013: Gruesome failure (Killed display, probably because battery was connected while re-attaching, and because of frustration. Next time I read that the keys are riveted to the case, I’ll think twice!)
• Replace battery in Pixel 2: Success
• iPad 2 screen separated, unreliable charging port: Success (fixed with Sugru and pliers)
• Galaxy S8 Plus battery and screen replacement: Success
• Replace battery in Pixel 2: Mixed/Failure (Why did the screen die on this Pixel 2 during a battery replacement, when I had pulled off the same exact fix with less experience a few months prior? Do not know. Fragile OLED displays under fragile curved glass are not my favorite technology. The battery replacement worked, though.)
• Remove write-protect screw from Chromebook Pixel 2013, Toshiba Chromebook 2, various other Chromebooks: Success (Long-term project, for myself and for work).

Raspberry Pi Nonsense

I owned zero Raspberry Pi devices in 2018. By the end of 2019, I had two. They’re addictive. They’re tiny Linux computers that use very little power. They’re a workshop that’s always open if you have SSH or VNC access, even if it’s freezing outside or you’re trapped in a waiting room.

Anyways, I now have a Pi 3B+ running RetroPie, inside this wonderful tiny NES case, hooked up to the TV, waiting for a life where I have lots of time to play old games. The other Pi, a version 4 with 4 GB RAM, is in my office, always on and doing weird stuff. Network stuff, downloading stuff, firewall stuff. In some ways, it’s like a learning box for Linux, remote sysadmin, and stuff like that. I love it.

Bikes

I didn’t buy any bikes this year. But I did buy new tires, cables, housings, and a few other components for the 1985-ish Peugeot mountain bike. I had once used it as a winter beater; after seeing it up-close again, I don’t think anyone should have to deal with Buffalo’s roads in winter, ever. Humans included.

I spent a good chunk of a vacation week scraping the salt and rust off with steel wool, cleaning and greasing everything, repacking the bearings, and trying to make it all fit again. But I’m stuck on the rear wheel. I had to dismantle it to get the freewheel off and get at the bearings, but I didn’t do a good enough job keeping track of the original hardware and spacings. Part of me wants to give in and just buy entirely new wheels with sealed bearings, but they don’t even make 26-inch wheels in that width anymore. Time to scavenge the vintage parts at the co-op and see what can be done.

Baking (Plus a Granola Recipe)

Me, King Arthur Flour, Domino Sugar, and Organic Valley Cultured Butter: we got even closer this year.

Clockwise, from top left, and then ending in the middle:

• Lemon meringue pie
• Giant chocolate cake
• Sobble Pokemon (sculpted by Matt Taylor) on a fondant-covered chocolate cake
• Millionaire’s Shortbread (NYT)
• Guinness Cake (NYT)
• Bakewell Tart (Great British Baking Show/BBC)
• Thick & Chewy cookies (Cook’s)
• Chocolate Beet Cake (Good Housekeeping)
• Almost-No-Knead bread (Cook’s)

I wrote about my four-year quest to make that “no-knead” bread in the center, rife with dense little failure discs, for Buffalo Eats’ favorite meal roundup.

Normally the thing I bake most is cookies for my Ride for Roswell patrons (email me if you want in for 2020!). This year, granola was king.

It started with this recipe in NYT Cooking, pulled from the cookbook of modernist restaurant Eleven Madison Park. It is the granola given to guests at the end of their meal, intended for breakfast the next morning. It’s a nice gesture, for people who paid nearly $350 per person for a no-menu dinner.

I made it once because I had a bunch of the ingredients taking up space in the cupboard. My in-laws were over, and I offered it with some Fage yogurt for breakfast. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard such praise for something I made. Something about the olive oil and salt as a backing, the varied textures, the good amount of protein amongst the maple-covered carbs. I kept making it, for ourselves and for friends. Ever make something really simple that gets more praise than the really complex stuff you sweat over? Like the kitchen equivalent of a pet picture.

Here’s an annotated version of that granola recipe. By all means, though, subscribe to NYT Cooking, where I found the original, and which my house finds invaluable for meal inspiration.

Kevin Madison Park Granola

Tools

• Half-sheet (regular size) baking sheet
• Parchment paper or silicone baking mat
• Large bowl
• Small saucepan
• Spatula

Ingredients

• 2 3/4 cups rolled oats (i.e. not instant oats)
• 1 cup shelled pistachios
  • Or almonds, walnuts, pecans, cashews, chopped about as fine as pistachios
• 1 cup unsweetened coconut chips
  • Flakes/strands are okay, but chips add a lot of crunch and texture. Don’t use sweetened, whatever you do.
• 1/3 cup pumpkin seeds
  • Or sunflower seeds, squash seeds, or even hemp seeds, rough-ground flax, or chia seeds, if you wanna roll that way.
• 1 tbsp kosher salt
  • A supposedly controversial aspect of the original recipe, but nobody has really complained about this amount.
• 1/2 cup light brown sugar
  • Or dark brown, or other kinds of funky sugars. You’ve got maple syrup to lean on, no need to be strict.
  • I usually go lighter on this in my recipes, either not packing the cup or going scant. It’s fine as-is, but I feel like it’s not necessary.
• 1/3 cup maple syrup
  • You could probably do some soft/easy-flowing, or thinned-out honey instead, but maple syrup does a lot of work in this granola. As with sugar, I go a bit scant.
• 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
  • I don’t mess with this, usually. If you didn’t have EVOO on-hand, maybe coconut or avocado or other oils would suffice, but the flavor of roasted olive oil sings.
• 3/4 cup dried sour cherries
  • They’re great, but they’re expensive and not always easy to find. Any kind of dried, sweet, but tangy/sour fruit works here: dried blueberries, currants, cranberries, or (if you chop them up) dates, apricots, etc. Raisins, obviously, can work, but they’re kind of a bog-standard granola ingredient.

Directions Set the oven to 300F. In a small saucepan, pour in the sugar, syrup, and oil, and start on low heat.

Meanwhile, in a large bowl, mix together dry non-sweet ingredients (oats, nuts, chips, seeds, salt). Watch the saucepan, and pull it off the heat when the sugar has dissolved into the liquids (or a very slight boil is starting). Stir the liquids good, then fold into the dry ingredients with a spatula, until everything is evenly coated.

On a rimmed baking sheet, lined with parchment or a silpat, spread out the granola, as even as you can get it. Place in the oven (I use a lower rack, probably doesn’t matter). Bake 35-40 minutes. I take it out every 12 minutes and stir it with a spatula, for a total of 36 minutes. After 36 minutes, it’s up to you how much longer you want to keep going for a deeper brown toastiness.

