Week notes 2026-44
It was Halloween week! Naturally we did not pick up any chocolate for trick-or-treaters until Halloween itself; we had to go to 3 different stores to find some. It used to be you could count on cheap chocolate the next day, but retail stores seem to take everything off the shelves as soon as possible to push Christmas dΓ©cor now.
We had a slight panic-inducing moment to start the week: we discovered a tick on our dog's ear. Luckily, from everything we researched, it appears it hadn't been attached for more than 24 hours. We were able to remove it easily with tweezers, and the bite site1 was small. It swelled up of course, but within a day it went back down and turned into just a bit of a scab.
One week later, she is also acting normal: full of energy, running around, scattering her toys everywhere. We're confident that she is okay, but will be taking our vet's advice and get some blood work done in a few weeks to confirm.
Back to Halloween - we actually handed out candy! We generally don't, because the doorbell and people in general cause our dog to go nuts. We locked her in the bedroom and put Hocus Pocus & Hocus Pocus 2 on and were amused by all the cute little kids in great costumes. I think there were at least two Buzz Lightyears (I know there were two different ones, because the second one came to the door with a whole Toy Story family). The best one was a kid dressed as a car.
Misc stuff
- I was pondering a phone upgrade last week and after discussing with my wife, I pulled the trigger. Despite wanting a smaller phone, she reminded me that I use my phone to pilot my drone. A bigger screen would be very helpful! So I ended up going for the Samsung S26 Ultra; it's marginally bigger than the S26+, and has longer software support.
- Now I have to go through the process of preparing to change phones. Create back-ups for everything, set it up for 2FA with work with a passkey, set up my SyncThing process all over again...it sounds exhausting.
- I think what I will do, however, is selectively install things rather than do a complete copy of everything. I learned from switching macbooks this year that it is sometimes better to start fresh.
- Over the weekend I tried setting up a PS2 emulator on my iPad. It worked, and I was able to launch MVP Baseball 2005, BUT my gamepad controls are laggy even when wired directly, and there's no smoothness to the control sticks. To put it another way, I could either pitch down the middle in the zone or outside the zone, no nuance.
- Then last night, I installed PCXS2 on my Macbook. I connected the SN30 Pro via Bluetooth, and let me tell you, the experience is much better. I didn't fully test it, because it was just before bed and I was too tired, but the next step is to see how the Sony Remote Play app works with it; I suspect my trouble with laggy control input was because of the iPad rather than network connections.
- I posted my yearly Halloween photos. I hope to keep this going, and maybe next year I'll have a sidekick to join in on the fun.
- Nobody Cares That You're Leaving Proton β Thoughts π of Widdershins β a lot of Proton stuff happened last week; Widdershins wrote this post that echoes my own about software (sort of).
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