↳

An ode to the humble space heater: you’re a marvel of simple engineering widely misunderstood as routinely dangerous when really, people are kind of dumb and plug you into dollar store extension cords. It’s not your fault you’re trying your best to fight the frost and only know how to do it the one way. Luckily there are folks on YouTube performing obsessively in-depth safety tests in their garages and I only had to watch a weird amount of them before finally picking a tower of power for my home office.

For the first time since the winter solstice I can feel all my finger tips and uncurl my hunched back, my brain thawing out every morning with very strong black tea. I have no compunction about running this thing at 70 degrees while the cats sleep on blankets with the cast iron radiators down to 66. It’s not a perfect implementation of heating people, not places, but it’s better than misery and it’s an important tool towards better wintering.

// 2026-01-15

Blog posts about how shit macOS 26 (ugh) Tahoe is are doing numbers over on Hacker News. They’re reinforcing my abstinence from upgrading and that I’m not crazy, Liquid Glass is bad! I knew it from the moment I saw it that it’s a fundamentally bad idea; transparency is a stupid design ethos when computers are stacks of opaque content. Anyways, here are the latest deep dives into how big this unprompted error of an update is:

• The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe – no.heger
• It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons @ tonsky.me
• Icons in Menus Everywhere — Send Help - Jim Nielsen’s Blog
• Last Week on My Mac: Tahoe’s elephant – The Eclectic Light Company

I’m annoyed on multiple levels: I hate bad design, and I associate Apple with good design; I hate the idea of macOS being harder to do “real computing” on, because it’s my primary OS for doing real computing; and I only made the switch to full-time mac usage two years ago, so I arrived just in time for everything to get worse. Frustrating!

The silver lining is macOS doesn’t force you to upgrade, so I’ll chill on Sequoia for as long as I can because it’s the most enjoyable OS I’ve used since Windows 7.

// 2026-01-12

It’s been over a month since I built a mostly-new, microATX gaming desktop, and since then the RAM-pocalypse has blown up, dominating enthusiast tech headlines and reaching into storage prices. The single stick of 16 GB DDR5 I bought has almost doubled in price from a rude $90 to a bonkers $190, and Micro Center claims that’s marked down from $399.99, as much as a brand-new iPad. Framework, the champion of DIY laptops, has adjusted their memory prices multiple times and plans to do so multiple times in the future. Suddenly it is materially even more difficult to own a computer that you own every part of.

↳

Feeling like a wizard right now. I downloaded M4’s The Hobbit Book Edit after the good time I had with Pentex Productions’ Mission Impossible: The Final Editing, but the 4.2 hour epic is delivered in barely compressed high quality, a hefty 24 GB.

That’s multiple times larger than I want to keep around on the NAS; I dusted off my FFmpeg notes and did some digging to learn how to use my RTX 2070 Super’s horsepower to get things going. NVENC support is widespread and Bazzite comes with it as part of the installed NVIDIA drivers, so I didn’t have to do any fussing to get it working.

I shot for a quality setting right down the middle using a constant quality (cq) setting of 22 out of 28 and in about ten minutes I had cut the behemoth in half with no damage done to the frame as far as my pixel-peeping was concerned.

Here’s my command, nothing special at all once I remembered I needed to bring over everything in the Matroska:

ffmpeg -i input.mkv -map 0 -c:v hevc_nvenc -cq 22 -c:a copy -c:s copy -c:d copy -c:t copy output.mkv

The jury’s out on the edit itself – can anything save The Hobbit from itself? – but I was happy with how easy it was to make a solid improvement in file size without any discernible drop in quality.

// 2026-01-05

↳

Jump scare: it’s technically the first week of 2026, not the last of 2025.

*

What can you say about “the holidays” that hasn’t already been said? Ours have always been chaotic – historically we’ve done 3-4 Christmas gatherings in a handful of days, to cover all the bases – and that continued this year despite our best efforts.

We said no to one side of the family and were supposed to have a slow Christmas morning then an easy drive to dinner, but I put the address in Apple Maps wrong and we ended up going an hour in the wrong direction, on total autopilot in the grey sameness of Massachusetts’ state highways. I was the butt of the joke for the evening and that’s fine; the real defeat was shattering the illusion of this being an faux pas-free jubilee season.

↳

Last night I watched Pentex Productions’ fan edit of the last Mission Impossible movie, “The Final Editing”, and it is a marked improvement over the original, and almost makes it a good movie.

Pentex humbly credits the original editor and highlights their impossible tasks, but his hard work makes it all the more obvious that MI:TFR became a monument to Tom Cruise above all. Cutting out those slavish, messianic notes throughout makes the whole movie more human, though not by enough! It’s still too dour and preposterous – the dialog goes in circles about what the “Entity” WANTS you to think – but a skosh over two hours is a hell of a lot better than three.

// 2025-12-27