Thank You Steam Deck

I have been a gamer as long as I have been able to form memories.  I have fuzzy recollections of Atari consoles sometime around the ages of 4 or 5 years old.  I can remember playing Castle Adventure on a terrible monochrome LCD screen "laptop" from the mid 80's that my father had brought home from work.  My parents got the NES console for my brother and I when we were 9 and 6 respectively.  This continued and was followed by every major console generation: SNES, Genesis, N64, PSX, PS2, Xbox, Xbox360 (Not to mention Gameboy, Game Gear, Gameboy Advance SP, DS, PC gaming).  Literally until I was 29 years old and became a father, gaming was my primary hobby with my brother, my friends through school, college, and even into early adulthood. 

Being a father had a way of eating up all that free time...

Now, don't get me wrong here. I wouldn't change a thing, but even as my kids grew older and began to find their way to video games as well, I had become a mentor... I became "Player 2" at best.  It was my children's turn to take their journey into this form of entertainment that was so meaningful to me, and I gladly helped them do so in the driver's seat while I would navigate.

The Steam Deck flipped the script on that narrative for me

When Valve announced the Steam Deck back in 2022, I knew it was something I had to get.  It represented a chance to make gaming more accessible to me... Where I could pick it up for 30 minutes in the living room while my kids are teaming up on Mario or Fortnite.  So, I put in a reservation for the top tier model in April of 2022 and finally received my device in September of that year.  The timing was perfect, as it was my main form of entertainment for the inaugural WPECon trip where I played through my first two games (Control and A Short Hike).  This device brought gaming back for me in a big way, and it's truly my favorite tech purchase I've ever made.  It's helped foster a new appreciation of gaming for me, particularly with "Indie" games developed by small studios or even individuals.  These games often have creative story lines, interesting characters, new and innovative mechanics - and even some top notch voice acting and writing. 

In short, the Steam Deck helped me find a way to be "Player 1" again... And, it did so in a way that I could still be present for conversations and around my loving family as opposed to being huddled down in a man cave or engulfed in headphones at a gaming PC.  That's a compromise I'm happy with any day, and at this point I'm sure I've spent more hours gaming on my Steam Deck than I have any other platform.  I've kept a running list of all the games I've played through since owning the Steam Deck.  I'll share that here as of 12/9/2025. 

• Control
• A Short Hike
• South Park Fractured but whole
• Vampire Survivors
• Hue (Xbox)
• Firewatch
• Inside
• Ori and the blind forest
• God of war (PS3 emulator)
• TMNT: Shredder's revenge (Xbox)
• Inmost
• 12 minutes
• Ghost of Tsushima (Chiaki / PS5)
• God of War 2 (PS3 emulator)
• Cyber Hook
• Night in the woods
• Ori and the will of the Wisps
• A Plague Tale: Innocence
• Bastion
• NBA Jam (MAME emulator)
• Ghostrunner
• Detroit: Become Human
• Tetris effect connected (easy)
• Max payne 3
• Titanfall 2 
• Portal 
• Portal 2
• Black Mesa
• Spyro Reignited 
• Pilot wings (snes emulator)
• Super Marioworld 2: Yoshi's Island (snes emulator)
• Lil Gator game
• Gris
• Alan Wake
• El Shaddai
• Tetris effect connected (normal)
• Spyro ReIgnited: Ripto's Rage
• Stray
• What remains of Edith Finch
• Katana ZERO
• Transformers Devastation
• Prey
• The Messenger
• Braid Anniversary 
• Spider man Remastered 
• Celeste
• Gone home
• Gta4
• Spyro ReIgnited: Year of the dragon
• Contra 3 the alien wars (easy)
• AstroBot (Ps5)
• Shovel Knight
• SANABI
• Spider Man Miles Morales
• Tony hawk 1+2 100%
• Skate 3 (xbox 360 emulator)
• Half Life 2
• Halo: CE Anniversary 
• Batman: Arkham Asylum 
• Cast and Chill
• Thps3+4
• The Drifter
• Metal Gear Solid
• Chrono Trigger

Thanks to Valve for creating a device that was able to allow this.  🩷 

In Flames Records Ranked

My ranking of In Flames discography as of 12/3/2025.  Subject to change based on re-listen or mood change.

1. Come Clarity
2. A Sense of Purpose
3. Sounds of a Playground Fading
4. Reroute to Remain
5. Colony
6. Clayman 
7. Soundtrack to Your Escape 
8. The Jester Race
9. Whoracle
10. Siren Charms
11. Foregone
12. I, The Mask (parenthesis this is our house) 
13. Battles  

Unranked: Lunar Strain because Anders = In Flames 

Launching a Project: CowSaysDailyNews.com

My opening entry on this relaunched blog was discussing how I recently did some self-learning with AI using Google's Gemini CLI.  That work really sparked an enthusiasm for me to keep working with AI, and my focus was around summarizing news headlines which I continued to work on automating.  My first versions were just simply outputting the headlines in command line and wrapping them in the "cowsay" command.  (Think: echo $daily-news | cowsay ).  But, before I knew it, I found myself thinking this should be better served as a web platform where people could get a quick update of daily news.  I made pretty quick and early progress, and my inspiration to keep working towards building something tangible continued...

