HAL's tech help

This image shows two separate recordings of two separate magpie calls. I'm fascinated by how accurately they repeat on a spectrogram. I wonder what she's saying.
Artificial Intelligence is making massive steps towards the first dialogues between birds and humans.

Hal can Halp you set up your own bird call tracker at home using open source software

Last night I was helping a client who found benefit from an accessibility function in iOS that I didn’t even know existed!

Double pressing the side button for Apple Pay was impossible to do without the help of a support worker to be able to pay for things.
I incorrectly stated that I don’t think it’s something we could change, but I Googled it just to be sure and I’m so glad that I did because it must have been a new feature added!

It wasn’t the original reason for the visit, just an added extra but it felt so good to be able to give a friend some very well deserved independence back.

So much of IT isn’t necessarily about knowing all the answers but knowing where and how to find them and I love it when I can show my clients how to find the answers on their own

Disconnect your smart TV from the internet - use Apple TV instead

Your Smart TV Takes 7,200 Screenshots Every Hour (Texas AG Lawsuit) Your smart TV is taking screenshots of everything on your screen 7,200 times every hour and sending that data to advertisers. Samsung, LG, Sony, Hisense, and...

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This might be a cliche thing to say but I grew up through the golden era of gaming.

My first console was a hand-me-down Sega Master System when The Sega MegaDrive (Genesis) was the latest and greatest.
I played Alex the Kid which was built into the console and I had Sonic 2 which to this day is still my favourite game of the era.

I witnessed Mario go from a few pixels to the world of 3D. I played Grand Theft Auto when it was just called Grand Theft Auto and lived through the evolution from Birds Eye view to the 3D era. GTA III to this day is my most played and favourite video game of all time.

I was addicted to Call of Duty at a point in my life - Black Ops 2 was the last one I played and having seen the jump from GoldenEye64 to the latest and greatest AAA+ Call of Duty, the future of gaming felt like it was in great hands.
GTA IV on the PS3 was incredible and I bought a PS4 for the sole purpose of playing the GTA V story in 2012.

I haven't played many games since then. I've still been 'into' gaming but I don't have a current gen console nor did I have a PC powerful enough to play the latest and greatest - nor the time.
I never played Skyrim but I played Oblivion.
I never played fallout 4 but loved fallout 3 and New Vegas.

Looking at the current state of gaming I really feel like things haven't progressed much at all in the past 20 years - besides more pixels, micro transactions and RTX, what do we have now that we didn't have already?
GTA 5 is still the best selling game of 2026? Something is terribly wrong with what once was the fastest moving industry our culture had to offer.

Find me a current game that's a better gaming experience than The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time, Half Life, Portal, Bioshock, Fallout New Vegas, Max Payne, THPS. Even the remasters and definitive editions of these games are a sub par experience to the originals in my opinion.

I see a lot of the younger generation being pushed toward older games and to those I recommend trying to get your hands on an original fat PS3 console (the one with the Spider-man font) because not only does it play PS3 games, BluRays & DVDs over HDMI & composite/component but is also backwards compatible with the PS2 & PS1 giving it the biggest native library of any console (11,000+ games) and if you are confident enough to mod your console that number jumps tenfold.
If you can find one on the used market this is an incredible purchase, especially with the return of physical media in the era of 'Ensh*ttification'

https://halimmellick.myportfolio.com/journal

This $5 Trojan horse armour created ensh*ttification 20 years ago

While on the topic of Android TV I highly recommend this app https://www.quasitv.app HAL can HALP you get it filled with FREE content

QuasiTV QuasiTV is an app for Android TV and Fire TV that simulates live tv using content from Plex, Emby & Jellyfin Available on Google Play and

I love my Apple TV 4K but I still use my Android TV for SmartTube https://is.gd/fyXWEt

SmartTube is Youtube done better. No ads, higher quality, Sponsorblock built in and Dearrow which removes clickbait titles and thumbnails.

Even as a Youtube premium subscriber I still flick over to the AndroidTV to use SmartTube because the quality is just so much better.

HAL can Halp you install SmartTube on your Smart TV if the instructions below 👇🏿 are too hard to follow

GitHub - yuliskov/SmartTube: Browse media content with your own rules on Android TV Browse media content with your own rules on Android TV - yuliskov/SmartTube