I take a fair number of random photos around the house, several a week on average I'd guess. A common subject for my pictures are our animals: Irene isn't fond of me taking pictures of her, and pictures of myself aren't fit for human consumption, so that leaves our furry companions. And they are more photogenic than most of the subjects around here anyway.

Fasten your seat belts as today my own personal "Wayback machine" is taking us all the way back to March of 2003. At the time the Iraq war was still only two weeks old, and Republican law makers in the U.S. had their sights set on critically important decisions. Specifically Congressman Darrell Issa was pushing for a specific cell phone standard to be used in Iraq during reconstruction of the country.

I came across an article on Wired during Blaugust of 2024 and thought I should write something about my own introduction to coding as a teenager. I sort of forgot to follow up until today, so here we are. My youthful experiences with coding documented here all took place between about 1979 and 1985. I also did a bit of fiddling about earlier than that on computers I briefly had access to: a Commodore PET on a counter at Woodwards or a terminal attached to a PDP 11/70 at the University come to mind.

Two years ago Wilhelm had some well-considered words to say (TAGN) regarding the state of blogging in the 2020's. A couple of years have passed and I have considered my own thoughts on the topic. And then I came across this post over on the Dead Parrot BBS, which inspired me to assemble my thoughts into a post here.

I was going through my notes from a year or so ago and came across a reference to this post from Axxuy on the topic of longevity as measured in blog posts. There are a lot of ways to calculate a lifespan: how many times will I shave before I expire, how many rolls of toilet paper will I use, or how many sunrises will I actually see.

Ten lions have been killed with poison in an attack on the wildlife in Tanzania's Ngorongoro Conservation area. It is yet another incident where human factors outweigh the survival of the animals we share the planet with. Apparently the local nomadic human population in the area has increased by a factor of about ten since about 1960. The government has seen this rightly as a risk to the wild animals being conserved in the region, and has attempted to relocate the human population in recent years.

Bhagpuss published a post a few weeks back about AI and how we feel about it. Not about the hard crunchy aspects of AI, but about feelings and attitudes towards what may one day be a new form of actual intelligence we have to share the world with. I have some thoughts on the topic that I could either make into a long comment or a short post, so here we are.

Microsoft has announced new limits on cloud gaming will be introduced in November of this year (Arstechnica). Depending on the Game Pass level you are subscribed to, your monthly hours will drop from "infinite" to as little as 5 hours: Game Pass Ultimate: 15 hours/month Game Pass Premium: 10 hours/month Game Pass: 5 hours/month This applies strictly to streamed games, where the game itself executes in Microsoft's cloud infrastructure and your device acts as a display and input device.

Late last week Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay calling for the AI industry to be regulated for reasons of safety. It is a long read and I will be honest: I only skimmed it, and read a summary of the discussion around the issues on Gizmodo instead. But my limited understanding of the situation is that Amodei says the pace of AI development is putting us all at risk, and needs to be controlled with government oversight.

I have missed the actual birthday of Star Trek- September 8- by a good week. I have a good excuse as I was away visiting friends and touring around Radium Hot Springs at the time. I could have posted something I suppose, and I definitely felt the urge to do so when I saw Wilhelm (TAGN), Roger (Contains Moderate Peril)

I refuse to name the man here today who has called for the closure of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (CBC) in Washington. But he is the one who rules from on high south of our border, the man who hasn't met a monument, airport, or national treasure that he hasn't immediately wanted to put his name on.

My best friend Chris reached out to me at the end of June with a plan to meet up at a midway point between his home in Edmonton and our home in Castlegar. He would be travelling with his significant other Billie and his brother Richard, and I would aim to bring Irene along for the trip. I had enjoyed our similar gatherings in the past and so plans were made.

Roger over at Contains Moderate Peril wrote a nice piece on boredom and what it means to him. I've had some time to ponder and developed some of my own thoughts on the topic. As per usual I am sharing those ideas here out of a desire to break up my day and relieve some boredom... actually, that isn't quite true as I don't feel bored at the moment.

I decided recently that it was time to build a new network attached storage service for our home network. I have an old one, a NetGear ReadyNAS NVX+, but it is no longer maintainable. The ReadyNAS admin UI doesn't even support TLS 1.2, which means most modern browsers cannot connect to its administration page. Speaking of which, if you need to connect to an old web page like the Admin UI on a ReadyNAS…

I previously recounted an issue with my blog server wherein the MariaDB failed to start after a Fedora update. I found a work-around for that problem to get the blogs back up and running but the underlying issue remained: each time the server rebooted the MariaDB database would fail to start due to a missing /run/mariadb folder. The root cause…

An off-hand comment in a post on The Ancient Gaming Noob today about EverQuest Legends reminded me of the passing of Brad McQuaid over six years ago. The reminder sent me on a bit of a journey that took me to a video that inspired some feelings. I recall being sad at the time- Brad "Aradune" McQuaid was several years younger than me when he passed at the age of 51 in 2019.

September 1st is Tim Cook's official last day as CEO of Apple after 15 years at the helm of that now-dominant company. He took over from Steve Jobs, an iconic leader who for many was the very face of Apple. And, despite the challenges of not being a design and product guy like Jobs, Tim Cook achieved great things while in charge.

