Katie gave me my anniversary gift today. It's an Amazon Fire HD 8+ (2020 model year) tablet. 

Yup. Another late night deployment. 

After far too many years languishing with a spotty internet connection as provided by AT&T Uverse, we finally made the jump yesterday to MetroNet.

This video was all Nathan’s idea. He wanted to do a full LEGO set build in time lapse. Of course it had to be the set I got for Father’s Day meaning that my set build got delayed to whenever was convenient for the video.

I’ve had a hit or miss relationship with home automation technology. I loved and then hated our WiFi outlets, I love our Nest camera/doorbell, I love our Nest thermostat, I worship our Roomba vacuum, I could care less about our Echo voice assistants.

First off, yes, I was able to successfully charge my iPod Shuffle. Based on the first 10 or so tracks, I was really digging on Beck when I last synced it up.

While digging around for a backup lightning charging cable to use in the kitchen, I found something unexpected. 

Apparently, on this day eight years ago, I was really into doing Halftone cartoons featuring a LEGO Gollum. Can’t imagine why. Especially since I’ve barely even looked at it since that time. Weird. 

For his birthday last year, a friend gave Nathan a toy rocket. It’s not like the old dry fuel rockets I played with as a kid. More like a rocket jet with a tail propeller attached to a USB-charged motor.

I’m not a car guy. I never have been. I don’t go ga-ga for most sports cars. I don’t drool when a car gets a redesign. I just want something reliable, comfortable, and inexpensive. 

I swear, once I dumped that nasty old video making goal I had the last two years, I actually started enjoyed making videos. This is the third video that I’ve edited and shared with y’all in a mere four months. 

A week or so ago, I saw some headline on the web touting how you can use old tech and gadgets to make for a better work-from-home experience. Despite suspecting it was clickbait, I clicked on it. I couldn’t help myself. 

The other day, I opened the mailbox to find a catalog from our local toy store, Learning Express Toys. I was pretty excited to see it as, if it's not a catalog in our mailbox, it's a bill, spam, or other junk. So, yeah, I was happy to have something fun like that. I also knew Nathan would be excited to see this catalog. 

Nathan brought this to me the other day. I had no idea he had it. He wanted me to have it back because he knew it was mine when I was a kid. 

Over Thanksgiving break, Katie and I bought a Chamberlain MyQ Garage hub kit. We would’ve gotten either a hub or an opener with one built in when we bought a new garage door opener a couple years back but it was still a little cost prohibitive at about $100.

One of my favorite things about my iPhone XR is wireless charging. Oh. My. God. I love it!

Back when I worked at Aurora University, my buddy Eric (the Pitchfork Music Festival-attending buddy) and I used to take this blue goo that I had for strengthening your hands and forearms and put it on top of toys and other random items and let it "melt" over them for a day or two and admire the results. I swore we used to take pictures of them, but I cannot find those photos anywhere and they pre-dated the iPhone so they're certainly not in the cloud anywhere. So I'm wondering if they actually happened or not.

A friend was tweaking settings on his home VPN when he noticed the permissions section and some new icons that were being used by the developer. They're, um, fun and unique to be sure. Check out this sampling...

On Sunday, Nathan and I went to our local park to have some 1:1 Nerf gun wars. While we were there, a guy and his son came by with a medium sized styrofoam box containing this...

As you all know, I do love my old GoPro Hero 2 action cam. It’s so much fun to use. 

It's amazing how dependent I've become on my iPhone. It does everything for me from receiving calls and text messages to playing any and all games to taking and sharing photos to verifying accounts and storing passwords to entertaining me via Spotify or podcasts or audiobooks. It does it all. And, no, I still don't have it back.

It’s kinda amazing how far toys have come since I was a kid. 

I hate when technology is on the verge of death and I play the will-it/won’t-it game trying to see if I can make it last just long enough to get through another month or two until an expected sale or whatnot. 

One of the things I missed most about not having a Fitbit was receiving notifications from my iPhone right on my wrist.

A couple years ago, Nathan happened across a couple of my old G.I. Joe 3.75" action figures. He doesn't have any other G.I. Joe stuff, but he loves these two figures. One of them is the vintage Baroness from 1984...

I feel like I’m writing announcements like this every year, but, yet again, another Fitbit has bitten the dust. 

It’s kinda cool the stuff you find when you clean out something like, say, the trunk of your car.

I guess since the company working on installing new roofs on our home have done this...

Is it cruel if I tap into the microphone on my Nest doorbell and start doing satanic chants right now?

As it turns out, the roof replacement work on our unit will begin at the end of this month necessitating us jumping from DirecTV very soon. But there is good news. We’ve been doing our research and have a good idea what steps we’ll be taking... just a whole heckuva lot sooner than we anticipated. 

We re-arranged our entertainment cabinet at home and, afterward, while sitting in the couch, the ever familiar dock connector end was shining out at me like a beacon. 

It’s kinda funny. For the last two decades, I’ve grown accustomed to always fast forwarding through commercials on shows that we watch. First because we recorded them on VHS; then because of the beauty of DVRs. 

A while back, I mentioned an issue with a missing piece from our San Francisco puzzle. When I was at a point where I figured there was no hope of finding it, I started researching options for getting the piece replaced.

We now have two Roku SEs hooked up in our house and tied into Hulu, Netflix, MoviesAnywhere, Disney Now, And a couple other services that we’re trying out and you wanna know what we have not used (much) in weeks? 

I’m starting to get severely creeped out by our Amazon Echo devices.