I was able to use AI to help me get started by solving some challenging code logic, creating some website graphics, and even setting up an automation pipeline to generate updates on a daily basis.  It was honestly very enlightening to me to see how fast somebody with some motivation could use AI effectively to bring an idea to fruition.  AI has some scary potential impacts, and some uses that I think we need to be careful about instrumenting.  But, the simple point is that I could not have brought this idea to life without it.  I can write code, yes.  But it would have taken me weeks to do this without AI just from the technical perspective, not to mention graphics, publishing, etc.  

 

With this backstory, I'd like to announce Cow Says Daily News.com.  The name represents my early use of the cowsay command brought to a more modern web-based experience... CSDN was launched this week, and I've been making some fine tuning/tweaks since launch. I hope people try it and enjoy using it.  It was fun to build, and if it's helpful at all, I'll take that as icing on the cake. Feel free to check it out.  Bookmark it if you like, or subscribe to receive a daily email update of top news headlines.

🐮https://www.cowsaysdailynews.com 

Overall, I'm really happy with what's been built.  CSDN is certainly a labor of love, but one that I wanted to bring to fruition.  Although the experience was entirely educational on my part, I think there's a chance people might actually use it and get a benefit from what it can do.  Here's our chief correspondent!

 

I chose the Ghost.org platform to host the site, largely because I'm a big fan that they are open sourced. I also wanted to open source my code that gathers news and brings CSDN to life.  So, if you're interested in checking it out, here's the Github Repo. 

Thanks for reading 

Trying Out Gemini CLI (and rebooting my personal blog!)

I’ve been trying to make a more focused effort recently to dedicate at least a portion of my Fridays to getting “hands on” with new tech. This effort usually ends up taking a back-burner unfortunately because my work has been pretty busy recently. I maybe get around to trying out new tech 1 Friday a month. Today though, I was able to spend a few hours and it has been a particularly fun thread to dive into! So much so, in fact, that it has me inspired to reboot my personal blog here on Substack. :-)

Today I decided it was finally time to give the Gemini CLI a real test drive…

Sure, I’ve installed the Gemini CLI a few times and given it some basic tire-kicking in my CloudShell on the GCP console. This time though, I wanted to try out some real use cases and get to some more technical outcomes. I did some searching around and finally started out by running through this codelab which really did a nice job showing how you could take AI to the next level. There’s just something fun about running advanced AI tooling within a terminal environment. Look how cool it is. You feel like Neo hacking the Matrix just by using the tooling.

 

In less than 30 minutes, I had set up my environment, used AI to query and summarize news articles from the command line, and set up connections to MCP servers for Github and BigQuery natural language tooling. It was immediately useful. I was querying and summarizing news articles.  I was such a fan of the output that myself instantly wanted to have this output to start my day: 

✦ Here’s a summary of the latest news in the US today, November 7, 2025:

Government Shutdown and its Impact:

The US is experiencing its longest government shutdown in history, leading to significant disruptions. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has reduced flights by 4% in “high-volume markets” to maintain air traffic control safety, potentially causing thousands of flight cancellations and delays at major airports across the country, including Atlanta, Charlotte, Denver, Dallas/Fort Worth, Orlando, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Houston, and Chicago.[1][2] The Trump administration has also asked for an emergency pause on a judge’s order to fully fund SNAP benefits.[3][4]

Developments Related to Donald Trump:

 * The Supreme Court has allowed Trump to block passport sex markers for transgender and non-binary people.[5][6][2]

 * Trump pardoned Glen Casada, a Tennessee Republican convicted of federal public corruption charges.[5]

 * New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Trump loyalist, announced her bid for New York governor.[5][7]

 * The Trump administration reached a deal with Cornell University to restore research funding.[3][7]

 * Trump is expected to meet with Hungarian leader Viktor Orban at the White House.[8][3]

 * There are ongoing discussions and analyses regarding Trump’s popularity and the impact of the government shutdown on his administration.[5][1][2]

Other Notable News:

 * The death toll from a UPS plane crash at Louisville airport has risen to 13.[5][2]

 * The NCAA has banned six men’s basketball players for manipulating performances in a betting scheme.[5][1]

 * Dallas Cowboys defensive end Marshawn Kneeland died at the age of 24.[5][6][4]

 * Seven people fell ill at Joint Base Andrews after a suspicious package was opened, leading to evacuations.[1][7][9]

 * An immigrant was sentenced to time served in Wisconsin after a judge allegedly helped him dodge ICE agents.[5][1]

 * A film festival in New York was canceled after China put pressure on directors.[5]

 * The Senate is preparing for a key vote on a new approach to end the government shutdown.[4][7]

 * Elon Musk’s new pay package was backed by Tesla voters.[9]