Martin Pease

Well played, good sir, well played.

My wife screamed a loud, sharp, “STOP!” I jumped immediately on the brakes, just as a phantom Chevy Tahoe emerged from nowhere and crossed our path from right to left. The driver gave me a sidelong look with a clear indication of his opinion of me. Of course, the Tahoe had been there the entire time, yet it was all but invisible to me. Computer aided design, wind tunnel and virtual aerodynamics modeling, and NTHSA safety ratings have caused what I believe to be a minor crisis in automotive design. This rigorous process of fuel economy and safety rating maximalization dictates a generic blob, which the car companies then “style”. In the search to make their blob stand out from everyone else’s blobs, the incidental surface decoration of many cars is becoming increasingly bizarre, e.g. everything Toyota is producing currently. But this relentless march to the regulator’s tune has a secondary, and worse, effect. More and more cars are just too damn hard to see out of. Let us list a...

A l33t haxxor, yesterday This post is primarily for myself, as I always forget the exact order that is required when I want to root and install a new ROM on an Android phone. My recent experience flashing my old HTC made me have to relearn all this stuff. The most common reason anyone flashes their phone is because the OEM (Samsung, Nokia, HTC, etc) has not released the latest version of Android, and has no plan to. So your older phone is stuck using Android 6.0 or whatever, and you'd like the new stuff. First things first, you need to have a working phone. If there are hardware problems, flashing a new ROM won't fix them. Also, make sure your phone is unlocked, i.e. not locked to a single carrier. Many newer phones come unlocked, and so long as your phone is paid off, you can request your carrier to unlock it for you. Flashing your ROM will void your warranty, so if you brick your device it's all on you! Also, you should make sure you know exactly which model pho...

Against all odds, this 2014 HTC One M8 lives again. It only took 3 years. The HTC One M8 arrived in April, 2014, sporting a 5" 1080p SupreLCD display, a Snapdragon 801 quad-core processor, Adreno 330 GPU and 2GB of RAM. The model you see here has 32GB of storage, although 16GB was also available. It belonged to my wife, and she says it was the phone she loved most of all. I believe I bought this phone as a gift for her sometime in June, replacing an earlier HTC One from 2013. The M8 was to be the start of HTC's return to prominence after several years of decline; unfortunately, the inherent goodness of this phone wasn't enough. In 2015, my wife was carrying this phone in her purse, and a bottle of milk that was next to it leaked, flooding her bag and completely soaking the phone. It was dead. Or, as we shall see, only mostly dead. Despite our efforts to clean it out and dry it off, the phone remained comatose, and was put into a drawer. An iPhone 5 replaced it....

I am finally coming back to this blog after years away. I wrote up this post 3 years ago(!), and it was sitting in my drafts folder. I decided to publish this, just because some of the pictures are cute.  I'm just come off a 12 day stint taking care of my 3 youngest children while my wife and eldest went back home to visit her family, way way out across the wide world. It was my idea that she go in the first place, taking maybe just one or two children with her, to spend time with her brother's first baby, newly born, as well as her parents and grandparents. The thought of trying to take all four children on what is realistically a 26 hour trip each direction did not fill me with happiness. So, just take the oldest boy, who is not quite entering his teenage years, when he is old enough to appreciate the strange and wonderful sights of a foreign country but not yet sullen and moody. In the end, they had a good trip with many wonderful moments. My part was to stay at home w...