My daughter finds emoji hilarious. She’s 6 and will scroll through an emoji picker for ages. My wife and I started by letting her use WhatsApp’s emoji picker to send us messages, but that quickly polluted our chat history with emoji spam. We tried a few dedicated emoji-only apps like Emojichat, but there was this...

This year I moved the blog from GitHub Pages’ built-in Jekyll to a GitHub Actions workflow, then added .txt URL support for posts. Inspired by Terence Eden’s blog post about text-only websites. Why move to GitHub Actions? GitHub Pages runs Jekyll in safe: true mode, which disables custom plugins. It limited me to...

I’ve spent countless hours playing Balatro, and I’ve always wanted to create my own game with similar mechanics. When TrinketOS announced a game jam, it was the perfect excuse to make it happen. TrinketOS is an Android launcher with built-in lore and a meta-game: At its core, TrinketOS is a modular interface altar:...

After reviewing the Mangmi Air X, I got curious about how the firmware updates worked. Mangmi have been pushing updates fairly regularly, which is great to see on a budget device. Officially they release full update packages via Google Drive links, but those have a tendency to disappear over time. I wanted to access...

Back in 2015 when I reviewed devices like the GPD XD and similar Android handhelds, the whole ecosystem felt half-baked. Emulation wasn’t particularly good yet, the devices came from obscure Chinese manufacturers, the ROMs were loaded with questionable apps, and the SOCs couldn’t handle much. A decade later and the...

The built-in audio output menu in macOS has always felt a bit limited. The icons aren’t very helpful, the device names can’t be customised, and if you’ve got a few different outputs, it becomes tricky to quickly tell what’s what. I wanted a faster and clearer way to switch devices, ideally without opening System...