Sony would like you to know that any reasonable gamer would know that purchasing a game is just licensing a game (Video Games Chronicle), not owning it. And there is truth mixed in with a bold-faced lie in that statement. There is also a comically bad argument about ownership mixed in there that I am still chuckling about. I'm sure lawyers wouldn't laugh as much as I am, but it sounds stupid to me so let's go with that.

We lost another cat hat I haven't previously written about in addition to Iris: CoCo. She was with us for nearly as long as Iris, and passed at about the same age of 19 years. In her last days CoCo stopped eating and according to Irene started being unstable on her feet. We had CoCo put down on December 17- sadly, I have no memories of the event as it took place as…

I spent a bit of time on Monday adding a PHP code snippet to my Wordpress site that outputs a total monthly word count and average word count per post to the archives page. This is far from a complex bit of code, and I used AI to get the basics, but here it is. PHP snippet to add word counts…

The 2026 edition of Blaugust- the festival of blogging is wrapping up. This is my third year participating, and I started with fairly modest goals: Post at least five times (the "bronze" level of the event) with with a stretch goal of posting at least once for each of my three blogs secondary goal: keep my posts short with most being around 500 words…

We had our beloved cat Iris euthanized after a long illness on May 1 of this year at the age of 19 and one half years. I've been remiss in terms of reporting on this fact for no good reason other than it hurt then and it continues to hurt now. But I felt it was only fair to say something about our loss of our beloved grey and white tabby girl since I so recently reported on…

If you have a PC, PS5, or XBox X/S with a copy of Witcher 3- rejoice! CD Project RED is giving us some free stuff in the coming weeks. Available immediately are the two expansions for the game. At the end of September we get a remastered version of the game with improved gaphics and gameplay tweaks. This is all in preparation for the forthcoming Songs of the Past expansion coming in 2027 which, of course, won't be free.

Juhis tells us that there is no membership card for the Indieweb blogging community. I like his thesis as I sort of feel like I'm at least on the periphery of the Indieweb movement. But I also feel like I'm on the outside, being judged for not being "indie" enough. But to understand my thinking on the matter you first have to have an understanding of what the Indieweb is.

We have added a kitten to our clowder as of August 2, 2026, and her name is Sapphire. Before you ask: this means we now have four cats, three in the main house and one in my office over the garage. Yes that is a lot of cats. No, I didn't really want to have more cats. Yes, Irene begged and cajoled me for days.

I read a post by Toby on the topic of purpose as a general concept in life and found it very insightful. His post is far more insightful than this one is going to be. Go read his blog at the link above to get some excellent definitions and thoughtful consideration regarding the meaning of purpose. But Toby's words did get me thinking about different aspects of purpose in my own life and how the presence or absence of reasons for what I do might affect me.

My blog went down overnight without any planning on my part. When I checked it this morning, all three of my sites were showing an error that looked like this: Not exactly a good thing for me to wake up to, but I was eventually able to debug the issue with help from Google / Google AI and get things back up and running again.

I have Opinions™ about artificial intelligence. I'm not wholly against it, but I do feel that the current over-enthusiastic investment and circular dealing in the industry is a toxic aberration. We are spending trillions of dollars on technology that produces a few billion dollars worth of questionable benefit, all while consuming vast amounts of power, water, and technology. Questionable benefits…

I came across this post over on Engadget about Warren Spector retiring from the games industry. It caught me a bit in my emotions, and stirred up a few thoughts. It bears mentioning that Mr. Spector has said he was retiring in the past, but he seems pretty certain about it this time. There is a big cutout in his plans for "Consulting" which could bring him back for just about anything game related.

It is the fourth week of Blaugust, and the topic is on staying motivated. I normally don't post very frequently on my blog, so any increase over perhaps two or three times in a month is a significant goal for me. But I'm doing better than I ever had this Blaugust having achieved 31 posts several days ago and 38 in total as of August 21.

I came across something on Engadget about AI watermarking being implemented to comply with new EU regulations. The topic was a new one for me, and piqued my interest. A lot of people have rather strong opinions on where and how artificial intelligence is used, and watermarking is a step to provide some visibility into that use. What is AI watermarking?

There was a time for me when blogging about games was easy. I was gaming almost daily and my time spent in front of a console or PC games machine probably averaged two or three hours per day, seven days per week. Somewhere along the line, however, it became harder. I read an article by Aywren on their blog on this very topic and started considering a bit more why game blogging has become such a slog for myself.

There has been a bit of discussion in the Blaugust community about the importance and nature of RSS feeds for bloggers. Roger at Contains Moderate Peril had his say, and so did Fyr over at Fyr.io. There is a general consensus amongst the folks who commented in the Blaugust discord that RSS feeds are a general good if not an outright necessity for a blog.

There was a post over on the DivergentRays blog about mortifying things one has said or done. The example given of seeking out a kitty to pet at a social event is so in keeping with my own likely behaviour: even petting a stone cat is better than having to interact with people! I felt compelled to write a few words about my own personal embarrassing moment.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun had an interesting article on the activities of the consumer protection group Stop Killing Games (SKG). The article inspired some thoughts on my part about what SKG and similar groups are trying to do on the behalf of gamers. SKG's raison d'etre Stop Killing Games was, as I understand it, founded on the concept that games that players pay for should continue to be available for some reasonable span of time.

