Before I explain, you have to understand something. This thing was dead dead. Completely unresponsive to any and all input, including the recovery key combos. I let it sit on the charger for a good long while. No change. I took it off the charger for another good long while. No change.

Making it Apple’s problem

Apple will do a free diagnostic if you take your device into a store. I may as well, right? Just before leaving, I double checked the laptop again so I wouldn’t accidentally look stupid bringing in a working device for diagnostics. Still dead, as expected.

We get to the store, check in with a support person, explain the problem, and open the laptop for them. Obviously it immediately lights up and goes straight to the login screen. So much for double checking it beforehand.

Best guess

They ran a diagnostic anyway since we were there. Everything came back 100% which is a lie because I know for a fact the battery at least has seen far better days. So there’s still no great leads on what killed it in the first place.

My current best guess is something to do with the aging battery. There’s a chance I’ll replace it myself. A small one, since — and I’m not exaggerating — you have to take apart the entire MacBook to do a battery replacement. Not to mention I’d be doing all that based on a hunch, crossing my fingers that it doesn’t decide to randomly die again.

In any case, we’ve been considering replacing the whole thing with a Linux laptop anyway. This MacBook really shows its age on recent versions of MacOS. It’s also the second one we’ve had die in this weird way, so we’re done with Macs.

What to replace it with?

Framework, maybe? They’re considerably more expensive than comparable models from other companies, but simply reading a battery replacement guide for the MacBook has already started to radicalize me. Paying a premium for easy repairs and upgrades might not be a bad idea.

I’m considering Lenovo as well. Some of their models are way cheaper, comparably specced, and at least appear not to be actively hostile to repairs. Their higher end models are apparently quite repairable from what I’ve recently learned, and I’m wondering if they would be a better value than Framework.

I’m super open to recommendations here if you’ve got them. You can get in touch at the bottom of the page.

— JP

But that’s a story for another day once I have a chance to dig more into it. The main thing is that we were down a computer and my wife still needed something to get work done on. I decided to test out an idea.

We have a Steam Deck we both use a lot. I booted it into its desktop mode, connected it to a laptop dock with a display and peripherals, and that was pretty much all there was to it. It may as well have been any other ordinary computer that you could get real work done on.

I love that this is possible, but it’s a little lame that it feels special. With as many devices and gadgets that we have, so many of them are held back by seemingly arbitrary limitations. Why shouldn’t I be able to use my game console as a desktop PC? Or my phone for that matter? Or my car? My fridge? If everything is a computer, why is hardly anything something I can actually use as a computer?

I’m joking of course. But only a little.

— JP

I go to check my email in Gmail’s web UI. I see a few new messages regarding feedback on a project I’m working on. I click through to read one of them and the first thing I’m greeted with is a message summary I didn’t ask for generated by a language model.

I focus the message box to draft a reply, but there’s already one there. It was also generated by the language model. I delete it, replacing it with my own.

Afterward, I go to compose a new message. A colorful animation steals my focus for a second highlighting a new “help me write” button. I ignore it and move on to filling in the recipients and subject line.

I focus the message body area and underneath my cursor appears the message “Press / for Help me write”. Again, I ignore it and begin writing.

A few moments later, I start a new paragraph and pause. There’s a new message under my cursor now: “Tab to improve”. What I’ve written so far isn’t up to Gmail’s standards, it seems.

What message are you trying to send?

Look, I’m pretty pragmatic when it comes to generative AI features in software. I see very little wrong with including an optional AI writing assistant for those who want it.

But when you nag and nag, when you summarize my messages and write my replies without my asking, when you repeatedly interrupt me to beg and plead that I rewrite my drafts, you’re sending the wrong message.

The message you’re sending is that you think I’m not capable of reading and writing my own emails. That the people I’m exchanging messages with don’t deserve my time and energy. That I’m doing something wrong by not outsourcing my communication skills to a token prediction machine.

I’ve looked into it. Some of these features can be turned off. Others can’t. Or if they can, it means also turning off useful long-standing features like automatic thread categorization. I have very little doubt that this is intentional, that the unsolicited summaries and auto replies are a means of artificially inflating the usage metrics for the language model features.

I think we’re all used to user-hostile software these days, but this is the first time I’ve experienced software that feels like it’s actively trying to be disrespectful. Sure, I could switch to a different mail client and never see any of these language model features, but my experience these past months has left such a bad taste that all I’m looking for now is a clean break.

A 16 year breakup

I’ve had my Gmail account for 16 years. It’s by far my oldest internet account that I still use. Or used to use. I’ve already started the long process of moving away.

This time I’m doing things the right way by connecting my own domain to a mail host. I’m currently with Fastmail since they were by far the most popular option when I asked for suggestions on the fediverse. I’m still early on in the trial period, but so far first impressions are great. It seems really flexible, and after connecting multiple domains and setting up a few aliases I’m starting to wish I had tried it sooner.

I haven’t settled on whether or not I should import my Gmail data. I’ll almost surely import my contacts, but there’s something nice about starting fresh as far as everything else goes. I’m interested in what other people in a similar position have done.

