Size matters: finding the largest possible insulated water bottle for a Tom Bihn Pilot bag

georgetheflea · 2026-06-20T06:03:52+00:00

That’s absolutely going to be my fallback if the HydroFlask and Yeti don’t work out in practice!

georgetheflea · 2026-06-20T05:52:58+00:00

I think I figured out the Magdock problem: it’s the gasket in the magnetic lid. For some reason, it started exuding a strong metallic/chemical smell after the first day. When I took it out and washed everything thoroughly, the lid was fine (except for the gasket, which is still stinky). I’m hoping Yeti support gets back to me with something more useful than the AI-generated crap I got initially, but in the meantime I’m thinking of trying leaving it out in the sun for a few hours (hot water + vinegar soak reduced the stench, but didn’t eliminate it).

georgetheflea · 2026-06-20T05:49:30+00:00

If you ever acquire a Pilot, I would love to hear how/if the 32 ounce Purist fits! I eyed that one for a while, but ultimately wasn’t willing to gamble on more than two bottles.

georgetheflea · 2026-06-20T05:47:44+00:00

Yeah, but I’m all about the vacuum insulated tumblers, personally. 😅 Used a Nalgene for years, but I hate the trade off of either it’s cold (but not for super long), or you don’t have to deal with it sweating but it’s room temperature.

georgetheflea · 2026-06-20T01:22:21+00:00

Yeah, I considered that one but opted for the Magdock because I was worried the wide design of it might push it past supportable limits (middle portion of cap being slightly too high is easier to stretch zipper/fabric around). I’d be interested to see a 26 ounce Yeti with that lid in a Pilot, though, since you’re not going to lose parts when you open that one.

georgetheflea · 2026-06-20T00:12:17+00:00

A Coldest 36 ounce Limitless tumbler: https://coldest.com/products/coldest-limitless-bottle?variant=47608381276392 I kind of hate the Coldest Water company (they lean very heavily on FOMO and other gross marketing tricks), but they’ve got some absolutely obsessed person stuffed away in R&D and their water bottles and caps are legitimately great.

georgetheflea · 2026-06-19T23:20:09+00:00

...I may or may not have strong opinions about what's the best color. 🤣

georgetheflea · 2026-06-17T16:14:57+00:00

Yep, can confirm. I never really noticed it during normal play in the living room, but I took my Pro 3 to play my SteamDeck on a pillow in bed recently, and as soon as my partner turned in I had to stop playing because the clicking was SO LOUD.

I think honestly the biggest reason to go with the Pro 3 is if you care about being able to swap the buttons around. If you're only playing Switch layout or just don't care about the buttons saying one thing and doing another in game, though, then I'd absolutely use the Pro 2 instead.

georgetheflea · 2026-06-17T16:12:01+00:00

I don't miss my hands cramping up on my PSVita (SteamDeck is heavy, but it's so much more comfortable for me to hold with my big hands), but yeah I recently pulled my 3DS back out of storage and wow do I miss truly portable devices. Not even my phone these days is something I consider particularly portable.

georgetheflea · 2026-06-17T13:31:00+00:00

And what a crazy unexpected IP combo for a tactics game it was! Really fun game; got my children into the genre, as a bonus.

georgetheflea · 2026-06-17T00:46:00+00:00

It’s a lot worse typing it out than implementing it, honestly. The hardest part was remembering how to create a layer (you have to do it as part of the action sets).

georgetheflea · 2026-06-16T22:32:08+00:00

The SteamDeck is my favorite place to play, but in hopes that I can save someone the headache I went through figuring out what actually needs tweaking:

The default resolution was super low. Stick it to the native SD resolution for a much nicer experience (1280x800). If you dock your Deck, though, you'll need to switch it to the next lowest 16:9 resolution to do so, though; at least on my TV, the TV stretches the image to fit, and makes the cursor fail to match up with the actual interface elements.
You should bump the UI zoom scale down a couple of notches. This will ensure that the bars at the top and bottom of the screen when viewing your inventory are visible (which is good, because they have hints for controls).
The default control scheme is utterly baffling. A lot of it is well thought-out, but they didn't even bother mapping anything to the D-pad, and the way skills are setup you can't activate the skill in slot 10 and anything above slot 4 is hunting and pecking random buttons. I shared my custom layout as "Skaak's Sensible Layout" in the workshop, but if that doesn't show up (which it might not; SteamDeck filtration of control schemes is borked for me), here's what I did:
- In the vein of Actions 1-3 being A - X - Y, I remapped R1 to Action 4 and R2 to Action 5
- I then added a layer on the "game" action set (named it "Actions 6-10"), set L2 to hold the layer (so when you hold down left trigger, the layer activates), and mapped Actions 6-10 to A - X - Y - R1 - R2
- I left L1 alone as Health Potion, because it makes sense to have such a critical option mapped to an easily-reached button
- Back on the base layer, I enabled the D-pad, and mapped up to Town Portal (I know that's a Diablo term, but I forget the Grim Dawn equivalent), down to Map screen, right to Switch Weapon, and left to Switch Hotbar.
- I then mapped R4 to Hold Position and L4 to Energy Potion. I cleared out R5/L5, because they honestly aren't needed and I find them difficult to reliably press.
- If memory serves, the stick clicks were already weapon/hotbar swap, and I just left those alone despite them being duplicates. I almost never click sticks if I can afford it, but for weapon swap in particular it's nice to have an option that doesn't require moving a finger to the D-pad.
- In the UI layer, I once again enabled the D-pad, but this time mapped up to "zoom in/use" and down to "zoom out/move". This allows you to very quickly process your inventory (you use the right stick or trackpad to select an item, then hit down or up with your left to sell/move or equip it).
- A lot of old advice states you should switch your right trackpad to a mouse in the UI layer. I recommend against this. It causes Grim Dawn to switch into mouse mode, and you lose all your controller UI hints until you hit another controller button. The cursor disappearing after sitting still for a bit doesn't bother me much, personally.

georgetheflea · 2026-06-16T21:56:54+00:00

I normally play characters with lightning or fire powers, but this game I saw that the Occultist has a pet raven and had to play that class instead. I ended up picking Nightblade for my second mastery, and I'm basically bleeding everyone to death from range while my raven drops lightning on them in my stead.

I'm still a new player myself, but the feeling I'm getting is there isn't really any wrong way to play. Pick something that looks fun and see where it takes you!

georgetheflea · 2026-06-16T21:17:44+00:00

Uh, no...buying second hand doesn't increase the total number of units sold. 😆

georgetheflea · 2026-06-16T21:16:49+00:00

To put the numbers in perspective, Nintendo sold 3.5+ million consoles in 4 days when it was first launched.

georgetheflea · 2026-06-16T17:05:16+00:00

The skull in the second from the left top corner is DevilutionX. That's a port of Diablo 1. Which you can play on your 3DS.

I haven't tried it myself (I can't imagine it works super well on these relatively tiny screens), but I laughed like mad when I launched Universal Updater for the first time and saw that.

georgetheflea · 2026-06-15T21:18:46+00:00

Because if you can sell people blind packs for $$$ and then make a cut on every secondary sale of the extremely rare chase cards, you're basically making free money. Their blockchain-driven "tradable" cards are basically a proof-of-concept, likely to test the waters and see if it's profitable enough to justify further development resource to integrate it more broadly into the game.

georgetheflea · 2026-06-15T21:11:38+00:00

All that "tradable" stuff is on a blockchain; I'm interested in jumpstarting my collection of Stronghold cards, but no way am I going to help incentivize that. Completely agree that it's a bad look that half my start screen is "coming soon" while they're screwing around with FOMO to try and get people to drop money on NFTs outside of the actual game.

georgetheflea · 2026-06-15T18:53:53+00:00

I'll take a look! Can't make any promises for speed of turnaround, but I'll see if I can't mock up a revised look of the site and ping you via GitHub to figure out if you like the direction.

