Weekender #74 — Playdate is here!

• Birb Watch: Tomorrow (Monday), will mark 2 years since Myna2 has passed. While I still miss her a lot, I think she’d be pleased to know that her mate, Handsome myna is still here and protecting my drive way, water dishes that she loved so much. He also comes by multiple times a day for snacks!

• Last week, after a long wait, Audra and I received our Playdates! I’ve been meaning to write about this tiny retro-style gaming device, but have been too busy with work to really dive into it and play.

  • My initial thoughts on the device and design: any company thinking of designing and shipping hardware has a lot of homework to do before they can even start manufacturing. I don’t know how such a small company like Panic was able to pull it off, but the Playdate is a wonderfully, whimsically designed device. I haven’t felt this type of wonder and excitement over a device since I bought the Teenage Engineering OP-1 synthesizer. It’s no wonder that Panic tapped TE to help with designing the Playdate!

• Speaking of whimsical design, check out this video of macOS from 1984 to 2022.

• I hadn’t given Google’s G Suite fiasco another thought since switching to FastMail last month. This ordeal finally got some attention in the New York Times this week, although the damage is already done.

• This blog uses DuckDuckGo for site search. Over the past couple of months, I’ve been noticing that DDG’s search results have been either really bad or non-existent — meaning search results return no links at all. At first, I thought that maybe DDG was having issues, so I tried again a bit later with the same results. Digging in to this issue, I also noticed that Daring Fireball and Michael J. Tsai’s blog were also experiencing this, so I started a Twitter conversation to see if they had knew anything about it. Both noticed the same issue, but neither had any ideas or explanation as to why it was occuring.

  • Tsai shared that others had issues with disappearing search results from DuckDuckGo as well as Bing, which is one of the sources that DuckDuckGo uses for search results. Turns out, that DDG and Bing weren’t just missing some search results, but their entire websites were removed from Bing and DuckDuckGo.

• NHK World featured my favorite Japanese quartet ATARASHII GAKKO! on the program SONGS OF TOKYO this week, complete with English subtitles. It’s so awesome to see them appearing on these higher profile Japanese shows at last!

• Audra and I finished the second season of Ghost in the Shell: SAC2045_ on Netflix. While I didn’t love the 3DCG / motion capture type animation style of the show, I felt the story line and plot was interesting and in the spirit of the original SAC. I’m not sure how this series did overall, but this may be the last time we see a new Ghost in the Shell series.

• I learned this week that singer, songwriter and former Chicago frontman Peter Cetera had officially retired in 2019. Cetera was a high school staple for those of us that grew up in the 80’s. His second solo album Solitude / Solitaire is my favorite, and was also a huge success with the songs Glory of Love (Theme from “the Karate Kid, Pt. II”) and his duet with Amy Grant, The Next Time I Fall. Both songs would become high school prom songs for years to come. The rest of the album is a gem, especially if you enjoy the stripped down sound of the 80’s synths with the fantastic guitar playing of Dann Huff. Listen on Apple Music.