Congrats to Google, really. They’ve done a decent job at keeping Gmail stable over the many years I’ve used it. Which is why even I am impressed by how quickly they were able to get me to pack up and leave.

— JP

Each week, Hyde interviews another blogger to get their opinions on five different topics and answer a few other questions. This week it was vinyl, Kobo, Keychron keyboards, Ray-Ban AI glasses, and cupcakes.

Over/Under #64 with another bear: ModdedBear

— JP

I played it on Steam Deck with the PC port Ship of Harkinian which is hands down the best way to play it these days. It’s extremely customizable (almost dauntingly so) so you can really tune the game to your liking and modernize it a bit.

Some of my favorite features:

• Unlocked framerate and resolution
• Modern camera controls
• Use of the d-pad for extra item slots

My thoughts on the game

Not that I was at all old enough to play it when it came out, but you can clearly tell even today that Ocarina of Time was a very ambitious game. Overall, I think it delivered and it’s easy to see why it was incredibly influential.

There are some enemy and quest designs that show their age a bit, but that’s pretty standard for the era. The worst example I can think of is (spoilers for a 28 year old game incoming) when first entering the Spirit Temple, the game strongly hints that you need to time travel to come back as a child. So I warped straight to the Temple of Time to do that, thinking that I could use the Gerudo membership card I just earned to have the guards let me through. Nope. I had to look up a walkthrough to learn that what I should have done is exit the Spirit Temple normally to trigger the cutscene where the Spirit Temple’s warp song is learned.

But like I was saying, needing an occasional walkthrough is something that more or less comes with the territory of playing 30 year old games. I don’t hold that against Ocarina of Time too much, especially since some elements have aged incredibly well all things considered.

The combat, while a bit simple by today’s standards, is one of the parts of Ocarina of Time that I think has aged the best. Modern enhancements like high framerates and manual camera controls definitely help here, but you can tell there’s a solid underlying system even without them. Most of the bosses and stronger enemies were genuinely fun to fight, and it’s easy to see where Ocarina of Time’s combat has influenced so many of today’s titles.

I’ll just say that it’s easy to see why this game still gets talked about even today. It’s definitely deserving of its status as a classic.

Next on my radar

When I think of The Legend of Zelda, Twilight Princess is the game that always comes to my mind. I put a ton of time into it growing up and there’s just something I love about its mechanics, world design, and characters.

So I’m super excited that there’s not one, but two ongoing projects porting it to modern platforms! The one that I’m most closely watching is Dusk. It appears to have a larger team behind it and be slightly farther along in development, though I could be wrong on both fronts since there’s not a ton of public information on either of these projects yet. The other project is Courage Reborn which also looks promising.

Based on posts in the Dusk Discord, videos from testers with access, and my own speculation, I won’t be surprised if Dusk gets an initial release sometime in the next few months. You can bet I’ll be setting it up as soon as it’s available. For all the time I spent playing Twilight Princess I never did quite roll credits on it. Looking forward to correcting that.

— JP

It uses a community voting system similar to sites like Reddit, Hacker News, or Bear Blog. Signing up is super easy since you just log in with a Fediverse account (with read-only permissions).

I think it’s an interesting alternative to other blog aggregators which typically only show you the most recent posts. You can also sort by new posts in Bubbles, but the ranked view seems like it’ll be nice for making sure I didn’t miss anything good from the past few days.

I’ve added the Bubbles widget to the bottom of my blog posts. You should be able to see the current vote count of this post after Bubbles refreshes and imports it!

Lastly, I’ve also reorganized my bookmarks page and added a dedicated section for places to discover new blogs. Check it out!

— JP

If this is the first time you’re hearing about it, the X4 is an affordable mini e-ink reader roughly the size of a 2010-era smartphone. It sort of feels pseudo-retro in that way.

The other way the X4 feels pseudo-retro is in just how straightforward it is. It reminds me of the days when a gadget was there for you, not the other way around. It doesn’t even have a bookstore to get new books from. You’ll have to get your own epub files and copy them over, something that I personally don’t mind at all.

Most days, I use one of the included adhesive magnet rings to keep my X4 attached to the back of my Pixel 9 XL Pro. It’s a perfect fit with just a bit of height to spare — don’t count on being able to do the same unless you also have a huge phone! It adds a few millimeters of bulk, but it’s a fun way to make sure my X4 is close at hand so I can read a few chapters during lunch or whenever else I have some spare time. I’ve found I’ve been reading a lot more ever since I got my X4 (as I’m sure anyone in my book group for The Expanse will be able to tell you).

Of course, the question I always get is whether it’s comfortable to read on something this small. It’s an obvious concern, but it’s not something I’ve ever worried about while reading. I would say the X4 is actually more comfortable to read on than my phone, even at a further distance. That’s probably thanks to its e-ink display and light weight.

I still love my Kobo Clara BW by the way! That hasn’t been replaced. I use it a lot for reading at home in the evenings since it has a reading light, something the X4 lacks. The Clara’s size also makes it a little bit easier to get immersed in, so I usually gravitate to it for more intentional reading sessions.

