We’ve made it to 2020! Amazing. It was just yesterday we were partying like it’s 1999.
If you’ve wanted to message me, you know that I’m not a big fan of texting and would rather use something better. Here’s one of the many reasons why, in November 168,149 Valentineās day text messages were sent. How did this happen? Your text messages aren’t just handled by your cellphone carrier, there are companies out their that deal with interoperability between the cellphone carries and your messages may be stored all over the place.
There are a couple of technologies that I was too young to get to experience, 8″ floppies are one of them. Until recently, the Air Force was still using 8″ floppy disks for a missile launch control system, but thankfully they’re upgrading. If you are wondering what 8″ floppy disks are like, hold up an iPad. It is slightly larger than an 8″ floppy.
We believe that technology is always getting better, but there are some times when technology may have been better in the past. Playing games on CRT (cathode ray tube) monitors is one such tech. Eurogamer took a look at playing games in 2019 on a CRT and their conclusion is that CRTs are awesome! I keep a couple around in the basement, unfortunately, they are getting harder and harder to find. Plus, once you find one, you then have to find a place to store it.
As a warning to all you male middle school students, it may be wise to lay off on the Axe Body Spray. The picture of the aftermath is impressive, I’m surprised the guy survived.
It turns out shopping on the internet may be safer than shopping in real life. A clerk used his photographic memory to steal credit card info from 1,300 customers. One safety feature of the Apple Card is that there is no credit card number, expiration date, or CVV number on the card itself. This means that your CC details are not exposed when you hand over your card in a restaurant.
Superhuman is a company that is trying to re-invent email. Unfortunately, to offer some of their services they have to violate the privacy of anyone you send email to. The idea of tracking the opening of emails isn’t new, mailing lists do it all of the time. However, in this case, it is being done to people who have never consented to being tracked in this manner. After the privacy implications were brought to light, they have since turned off the tracking. Nevertheless, it is a lesson in how you can be tracked through the most trivial of ways.
Retro cartridges can be big business, as an unsuspecting seller brought the most boring collection of NES carts to a store, along with a cartridge worth $13,000.
I was visiting Rochelle in the hospital yesterday when one of the machines starting beeping with the message INFUSION COMPLETE. While waiting for a nurse, I started freestyling with the beeps, because apparently that’s a thing I do now.
After a little bit, I decided to record the beeps in to Garageband, and thus the song Infusion Complete was born. Only available here!
I started this project last year, and the immediately lost the source code. So, this year, I re-created my script AND put it on GitHub.
The directions on using the script are in the repository, and it should work under macOS (with brew to install mutt), Linux, and Windows Subsystem for Linux. The only pre-requisite is Python.
This week is the Hardin County Fair, and, good news for my fans since I will be posting an array of eating delights. I try to not repeat any foods during the fair, but I will probably make an exception for the pumpkin dumplings1.
Here’s an example of a previous year, with a map. I’m not ready to add a map to my Shortcut… Yet.
After posting a picture, I usually get a few people asking where I got it. I started to include a picture of the food truck as a thumbnail in the corner of the picture. But, the creation of the picture takes time. I have a computer in my phone, let’s put it to work.
My Fair Food Shortcut
Here is my creation, the Fair Food iOS Shortcut for iPhones and iPads. Once installed, I can add an icon to my home screen.
To create my foodie masterpiece, I take a picture of the food truck and of the food. I run the Fair Food Shortcut. The Shortcut shows my last 10 pictures taken and asks for the picture of the food truck. After selecting the correct picture, the Shortcut again shows me my last 10 pictures taken and asks me to select the picture of the food. Once the food picture is selected, the Shortcut resizes the picture of the Food Truck and places it in the upper left corner of the food picture and then saves it to the Camera Roll.
Get a notification when I post!
Now I can share my composited image to my website here along with Instagram. If you want to keep up with my pics, you can:
RyanCollins.org – the best way. Use your favorite RSS reader. And if you don’t have an RSS reader, GET ONE!
