Going back to my backlog to finish jotting down thoughts on games that I've completed a while ago now.  This mini review is for Mass Effect: Andromeda, a game that I finished a year ago (yes, I should blog more often).  Just for the record, I finished ME:A on 10/6/22.I know that this game seems to get a ton of hate.  I don't really get the hate because it was, legitimately, a fun

Pocket Surfer 2OK, I sort of felt like I should have an honorable mention category for all the things I was going to post, and that I had drafts started back in my drafts blogs in 2019, but ultimately I ended up deleting, due mostly to a change of interests.  Still, here's a list of devices that didn't make the cut in my technology retrospective:1996-2013 Windows Handheld PCs (Wikipedia, YouTube)2000

OQO Model e2Alright!Here is the LAST of my 2019 tech backlog!  At least from the things I chose to save and write about.Today's blog post is dedicated to the OQO PC.  This is one of those devices that seemed to signal the future of computing to me back in those days.  The OQO Model 1 was released in 2004, and the final model (the e2) was released in 2007.  There was a subsequent

Here's another from the 2019 backlog...This time it's a device that's not all that well known: The IXI Ogo. I remember when Cingular (now AT&T) was selling these internet communicators in 2004.  The device was a little too late in the market, or perhaps it was a device that innovated in one way, while smartphones were innovating in other ways that ultimately surpassed the need for this kind

Here's another one from 2019 lol :-)Today's blog post is dedicated to the Ericsson R380w.  I think this may potentially be the first smartphone that I have ever seen in the wild. This phone came out in 1999 and I think it was the first device marketed as a smartphone.  While I think that connected PDAs had data devices connected to them before this, the R380w was an all-in-one device.As

Original N-GageHere's another one from the "drafts" pile from 2019 that I wanted to do a little write-up about, but...well it got lost in the blogging shuffle 😂. My original intent with this series of looking back at older tech was to talk a bit about the specs and the general reception, but since there are enough blogs, wikis, and YouTubers who already do that, why add to the chorus?  So,

Well... Back in 2019 I had started to write this post, when the Gemini PDA was relatively new, and ... well it got forgotten in my drafts folder 😂.  The images of the device pictured are that of the Gemini PDA, which is a connected PDA that aims to replicate the look and feel of those older Psion Series 5 PDAs from the late 90s. The device runs Android, and it has a slot for a SIM so

 Well... I didn't think I'd be migrating from one Mastodon server to another one so soon (I just created the account this past spring!), but here we are! 🙄 I joined this particular server because it seemed like this was where fellow academics were going after they left Twitter (or while they were co-establishing their presence on Mastodon). I should have read the prohibitions a bit more carefully

It's weird that I started writing this last summer and I am only now getting to it... let's see how much I remember 😂.OK, so last summer I watched this series.  The premise was quite simple: who's the next Hawkeye not that Hawkeye has "retired" from being a superhero? This series takes place after the events of Avengers: Endgame. It's Christmas Time in New York, and all Clint Barton

Here's another show from my sci-fi catch-up watch.  This one was on Hulu, I think, and it's a comedy about alien abductees.The series follows city journalist Ozzie Graham, played by Wyatt Cenac, who travels to Beacon, New York to write a piece on a support group called "StarCrossed," who are survivors of alien encounters. The abductees are stereotypical tin-foil-hat folks. Although skeptical at