All posts by Tim

Towson gathering – 2019

the mindlab

Mike and Krissy had been planning a trip to Maryland for some time, and my mom, Al, and I all decided to coordinate so we could see each other. Brian and Buff were gracious enough to host Al and myself for a few days. We also got a chance to see aunts and uncles. Food was great:

  • Rise Biscuits and Chicken
  • Hot Pot
  • Salad for a night off
  • Cookout
  • A big crab cake

We also played a variety of games:

  • Micro Mages
  • Conan (briefly)
  • Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime
  • Devil’s Level

All in all, a good trip. We should do this more often.

link to flickr album

Click on the picture to see the flickr album.

July 4th, 2019

the mindlab

July 4th was a bit abbreviated this year, and Mike and Krissy couldn’t make it. Regardless, it was good to see everyone. Here are a few of the pictures I took. Sorry Buff, I couldn’t resist the one picture. So it goes.

Click on the picture to go to the flickr album.

PICO-8

the mindlab

I recently bought a copy of PICO-8. It is a virtual game console that you can play on your computer, a raspberry pi, or even in your browser. It’s only $15. All of the games for it are free and written by regular people. For the most part, they are pretty simple and short. I’ve enjoyed the ones I played. Little Dragon Adventure was short and fun. All carts are downloadable from the PICO-8 interface. The cart format is cleverly some type of PNG picture, and most (if not all) can be played in a browser window as well1, so you can try it out if you want without spending any money.

I also picked up an 8BitDo SN30 pro controller. It’s a bluetooh/USB controller designed to look like an old Super NES controller, but with dual analog sticks and some extra buttons, more or less like more modern game controllers. It works with a bunch of different systems, including the Nintendo Switch. They have cheaper models too if you are looking for something less expensive. I recommend it if you want a controller.

This is the world’s lamest review, but if you are looking for a little bit of entertainment without spending too much money, I recommend PICO-8. The controller is a nice add on too if you have use for such a thing.

Update

I just found Delunky for PICO-8. Brian, I think you should give this a spin.

  1. With a gamepad too! ↩

Shaving: Pt. 3

the mindlab

Some time ago, I wrote about how I shave with a 2 blade razor and how unfortunately Gillette has basically stopped selling the line I use in the US. I was buying the blades off of Amazon. I finally gave up.

Now I just buy the disposable version from Target or Amazon. I don’t like using disposable razors, but they are about 95% as good as the replaceable blade version and about 50% of the cost. So it goes.

Candy

the mindlab

When we went to Europe when I was kid1, we spent a few days in Yugoslavia. At the time, the currency wasn’t worth much and we exchanged too many dollars for dinars. The dinar was worthless enough that the banks would not let us exchange the excess back to dollars, so we spent money on random things. I have a memory of being in a store that was pretty picked over but it did have 1 pound2 bricks of PEZ. We bought one and ever since, I have kept an eye out for PEZ in bulk, but have never seen it.

This weekend, I went to the b.a. Sweetie Candy Company since we were nearby. People have mentioned it from time to time as a big candy store. I had a mental image of it, a lot of candy, etc. but it actually exceeded my expectations. It was enormous. Needless to say, not only did I find PEZ available without the dispensers, but I found legit bulk PEZ:

bulk PEZ

The also had some other candy from my childhood that I was kind of surprised still existed, like El Bubble and of course, the shitty candy cigarettes we used to get at the B&J. They had a lot of those.

These were bad when I was a kid.
World’s King Size Candy

I was surprised at a few things:

  • They had no chocolate NECCO wafers. That might have to do with the issues NECCO is having and they might be sold out. They did have Tropical and Sour, which I never knew existed.
  • There were only three varieties of Nerds. Mind you, this place had at least 10 flavors of Now & Laters. I guess the varieties of Nerds have been significantly reduced over the years.
  • I only saw Chick-O-Stick in the nugget size.

On a side note, I have to keep an eye on the NECCO company status. If things go south in the next week or two, I might go buy a few boxes of NECCO wafers.

  1. I don’t actually know what year we went. I think it was 1989 or 1990. ↩

  2. Not sure if it was a pound, a kilogram, or some other quantity. It was a lot of PEZ. ↩

poop bags

the mindlab

I was going to work on a more serious post this weekend, but instead I will write about consumption and poop bags.

Amazon is currently running an offer to get an Amazon Dash button for $1.1 I know Tom likes them, but I find them kind of strange. Still, for a buck, maybe there was something there that I can use. Well, there wasn’t. But that was not the point of this post.

Many of us have pets. Those pets require lots of repetitive purchases: food, medicine, treats, poop bags, etc. Seems like it might be a good fit for a Dash button. That is not what I am here to criticize. No, I am here to criticize one of the selections that you can choose. Poop bags specifically. Look at the image above. Look at the image below. That is one of the possible combinations.