I was just beginning to explore the concept of health monitoring or self-quantifying back in 2013 when I wrote about my use of the Fitbit Flex. I was hoping that the device would, if nothing else, remind me how little I move. A dozen years later and I'm still using technology for the same purpose: not for "fitness" but as a reminder to get up and go at least a little bit or, in some cases, to lie down and sleep.

I read an excellent article on Wired the other day on the topic of organoids and thought I'd share a bit about it here. Even the basic concepts of this topic feel more like science fiction than reality, and that is right in my wheelhouse. I'll try not to directly repeat too much of what the author of the article said: for details refer to that larger article.

As of today I have achieved the old school / traditional goal of Blaugust: posting 31 times in the month. My current count across my three blogs, not counting this post, looks like this: Ubergeek Kelly's World: 25 posts Words of the AgingGamer: 5 posts Geek on a Harley: 1 post Getting to thirty one posts was definitely not one of my goals for Blaugust festival.

This is the third week of Blaugust, and the topic of discussion for the week is creator appreciation. Who, either individuals or corporations, do we look to and respect for certain qualities of the items they produce? Saying thanks to these entities is what this week is all about. I am focusing here on game developers who repeatedly produce games that keep drawing me back in.

One of the posts I came across during Blaugust was this one by David Somers aka Omz13 about Nownownow. It piqued my interest but less for the discussion of Nownownow and more for the concept that leads to: the /now page. I will endeavour here to explain what I understand about both. The /now page Pretty much every blog has some kind of /about page: in the case of my site, it is…

Another Blaugust post, another bit of inspiration comes my way... Juhis posted on their blog about Python's philosophy of "batteries are included". This is a design philosophy I can respect, and it takes me back to old school languages from my youth. The basic philosophy of Batteries Included Juhis' post gives the main idea very well, but in summary: Python is designed to include a sufficiently rich set of standard functionality that you can begin performing useful work without immediately needing to incorporate additional libraries.

An excellent post on Roger's blog, Contains Moderate Peril, delved into the subject of what topics individual bloggers may self-censor. The short answer for me is I don't block myself from covering any subject: this site is a reflection of what is on my mind after all, and not everything I think is suitable for every reader. But there is a longer and more subtle answer worth digging into a bit at least.

This post reflects my participation in the following Blaugust group project: NOTE: this post delves into some details of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series that could be considered spoilers. Some of these are fairly detailed as they discuss achievements from the first three books: you have been warned! My favourite achievement The Dungeon Crawler Carl (DCC) book series is great fun, and I am enjoying it immensely.

We have had no rain in the Castlegar region since early in July: almost a month of totally dry weather. This was made worse when a high pressure zone moved in to the area two weeks ago, trapping the forest fire smoke from half the province in our valleys. Rain has finally arrived, and I am relieved. Breathing When the smoke gets as bad as it has been I become largely home-bound.

My wife Irene has cancer. It is stage 4 breast cancer, so we have a lot of things to worry about despite the excellent care and good results she has seen thus far. Paramount amongst these worrisome things is the quarterly testing regimen she is on. What happens each quarter Irene receives treatment with monoclonal antibodies (MABs) every month. She tolerates these well, but it is always a question mark exactly how long these will continue being effective.

My wife Irene and I watched Star Trek: Enterprise recently- the whole series, beginning to end in order. I acquired access to the Paramount Plus streaming service to facilitate this and it worked pretty well on Apple TV. Well enough that when we finished and Irene asked "what comes next?" I felt confident in saying "The original series (TOS)". Strange to say the "next" thing after watching a show from 2003 is to watch a show from 1966, but that is the way the Star Trek series chronology works.

In my personal experience children can be horrible creatures. I moved a lot as a kid and this indirectly contributed to me being the 'odd man out' at nearly every school I went to from grade 2 through grade 9. I faced nearly daily torment and, because of my own emotional dysregulation, I suffered greatly. To a great extent I stopped going to school by arranging to be sick for weeks at a time.

I read a post by Belghast in my Blaugust feed regarding the steps he went through to create an image of a book representing  Krikket's invaluable primer. Belghast's words are an interesting read delving as they do into the pros and cons of AI versus manual image creation. It got me thinking... ...Thinking much simpler thoughts about my own basic process for creating header images for my blog posts.

This week in Blaugust has the theme of Introducing yourself. I haven't really done that this year, so here goes. Who is Kelly Adams? I'm a 62 year old man with greying red hair. I am married and have been so for 36 years as of July. My wife and I live in Castlegar, BC with our dog and four cats.

I came across this post from the 2003 Big Beaver homecoming event back in 2003 after chatting with my brothers Ron and Colin and sister Connie on the topic. I had vague recollections of the homecoming, but thankfully I had taken enough pictures to give me a few good memories. Big Beaver is a tiny hamlet in Southern Saskatchewan just north of the Canada - U.S.