Luxury Properties
Want to buy an old Italian villa? Perhaps a English countryside manor? Got a few million quid to make your dreams come true? You can spend all too much time browsing the Coldwell luxury listings.
Teamlabs
I was blown away when I went to Teamlabs Borderless in Tokyo. I think I spent the better part of 4 hours in there.
But they do lots of other work as well. Check out their ever-expanding installations.
You can also learn more about their process
Best Marshalling/Reshipping Companies for Japan
I have been to Japan a few times and really love visiting. One of the things I enjoy most is the amazing and well crafted products. While Amazon and other companies are increasingly selling Japanese products domestically, they often cost a fortune or still have a lot of things you simply can’t get in the US. Having a friend in Japan who can mail you your favorite items is one way, but not if you do a fair amount of this.
Enter marshalling and reshipping companies. They are companies that operate in Japan, provide you with a Japanese mailing address, and then re-ship anything sent to that address to you overseas. All with increasingly minimal handling fees. I used a few of these services a few years back, but they have become much more efficient and recommend.
Tenso
Tenso is a complete but more manual solution. It provides you a bonafide local Japanese address that you can give to Japanese individuals or companies to ship your products to. When your package arrives at their shipping center, they re-ship it to your domestic address.
There are some hurdles. You must provide documented proof of your identity and it takes a few business days to get that registration done. However, you can quite literally give the address to anyone in Japan, have them mail things to you there, and receive them re-shipped to you. This is also one of the cheapest solutions, only adding a few dollars of handling.
Buyee
Buyee is a more user friendly version that only handles the big online retailers in Japan. If you want to buy things on Yahoo! Japan auctions, Amazon.jp, Mercari, Rakuten, Aomori, and a few others, then this might be your best choice. They have a simple web plugin that you add items to your cart. They order the items from the retailer for you – filling in their re-shipping address and doing a lot of the legwork.
How much does this all cost? You pay the retail price, plus a $5-7 handling and re-shipping fee. Honestly, that’s incredible considering that’s the entire price – including the shipping to the US.
Denuvo DRM and Intel hybrid core architectures
12th Generation processors are built on a new hybrid core architecture of big and small cores working together. However, it turns out that some DRM software has issues with this hybrid
“Certain third-party gaming Digital Rights Management (DRM) software may incorrectly recognize 12th Generation Intel® Core™ Processors efficient-cores (E-cores) as another system. This prevents games implementing that DRM software from running successfully. Games may crash during launch or gameplay, or unexpectedly shut down.”
However, there is already a workaround for this issue with Denuvo DRM. Give it a try if you find you have one of the affected games:
- Power-up system and enter system BIOS setup.
- Enable switch Legacy Game Compatibility Mode to ON (one-time only) in BIOS.
- Save BIOS setup changes and exit.
- Boot to OS.
- Toggle Keyboard Scroll Lock key ON.
- Launch affected game title.
- Toggle Keyboard Scroll Lock key OFF after ending game title.
ASUS Hyper M2 x16 NVMe Quad RAID card
My current computer is about 6 years old so I’m currently setting up for a 12th Gen Intel system build. While looking at all the new motherboards, I found that ASUS has a really interesting RAID card for up to 4 NVMe drives. I found this an intriguing bit of hardware, and the fact it seems to get near linear doubling with each drive you add was even more impressive.
BuildOrBuy shows the somewhat confusing steps of how to set this beast up.
2021 Best Employers
Forbes releases it’s 2021 best employers list. We still see lots of tech at the top, but definitely some change-ups in the order.
Crosstrek maintenance schedule
Oil change places and shady mechanics are all over in the industry. Oil change places especially LOVE to scare and upsell people on services they do not need. All one has to do is look in their manual to find out they’re being peddled services that are often unnecessary. The NTSB and various manufacturers even issued warnings that these services often damage your vehicle.
Honestly, this info is all over in the manual, but it was great to find this info in one place.
Metpoh!
Metron (МЕТРОН) is a full motion video adventure game made in 2004 by a Russian ‘garage game developer’ Korban Laser Games.
Set in Korenevo, Kursk Oblast, Russia. Polina, the protagonist, finds herself investigating a series of murders committed by the evil Metron and trying to avoid becoming a victim herself.
The game was made extremely cheaply. The actors all basically teenagers, obvious ketchup as fake blood, and some pretty funny and inventive ‘special effects’. The story itself…well…it sure reads like teenage sci-fi fan fiction. It was never exported overseas or translated to any other language – a relatively common situation for lower-tier Russian game developers before the GFC and Steam. Nevertheless, it has become a popular title for Russian “Let’s players” due to how infamously corny it is, and videos of it can be easily found on YouTube.
Interstate Bridge Survey
Portland’s infrastructure is woefully behind. Despite 10 years and dozens of millions of dollars, there is still no I-5 bridge replacement plan.
Take an opportunity to answer their survey:
https://www.interstatebridge.org/november
Bad Games are the Best Games
While the retro gaming crazy has been playing itself out, there’s still a section of old games that I find is almost always more fun. Even during Games Done Quick, the bad games block seems to be one of the most popular sections.
But what if you had a WHOLE game-a-thon that’s just bad games?
Big Bad Game-a-Thon
The Big Bad Game-a-Thon comes around every year and gives some great performances. Give some of their videos a watch:
https://www.youtube.com/c/BigBadGameathon/videos
Here’s a list of the games played in the 2021 session to whet your appetite.
https://horaro.org/bbg2021/schedule?key=2021
Don’t Make Us Bored
Another great series of people playing bad games is the ‘Don’t Make Us Bored’ variety show run by Brossentia. Players come onto his show and play through some truly bad games. It’s a whole lot of fun.