My family has celebrated Christmas at my grandparents’ house for longer than I’ve been alive. During my childhood, it was always in the afternoon on Christmas Day. All of my aunts, uncles, and cousins on my father’s side would bring gifts and a dish-to-pass for the family meal.

We would eat together as a family, albeit scattered throughout the house because there wasn’t a table large enough for all of us. After dinner we’d open gifts one by one, always starting with the youngest in attendance, working our way up to the oldest, and repeating the process until everything was opened.

We always had a large barrel-sized cardboard cylinder in the corner of the living room that we’d use to discard the wrapping paper. When it started getting too full, one of the younger kids would have an opportunity to jump in and stomp on the paper until it was sufficiently compressed to make room for more.

As time has gone on and each individual family has grown, the day we celebrate has shifted. Sometimes it’s before Christmas and sometimes it’s after, but the tradition has always remained.

Not everyone in the family attends now. Some are too busy with work to travel or are dealing with an illness that causes them to skip a year. But there’s always the following year to have a new opportunity to join in the festivities.

I’m not sure if there are many that truly grasp how important traditions like this are. It’s easy to get caught up in the little annoyances associated with the event — the stress of coming up with a dish to bring, your child being the one that’s a bit more rambunctious than the others, the inefficient process used when handing out gifts, and so on.

But none of that really matters in the long run. When I think back at my experience of going to Christmas at grandma’s house, I think back to when I was seven or eight and received a toy basketball hoop. I think about joking around with my uncle Mark. I think about the time I spent with my cousins tinkering around with whatever toy one of us opened. I think about the people, I think about the laughs, and I think about the fun. That’s what matters.

I believe that there is value in these types of family traditions. Because each individual event contributes to the family’s story and helps keep us together. Traditions become a part of who we are.

Now that I’m one of the adults, with two kids of my own, it’s my duty to keep the traditions going as long as I can. And to try and recreate the ones that have been lost — both to honor those that came before us and to ensure my children and future grandchildren get to enjoy them, too.

Luke 2:8-14:

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, And on earth peace, good will toward men.

I pray that everyone has a wonderful Christmas this year.

➝ Source: bible.com

I always have a hard time coming up with a Christmas list to give to friends and family. That’s partially because there isn’t too much I actually want at any given time and partially because I buy most things I want throughout the year.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve been looking for some ideas of what to put on your wishlist. And aside from the obvious suggestion — Initial Charge merch — I have a handful of others that I’d like to share.

A Compact USB Charger

I have a bit of an obsession with USB chargers. There just seems to always be a new one that’s slightly smaller and with more power output than the ones I currently have.

I’m a massive fan of Anker’s USB chargers and I have a couple on my wishlist this year:

Anker 715 Charger (Nano II 65W) — it offers a single USB-C port that can provide up to 65W of power. It has foldable plugs and is significantly more compact than what you’ll get from just about any device maker. I have their slightly smaller 30W version, but with my recently acquired Framework laptop, I want something that offers more power output.

Anker 523 Charger (Nano 3, 47W) — a two-port USB-C charger that can output 45W when charging a single device or 47W when using both ports. I have the 40W version of this and absolutely love it, but the plugs on that one aren’t foldable and it obviously outputs less power.

A Great Game Controller

Video games are fun. And if you want to play video games, you should get yourself a proper controller. I own a bunch, but there are two that I recommend to everyone that asks.

Backbone One — one of those fancy retractable controllers that you slap on your phone to turn it into a handheld console. I have a few others like it, but always end up coming back to the Backbone. It’s comfortable to use, is available in a slick PlayStation variant, and they offer a carrying case. My only wish is for them to swap the d-pad and analog stick on the PlayStation Edition to match Sony’s controllers.

8BitDo Pro 2 — sometimes you just want to sit back on the couch and play a little Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 in RetroArch on your Apple TV. But if you want to make that happen, you’re going to need a Bluetooth controller. This one from 8BitDo is what you should get.

A Nostalgic Camera

I had a realization recently that I’m just not taking enough photos. How do I fix that? With a new hobby, of course. This year I’ve added the Kodak Ektar H35N to my Christmas list. It’s a super cool half frame film camera. It uses standard 35mm film, but each photo only takes up half the frame of a normal 35mm camera. This means you can get twice as many photos per roll.

I don’t expect the photos that I take with this camera to be as crisp as what I get with my iPhone, but that’s not the point. I’ll get to toy around with a nifty little gadget, explore the world of film stock, teach my kids about film photography, and capture memories along the way with a retro style.

An Excellent Wireless Charger

Who has time to connect cables to their devices to charge them? It’s so much easier to slowly slide your phone around while watching an LED, waiting for it to illuminate, indicating that you’ve found the sweet spot on your wireless charger.

You still have that experience with the Nomad Base Station, but it does feature magnets to help align iPhones with MagSafe. And you don’t have to mess about with USB cables that fall behind your nightstand because you bumped the alarm clock that was holding it in place.

The Nomad Base Station has three wireless charging coils on top and two USB ports on the rear — one A and one C — which you can use to top-off devices that don’t have wireless charging support.

And if you’re the kind of guy that has an Apple Watch. Nomad has an Apple Watch Edition of the Base Station that includes an integrated Apple Watch charger.

A Retro Gaming Handheld

Maybe you don’t want to use your phone as a handheld console. Perhaps because you’re tight on storage and just don’t have the room for all those rom files. Or maybe you feel too restricted by Apple’s asinine rules around JIT and emulators in the App Store.

If you have an iPhone and want to emulate systems beyond the PSP and PlayStation, you’ll probably start looking at dedicated gaming handhelds. I’ve been a fan of Retroid’s offerings for a couple of years and if I was buying one today, I’d end up with either the Retroid Pocket Mini or the Retroid Pocket 5.

