BALANCE BUBBLE PLUS COMPLETED!

The first time I tried Wii Fit Plus' Balance Bubble Plus, it was so difficult.  The idea is the same as the original Balance Bubble.  You "travel" in a bubble and direct the movement by leaning left, right, forward, and backward.  Yes, it's very useful to be able to move in all four directions.  And it's a bubble so the slightest bump and your "vehicle" busts, game over.  First time I played Balance Bubble I also thought it was difficult.  Too difficult for mere mortals!  Luckily the "harzards" moved in the same pattern so after a while I knew what to do to complete the game and completed it I did.  The Plus version introduced a rotating arm, a big one, shortly after you make a few turns.  This is where it's important to be able to go backward a step or two.  You don't want to move faster than the arm.  Every now and then I can even squeeze right in front of the arm and not have to wait for a gap to open up.  Then comes the dark tunnel, with which I had to constantly stop to observe the surrounding because your light can only see so far.  Move forward too fast and you can bump into the floats or whatever that's floating around you.  Out of the tunnel there are two small rotating arms going in opposite direction.  You need to time your movements and squeeze into the gaps.  Last hazards are the bees!  I hate them!  There are five or six of them, just cutting across the screen as you try to reach your final destination.  In a classic case of witnesses with unreliable memory, after I completed the game I watched some YouTube videos and now I cannot recall if I paused on the first two bees then zoomed past the remaining bugs, or if that's what I saw in the videos.  Whatever, I did finish the game, not easily, far from the ease the YouTube people showed.  For example, it looks like when they arrived at the dark tunnel they just went straight through without pausing like me.  Oh well, I should be glad that I at least finished it.

SWIPERS GONNA SWIPE

 I love the iPhone and smartphone technology but in some aspects my old-school way of thinking can only take me so far.  In particular I am talking about swiping with the finger(s) as a way to interact with smartphones etc.  Swiping with one finger, say as a way to look through a list, is kinda easy.  Pinching and un-pinching to zoom in and out isn't too difficult to learn.  Some maps would tell you to use two fingers to move around.  The message would be there so you can read it and act accordingly.  That's the max for me.  I understand there's a whole slew of things you can do with three fingers or maybe even four fingers.  That's too much for me.

I looked forward to using iOS 14 just for the ability to add captions to photos.  I hate it when I cannot find a particular picture I want.  Having the appropriate caption associated to each photo would be useful, but only in the recently released iOS 14 can that be done natively.  The thing is I couldn't find the place where I would enter the caption.  I know there's an Edit button, after you selected that you can do some simple manipulation of the photo, like rotating, cropping, or messing around with its color, brightness, etc.  So that's where I went to find some mythical button that says Add Caption.  Except it's not there!  I tried Googling for it but because of my choice of words all I got back was lists of features of iOS 14.  Why, some of those lists even mentioned the ability to add caption, just that they are so busy talking about the new features there's no time to show me how to actually do it.

I decided to ask a friend who upgraded a few days earlier.  Maybe my iPhone 7 is too old to support the feature.  Not so.  The feature is there, I just had to get the photo in full-screen mode then swipe up from there.  Doh!  There it is, a blank space to take Caption!  Of course, afterward I searched for How to add Caption in iOS 14 or something similar and there are many useful hits, albeit useless now.  Now that I know how to add caption, it vaguely dawned on me that I came to that screen before, where there are other info about the photo, like Location.  I probably arrived there by mistake, otherwise I would know how to get there.  Maybe it's just me, but that's not intuitive at all.  Oh well, years from now when old farts like me die off the young people (young now anyway) will all agree what a great interface it is, so natural to swipe up to see more info about whatever they are looking at.

CLAPTRAP BY TOM RICHMOND AND DESMOND DEVLIN

I love MAD magazine.  Being a bit artistic myself, I love to see the caricatures in the magazines.  I don't know why I didn't buy it more regularly.  For a while, I decided to buy it every two months, that's their publishing schedule, six issues a year instead of the usual twelve.  It gave me an excuse to wander into Barnes and Noble.  I even stated buying the compilation books, which technically are just reprints of the magazine, except for the foreword and other writings in the beginning.  But I missed so many years/issues, the regurgitated materials in the books were new to me.  I even decided to stick with MAD after the move from the East Coast to the West Coast.  New staff, new this new that, many people hated the new stuff, but I didn't mind.  But my measly support wasn't enough.  Now MAD supposedly won't even publish much new materials any more, except perhaps the cover and a few pages inside.  Enter former MAD cartoonist Tom Richmond and former MAD writer Desmond Devlin!  Together, they are putting out a new book with at least ten parodied movies, brand new, never published elsewhere.  There are a few Indiegogo tiers to consider but simply put for $25 you can a book featuring materials normally seen in a MAD magazine as if the mag is still churning out new, monthly content.  They already plan to do Volume 2, if this pattern continues it's almost like having a monthly MAD magazine with new materials.  Who knows, they may even release something every two months!!!

