Welcome back to the second weekly blog recap, as I work on getting all set up with hosting for an official news letter. This week was a bit of an interesting week. I’ve had a lot going on in my personal life and I’ve been hurting a bit in terms of energy so this week was I was really flying by the seat of my pants. I still managed to hit five posts, though (thank god for Saturday!) but I so think that this was a good thing. It forced me to think about the content I was going to put out in a different way and has left me a few ideas for in the future. Some of next week’s content is even going to be released to this weeks now!
Blog Recap
Using Marvis Pro’s Live Activities for an Even Better Apple Music Experience
Thinking About Text-to-Speech AI on Mac
Quickly Get a Room’s Temperature and Humidity Using HomePod and Shortcuts
The Joy of Vinyl and a Few Ways to Scrobble It
🔗 Why does the iPad not show battery health in Settings
Media I’ve Been Enjoying
📺 Shrinking
Shrinking premiered on Apple TV+ this week, and I have to say this show is hilarious. I have no idea how they manage to pitch this to Harrison Ford but him and Jason Segel are proving to be a great team. I’m a big fan of Scrubs, so seeing that Bill Lawrence was involved in creating the show really helped hype me up for it. The writing is incredibly well done too, though. If you strip away, Seagal and Ford and Christa Miller, you’re still left with a show with intriguing plot lines that isn’t afraid to show you its heart.
🎮 Goldeneye 007
This week saw the Nintendo 64 first person, shooter classic Goldeneye 007 released to both Nintendo switch Online and Xbox Game Pass. There’s been a lot of chatter online but it has an open positive and it’s made this week. A bit of an annoying one to be a gamer. Objectively, Goldeneye 007 is a game that shows its age. I can understand how it would be hard for a new player to pick it up and look at it as a positive experience without having that nostalgia that I do. But it feels like some people are really going hard on this game.
The Nintendo Switch Online version of the game, from what I’ve heard, doesn’t play very well with the pro controller. I haven’t actually tried the Switch Online version yet, but I do plan on playing it with the Nintendo 64 controller that was released for Switch Online subscribers. I get that Nintendo could have modified the controls to make it play better on modern hardware but the truth is Nintendo simply released what they released then. I think Modern Vintage Gamer had the best take on it when he said that there was probably contractual obligations in place, preventing either Microsoft or Nintendo for making significant changes to the game.
Still, I’ve been playing it on Game Pass and I’ve been having a lot of fun revisiting the past, even if the game didn’t age as well, as I had imagined. And honestly, the reason this game is one of my favorites has nothing to do with the graphics or the controls, but rather the development team. Back when this game was being made, the dev team literally worked off of photographs and blueprints from the film sets to make sure that they created a game that was accurate to the movie. As someone who grew up playing a lot of terrible tie-in video games for movies, when I found this fact out my respect for the dev team, and the game, went through the roof.
Hilton: We were even given the set blueprints so we could plan out the levels based on the actual set designs, and a very early version of the film script so we knew all the characters and plot developments. Also, all of the international locations the film would be using.
Source: Mel Magazine
💿 Screen Violence by CHVRCHES
CHVRCHES fourth studio album has been on my mind a lot this week. I first discovered the album when Federico Viticci mentioned it on an episode of MacStories Unwind. Ever since, it’s been an album that comes up in my rotations quiet frequently. Then earlier this week I saw a post on Mastodon from Matt Birchler that got me back into listening to my records. It was only fitting that the first new vinyl I pick up in a number of years be an album that I listen to quite frequently. It’s one I’d highly suggest you check out!
Misc. Writings
I Tried Royal Farms
“Gotta have a Wawa.”
If you live in a certain part of the United States, those words mean something to you. They mean a place of gathering in the morning, of great made to order food items, and a way of life. If you live anywhere else on the planet, those words mean nothing to you.