When it’s ready, remove from the oven and immediately mix in the dried fruit. In my head, this softens the fruit up and causes it to trade sweet/bitter flavors with the still-warm roasted stuff, but who knows. Wait until the granola is cool to store it.

Writing

Other than this post you’re reading, the previous post about my job change, and some odd press releases or text contributions? No real writing outside work. No judgement from me, just how it is lately.

Lifting

This year really taught me that you have to be in it for the long haul. I had some extended periods where I had to step back and watch my numbers go down: travel, injuries, mallet finger, the holidays.

Much like you develop core strength, accessory muscles, and good form for weights, you can build resilient mental strength for setbacks. I’ve had so many now that it’s exhausting to throw a small tantrum every time I get back to work. There’s no shame in not being able to maintain a pro-am exercise schedule while you live your life. Just walk up to the weight, pick it up, and realize that doing something, anything, is better than walking out.

That previous graf doesn’t quite sound like me, but in a good way. The work is paying dividends.

TEDxBuffalo

It happened again! I’m impressed every year, and deeply thankful that people dedicate their time to keep it going.

Awesome Buffalo

I turn over money to the local Awesome group, and they gave that money out to projects like

• Neighborhood benches
• Free workshops to make DIY TV antennas
• Reusable bags for food pantries
• Homemade scarves and blankets placed at bus shelters
• Birthday parties for kids in residential shelters

If you want to give some money and vote on which great projects it should go to, get in touch with Jessica

Ugh, Twitter

These are some of the tweets that people (or bots) most liked. Linked and screen-captured, because embedding tweets is misplaced optimism.

Reading

I deleted my Goodreads account, because I didn’t like the idea of Amazon knowing what, when, and where I read, or which books my friends like. Weird, right?

Here’s what I do remember reading. (And, yes, some of these are Amazon links, where I can’t find a proper book/author page. If you’re going to buy through Amazon, please consider buying used, especially from a non-profit or independent bookstore).

Beastie Boys Book: The Beastie Boys’ music, starting with Paul’s Boutique, had a major influence on me. This is a big, pricey book, but worth it to me. Horovitz and Diamond are funny, self-effacing, honest about their luck and privilege, and gracious in naming influences and collaborators. If you’re the type who’s ever wanted to know what it was like to hang around the studios while they were making Check Your Head, read this book. RIP Adam Yauch.

Elmore Leonard (Road Dogs, Killshot): Late-period Elmore Leonard, mid-period Elmore Leonard: he’s one of the few writers who got more efficient at characters and plot as he aged. Buying used Leonard books from libraries and charities is going to be a lifelong habit.

Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times: I read in some review of this book that it started out as an expansion of Leibovich’s interviews with Tom Brady and Robert Kraft, but he couldn’t get enough material out of two people who can’t or won’t express anything remotely profound about their lives and stations. So he went big-picture and anecdotal, in the style of the D.C. tour This Town and … I didn’t really dig it. I have a voracious appetite for material about the shitty NFL (see above tweet), but none of this felt revelatory, and the arch tone made it hard to sit with.

What If This Were Enough? & How to Do Nothing: Unsettling books, in the good way. You can read an essay-length version of How To Do Nothing on Medium

The Mastermind: I admire Evan Ratliff and his Atavist long-form journalism project immensely. This book is a work of dogged reporting and passion, through and through. You can feel him working way harder than any editor ever wanted him to, beyond what even makes sense commercially, to piece together the unknowable aspects of a guy who was as close as they get to a supervillain.

Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun: I know a bit more about guns now, and I know a lot more about how guns get into people’s hands.

Boss Fight Books series (Star Wars: KOTOR, NBA Jam): I didn’t finish the KOTOR book, in part because I tried playing the game halfway through and was defeated in my efforts at enthusiasm (see below!).

Now, NBA Jam: this is my favorite kind of Boss Fight Book, one that tells the story of a bigger thing (the arcade industry at its late-‘90s/early-‘00s nadir) through one crystalline example. Real heavy research and great editing.

The 33 1/3 B-Sides: New Essays by 33 1/3 Authors on Beloved and Underrated Albums: A mixed bag, kind of like the used bin at a record store. Some gems, some oddities, mostly enjoyable.

Bike Snob Abroad: Not an inspiring rant like the first Bike Snob book, but useful for … feeling bad about the bike culture of my country, I guess? Still, humorous and worth the time.

Games

Switch

Stardew Valley: I stopped working on my first single-player farm in late 2018, after 100 hours of enjoyable farming. All year long, I saw the game pop up on lists of stress-relieving, low-key games, for people who aren’t really into games, or just need a break from the endless news of how helpless we all are. After a mutiplayer update arrived on the Switch, I nudged my wife to try it, with the idea that I could jump in and help when needed.

Nearly 30 hours later, I am a happy tenant worker on my wife’s farm. I’m learning how to just go along with someone else’s plans, not optimize everything just for the sake of it, and divide up work on a day-to-day basis.

It’s really a remarkable game, exponentially so if you know it was mostly made by one person. For $15, it’s a steal.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt: I’d already played through Witcher 3 once on PC. The graphics on the Switch are a far cry from that. Sometimes you can feel the Switch trudging like it’s on mile 18 of a marathon. I don’t care; I don’t think tri-linear filtering or water ripple effects are why this game is one of my all-time favorites. I’m trying out different decisions, new character builds and strategies, reliving old favorite moments, and I’m doing it while stuck in an airport terminal, or while rice is cooking for dinner.

Wargroove: Dug it, well worth the tiny price and time commitment. I really like the idea of asynchronous games you can play turn by turn with friends, remotely.

Night in the Woods: Sasha at Wirecutter told me that I would love this game, over and over. I grew up in a past-its-glory upstate NY town, and if I didn’t like the vibe of this game, well, she doubted whether she knew anything about me. Sasha, you were right! This game was wonderful, and lasted exactly as long as it should, and made a real impact on my brain-feels.

My Friend Pedro: Neat core mechanics, but I didn’t love the vibe or plot, however thin they were intended to be. Games that mock your score to make you redo levels? They make it easy to decide that you’re done.

Untitled Goose Game: I bought it before a 5-hour flight, and it was just perfect for it. Like the good person tweeted:

The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening: The art style is slick, the music is top-notch, and the nostalgia kicks were fun. But this is one of many Nintendo first-party games that I’ve bought, played immediately, then re-sold to recoup about 2/3 the cost. Not a ton of replay value, but glad to hang with an old friend for a while. Speaking of old friends!