These two devices offer nearly identical performance — although, the Retroid Pocket 5 has a bit more memory. The largest differences are the display and the physical size of the unit.

The Retroid Pocket Mini has a 3.7-inch display with a 4:3 aspect ratio and is, as the name implies, smaller than the Retroid Pocket 5. The larger of the two has a 5.5-inch display with a 16:9 aspect ratio.

I think I would lean toward the Retroid Pocket Mini. If only because the vast majority of games I want to play are from the GameCube and PlayStation 2 era where a 4:3 display would be more fitting. But I could see myself settling on the Retroid Pocket 5 since the price difference is negligible — only $20 — and the larger display could come in handy if I wanted to use it for watching video or on the off-chance I end up playing more modern games on it.

A Dedicated Music Player

The iPod Click Wheel Games Preservation Project has had the iPod on my mind a lot more lately. Phase is one of the best games of all time and that’s not a joke. As far as rhythm games go, there’s not another one that has brought me as much joy as Phase has. The ability to play with music from your own library is dope.

I have a few iPods, all purchased from Elite Obsolete Electronics. And unless you have a specific model that you’re nostalgic for, I’d recommend either the third generation iPod nano because of it’s minuscule size or the fifth generation iPod because of it’s impressive feature set and the ability to modify it for additional storage and battery capacity.

You get yourself one of these, install some Click Wheel games (Phase, seriously), setup a virtual machine to install an old version of iTunes, and sync over some music. You won’t regret it.

mb:

For a long time we used Amazon Lists primarily because (back then), Amazon had a browser extension that let you add stuff from other websites. It worked really well and happiness abounded. Then, for whatever reason, Amazon stopped supporting and removed the extension which sucked.

We tried having our Amazon list, and another list of items from other websites but that didn’t work. We also tried services like Giftster, but they all had a horrible UI, hard to add things, and were just plain bad.

I setup a WordPress.com site for us with a category for each member of the family. Whenever we think of something that we’d like to have on our Christmas list, we add a post to the site with the appropriate category.

We’ve had this setup for a handful of years now and it’s worked out quite well. I’m sure Amazon wishlists are a bit quicker to add items to, but it limits you to only including items that are sold on Amazon.

➝ Source: jarunmb.com

It’s been several years since I’ve published a gift guide on Initial Charge. But I thought it was a great time to bring it back. I’ve maintained a private wishlist site where my family and I post links to things that we want and we can all view each others’ lists. The site isn’t just for gift giving, though — I also use it throughout the year to keep a running list of things I want to purchase for myself.

I happen to have a number of items that I’m pretty excited about acquiring, though. So you can think of this as a gift guide for people who happen to share my interests.

Retroid Pocket 3+ — an excellent retro emulation handheld. I already own the Retroid Pocket 2+ and the 3, but the 3+ includes a pretty decent performance boost over the 3. It’s far from perfect, but the more powerful internals allow it to better emulate PlayStation 2, GameCube, Wii, and Nintendo 3DS games.

8bitdo Pro 2 — I love 8bitdo’s controllers and this seems like the one to get right now. I’d mostly pair it with my Retroid handheld for playing on a television, but I’d also use it with my Apple TV, MacBook Air, and Nintendo Switch.

Apple TV 4K, Wi-Fi + Ethernet — I’ve purchased every Apple TV iteration since the first generation. This one would go in the living room and the old one would be moved to the bedroom. The old bedroom one would likely get handed down to my in-laws.

20TB WD Red Pro — These are priced at $330 at the time of this writing, which is an unbelievable deal. The 8TB drives I’m currently using for media storage are nearing their capacity, if I’m going to upgrade, I’d want to go a lot bigger and this capacity offers the best price per terabyte from my preferred hard drive manufacturer.

CyberPower 1500VA UPS — My current uninterruptible power supply is maxed out in terms of power outlets. This model only adds two, but that should give me enough room for the new hardware I’m planning to add.

ThunderBay Flex 8 — This is a bit expensive, but the ThunderBay 6 I’m currently using will eventually reach capacity and I’ll have to move to something with more bays. The ThunderBay 8 only offers two more, but it also has a PCIe slot, which can be used for additional storage or accessories.

2012 Mac Mini, Quad Core — You can pick these up from OWC or eBay for under $200 at this point. I would install Ubuntu and run it as an Umbrel. And for the price, they offer pretty decent performance in a chassis that matches the rest of my server hardware.

Anker 40W, 521, Nano Pro — This is the charger I have in my laptop bag and I love it. I’d like another one to keep in the living room for more flexibility in our charging setup — we’re just using Apple’s 18W USB-C power adapter at the moment.

Ledger Nano X — I still dabble in cryptocurrencies and would like a hardware wallet for more secure storage, rather than keeping everything on an exchange. From what I’ve researched, this is the best option on the market.

I started adding a single emoji at the top of the site for special occasions earlier this year, which will typically link to a song to celebrate. I’ve decided to link to Little Town by Amy Grant for Christmas, but it was a bit of a toss up between that and the title linked Emmanuel from the same album. Truthfully, they flow so well together that you should really just listen to them back to back.

But setting that aside, I hope everyone out there has the best Christmas they can with as many friends and family members around them as possible.

➝ Source: song.link

Every year growing up, my family would get together at the grange for Thanksgiving. We’d have food, play board games, compete in two-hand-touch football, and listen to music. The music was usually played on a boombox that my family would bring and A Christmas Album by Amy Grant was in heavy rotation.

Although we don’t go to the grange anymore, I’ll still have this album on repeat for much of the day — it’s one of the best Christmas albums of all time.

➝ Source: album.link