If you want an alternative…
t.me/supgoz – Telegram is my favorite messenger, and Sup Goz is a channel that receives notifications when I post to RyanCollins.org.
1 – The pumpkin dumpling is a slice of pumpkin pie in dumpling form, topped with pumpkin ice cream and whipped topping. Although the dumpling has shrunk in size over the years, the entire dessert is still delicious.
I was never a fan of the original Game Boy, which, to my surprise, did not affect its popularity. I was still an Atari fan, and was rooting for the Lynx. This past April the Game Boy turned 30. One must not underestimate the legacy of the Game Boy, it made casual gaming popular with Tetris being the pack-in. I know of several Game Boys that were nothing more than dedicated Tetris consoles.
Because of math, buying a larger pizza is usually the best deal. This can be harder to calculate if the price of toppings also change per size. Never fear, the internet has you covered with the Cheap Pizza Calculator. Enter in the prices of the size of the pie and the toppings, and the calculator will give you a per square inch pricing. I recently used it to calculate the difference of a 14″ versus 16″. It didn’t seem like there was a big difference at only a penny for square inch, but since the 16″ was 200 square inches, that made the total savings a cool $2.00.
My first viewing of Office Space didn’t impress me much. I enjoyed the opening scenes, but after that I was kind of meh. But, after multiple viewings, I became a fan. This year marks the 20th anniversary of Office Space and The Ringer wrote an oral history of the movie.
Is your screen too small on your phone to watch movies? Well, here’s a $17 device to help you watch. Reminds me a lot of these devices. Everything old is new again.
Mortal Kombat was a graphical revolution in fighting games after Street Fighter II dominated the arcades with its cartoony graphics. Here’s a behind the scenes look at how the iconic graphics were created.
Look at the boatload of money they’re bringing us!
(I’m writing this review in two parts. The top will have no spoilers for the movie. The bottom part, which I will delineateĀ with several warnings, will have spoilers.)
For those who grew up in the 80s, a common theme to boost TV ratings was to have a crossover episode, taking two different shows and combining them into one. A famous example is The Jetsons Meet the Flintsones in 1987. The crossover reached its zenith with Who Framed Roger Rabbit. For the first time we saw Mickey Mouse sharing the screen with Bugs Bunny, and Daffy Duck dueling it out on pianos with Donald Duck. Besides the Marvel Cinematic Universe, DC has been carrying out their smaller crossover on the CW network with Supergirl, Arrow, and Legends of Tomorrow.
Marvel has done the same with its Marvel Universe. You may say that the characters are all owned by the same company, so it’s not a crossover, but I would disagree. Each character’s movies have a different feel, so to be able to combine all of the story arcs into one cohesive movies such as Avengers:Endgame is an incredible feat.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe started with Iron Man in 2008 and came in three phases. The first phase contained the movies Iron Man through Avengers, the second phase started with Iron Man 3 and ended with Ant-Man, and the current third phase, which started with Captain America: Civil War and will end with Spider-man, Far From Home this summer.
What Marvel has done with its cinematic universe is nothing but amazing. They took characters that weren’t very popular, such Iron Man and Thor, and produced top notch movies. I realized I was watching history with the first Iron Man. It was the fact that I was so engrossed in the movie that I wasn’t impatiently waiting for Iron Man to show up. That’s how I knew.
Avengers: Endgame is the culmination of 21 movies over 11 years. Although the plot is pretty convoluted, and the fan service scenes are dialed up to 11, it is still a must see movie. I can’t really say much more about the movie without giving something away, so I will leave you with this: the movie gets my highest rating, Opening Night. If you haven’t seen it, go see it!
Spoilers Below
Yes, I’m serious…
If you don’t want to read any spoilers, STOP READING NOW!! YOU’VE BEEN WARNED!
