Return to Monkey Island More than three decades after my first visit, I finally found the Secret of Monkey Island™. Return to Monkey Island picks up right from where Monkey Island 2 ended in a quite clever way. It is filled with absurd, but never illogical puzzles, brings you back to many familiar but also many new places, let's you meet old and new characters and is just a wonderful nostalgic game. I can wholeheartedly recommend it to any fan of the series.… ▶

Bandsaw Acquired A bandsaw was one of the few large power tools my workshop was missing. This has finally been remedied and I am now the owner of a Scheppach HBS261. It's probably the cheapest model available in it's size class (with a throat width of 12cm) and Scheppach isn't known for high quality tools. But I figured with a bit of careful tuning it should be okay.… ▶

Scrapwood Side Table From a recent project, I had a whole lot of weird off-cuts of rough construction lumber left. I hate throwing away wood, so when Kaddi asked for a small side table to use with the lawn chair I knew what to do. Each off-cut had an angle cut, so the idea was to arrange them in a circle. But since the cut had been done with a handheld saw at a weird angle, they didn't really line up:… ▶

Connecting a Split AC to WiFi/Tuya We recently bought a Bomann CL 6046 QC CB split inverter air conditioning. It comes with WiFi connectivity and of course I wanted it to be integrated into Home Assistant. The AC is one of those cheap Chinese ones that are sold under various brand names (TLC and Daikin seem to be similar). All of them use the Tuya Smart Life app and as always with these things the first connection is a… ▶

Deck Content 2 It now has been a month of owning a Steam Deck. Time for a tiny little review. [Steam Deck] For those living under a rock (or are simply non-gamers): the Steam Deck is portable gaming console. However unlike other popular portable consoles like the Nintendo Switch, this is basically a PC under the hood. It runs SteamOS - a Linux system made for playing PC games. And since most PC games only run on Windows it comes with it's own Windows emulation layer called Proton which is bas…… ▶

Deck Content 1 Over the last weekends we (re)build a deck. Or terrace. Or patio. Or whatever you call it. Materials The new deck is made from WPC -- a wood/epoxy material that is supposed to be more durable than wood. We ordered all the material online at… ▶

My Brain Sucks (sometimes) Content Warning: Mental Health … ▶

Using MailHog as my default MTA I'm using Linux on all my machines and that includes desktop systems, not only servers. Those desktop machines have no reason to send mails to the internet directly. When I want to send an E-Mail I will use a remote SMTP or just log into the GMail interface. My laptop might not even have an Internet connection some of the time.… ▶

Scrap Wood Dice Tower When YouTube wood workers talk about how they built something out of scrap wood, they usually talk about off-cuts of perfectly fine baltic birch plywood in sizes larger than a sheet of paper. When I talk about scrap wood, I talk about this:… ▶

Workshop Infrastructure Updates Fitting with the Easter theme, I worked on a few things in my workshop to spend less time searching and making finding easier. Most of my hand tools were stored in the IKEA Trofast shelving system I built a very long time ago. It worked, but it violated the… ▶