Super Metroid: The minute I saw that Super Metroid was coming to the Switch’s free NES/SNES game library, I knew I would be playing through it, yet again. And I did. With maybe 10 years distance since my last play-through (maybe?), I notice how some of the puzzles and secrets are seemingly impossible to intuit without a quick Google search, or the kind of time kids have. Or maybe the web has made me lazy. Or both!

Dragon Quest Builders 1/2: Based entirely on Jason Schreier’s review, I tried out a demo of “Minecraft with actual tasks.” One week later, I had a used copy from eBay and was building little towns. It’s got weird humor that feels like all the mistranslated humor of my JRPG youth (but intentional?), interesting tasks, and solid performance on the Switch.

DQ Builders 2 contained lots of fixes and upgrades for the systems, controls, and gameplay loops. I’m maybe halfway through it, but I dropped it for something else, and I’ve yet to get back, months later.

Into the Breach: I have never really stopped playing this game. It’s installed on every computer I own (even this Pixelbook, via Linux/Steam), it’s on my Switch. God help me if they released a mobile version. I also hope never release DLC for it. I’ve never been so driven to 100% a game. UNLIKE …

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: I ended up selling this. Too demanding of my time to learn, advance, or just be able to enjoy. The menus are truly some kind of teachable course in hostile interface design. I did enjoy playing against friends online, whenever the lag wasn’t bad.

However! I went to a local Smash tournament, big-screened inside a historic theater, and watching that and feeling the cohesion and camaraderie of the competitors and crowd was honestly thrilling. It was one of the most diverse events I’ve ever attended in Buffalo. And way more fun than endlessly changing controller settings or fighting AI opponents to unlock characters.

PC

Slay the Spire: Magic: The Gathering is off-putting to me, in card and computer form, because it feels like I could never catch up with its immense history, or ever stop spending money. Ditto Hearthstone. But a contained, single-player deckbuilding game with rogue-ish progression? Oh heck yes. I have installed this on three different computers, have different progress on each of them, and I don’t even care that it’s inefficient. I’d be happy to have to win on all three of them.

Baldur’s Gate II / Knights of the Old Republic I/II: Maybe it was the Switch release of BioWare’s classic CRPGs, or the endless Star Wars discussions, but it felt like every game critic personally emailed me this year to remind me that these are among the most well-regarded RPGs of all time, and, as an enthusiast of the form, I should play them.

I … cannot play them. I’ve put a few hours into each one. The pause-and-correct battle system gives me low-grade agita. The potato-ish graphics on KOTOR are hard to stomach now, which is not LucasArts’ fault per se (although the company’s burn-the-ships move to 3D seems tragic, in retrospect). Baldur’s Gate II is just a lot of interface to deal with; I can’t imagine it on the Switch. I’ve heard nothing but praise for the writing in these games, but I can’t find my way in.

Dishonored 2: Speaking of great writing! Dug this game a whole bunch. Improved on its predecessor, provided just the right mix of open exploration and guideposting, and the voice acting! Voice acting in open-world games often gets extremely old. I could listen to the NPCs in Dishonored talk forever.

Wolfenstein: The New Order: What a fun ride. I am very sad that killing Nazis—really, just killing lots of Nazis, and wanting more of them to be killed—has even more real-world context now than when this was released in 2014. But it wouldn’t work if the mechanics, the feel, the voice acting, and (most of) the plotting and dialogue didn’t sing and glide.

Pictures of pets

Howard

Cork

Apricot

I started writing for the home-goods side of Wirecutter in early 2013. I joined the staff full-time in early 2015. We were bought by the New York Times in late 2016. It never felt like I truly settled in, and yet it is the longest-held job in my career. This is a compliment; it is not a site or publication that rests on its heels.

I’m heading to iFixit, which is a few different things: an online wiki-style repair guide, a shop for tools and parts for electronics and other gear, an advocate for the societal and ecological good of fixing things instead of throwing them away, and a partner in the Right to Repair movement. I’m going to write about people repairing things, people forcing companies to think beyond the next sales cycle, and people who are helping all of us rethink our relationship to our stuff.

Yes, I can also lend you a spudger, if you’re nearby. I start in early April.

Leaving Wirecutter was an extremely tough decision. I will miss so many of the people that are part of my daily life now. I almost wrote “despite only knowing them through Slack,” but I think I know these people better through an open all-day chat than I would if we worked in the same building. We’re obsessives, and the job demands that we burrow into our computers and spreadsheets and tests. But people play off one another when they need a break from rabbit holes, and it’s often a wonderful cacophony of knowledge and good humor and corny humor and trivia and deep links and encouragement.

But. After nearly six years of trying to answer the question “What’s the best one of these things to buy, so I don’t have to worry about it?”, I’m ready for something new. It might be the question: “Why are we getting rid of so many things?”

I write on this personal site for personal reasons, and don’t expect much feedback on it. But the most-visited page on my site, in the whole time I’ve had this site, is a post about turning a little-loved, underpowered HP “Stream” into a decent little Chromebook-ish laptop. It ranks highly in Google for its keywords, it gets more visits than any other page each week, and every month or two, I get an email from someone who hit a snag, or who suggests a fix or clarification. That one-off Saturday post constantly reminds me about the quiet power of helping someone fix their stuff.

I’ve been relying on that powerful knowledge my whole nerdy life, starting with the computer that wouldn’t run System Shock, through a 36-hour college bender trying to find an ethernet driver for my desktop PC’s cheap motherboard, and right up until 10 minutes ago. Eager for a distraction from writing about this big stressful life change, I searched online to see if anyone else who had retrofitted their Chromebook Pixel 2013 to run CloudReady was having the same problem with their headphone jack. It’s not just computers, either: I’ve had help from both friends and random internet people in home repair, bike mechanics, weightlifting, baking, all kinds of stuff.

Finding out that you can fix or upgrade or reuse something that previously left you feeling helpless or unlucky is an intensely good feeling. I’ve been happy to give back where I can, and I hope I’m able to do a whole lot of giving back at iFixit.

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Wirecutter. Particularly to its founder, Brian Lam, who cold-emailed me in late 2012, as he started up a sister site to The Wirecutter (it was “The” back then). It was The Sweethome, and he needed someone to write about kitchen gear.