Endgame starts with everyone brooding, trying to figure out either how to fix what Thanos did or how to deal with the aftermath of half of the population gone. Our heroes’ solution? One that is very disappointing…
Time Travel
Ah yes, the solution to everything, go back in time and fix it. Thanos used some sort of Infinity Stone Inception where the Infinity Stones destroyed themselves.
Marvel’s rules of time travel are different than Back to the Future. And if you don’t realize the rules are different, they insert several jokes to make sure the audience knows. Anything our heroes do in the past is really the hero’s future, so they can’t change the past. But, they can bring things from the past as long as they promise to return them to the moment they took them. So, they spent 20 seconds on coming up with the name Time Heist and set up 3 separate teams to go back in time and grab the infinity stones.
The teams travel back in time, hilarity ensues, and they return to the present to make their own Infinity Gauntlet and snap everyone back. But, it’s been five years, so they have to make sure that nothing currently changes in the present since Tony now has a daughter. This also means that people will be snapped back and have the grief of loved ones who have died in the past 5 years, but lets not dwell on their grief.
Thanos 2014 finds out about the time travel, and brings his ship to the present. Professor Hulk by this time has snapped everyone back, but Thanos is bound determined to snap again, this time removing the memory of all of the people so no one will try to undo his purge.
Because it is a super hero movie, we have to have a battle that makes the massive LotR battles look small, with what appears of hundreds of thousands of people fighting each other in upstate New York. And this is where the movie falls off the rails. The fan service is strong, the movie has to show Cap not only wielding Mjolnir like a norse god, but he can also bring the lightening. Every fight is created not to move the story along, but to give the audience something to cheer about, hitting you over the head again and again.
Anyway, after all of that spectacle, Tony Stark wields the Infinity Gauntlet, snaps Thanos and his minions from existence, and then dies. Funeral for him, and then the end. Or you would think.
Cap goes back in time to return the Infinity Stones using a time travel machine set up by the lake. And they do this right after Tony’s funeral because we’re already almost three hours into this thing and still have to have Cap bow out. But, Cap doesn’t return on the time travel machine. He just, shows up, old, on a bench because that’s what old people do, sit on a bench by a lake. Really, this end scene makes no sense. Cap goes back in time to spend his life with Agent Carter. He knows Hydra is infiltrating SHIELD at this time, and he replaced the guy the Peggy already had married. Totally out of character for Steve Rogers. Ugh.
Anyway, my biggest complaint is the use of time travel. Not only that, but how their rules allow all sorts of crap to happen.
It is a joke that no one ever dies in the Marvel Universe, and now they can make that a reality. You can kill your past self without consequences (Nebula). If a person dies, go back in time and bring them to the present before they died (Gamora). Old age won’t even kill you since Scott Lang’s initial time travel experiments showed that it is also a fountain of youth.
Is this the best Marvel movie? No, Iron Man still holds that mantel. Is this in the top 10? Probably, but do the movies really need to be ranked? Even Thor: Dark World comes across better than almost any super hero movie DC has put out. And Dark World was redeemed with Ragnorok. Nothing can redeem Batman Vs. Superman, although Aquaman wasn’t bad.
Although I prefer the sequel Aliens, Alien was ground breaking at the time with its take on scifi horror. The coolest high school ever put on a stage production of Alien. Unfortunately, the trailer is pretty lame. I would love to see more of the play, especially the dinner scene. Alien is also making in roads in higher education.
It is hard to look away from a car wreck, and watching big trucks lose their top is even better! The 11 foot 8 inch bridge has several warnings for trucks, but to no avail.
If you’ve wanted to message me, you know that I’m not a big fan of texting and would rather use something better. Here’s one of the many reasons why, in November 168,149 Valentineās day text messages were sent. How did this happen? Your text messages aren’t just handled by your cellphone carrier, there are companies out their that deal with interoperability between the cellphone carries and your messages may be stored all over the place.
I was never a fan of the original Game Boy, which, to my surprise, did not affect its popularity. I was still an Atari fan, and was rooting for the Lynx. This past April 
