Please enjoy this slow motion video of Alan Rickman making tea, and then losing his shit because he caught you looking at him.

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If you’re old enough to remember Epic Games back when they were called Epic Megagames, then you’re old enough to have played some of their classics like Jill of the Jungle and Jazz Jackrabbit.

Epic just released a free 21-track album with audio that spans their releases of the last 20 years. Check it out.

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Tree Two One makes custom picture frame-like wall plates for Nest thermostats. Four designs available today – $40 each.

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I lost 30 pounds in 3 months. To date I’m down 35 and still losing. Here’s how I did it.

In four words: Calorie Counting, No Exercise

In more words: Keep reading.

I got a Fitbit for Christmas.

The Fitbit is just a pedometer, but it’s pretty smart about things. It doesn’t just count steps – it counts the intensity of those steps and can make some educated guesses about your activity level throughout the day. With the push of a single button you can immediately see how many calories you’ve burned on any given day.

I wasn’t particularly looking to lose weight, but once I got the Fitbit I thought I’d see what it could do.

I’m 6’2″. My body wants to be 212 lbs. I’ve spent the last few years not dieting or exercising, and my weight has always been pretty stable at 212. I’d really have to try hard if I wanted to get myself above or below 212. (For my height, 195 is the boundary between “healthy” and “overweight.”)

I told the Fitbit my height, what my goal weight was (180), and it told me how many calories I could eat each day. It also told me when I’d hit my goal weight – which turned out to be accurate within one day (!) three months in the future.

I used the free Fitbit app to track everything I ate against my allowable calories by entering all the food I ate, and I used the Fitbit itself to track how many calories I was burning each day. I wasn’t paying attention to carbs or fat or anything like that – the only thing I cared about on the food I ate was the amount of calories it contained – that’s it. Most days I was eating between 1200 and 1400 calories.

What it boiled down to is this – I never took in more calories than I burned. That’s it. Zero exercise. Exercise is for chumps.

The first week was the hardest because I was basically hungry all the time, but after a while my stomach got used to taking in less and it complained less. I just kept telling myself that the feeling of hunger was the feeling of my body burning fat. I don’t think that’s actually true, but it helped me get through it.

At first I was losing crazy weight. Like a pound a day. Pretty consistently.

As I lost more weight there would be mysterious days where I’d gain anywhere from like 0.2 to 2 pounds despite not wavering from my plan, but I chalked that up to water retention or just other random weirdness. It’s like when you own stocks – you can’t get any meaningful data out of day-to-day performance. You really need to take the long term view and consider your weight trends over the past week or two to get some idea of where you’re headed.

Anyway, I reached my goal weight of 180 and I’m still losing, albeit much more slowly, and today I’m at 177. While I still use the Fitbit to track my calories burned, I now use the free MyFitnessPal to track my food intake – it does everything the Fitbit app does, but it also lets me just scan barcodes on food I eat to log calories automatically.

You can view my complete history at Fitbit and view my food diary at MyFitnessPal too.

I never used to feel the effects of caffeine before, and now that there’s less of me I definitely do.

I also get drunk a lot faster, which rules.

I’m not sure yet if I’ll try to lose more weight or just stay where I’m at.

Eating less as a general rule has gotten easier for me, and I’ll probably keep riding this crazy train until the novelty wears off. When that happens I might just go the other direction to see what it feels like to be at 250.

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For a long time I felt like the only people who should play Hall & Oates songs were Hall & Oates themselves.

Then I found this cover.

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A lot has changed, and a lot hasn’t in 55 years.

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Announced at CES this week: HomePlug® Powerline Alliance Announces AV2 Specification for Next-Generation Broadband Speeds over Powerline Wires

I’ve been waiting years for this to happen and can guarantee I’m about 300% more excited about it than you are.

It bumps the HomePlug spec up to gigabit speed, AND all of my 200 Mbps AV adapters will be fully interoperable.

Finally. Sheesh.

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I’d been on the waiting list since October, so when I finally had the opportunity to order a Nest thermostat, I jumped at the chance.

It arrived Friday.

Before doing anything I disconnected the heater/fan from the power and killed the breaker to the air conditioning condenser.

Check out this business. We’ve been in this house for nine years and this old Honeywell gizmo is at least that old. It’s served us well, but it was time to move on.

First order of business – remove the faceplate.

Before removing the backplate, make note of the wire colors and the letters they’re connected to.

I masked off the area below with some plastic and painter’s tape to make cleanup easy.

When you remove the old thermostat you’ll probably be faced with old paint. Nest has anticipated this and includes paintable white plastic wall plates, both rectangular and square, to cover this mess.

(I wrapped the four wire ends in tape to keep them clean.)

I didn’t want to go the wall plate route and instead went the extra mile to make it look nice. It also meant the install took twice as long as it needed to…

It’s not enough to just repaint the wall – you’d end up seeing a rectangle in the shape of the old thermostat in the wall texture. I first sanded down the edges of that old rectangle…

Then I bought a can of water-based wall texture and sprayed it on, making sure to cover the sanded areas framing the edge of the old thermostat.

Water-based is important – if you screw it up or overspray you can just clean it up with a wet paper towel or sponge.

You really have to spray from quite a distance – and not go crazy. Both the new and old areas should still show through whatever you end up spraying on the wall. Takes a little under an hour to dry.

Once the wall texture dried I painted the wall. This is fresh and hasn’t dried yet, hence the discoloration…

Once it had dried I realized that the hole in my wall was wider than the Nest’s base – I had to go back and add some spackle, let it dry, and repaint a small section. Only then was the hard part finally over.

If, unlike me, you decided to use the provided wall-plates, there was no hard part. You were done in 15 minutes and you whistled Dixie the whole way through.

Now you just use the provided anchors and screws to put the Nest base on the wall, just as you would with any other fixture. The included bubble level was a nice touch.

Every residential HVAC system is different, but here in Southern California the four-wire system is very common.

Red provides power, white goes to heat, yellow goes to A/C, and green controls the fan. Unlike nearly every other thermostat on the market, Nest has an internal battery and it’s able to charge itself from the low-voltage power provided on the red wire.

Just push the Nest control module onto the base, restore power to your HVAC, and Nest will power up! The first thing it’ll do is ask for your Wifi name and password. It’ll immediately download the latest firmware, reboot itself, and ask you some basic questions about your setup.

This would be a good time to clean up. All that texture overspray, paint, and sanded-off material has been waiting patiently to be thrown away…

And there we go. After downloading and installing the latest firmware, Nest is ready to start heating and cooling your home.

You can control Nest from the dial, of course, but also from a web browser, iOS device, or Android phone.

Nest will learn your heating and cooling preferences and, after a week, program itself for optimal efficiency. It can also detect when you’re not at home and set itself appropriately. I’m just scratching the surface here, but nest.com has all the particulars, so check it out for more info!

Look how classy this tiny wall in my house looks now!

Being able to climate-control my house from the comfort of my bed or couch is a pretty wild idea. Unfortunately the weather this weekend has been pretty mild so I haven’t had much use for heating or cooling, but I’m looking forward to someday turning the heat on from the comfort of my toilet.

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This exact same scenario almost happened when Tammy and I started watching season one of BSG years ago. You can’t watch just one.

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