I have an email from Feb. 15, 2013, after Brian read my first draft of a Sweethome guide, to Dutch Ovens. I had run some overwrought tests involving the browning of meat, cooking of risotto, and a laser infrared thermometer. Brian asked me, through editor Joel Johnson, to focus on interviewing more experts and parsing reviews of experienced cooks.

Kevin has no chops as a cook or a tester of kitchen ware, so to be honest, his tests mean very little to me. (as a reader! as an editor, they mean a lot to me!) That make sense?

I can’t remember everything about being a 32-year-old freelancer, but I remember this light ego bruising. Still, I was impressed that Brian was so honest about what was actually needed, versus what I was working way too hard to show him. Maybe editors had been too nice to me over the years, but I felt weirdly good about being dressed down. Because this is what came after:

That’ll be the best way to make sure we’re hitting these things in such a way that someone who doesn’t know us or have any reason at all to believe us has no room to not believe us. they’ll have to believe us. … the piece is fine without this stuff, but I think it’ll be good to aim for best and most comprehensive piece on dutch ovens in the world …

I also owe Jacqui Cheng many thanks, for keeping after me to sign on full-time, and many other gracious things along our shared path.¹ The same goes for everyone who helped me make overwrought pick decisions. To those who had to prune my verbiage and make me commit to declarative statements: I shall strive to torture fewer people in the future.

My biggest regret is that my dad never knew his son worked for the New York Times². I think he would have liked the risk I’m taking now, though.

Onward.

2017, as lived in and around the United States of America,

Wow, buddy. But, also, I can forgive myself. It was hard to believe 2017 happened, and at the end, I wanted to record and confirm that it really did, and how it felt.

2018, I know that year happened. It felt like it happened twice. I’m gonna list and detail some things about it, that were important to me, to varying degrees. Here are those things.

If you spot a typo or formatting quirk, let me know by quick tweet or email.

• CoworkBuffalo is closed
• Bikes
• Baking
• Writing
• Lifting
• TEDxBuffalo
• Awesome Buffalo
• Smart home nonsense
• Friends, beer, and making an effort
• Ugh, Twitter
• Reading
  • Articles/posts
  • Books
• Tasks
• Games
  • Switch
  • PC
• Pictures of pets

CoworkBuffalo is closed

I rewrote the homepage for CoworkBuffalo when we had to announce the closure of the coworking space I co-founded more than 7 years ago. The whats and whys are mostly on that page. I need to, and want to, write more about what we learned, what it was like, things that could have been.

Mostly, it was just partners needing to move on in their lives that caused us to close. All of the co-founders and partners have different situations and demands now, and when our lease was up, there wasn’t enough energy to renew it. But we kept open this thing that was kind of convenient, sometimes fun, and occasionally and inadvertently business-minded. We did it mostly for the sake of the city we lived in, and because we didn’t want people, including ourselves, to sub-let sad 10-by-10 offices.

A surprising number of people said or wrote nice things to us after we announced our closure. Matt Glynn and Dan Miner, who I respect immensely, wrote about our closing for The Buffalo News and Business First. On the last day, we donated as much stuff as we could, hit the lights, and that was it.

Bikes

I lost a bike, I gained a bike, I replaced that first bike, I need to finish repairing another bike. I took two really long bike rides. This section is long.

As detailed in last year’s bike section, I finished a big refurb of my 1988 Schwinn World Tour, and obtained a Peugeot mountain bike from the mid-80’s with wide tires for my winter bike. I bought studded tires for the winter bike, wore a lot of layers, and declared myself a Winter Biker.

That was a rough winter. Studs only really help with ice, and they add a lot of drag. I wore simple googles or sunglasses that fogged up constantly. Sometimes I pulled my rim brakes as hard as I could, and the ice-slicked rims just kept turning. Worst of all, I didn’t really know to wash or even wipe down my bike’s drivetrain after slushy rides, and … this was my cassette, after a week or two.

But spring eventually came. I raised more than $2,500 for the Ride for Roswell. I took Seymour on a 60-plus mile route. I got a flat halfway through, but fixed it in 10 minutes. Later on, maybe 10 miles from the finish, I hit a rough pothole. Then, the sound of rubber friction. I spent 20 minutes riding a few feet, hopping off and checking, doing that a dozen times. When I gave up trying to figure it out and put the bike in the grass at a rest stop, that’s when I saw it.

The frame had snapped, in the back, near the gears (the drive-side chainstay). Every time I put weight on the frame, it dropped onto the tire.

I sat on that grass for more than an hour, waiting for a pickup truck to get me and my bike. One of the volunteers told me that the rest stop, new that year to the Ride, was set up by a farmer’s family. The farmer was battling stage four cancer. After an hour, a pickup truck hauled me and Seymour to the finish line.

Seymour Schwinn rode this earth for nearly 30 years, and it was his time, and I just happened to be the rider when the time came.

A few months before the Ride, I thought about next winter. My wife and I share one car now. I knew I’d be working from home after CoworkBuffalo closed. Sure, I could take better care of my bike after it gets wet. But biking in the cold is enough of a challenge, without having to clean out exposed gears, cables, and chain. Or wonder at which intersections your brakes will surprise you.

I kicked around the idea of converting my mountain bike with 26-inch wheels to a fixie or single-speed to reduce maintenance. But I had just finished one big bike rebuild. And after riding a few fixies and reading up on them, I … declined. Plus, I also wanted something I could ride in a few other situations, where a thin-wheel road bike wouldn’t quite do.

I started looking for a new bike. Or at least welded and assembled this century. My ideal bike had disc brakes (preferably hydraulic), flat handlebars,decently wide tire clearance, mounts/eyelets for fenders and a rack, and, fingers crossed, some way of mitigating the impact of snow and salt on gears and chains. I ran down a lot of possibilities.

I ended up with the 2018 version of the Norco Indie IGH A11 Belt. IGH stands for “internal-gear hub.” If you’ve ridden a bikeshare bike in a city, you’ve used one. All the gear-shifting takes place inside a mostly weatherproof hub in the middle of the rear wheel. I still don’t quite understand how they work; with luck, I may never have to! “Belt” means carbon belt drive, instead of a chain. It had wide enough tires, most of the cables ran inside the frame, and lots of accessory attachment points.

I had to order from a dealer in Beamsville, Ont. I drove there one night and met the owner of Moutainview Cycle. He was initially skeptical on the phone that I knew exactly what kind of weird beast I was ordering. After hearing my story of salt and woe (or maybe just to stop me from showing him the spreadsheet), he seemed reassured and glad to help out. He showed me some tricks to disc brake maintenance, helped me fit the seat and bar positions, and showed me his in-progress electric cruiser hot rod thingy.