I think I’ll leave it there for now, but let me know if you have any questions. If your interest is piqued, there’s plenty of great full reviews out there and I don’t have a whole lot to add to them.

One last note: if you get or already have an X4, make sure to check out the popular open source firmware Crosspoint. It’s extremely easy to install and takes less than a minute. It’s well made and really helps the X4 punch above its weight. Both photos posted here are running Crosspoint.

— JP

And just this last week we submitted our first game to the client! I learned a lot along the way and it was a blast.

Thankfully I’m not brand new to game development

Like I said, I’ve always been into game development and have done a bunch of random stuff related to it over the years. Mapping, modding, messing with fantasy consoles, and I’ve even helped out a little bit on an unreleased Unreal Engine game. But this last project feels like a milestone because it was my first time doing anything professional in the space.

My brother and I teamed up which was perfect. He’s way more experienced than I with 3D asset production, and I was able to bring some programming experience.

Godot is an awesome tool

The game we just finished was my first time doing anything serious with the Godot game engine. I have to say I’m a fan now. Granted, this game was really small in scope but I think that’s part of why Godot was such a good fit for us. Its documentation is excellent and in general it’s really quite approachable and easy to learn. It’s just a joy to work with. Certainly much more so than Unity or Unreal.

We used Godot’s scripting language, GDScript, out of necessity because of our target platform. But even if we’d had the choice available I think GDScript would’ve still been the best option for us. Syntactically it seems to draw most of its inspiration from Python, which made it pretty easy to dive into. Overall, I haven’t had many complaints with GDScript’s feature set. I am curious now how developing in C# with Godot would feel, though I definitely haven’t felt the need to yet.

I could really see myself making a personal project in Godot at some point, especially now that I’m familiar with it.

Keep in mind that my experience with Godot is still a bit limited and really tilted towards the programming side of things. But if you’re looking to start a new game project, I’d say it’s worth your time no matter your skill level. I’d love to hear about your experience with Godot if you’ve used it before, good or bad.

Doing something I enjoy

The last thing I’ll say here is that it’s been a really nice change of pace getting paid to do something I enjoy. Even though this project has been coming out of my free time, it’s felt exciting just like any other of my side projects. Never overwhelming or tiring.

I’m definitely looking forward to doing more game dev stuff in the future now that I’ve gotten a real taste of it.

— JP

I’ve pretty much always had some contact info posted here and get occasional messages through email and such. But the message widget is just sitting there and takes seconds to use. I’ve already gotten way more messages through it then I’ve ever gotten through all my other contact methods.

It’s not overwhelming or annoying though. After the first week, the number of messages coming in settled down to about a handful every week or two. A lot of messages are just some variant of “hi” or something funny (which I do love and fully expected going in), but still a lot of others are comments about something I wrote which are always nice to read.

Even with the short or joke messages, the message I get includes a link to the page you were on when you sent it. That’s useful so people don’t have to include context about what they’re commenting on but it also gives me a little bit of insight into what people are reading. I don’t have any analytics here and even the logs from my hosting provider aren’t terribly useful for that purpose. It’s nice to have a little more information for a change. Even if I was using analytics, a quick “hey” is a lot more cool than just a number in a report.

One interesting thing I learned is that more people are reading my older posts than I would have guessed. Often (but not always!) it’s a guide of some sort. That makes sense and is a reassuring sign that search engines aren’t entirely useless just yet.

I know some other people have comment systems or guestbooks which I suppose serve a similar purpose. But those aren’t as funny as being able to anonymously ping someone through their own website.

Anyway, thanks for the messages. There’s no way for me to reply to any of them, but I do have fun reading them no matter what they’re about.

— JP

Skate Story website

I stay fairly up to date with games that are coming out, though it’s pretty rarely that I actually play them brand new. So when I say I bought Skate Story on day one after playing the demo, that’s high praise because that never happens. And I’m glad I did since it turned into my favorite game of 2025.

Shortly put, Skate Story is one of the most stylish games I’ve played in a while. In every aspect. Visuals, music, gameplay. It nails everything while also managing to be really unique.

The skateboarding mechanics feel a bit reminiscent of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, though more grounded and with some extra elements like bonuses for well-timed tricks. It’s approachable and forgiving, but also tricky enough that it’s really rewarding when you get it just right.

Add the slick visuals and banger soundtrack into the mix and Skate Story is just one of the coolest feeling games I’ve ever played.

Speaking of the soundtrack, I’ve been listening to it all the time ever since I started the game. It’s a vibe, and a super memorable one.

There’s a few more 2025 releases I plan on getting to eventually (like Dispatch), but Skate Story has so much of what I love in a game that it has to be my game of the year.

By the way, if you’ve played Skate Story and are looking for something similar then you might want to take a look at Kitten Burst. I wrote about it in 2024 and certain things about Skate Story reminded me of it which doesn’t often happen. They’re pretty different games, but they’re both movement focused and have similar feels. I have a hunch that someone who enjoys one will enjoy the other.

— JP