Wednesday, 4/1/2020
Ordinarily I’d go for a run on Wednesday right after breakfast. But I assume I will get a call from Edgewood market asking for my credit card number to process my order. I don’t want to take that while jogging. So I hang around the apartment until lunch: no call. Then I call Marcia; oh, she got her response 24 hours later. So probably not today at all.
So I went for my run after lunch. Then I worked a while on a different remote desktop manager, Chrome remote desktop.
I didn’t even mention yesterday, that in the afternoon I tried a remote desktop manager recommended by Vanessa, our new CH IT director. That was TeamViewer. It worked well, although it required a fairly complex install procedure on the target (confused elderly user’s) system as well as the tech person’s. So today I tried the free Chrome extension.
Actually it works just fine in the Brave browser, which I’ve been using lately. That’s the Chromium technology, without the whole reporting your life back to Google part. I was able to see and control the desktop of my MacBook from my iMac, just as with TeamViewer. But like TeamViewer it required a moderately complex install process on the target machine. Also required the client to start it on the target and read a 12-digit number to the tech.
In the afternoon, I got an ad from Humble Bundle. I have bought software and books from Humble Bundle before; they are the “pay what you think is fair” software outlet. This bundle was a huge collection of games and books to benefit COVID-19. For $30 I could have over 25 games. OK, then.
So now my Steam account has like 35 games in its library, about 30 of which I haven’t tried yet. Surely one or two will be really engaging?
I finished Dear Esther. It was easy to do; just a very picturesque, beautifully rendered, walking tour of a complex landscape, while a narrator read evocative and strange letters to a woman named Esther. Nothing was really resolved, but soooo atmospheric.
Then I tried out the alphabetically first new game, Alien Spidy. It is about this just adorably cute little spider running around and scoring points and avoiding traps. So cute. Also so impossible to do. This needs a kid’s reaction time. I couldn’t get through the tutorial. You have to combine hitting the spacebar to jump while simultaneously using the mouse to shoot web strands to swing over obstacles. After about 50 tries I gave up.
Codgerville 