Norbert is cool as Hell. Sturdy, stable, easy to clean off after a slushy ride, and weirdly quiet without a chain or external gears. I threw a rack and fenders on him. I attached these mounted elastic straps to the fender. Tied one more bungee the long way around the fender for stability.

You can haul a lot of things around with a fender and a few bungees. Picture frames, 58 pounds of prescription dog food,a folding chair, and a two-person order from Sato on Elmwood, for example.

And yet: how many bikes do you need? N+1, where N is the number you have.

I wanted to replace my ligher, faster, and less expensive/theft-attractive road bike. I went back to the place where I’d gotten Seymour, the basement of Rick’s Cycle Shop. It felt like going to the shelter way too soon after losing your dog. But I found this 1983 Trek 500 series, and wanted to give it a shot at being the next bike I tear apart and ride to death:

Coming this year: new wheels (the original helicomatic hubs are historic but terrible to work on), transplanted brifters and cassette from Seymour, red cables instead of yellow, and probably a new chainring and sealed cartridge bracket.

Oh, and I need to de-rust and restore the Peugeot mountain bike I rode last winter, so someone else can do a better job with it.

I took two notable bike rides in 2018. That is, besides the officially sanctioned rides, like the Ride for Roswell, Skyride, and such.

In late September, I rode to and from Ralph Wilson Stadium to tailgate and (to a far lesser extent) watch the Bills get soundly beaten by the Chargers. This was partly the result of not having car access, but mostly a dare to myself that it could be done. There were some truly inspiring views in the morning light, at sunset, and when I whipped past a bunch of stalled cars on Southwestern Boulevard on the way back.

I shot photos as an Instagram story, which means too many of the photos have stupid text over them. Lesson learned: if it’s important, don’t use Facebook’s app to capture it.

I also rode a rental Lime bike from Cambridge to Quincy, through Boston. With everything I had packed for a 3-day weekend strapped to my back. As you can tell, I enjoy an impractical bike challenge. It was not the most comfortable ride, but it was really fun. My friend Chaz joined me, on a bike that was actually built for a long weekend ride.

Baking

I continued my journey into baking this year. The most notable projects were Momofuku Milk Bar’s Birthday Layer Cake for my wife’s birthday, and a decent shot at a Sacher/Satcher torte. And a Genoise sponge layer cake for New Year’s Eve. So, more cakes than 2017—maybe even more cakes than pies, last year. Also, more Thick & Chewy cookies than ever before.

This year, I want to get better at chocolate work, and maybe try some fondant.

Here’s a photo album. Google Photos is so creepy amazing; you can type in baking 2018 and by God you get everything you took a photo of in that year that contained flour and encountered heat.

Writing

Once again, I only wrote for my employer, Wirecutter, last year. I researched and wrote:

• Major updates to notebooks, pens, and mechanical pencils
• Blog posts on how hard it is to recycle a mattress, why the Blue Yeti is the go-to starter mic for ASMR, and setting up a good space for video calls at home.
• A semi-guide to silicone wedding bands
• Another epic update to standing desks
• A two-part guide to antivirus apps but not really and, uh, how you actually don’t need antivirus, you need layers of security
• Cheap gaming chairs, dog gates, a list of foul-weather bike gear, external optical drives, and others.

Lifting

I think I only truly injured myself once or maybe twice in 2018 lifting weights and putting them back down again. That’s progress! I hit new records in overhead press and bench press and barbell rows, whereas lower-body work has slid. That’s mostly because I’m completely uncertain of my ability to squat without hurting myself, or agitating my knee quite a bit. This year, I’m looking into knee wraps and going to work with a trainer on safe squatting.

That was a long graf, but I wanted to compress it all into one chunk, so people who don’t care can scroll past more easily.

TEDxBuffalo

This was the first year I actually attended TEDxBuffalo, the event I helped launch in 2011. I had a ticket, a seat, and had only glanced at the speaker roster before attending. Alex Opiel, the latest organizer, once again made me feel comletely unnecessary, and for that I cannot thank her enough.

The 2018 TEDxBuffalo talks were good. I particularly liked Dr. Ines Stuckert’s “How to deal with a populist president”.

Annie Brady’s “Blind, not broken” utterly shook me. I have rarely felt so moved to look anew at something I thought I’d undersood. Annie Brady took me into her life and asked me what I would do if I were in it. I can’t recommend it enough. It’s the reason I started TEDxBuffalo: capturing a spark of magic that exists in this area and giving it a chance to be seen by the world.

Awesome Buffalo

Awesome Buffalo is a small group of people who put in their own money to fund helpful, interesting, or simply good projects in and around Buffalo. Some of the projects we funded in 2018: a solar sprout garden at a rehab center,Small food pantries, much nicer trash cans, and other things.

If you want to apply for a grant, or joint the team, get in touch.

Smart home nonsense

I escalated my connected home quite a bit this year. If you believe that Wi-Fi signals are slowly causing cancer inside us, you should not step inside my domicile.

I’m not here to brag about specific equipment. But here are the quirkiest things I can do now:

• Open my garage door from my phone (or my Pebble watch)
• Get an alert if my garage door stays open for more than 10 minutes, or opens at all between 10pm and 5am.
• Know when a Kitchen timer (set on an Echo) goes off, because the lights in the living room and home office blink.
• Change the lighting temperature in my home office with a voice command (or terminal command)
• Hit a button in the kitchen and have every Echo device in the house announce, “Ding ding, dinner is ready”

Friends, beer, and making an effort

Note: This whole section could just be whining about two very common phenomenae of aging: drinking hits you harder, and making friends gets tougher. Maybe! But I wanted to put down how it felt at this moment, and how the two felt connected. If you feel like I should Just Get Over Myself, that’s fine, you’re probably right. But I question how you made it all the way through that Bikes section!

I don’t live near most of my close friends anymore. They’ve moved away over time, over 18 years of living in Buffalo. They’ve moved either a long way to Boston or New York, or they live in a suburb, have kids, and don’t have a lot of time on nights and weekends. It feels like a real trend now, after years of isolated incidents that could be written off as circumstance.

I am still friends with those who moved away, of course. And I still have friends here. And I have friends I have neglected to keep up with. That was always the case, but now it feels like something that needs fixing. Maybe that’s now how one should look at it, but hey, if you were one of my friends? You’d know that’s how I’d look at it. I have things I can definitely fix, and things I feel guilty about not fixing, and I will apologize to you constantly about it. “Ah, no, really, thanks for saying that, but I really should … it’s just … one day … anyways.”