Living in southern New Jersey, I live deeply in the heart of Wawa country, with the occasional 7-11 thrown in for variety. The point is, sometimes we need to be reminded that other convenience store chains exist. A few years ago, southern chain Royal Farms started opening locations locally; I know of two in the area. While I’ve heard everyone say they have great chicken, I never really feel like these locations are ever busy. Based on their locations, they definitely don’t see the same volume of traffic that the Wawa near the high school sees before the day starts. But I. Good it’s good to try new things, so I decided to try Royal Farms, twice.
My first excursion to Royal Farms was at night time. I was in the mood for chicken, so I decided it was the perfect time to see how their chicken was. Now I’ll be completely honest: I don’t eat nearly as much fried chicken as I should because I hate how utterly greasy it makes my hands. Because of this, I’ll have friend chicken sometimes, but will opt for a tender or nugget most of the time. So while I can’t speak on their fried chicken, I can tell you quite a bit about their chicken tenders. For starters, I can tell you that they’re really freaking good.
I wound up going with a five piece tender meal, with potato wedges, a biscuit, and BBQ sauce. It definitely isn’t the cheapest meal I’ve had (that clocked in at just shy of $15 USD) but the quality was there to back it up. The biscuit was good. It wasn’t as dry as a Popeye’s biscuit, but I do feel like Wawa has a fluffier biscuit (though full disclosure, I’ve only had Wawa biscuits in a breakfast setting so far). I’m someone who loves biscuits though and will scarf them down from pretty much anywhere. If I turn down a biscuit, they have to be bad. So this was a good one.
The potato wedges were also quite tasty and a fair number of them had a good size to them. I honestly couldn’t even begin to compare them to Wawa’s fries, because a wedge would win that battle any day. The part I was most curious about was the chicken. Wawa has “tenders” but I can’t even begin to wrap my head around what brand they are. While they’re fine with BBQ sauce and cheddar on a classic roll…they really seem more like chicken fries on steroids than they do tenders. I could tell the second that I looked at Royal Farm’s chicken that THIS was going to be a winner. Even the smallest of the 5 still dwarfed what Wawa offers by comparison.
Then I hit into the chicken. Think about what biting into a chicken fry is like. It wasn’t that. This was a huge breaded piece of chicken meat that you could tell hadn’t been processed the way so many other places do. I wish I had taken a picture of this chicken but I was just way to into it. This was a certified win in my book! 👍
Now let’s talk about breakfast.
Wawa breakfast is a staple of the area. It’s tasty, convenient, and gran & go. Wawa’s system for making their breakfast sandwiches is to preface batches of each variety that sit in a hot case and get swapped out every few hours. While I know that hot cases can be a controversial topic, you can’t deny that a Wawa Sizzli is where it’s at. In addition to these sandwiches, there’s made to order breakfast items as well, ranging from burritos to paninis to omelettes. In this situation, we’re only worried about the Sizzli, though. The biggest drawback to Wawa breakfast? It’s only available from 5am to 11am. If you decide to sleep in until noon, you’re out of luck. While not officially policy, some kinda Wawa employees will make off hours Sizzlis as long as the equipment is still powered on.
In the case of Royal Farms, their breakfast menu is a bit more limited, but it is available all day! That’s a big point in their favor. Naturally, I slept in until 11:30 one day and then moseyed on over Royal Farms to check this out. I wound up getting a a sausage egg and cheese croissant. When I was ordering at the touch screen it asked if I wanted my bread toasted and I said no, though next time I may go ahead and hit yes to see how it improves things. Royal Farms is only heating up the parts of the sandwich that need it (ie the sausage and egg) so the untoasted croissant and cold cheese dramatically lower the temperature of the sandwich. I wound up deciding that I didn’t think it would make it back home (about a ten minute ride) before crossing into needing a reheat territory, so I ate it then and there. And honestly? It was alright. I need to experiment with breads and toasting and various other factors to see what potential their breakfast has, but it’s not one I plan to get a lot. It wasn’t a bad sandwich by any means, but compared to Wawa’s, the temperature gave a lot to be desired.
I’ll have to try more, but as it stands now, Wawa and Royal Farms are tied 1-1. I’ll report back on the next showdown.
-Dan
Dan Stransky 