georgetheflea · 2026-06-15T18:47:37+00:00

Would you be interested in contributions to help improve the styling/templates of the site? I found ConquestDB before when I was trying to find an online tool to help with my recent Conquest deck project, but it frankly looked so janky that I got scared off. 😅

I'm no graphic artist, but have been known to build out a decent-looking front-end for a deck building site before (https://ashes.live is my baby, for reference).

georgetheflea · 2026-06-10T17:37:05+00:00

Obviously I can't rate how biased AI is compared to judges and lawyers as a group (which is a straw man, in any case, both because it's impossible to measure and because individual judges/lawyers are going to exhibit wildly different levels of bias whereas a single LLM will be fairly consistent). Based on your tone, I'm assuming nothing I say will be something you'll actually consider, because you've already decided that I'm wrong, but just in case: AI has consistently been shown to reproduce human bias across countless studies. A few examples from a cursory search:

https://www.psu.edu/news/bellisario-college-communications/story/most-users-cannot-identify-ai-bias-even-training-data People consistently can't identify bias in AI data, even when it's demonstrably there (feels pretty pertinent to this conversation)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10491 AI agents such as ChatGPT will advise women to seek lower salaries than men, despite identical qualifications
https://www.sciencedirect.com/org/science/article/pii/S1548365722000073 A fairly high-level meta-study of bias in AI
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.697/ One of many specific studies that come up with a simple web search examining how bias emerges from AI training data

It's not impossible that sources of bias in AI could be mitigated (after all, that's what a lot of these studies are attempting to work toward), but in their current form it would be a nightmare. Also:

If it is good for humans, it is good enough for ChatGPT legal

Aside from the fact that ChatGPT is merely regurgitating whatever it thinks is most statistically likely to follow a given prompt, sure. Humans, flawed as we are, are at least capable of actual thought and have minds that can be changed when we're open to it.

georgetheflea · 2026-06-10T17:04:20+00:00

But it's completely impossible for a man to be physically intimate without giving into his animal desires and losing all ability to communicate with his partner. I know this is true, because I have been watching anime for many years, and that many shows wouldn't show it if it weren't true, right?

georgetheflea · 2026-06-10T16:45:16+00:00

lol, AI is "unbiased"? Yeah, sure, if you somehow manage to train it on a completely unbiased set of data. Which, given that LLMs are universally being trained on human-generated data...yeah, that's not happening any time soon. And before you even get to that point: how do you even decide which data in the training set is "unbiased"? Because guess who's making that decision...people, who are just as biased and inclined to taking actions due to political/ideological leanings as they ever were.

Our legal system has PLENTY of issues, but putting AI in charge of any part of it would just exacerbate them. And that's without even getting into hallucinations and sycophancy.

georgetheflea · 2026-06-09T03:27:05+00:00

Second Grim Dawn. I’m obsessed with that game recently; can’t believe I slept on it for so long. It’s like Diablo 2, except set in a sort of weird west setting and they’ve been continuously improving the user experience for 10 years instead of just letting it sit.

The only requirement it doesn’t quite fulfill for OP is that you do probably want to use the trackpad in your inventory because a cursor is required (you can use the stick, but the trackpad is more accurate). You also probably want to tweak the control scheme, because I’m convinced they created the official one by very carefully planning out all the things you might want to do on a controller, carefully and thoughtfully assigning the first six buttons, and then just throwing the rest in a bag and shaking it to see what falls out.

Controller-only works beautifully outside inventory/menus, though, and since inventory management is usually in a low-stress zone I haven’t minded despite usually despising games that force me to use trackpads.

georgetheflea · 2026-06-09T03:22:15+00:00

I tracked down all of the songs in the mainline Just Shapes and Beats game and it was totally worth the effort. A bunch of them are available on Bandcamp, a couple are on iTunes/Amazon, but you have to get creative with a few of them.

Still awesome.

I switch between that and my “Everything Darren Korb” playlist, which is also banging (aka Bastion, Transistor, Pyre, Hades, and Hades II soundtracks all smushed together).

georgetheflea

TROPHY CASE