Leaving behind TEDxBuffalo and CoworkBuffalo were necessary moves for me, but doing so also reduced my chances to meet people and show up to things. Like some men I know, I assume I need a bona fide Reason or Project to get together with people. Without those ever-present projects, the other loose reason I have to get together with someone is that “we should grab drinks sometime.” When this wasn’t just something said as a polite goodbye, I would reliably follow up on it. With gusto.

Now I’m not so sure I want to keep being good at grabbing drinks. Not the way I do it, anyways.

I’ve been drinking beer since I was 15 or 16. I drink beer way too fast. Cocktails and wine, too. I drink everything too fast, really. My wife and friends all notice. If you put down Diet Coke too fast, you’re not a real bother to anybody except those who have to experience your burps. Beer is different, though, and it’s what I drink the most. It doesn’t matter if it’s a 10% ABV double IPA or a can of rice-water macro brew, it’s gone before I even realize I’ve drank it. I’m not sure if it’s wanting something to do with my hands while talking, or having killed my senses of bitter or sweet, or some childhood thing. I’ve tried telling myself to take small sips, or ordering heavier stouts or lighter beers, alternating water with drinks—the end result is usually the same.

I weigh nearly 200 pounds, so beer doesn’t hit me very fast. Maybe that’s another reason I drink so fast. It’s easy for me to have two or three beers, when the time span or the company suggest one would have been just fine. I’m definitely capable of drinking more, and there have been many mornings where I realize I need two hands to count last night’s tally. But let’s say that my average has long been about three beers.

It’s not always a big problem, but it sometimes means my wife drives home when she had not planned to. It always adds a lot of money to the bill, and leads to some bad food choices. I think that I’m usually in control of myself, that my inhibitions are only a little bit looser. But I can’t hear what I sound like, or notice that I’m dominating the conversation. That’s one key trick to drinking, you don’t remember subtle cues or notice yourself that well.

If it sounds like I’m worried, I am, at least a bit. Alcoholism is prevalent on one side of my family. I’m not great at self-control with sugary stuff, either, and the internal reasoning sounds remarkably similar. You tell yourself you indulge only on “special occasions,” and very quickly “It’s Sunday afternoon and I’m preparing dinner” counts as a special occasion. You biked or worked out or walked a whole bunch today, you think, so you can afford the calories. Occasionally the news will cite the newest study that says something like, “These 14 Europeans drink once a day and they are very definitely healthy,” and you can pull a little assurance from that, too.

Those are temporary excuses against a long-term reality. I have to carry this nearly 38-year-old body everywhere, and I also have a budget to maintain. Hangovers are lasting longer. The empty calories are not disappearing just from hitting 10,000 steps. And the beers I like are not that cheap, especially outside the house.

My first attempt at addressing this was, after a particularly heavy couple holiday months, I decided to try a mostly Dry January, with exceptions for Actual Special Occasions. The one Special Occasion I’ve had, I went to a downtown bar for a going-away party, for someone I knew a little from my gym. I nervously put down three drinks in an hour and a half, while talking with a couple folks I had just met. I left the moment I felt unattached to any conversations, while the bar had gotten too crowded to talk, or just stand. It cost more than $50, including the Lyft rides both ways, and I woke up in the night with a dry mouth.

Other times, the challenge is pure habit. I’ll be working on a project, or finishing up work, or somehow letting my mind drift. If it’s early evening, or a weekend afternoon, I’ll think that now would be a great time for a beer. I have so, so much memory evidence that this will not actually “take the edge off” or “help me relax.” I’ll just get tired, maybe a bit irritable, and then hungry for bad food. But my brain, which can so easily pick apart consumerism, believes in these singular moments that beer commercials must be right: this is how you relax.

Back to friends. What I really liked most about my beer habit was “going drinking” or “having drinks” with friends. I liked the mild irresponsibility of meeting a friend or friends and planning to be completely useless together. Nothing else feels so like the opposite of being focused, productive, and earning money than talking about nonsense, doing nothing, and handing money to someone for something so disposable. In that moment, I felt like I was experiencing something real with somebody. If it went a bit too far, it was something we both lived through, it’s a badge.

And yet. I think it’s best that I stop making drinking the main verb of my friendships and social opportunities, new or old. It feels weird to make a point of this, because I don’t think this is alcoholism, and I know that is a separate, much harder thing. I don’t think having a (one!) beer with someone is a bad thing. I just think that I’ve been stuck in an immature relationship with beer for too long now. I want to do better at managing it. I’ll probably fail at it sometimes, or give into pressure to “let loose.” But hopefully less over time.

The thing I really have to work on, then, is staying friends with people I can’t easily meet at a bar anymore. Also, making new friends, without drinking a bunch to try and shortcut the bonding. I already have some friends who don’t drink, and we’ve covered a lot of ground together. It would be nice to save some money, lose some weight, and have fewer regrettable moments in 2019. Off we go. Thank you for reading.

Ugh, Twitter

Time for a big change in tone!

I continued to break the cardinal rule of Twitter in 2018. Here were the five best-received tweets, my favorite Twitter moment, and a bonus bit of character insight.

I’m using screencaps, with links to the original tweets, rather than embeds, because no way will Twitter outlast this website.

My favorite Twitter moment from this year happened the day after I went with some friends to Jay’s Artisan Pizza on a Wednesday night in summer. Right outside, in a pocket park, a band of middle-aged guys was ripping through some classic rock tracks. I said something offhand about the band being named “Dad Halen.” The next day, it popped back into my head: what if a group of dads was self-aware enough to put “Dad” in their punny cover-band name?

Click here or on the tweet below to see many, many more suggested band names. They are pun-tacular.

And this tweet, from former Wirecutter Editor in Chief Jacqui Cheng, really speaks to the experience of transitioning from knowing people online to meeting in real life. For breakfast.

Reading

I never read enough books, and I read a ton of articles.

Articles/posts

I like Pocket a lot for saving and reading articles. But its search and sorting make it hard to understand what you read in the last year. And I often read articles or posts that were not from the year I’m in. So here are five articles I kinda remember reading in 2018.

