A new hardware project

Earlier this week I put together a color e-ink picture frame powered by a Raspberry Pi.

It was a pretty easy, fun little project. For the past few days I’ve been having it run a simple script I wrote that chooses a random photo of mine and overlays the current weather conditions every 30 minutes.

I’ll share more about it including photos in a future post. In the meantime, I plan on making a new frame for it. The screen I chose is just barely too small for a standard 5x7 inch frame, so to get it in the frame I used I had to get a little hacky and the end result is a bit sloppier than I would like.

Games

I’m still enjoying my time with Hogwarts Legacy. I’ll say though that I almost think the game suffers a tiny bit from trying to do too much. I mean, how is it that I was still getting introduced to new mechanics 15-20 hours into the game? I also hope some more enemy variety gets introduced soon as combat has been starting to feel a little easy. Overall though, still a great game.

I completed 1000xResist since my last post and really liked it. The gameplay is mostly walking around and talking to people, but it plays so much with different ways to tell a narrative that that’s what keeps you invested rather than the gameplay itself. This one’s definitely worth checking out if that sounds like your thing.

I started playing the 2024 remake of Riven recently and it’s been going great. It’s easy to see where other games I love like Outer Wilds have taken inspiration. It’s one of those puzzle games where the explorable world opens up to you fairly quickly, giving you a lot to uncover and think about at the same time.

Riven’s art style really stands out to me. It feels oddly dream-like in the way I feel games from the 90s often do, and it’s really unique to see that feeling captured so well with modern graphics.

Music

The new Spiritbox album I’ve been looking forward to, Tsunami Sea, came out this week. I’ve only had a chance to listen through it once so far but I can already tell I’m going to be listening to it a lot, just like their previous music. Speaking of their previous music, I think this album left a stronger first impression on me than usual. It’ll take me some more time to get a stronger feeling for which tracks stand out the most to me, but I’m hoping I don’t take too long with it because Sleep Token is rumored to be releasing new music very, very soon.

— JP