Year: 2017

November 16, 2017
November 15, 2017
One of my favourite games is Twilight Imperium 3. It is a sprawling game of galactic domination. It is quite magnificent, and the only downside is that a single game will normally take 4-8 hours, which limits the number of times it gets played.

However, I’ve recently been scheduling the odd game for myself and a couple of friends on a Friday. I don’t generally work Fridays, and the two friends are similarly free. This has meant we are getting the game to the table more often, which improves how we play it, as we are not having to remember the rules from 6 months ago.

November 14, 2017
Lately, I’ve been thinking about a couple of board games I was tempted to purchase.

The Thing: Infection at Outpost 31 is a brand new cooperative game based on the 1982 movie (and John W. Campbell’s novella “Who Goes There”, that it was based on. An American Antarctic station runs into problems with an alien creature that can take on the form of an organism it comes across. It is one of my favourite films, and so seeing this game made me sit up. Obviously, although a cooperative game, there will be a “traitor” element in the form of whichever station crew member gets infected/imitated.

October 9, 2017
Since buying my Tenor guitar, in 2015, I haven’t done much more than play around with it – certainly nothing serious.

This is mainly because I found myself spoilt for choice in terms of tunings. “Standard” tuning is in fifths, CGDA, but they are also commonly tuned to “Irish”, GDAE (also in fifths, or Chicago, DGBE (like the top 4 strings on a 6-string guitar).

October 6, 2017
September 21, 2017
September 18, 2017
More news of 360° video cameras.

I posted the other day about my excitement over the new Ricoh Theta V 4K/360° camera that has recently been released, and then my disappointment on reading about some of the details. This ultimately led to me cancelling my pre-order for the camera.

August 31, 2017
August 15, 2017
I’ve been using my Harmony hub with remote for a month now, and it has been extremely successful. I have it controlling my TV, my DVD player, my YouView box, my Fire TV Stick and my stereo.

In the last month, I have had to resort to using an original remote just twice, when I found I was missing a function. However, each time, the learning ability meant I was able to plug each gap as I came to it.

July 20, 2017
It was while I was looking for potential better DNLA clients that I came across Plex. Plex is a server you set up yourself – either on a spare computer, or perhaps a Raspberry Pi, or even (with a paid subscription) on the cloud. From it, you can stream your music and video, with clients available for most platforms. My android phone has a client, my Windows 10 desktop has a client, both my Blu-Ray player and my Amazon Fire Stick will run it.

July 20, 2017
July 15, 2017
My new CPAP mask has arrived. It is one of a very different type that I am trying – the DreamWear FitPack Nasal Mask

I’ve recently been having skin problems, particularly on my forehead, where my normal CPAP mask has a silicon pad to support the mask fit. So I wanted to try something totally different.