Why would you need 900 damned poop bags? And why would you need the ability to order them with a push button? I would think if you are the kind of person who orders poop bags 900 at a time, you probably obsessively plan far ahead. Because most people don’t go through poop bags at a rapid rate. It’s not like they take up a lot of space or have a shelf life. So why would someone need to hit a button when they realized they went through 895 of their poop bag stash, and that they need 900 more TOMORROW.

For reference, we bought 300 (I think?) poop bags when we got Neutron for her litter box. I think Mike used more of them than I have. Neutron poop goes in Target bags.

Also, I like the branded version of the button more.

  1. For those who don’t know, Amazon Dash buttons are little wifi devices that have a button on them. You link them to a specific product, and when you hit the button, it orders the product. The buttons are branded and only linkable to certain items. For example, the Gatorade button might let you select between several different flavors and sizes of Gatorade. ↩

Shaving

the mindlab

Mike wanted me to write some stuff about shaving. He needs to follow up with his side of the story.

I started this post over a year ago. I only wrote the previous paragraph before I got side-tracked.

Learning to shave

Dad had a beard. I think at some point he gave Mike and I some cursory advice on how to shave, and that was it. I think it consisted of:

  1. Make sure your skin is wet. Shave after showering.
  2. Shave with the grain before you go against the grain.

I can attest that the first point is valid. The second… it took me several years to learn that if I shave against the grain, at any point in the process, I’m asking for trouble. So I stopped. I know that by college, I had stopped that step completely.

So that was it. Everything else was trial and error. Anyone who has ever done lab experiments knows that when your output variable (your feedback) is delayed by a couple of days from your inputs, it takes a while to figure things out. Couple this with the fact that you have to keep repeating the input actions every day or so, before you get the feedback, and it becomes a very long and drawn out process. Does my face hurt because of how I shaved this morning, or from 3 days ago?

Lastly, I didn’t necessarily realize that there was something I could do about this. I figured for a long time, “This is what it is.” It wasn’t all that bad and I didn’t know any better.

So it basically took about 15-20 years of shaving before I wised up. And I eventually did. A close shave is the worst type for me. Unfortunately, this is the exact opposite of what the shaving industry markets. I see Mike essentially stopped shaving; that’s how he deals with it.

I blame the Mach3.

The Mach3

The Gillette Mach3 was released in 1998 according to Wikipedia. To put that in perspective, I turned 19 in 1998. I don’t remember when I started shaving (13? 14?), but I didn’t shave that long before the Mach3 came out, and I certainly didn’t have heavy facial hair before then either.

Now, for those of you who aren’t intimately familiar with my facial hair, I don’t have a lot of it. I shave every other day (something it took me a few years to realize). I most certainly don’t need 3 (or 4 or 5) blades to knock back my 5 o’clock shadow. I used this razor, or variants thereof, for the better part of 15 years. It sucks for me. Too close of a shave which led to irritation. Also, the heads on these things are huge, which makes it hard to shave certain areas, like under your nose.

Sensor Excel

For some reason, back in 2007, I bought a Sensor Excel and some blades. I think it was because I was a poor graduate student, and the thought of spending a week’s worth of food money on razors got on my nerves a little. The Sensor is a 2 blade razor. Probably all I needed. I used it once or twice and then forgot about it for some reason.

I started using it again about 2 years ago. Ingrown hairs and razor bumps are for the most part a thing of the past. I still only shave every other day, and only with the grain. The replacement blades are getting hard to find, so I order them off of Amazon.

Oddly enough, the regular Sensor blades aren’t quite as good as the Excel blades, but they do in a pinch. I just have to shave at a slightly different angle.

Wiki says the Sensor and Sensor Excel were released in 1990 and 1993 respectively and are discontinued. I think the blades I buy are imported from other parts of the world.

The future

At some point, I’m not going to be able to get these razors any more. I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do. I’m not going back to 3, 4, or 5 bladed razors.

I’m getting to that point in my life where I don’t want to dick around with this shit, so whatever the decision ends up being, hopefully I won’t have to make another after that.

Machine learning and age

the mindlab

I’ve been using Mathematica more for work, and finally getting better at it. It’s only been 20 years…

Anyway, Mathematica has some machine learning capabilities built in, so I started playing around with them. Maybe something would be useful for work? (Probably not.) Anyway, a few of the tools have pre-trained datasets to play with, so you can just plug stuff into them.

One is the “NameAge” dataset, which predicts the most likely age for a given name. Naturally, I put some names in. I then plotted up the difference between the predicted age and the person’s actual age. In my chart, negative numbers represent how much younger the person is predicted to be compared to their actual age, and positive numbers are older.

Buff does the worst, but with her given name, she is predicted to be much younger. Up next is Joe, Mike, Pete, Tom, and myself; according to this machine learning dataset, we should be getting ready for retirement, clocking in at more than 15 years older than our actual age.