• Everything on Amazon is Amazon!
• How I Infiltrated One of L.A.’s Most Vicious Motorcycle Gangs—and Lived to Talk About It
• How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald’s Monopoly Game and Stole Millions (This article was algorithmically generated to eat up my entire Sunday morning)
• Fatal accidents, off-the-books workers, a union once run by a mobster. The rogue world of one of New York’s major trash haulers.
• Made in Taiwan (This one is about bikes, but it’s also about the American perception of how everything made in certain Asian countries is “cheaply made.” It doesn’t hurt that my dearly departed Seymour Schwinn had its frame welded in Taiwan, right after Schwinn moved production there).
• How a Sneaky Furniture Expert Ripped Off the Rich and Tricked Versailles

Books

• Blood of Elves: The Witcher #3 - Actually, I’m good with the video game. A rare moment where I see that there’s a lot more lore available, and I pass.
• Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion - They show their age, they’ve got a lot of male gaze, and boy, if you like clean resolutions, these ain’t it. But some sections are absolutely spell-binding, some characters heart-rending, and each person is going to relate a bit differently.
• The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet - The perfect salve to Hyperion’s rougher edges. A whole book of people looking out for each other, eager to learn about one another, and imagine a greater good. Sounds boring! Is not.
• Killings - My only complaint is that there is not more. Chapters of this book, I mean! Not killings, themselves. Geez.
• Bible Adventures - Good interviews, especially for such a long-ago thing. Also, great context about what it was like to make games in the early days, when nobody really regulated what was published.
• Vacationland - The only thing that impresses me more than Hodgman’s ability to entertain with words is his brave decision to have the kind of career he wants to have, speaking to an intelligent audience he refuses to condescend to.

I feel like I read more books than this, but perhaps not! I will update this list post-publish if I recall more.

Tasks

According to Remember the Milk:

I re-committed to using my task manager in 2018. I use a very light kind of Getting Things Done methodology, and I cheat a little by setting priorities. You’d have to read about GTD to understand why priority-setting is a controversial move.

Anyways! I can add tasks to RTM through the Android app or webapp, by asking Google Assistant to add something to my task list (through an IFTTT hook-up), by asking Alexa to add to my to-do list (another IFTTT thing), or, my favorite way, through a terminal app, on either my work MacBook or this Chromebook. I can also add tasks by sending a text from my Pebble watch, but … anyways.

The hardest part of using a to-do app is realizing that you’re not doing some thing because you don’t want to do them. Some things are written down too broadly, without enough granular actions. Sometimes you haven’t given something the right context, or you can’t sort by the things you can or want to do right now. But sometimes, you’re just avoiding something you are afraid to try. That’s hard, and no app exists for it.

Games

Switch

I bought a Switch in 2018, and it’s been great. The portability, the indie games available, the Nintendo games—I was afraid I’d never play it and mostly stick to my PC, but oh, ho, just the opposite.

This is the only screenshot I have of this game, taken right at the moment I first “beat it.” It says something about this game that I’m usually so involved in it, I never think to take screenshots of the crazy tactical challenges you end up in.

Into the Breach: My favorite game of the year. I will be playing this into 2019. It’s so freaking good. If you said to me, “How would you like to play a kind of chess game, with mech suits and giant bugs, but there’s no re-loading, and there are time-travel paradoxes, and you sometimes have to think of 12 possible outcomes of each move?” I would probably first say, “That is quite a hypothetical!” and then I would say “Well, that might be good?” but then you’d say “Actually, though, I’m a strawman from a post you wrote in the future and you really, really like this game” and I might say “Wait, what?” and then you say “I can prove it, you spent like a week in Florida playing this game instead of going to the beach” and I say “Oh, right.” But I don’t really love the beach, anyways, so NICE TRY.

West of Loathing: I think it is quite hard to make a game that has solid mechanics and is also funny. This is probably my second favorite game of the year, and I hope to tell you more about that sometime this year or maybe next.

Mario Kart 8: A great game made better by becoming more friendly to newcomers. For a different way of iterating on a beloved franchise, see Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

Zelda: Breath of the Wild: My favorite Zelda game so far. Including Link to the Past! It feels like the technology has finally caught up to the promise of what a Zelda game was always supposed to be about: exploration.

Stardew Valley: I wrote a bunch about this in Currently Digging Vol. 3.

Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle: It’s XCOM, but fun, forgiving, and with inventive, different mechanics! Even the creative director of XCOM digs it.

Overcooked & Overcooked 2: My wife and I really enjoy stressing each other out by worrying about orders, critiquing strategies, and telling each other to stick to our sides. This doesn’t sound like fun, but it is the most fun.

Death Squared: Fun multiplayer puzzle game. That’s harder than it sounds!

Hollow Knight: It took about an hour and change for this game to finally click with me, and at first it seems just unnecessarily hard and obtuse. But then you get it, and then you like it, and then you feel mastery over it.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: I think it’s weird that Nintendo, of all companies, would make a game that’s so obtusely hard to get into for newcomers. The tutorial video is so deeply buried that Nintendo had to post a tutorial on how to find it. You have to grind for hours and hours to unlock all the fighters you might play. The menu and interface actively fight your attempts to get to the kind of game you want. I really want to like this game, and get better at it, but along with the lag-laden online matches, it’s hard to get into. (See also: section about how a large number of my friends no longer live near me)

Death Road to Canada: A goofy, challenging shoot-em-up with permadeath and lots of weird humor. Cheap, fun, great airplane/15-minutes-free game.

PC

DOOM: The great human ZODIAC MOTHERF***ER put it best: Metal. Satan. Ownage. This is a game where a strategic decision is whether you knock over the Revenant and stomp his head to mush for a health bonus, or tear off his left flank with a chainsaw for the ammo. Every time I was stuck in this game, not able to get past an arena full of demons, the solution was usually to move faster and use a bigger gun. I haven’t felt this teenaged in forever.

XCOM 2: Tactical Legacy Pack: More XCOM missions, for free, yes please.

Bastion: I intend to make it through every one of this company’s games someday, and this was my starting point. The soundtrack, the voice acting are so danged good.

Pictures of pets

Howard

Cork

Apricot

Podcasts

Good Christian Fun. Many/most of the episodes thus far are two well-meaning, progressive, fully awake Christians taking apart contemporary Christian media―films like Left Behind, music from Newsboys. Some recent episodes have involved media about modern Christianity, like the film Spotlight, with the incredible guest Film Critic Hulk.

The co-hosts miss nothing when it comes to hypocrisy, woefully misguided messaging, and terrible film and audio production. If you want to laugh at this stuff, you’ll get your shots (listen to the Carman or Fireproof episodes for that). The critiques come from a warmer place than where snark comes from, though. I’ve learned more about what it means to be a modern, thoughtful Christian from these goofballs than any Christian church has gotten across to me so far.