First, Tom and Desmond needs your help.  Support the IndieGoGo project, if you share my love for MAD magazine.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/claptrap-movie-spoofs-in-a-classic-humorous-vein?fbclid=IwAR1ToPkFdB-xN9uPeor3baZkH4Y-pX5FQQBRB9LcTsYmO0Stj95O71IuJ2k#/

NO SLEEPLESS IN MAC LAND

I finally have a modern computer monitor that can directly connect to my not-so-modern, but not that old, Mac laptop.  Typically with laptops using external monitor, I prefer to keep the lid closed.  I have this fear that a laptop is very vulnerable when it's wide open.  A push of the screen in the wrong direction can snap something and it won't function the same way any more.  When not in use, I usually keep the lid either closed all the way or at least leaning toward the closed position.  Alas, the way Mac OS X works, as soon as you closed the lid, the computer goes to sleep.  There's no built-in function like Windows where you can tell the operating system to Do Nothing.  There are utilities to disable sleeping but they don't work with laptop lids closing.  What a bummer!  Ya know, back in the day, the Mac was a superior graphical interface but in some areas Windows now has overtaken it.  Like this Sleeping issue, for instance.  My so-called workaround is to keep the Mirroring function, so that the laptop screen and the external monitor show the same thing, then close the laptop lid but jam it with my Bluetooth keyboard.  The laptop lid is in a slanted position so I don't gain any additional real estate space on my physical desktop, but at least I can see the big screen with the laptop screen sorta out of the way.

WII FIT - BALANCE BUBBLE GAME

 Part of my daily exercise regiment includes, usually, 30 minutes with Wii Fit Plus.  For those who don't know, the Nintendo Wii game console interface is more physically-involved than other systems.  It's a decent way to get some exercise while playing games.  They even go as far as having exercise programs such as Wii Fit and its sequel, with which you do actual yoga and strength training exercises.  The interaction is achieved with the help of the Wii Board, which the player would stand on.  You can weighed everyday to track your pounds.  You can also find out how balanced you are, even though your left and right sides are not identical, you do want to try to have a sense of balance of the two sides.

Sometimes the yoga and exercises get too boring.  You can unwind a bit by playing Balance Games and such.  They are basically video games but you control by shifting your body to move around.  Just like video games, with some games you can only advance so far and it seems there's no way to complete the game.  With some computer video games,  there are cheat modes that you might find to finally complete the game.  Not a good idea to always cheat, but it's just a game and if you already tried hard enough you just want to get over it.

One game I finally complete is Balance Bubble, found in the original Balance Games of Wii Fit.  Like many things in life, the first few times I didn't get very far.  I kept trying and got better, eventually completed the Basic Level.  In Advanced Level, there are bumble bees buzzing around and would bust your fragile bubble that you ride in when you cross their path.  Again, for a while I couldn't get past these pesky insects.  Luckily, once you know that the bees fly in certain pattern and that you can go backward or stay in place, then it's not too bad.  Also, in places where the wave emanates from the shore, the current isn't that strong so you don't need to overreact and end up crashing into the shore.

I am now trying to complete Balance Bubble Plus.  The route is totally different, there are rotating arms, and there's a dark tunnel that you can only see so much ahead.  You just have to move slowly and carefully avoid bumping into the round objects floating about.  Once you are out of the tunnel, there are two rotating arms, with smaller radius so that you have less room to maneuver, one set of arms after another.  And they rotate in different directions, too!  The furthest I got was past the first set of arms.  Even if I somehow get past the second set, time may be running out, too, so I'll have to try to lose little time in the easier, beginning section.  These games are supposedly to be relaxing but they are getting my blood pressure up!

LET THE MUSIC PLAY... FOR THE DISHWASHER

 I don't cook so the deal at home is I do the dish-washing etc.  We don't have a dishwashing machine so it's a tedious task that I was happy to delegate to my son when he was home from college.  Now that he's back at the dorm, it's my responsibility again.  I try to make it more tolerable by having something to listen.  I am a big fan of podcasts so that was my first choice.  However, dishwashing can get noisy and as sharp as my hearing is the clanging sometimes muffle the sounds from the podcast off my iPhone.  I would miss the punch line of a joke on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me or Ask Me Another, so that's no fun.  Next I tried my music library, but after a while it gets boring, hearing the same old songs day in day out, even though I have a lot of songs randomly played.  So I tried apps like iHeartRadio.  Strange thing is the app would just stop at some point after playing for like ten minutes.  First-world problem!

Now I am happy with YouTube playlists.  Not just any list, but 70s and 80s rock music, maybe even 60s and I can even stretch to pop music.  Yes, there are advertisements and some even demand you interact with them before the next song plays, so it's not a perfect solution.  What I like is now I finally learn the names of some of the tunes I hear regularly.  Not that the makers of those playlist always list the song names, but some kind souls usually add the names, in proper order, as a comment.  Thank you!  Two songs I now know the names for are The Breakup Song by The Greg Kihn Band and Paint It Black by The Rolling Stone.

NOT THE BRIGHTEST BULB IN THE ROOM?

Continued to slog through study session for A+ certificate, so boring since I know most of the stuff, I just don't have the piece of paper to prove it. Let me try to make some puns so I can remember more useless facts and acronyms...

Why are laptops screens never brighter than desktop computers' screens? Because for their memory laptops use Small Outline Dual Inline Memory Modules whereas desktops' memory modules are just Dual Inline Memory Modules. SO DIMM vs. just DIMM!

I did learn something fun, not sure how useful it is though.  Supposedly while some designation for memory speed are usually rounded down for better appearance, such as 66

2/3 becoming just 66, exception was made DDR2-666, as it gets artificially inflated to 667 to avoid looking like the Devil's Number.  Talk about religion of the Western World influencing everyone else.  If the people who control technology believe in Buddhism or Islam then 666 doesn't mean anything.  On the other hand, if the Chinese control these designation, everything will end in 8, as the sound for the number 8 is the same for expansion, more, increase, which the Chinese automatically pair to wealth, health, the usual good stuff.