Santa brought me a technological upgrade for Christmas this year. I’ve been using a base model Kindle Fire since last Christmas, when a rock bottom sale made the purchase a no-brainer. It’s a decent bit of gear for the money but I found it lacking in a lot of ways, especially after comparing it to the iPad it replaced. The battery life is short, which is no surprise given its size. The touchscreen is less responsive. And the interface, while functional, lacks some basic features–like a file system that lists files alphabetically. Santa took advantage of another sale this year and got me a Fire HD, with a bigger screen, faster chip, and better battery life. These small improvements have finally presented a useful replacement for the iPad; it’s faster, the battery lasts longer, and the screen is more responsive. It’s cheap enough that if it gets broken I’m not going to cry about the cost, but it’s powerful enough that it does the main things I need it for. Plus it’s got a mini SD card slot so I can add storage space when I need it.

This means my old Fire is available for Finn to use in a limited fashion; I’ve been reading up on how to lock it down for child-friendly use. Amazon has a couple of different approaches available for parents, from setting up a household account and making a user profile for your kid, to using an app called FreeTime which essentially locks the Kindle down to only what you want them to access. I haven’t figured out which one is better yet, but I’m going to get this sorted out in the next week. She’s asking to play Minecraft, because pretty much everyone else her age is already doing so, so I’m going to have to read up on that as well.

And speaking of games, I installed Steam on my work laptop over the break, mainly so that I could play Firewatch, which was available through a holiday sale. I initially tried to run it on my personal laptop but it was so choppy as to be unplayable–not surprising for a 7 year old machine. (This also raises the question of a new laptop sometime this year). I was excited about this game when I saw the previews; it’s produced by an indie game developer and funded by the company that makes several Mac apps I use on a daily basis, and it got excellent reviews when it was released. I played about an hour of it after installing, and immediately was hooked. It’s a first-person mystery exploration game, so there’s no running and shooting, and all of the information you get is through a walkie-talkie with an offscreen female voice or what you pick up along the way. I’ve played about two hours of it now and the mystery portion is just setting in. I will have to ration it out so that I don’t play through the whole thing in one sitting.

Meanwhile I started archiving photos from this year and making room for 2017. We’re running out of space on the basement server, so I bought a 4TB drive to replace the cramped media storage drive that holds our movies and music. I began reorganizing the miscellaneous files there to free up space, but it’s obvious I’ve got to rethink the whole situation, especially in light of the gigabytes of photos I’ve got from 2016.