I don't often get excited about Star Trek computer games. The last one I enjoyed was "A Final Unity" back in the MacOS 8 days. The JJ-Trek game that came out around 2009 seemed like a shooter dressed up in a Star Trek skin.  Resurgence seems different! A bit pumped for it.

Defiance, the MMO that was tied in with the SyFy show with the same name, has been gone for a while now, its servers shut down before COVID hit (from what I remember). That doesn't prevent some intrepid fans from brining the game back as a solo, offline, game.  I think there's probably a lot more work to do, but this looks mighty promising!  I would love to play this game again, even without other players roaming around in the word ;-)

I remember the Computer Chronicles on my local PBS station.

Pretty cool to discover some of these old Copland Demos (even though Apple totally botched that potential future). In some alternate universe, Copland forms the basis for MacOS X 😅

I don't often pay attention to dev-conferences these days, but every so often something catches my eye.  This time around it was Google's annual I/O event where new devices were announced.  The Pixel 7a looks interesting. It looks like a solid replacement for my aging Moto Z3, but it's still a slab of glass.  It seems like a lot of the cool stuff for this phone is under the hood in Android and other related services

So far I haven't been keen on any of the foldable devices (e.g. the new moto razr or the samsung fold) because the folding elements don't seem to add anything. However, the Pixel Fold  is a phone that I am legitimately excited about.  The last time I remember being this excited about a phone was 2000, and I kept checking the listing as CarPhoneWarehouse in the UK (or some similar retailer) to see when the device would be finally released. That kind of device would not be available in the US, so I needed to import it.  It cost me $1000 + import tax, but I basically got one of the first UIQ devices, which worked well for a number of years! Smartphone before the iPhone.  The price of the fold seems hefty ($1800), but I guess accounting for inflation, it cost the same as my P800.

Finally, the new Pixel tablet: similar to phones, I don't get too excited about tablets, My six-year-old Samsung SM-T820 still works (albeit a bit slow).  One of the things I like about this tablet is the integration between devices (phone to tablet), and with the included charging stand, the tablet becomes a smart appliance (sort of like a Nest device). I haven't been tempted to change my Samsung device, but this might be useful functionality.  I do wonder how the pixel works if there's a case on it.  I would, presumably, want to take this device out of the home.

Here's another Reddit find in the r/vintagecomputing subreddit.  What if MacOS had support for Vintage (aka obsolete) Mac hardware, such as the Mac Plus?  It might look a  little something like this! It's always fun to look a bit at the alt-history of computing :-). I wonder what the MacOS would have looked like today if Apple had retained the Platinum look!

 One last Year in Review came in, this one from Swarm, formerly known as FourSquare.

I don't know who is still using Location-Based check-ins these days. I do get a kick from seeing the random "this is a place you visited 10 years ago" pop-ups every so often.  I am surprised that even though I didn't travel any great distance, I still managed to find over 60 new places to visit locally.

 I came across this demo via reddit recently.  Before Apple bought NeXT to bring us OS X, Apple had A/UX (Apple Unix) which ran on classic macs (I think before System 7).  In my early days on the Internet I came across A/UX 3.0 installation discs (which I am pretty sure I've backed up somewhere).  I wonder if I can get a Basilisk instance of this running...

 TVTime, the app I use to track what I've watched on TV (and in various streaming services) gave me a "rewind" this year. I think some of my stats are a little skewed because I marked a lot of episodes watched in 2022 when I had really watched them in years prior, and I only really rated like 4% of the episodes that I watched.  Maybe in 2023 I'll rate things more consistently to see what comes out of it.  I do want to move my past movie watching from Trakt.tv at some point, but that's a project for another day. 

It's funny that I started the year with Sgt. Frog.  It's been 10 (or more!) years since I started this series and I still have over 100 episodes and a few movies left to complete the series.  Maybe in 2023 I'll binge it ;-) And yes, I am watching Gogglebox in three different countries 😂