If you have any friends who grew up in somewhat sheltered Veggie Tales homes, tip them to this.

The Great God of Depression. I’ve only just begun, but this podcast feels like I need to give it more space than just washing the dishes or walking the dog. You can read this excerpt if you’re not the podcast type.

Cults. This is a confession as much as a recommendation. This show is not remarkably insightful, nor packed with clever storytelling or immersive audio. It is two people with professional voices, reading what feels like lightly expanded versions of Wikipedia pages about cult after cult after cult.

I have listened to every episode to date, more than 50. I keep waiting to learn the one lesson you can learn from all cults, or for them to announce that, actually, people have stopped joining cults. But, no.

Droughtcast Speaking of lessons we never learn! Ryan Nagelhout and The Defenseman have made it through FIFTEEN YEARS of the Buffalo Bills’ record-setting no-playoff journey, game by game. Unlike the Bills, it sounds and feels like they’re hitting a stride right now, during the Rex Ryan coaching years. Some good misery explication here, folks.

Books

Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion.Recommended by my personal sci-fi sommelier Chris M. I listened to the first audiobook chapter in my car, twice, trying to hold on. There are a lot of descriptions of interstellar communication channels, warp drives, currencies, federations, and a guy with an idiosyncratic grand piano in his personal spaceship.

But! It’s worth the cold shock as you adjust to the waters. The world-building is good, the characterization is deep, and while there’s definitely a male view of sexuality, the female characters are on the same level as the men. There’s one character the book, and its sequel, could do entirely without (along with the thorough mechanical accounting of their romantic life).

Good, weird, deep. Also, if you happen to dig the Borderlands games, this is a key source material.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. Another Chris M recommendation, this one is very much in line with Hyperion, except written by a woman, smoother on introducting the technology and setting, and (so far, probably 50% done) … the characters like each other and support one another? I am actually taken aback at this. I’m used to camaraderie, not actual trust and support, in the pages of space soaps. It feels palliative, at this moment in time.

Music

Crushing riff bands. My unexpected journey into stoner/desert/doom/sludge metal continues. Mastodon, Elder, the deeper catalogues of Pallbearer and Kylesa … I don’t know where this will end.

But also:

[las vegas] by burger/ink - The dream of 90’s IDM is alive in this album I had never heard of but now can’t believe existed quietly in its own greatness.

Grant Green’s entire catalog. Though you can start with “The Original Jam Master” compilations. The man played guitar like nobody else, he was way too humble his whole life about his talent, and I need to fill up an entire SD card with his tracks and keep it slotted into my car system.

Games

(Note: Not the author’s farm. He’s too lazy to go downstairs, turn on the Switch, find the screenshots folder, find a good screenshot, save it to the microSD card, pull the card, find a card reader, pull it, resize it, and save it here. Yeesh, Nintendo.)

Stardew Valley. Every 10-hour increment or so, it will occur to me, once again, that this ambitious, kind-hearted, nearly perfect game was made by one person. One.

I believe 16-bit/SNES-style graphics (and, to a certain extent, sound and sound effects) are better able to hit a perfect Just Enough level of immersion for small and independent games. You can get just enough depth from a terrain, just enough characterization out of your characters (sprites), and the actions can feel visceral enough that people fall easily into the game. There’s definitely some more modern-day things happening in Stardew Valley’s engine than what was available to a Super Nintendo, but not by much.

Younger friends of mine tell me that they feel a kind of fondness for the potato-block games of the N64 and that generation. But I think very few people today would make the choice to use those kinds of graphics, intentionally (I imagine the developers of Steam Early Access games that look like unlicensed N64 games wish they could look better).

It’s hard not to fall into the trap of believing that the things of your adolescence were OF COURSE the best things that will exist. In this case, though, I’m continually impressed that 16-bit-like games are still a modern, going concern, and indeed a serious choice made by epically large developers.

Phone/Computer Stuff

Chromebooks with Linux apps. My last Currently Digging contained a paean to using the command line for certain work and productivity tasks. I still love the command line! But the unwritten hassle of doing this is having a working laptop running Linux, or a Chromebook that has been modified to run a Linux desktop inside a shell, such that you have to hit Control+D when it boots, or else it makes an extremely loud warning beep.

But now Linux apps, especially little terminal tools, can be installed in a Regular Non-Beeping Chromebook. No “developer mode” unlocking, no finger-twisting keyboard shortcuts to switch between sessions, just a little toggle in the settings. It may not seem like a huge difference, but three things make this oh so wonderful:

• The rest of your system still works like a Chromebook, in a non-precarious state. You will still be able to take a video call, or answer an email, even if you have deeply bollixed your nerdy Linux setup (which you can undo by simply toggling a setting off and then on again).
• The apps you install show up as app icons in your Chromebook launcher, so you can launch them even if you can’t remember their command-line name (this happens more than it should).
• You can get at your Linux-land files from the Chrome file explorer. There’s even a little penguin icon to mark their location in the sidebar. No more having to mv draft_of_this_post.markdown to a location I can’t remember in /home.

So now I’ve got this little Solarized-blue side window on my Chromebook, where I can manage my calendar appointments and to-do lists. Sometimes I feel weird and want to write something in SublimeText.

Feeling like I can manage my stuff makes me actually manage my stuff and be a bit more productive and focused. Well, except when I’m researching new bash scripts for improving them. Ahem.

“TV” and Such

Trapped. Real good. A bit hard to follow with what seem like tricky subtitle condensations, and a slight cultural barrier, but worth the investment. Wife and I are watching the similarly bleak, Icelandic murder mystery Case, which seems less suspenseful, more gratuitous.

Nailed It. 20-ish minutes of instant mood-resetting joy. Always let your cakes cool before applying frosting, people.

Great British Baking Show. Have watched every British season available in the U.S., now watching the “newer” season on Netflix.

Altered Carbon. It’s taking me more time to get through this one first season. I think it’s good, when I’m enjoying it? Good cyberpunk seems hard to pull off―making the character just hard enough, the setting hopeless enough, but expecting the reader/viewer/player to want to carry on with it.

Bojack Horseman. Every time I forget this show is available to me, I watch a new episode and enjoy it. And immediately forget it exists again. Probably a good thing not to binge this one anymore, like I did the first season.

Vietnam. Imagine a challenge more daunting than “Tell the story of America’s involvement in Vietnam.” How do they do it? Chronologically, with interviews and research. Bird by bird, as the great woman put it. Two episodes in, and most of what I thought about Vietnam is already discarded. Well, the stuff I read, anyways.