Slice of Life on yozy//NET

Postmortem of Oral-B iO Series 8s Electric Toothbrush

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I bought this toothbrush almost exactly 4 years ago. It replaced my then 4 and a half years old Oral-B PRO 3000 toothbrush. Today, the Series 8s is dead, due to failed battery. This article is a little post-mortem, a review after the whole lifetime of the product.

Let us start with the good parts:

The toothbrush cleans teeth well.
The best feature is that the pressure sensor not only indicates when too much pressure is applied (all decent electric toothbrushes do this), but also indicates when you do not apply enough pressure.
You can customize the color of the LED and it has RGB, which is always great.

However this is where the good parts end. The main problems with the device are:

It is expensive, and so are the replacement brushes.
Its smart features are pure gimmick: the position tracking does not work and nobody needs to track their brushing frequency.
The travel pocket is way too small to actually fit the toothbrush properly.
It gunks up easily.
Too many brushing modes make the menu tedious to use.

The battery is so bad it merits its own paragraph. The toothbrush became unreliable after maybe two years of use. Randomly, in the morning it would drop charge from 100% to 0, suggesting faulty electronics. Even at its best it would not last through a 10 day trip.

Verdict

Do not buy this, and steer away from the iO line in general. Myself, I bought a newer model from the PRO series for two reasons:

The battery in my old one still work and I use it when I go visit my parents.
You can now get off-brand cheap (and ecological) brushes for the from The Humble Co.

Staying in Shape During Lockdown

Fri, 01 May 2020 15:00:00 +0200

The thing I miss the most from times before the lockdown is my Gym. After years of not being able to stick to any sport I have managed to find my thing, and that was weight lifting with few exercises that don’t change often. This allowed me to concentrate on the form and most importantly: see the progression.

Nowadays, I struggle to get motivated to move. At first I took up running but then they banned that too in normal hours. I took up Convict Conditioning again a bit, which is an interesting book, and also got recommended the darebee site. But both of these have the same issue, the progression can only really be measured in the number of repetitions or sets, and that just does not really work for me. I still do the work, because one must, but not nearly enough to keep the blood pumping.

So I took up a game I played a lot 10-15 years ago—Stepmania.

Stepmania is the open source program that is compatible with data for Dance Dance Revolution, the first game in the genre. Back in the day I was one of the first members of the DDR.SK¹ organization that promoted machine dance games in Slovakia, and organised a few tournaments. Stepmania was also base of various commercial iterations such as In The Groove or Mungyodance. The great thing about all these is that the data is compatible, so it is now possible to shove it all into one program and play.

The great thing about Stepmania is that the progression is clear: you either finished a song or not, and you have a score. The game itself is quite a bit more physical than your Sunday jog, so it’s also perfect for me.

I am unsure if I will continue playing after the confinement, but I am glad that I still have the mat and a physical activity that is not a chore.

I lost quite a bit of practice and speed but luckily it’s like biking, it eventually comes back.

Since then it was bought and merged into another org. ↩︎

System Shock

Tue, 28 Apr 2020 08:00:00 +0200

First time I played System Shock was around 1998 but I have never managed to find one button so I never finished it. Two decades later, Night Dive studios released the Enhanced Edition current hardware and has “modern” controls. I started a game, completed several levels, and then real life started interfering so I shelved the game once again.

In April of year 2020, the Dos Game Club selected System Shock as the game for the month. This time I decided to finish it.

And finish it I did.

After confined corridors, come massive halls.

After completing it I felt the same void one does after having finished a book. The story is thrilling. Watching the fates of various protagonists unfold is fascinating. The game is technologically impressive for the time with varying environments, lightning and shading pushing the 256-color graphics to the limit and dynamic soundtrack seamlessly switching tracks depending on the situation. Although clearly aged the game has managed to completely pull me in.

A very interesting technical achievement was security cameras that were rendering in-game spaces real time. At some point I wondered it it was possible to get two of the cameras display at the same time and it turns out that although it is possible, the authors tried to make this impossible. Observe:

See how the screen on the right turns into static when the one in the left comes into field of view? That’s ingenious.

I find that it still has the best kinds of puzzles. You know, actual puzzles, not some sort of dumbed down mini games, jumping puzzles or crafting. Jump scares often result in instant death so the player needs to stay alert all the time, making them even worse.

There are other features of the game I still miss in modern games, for example the possibility to take notes on the map. This has come very handy to keep track of various objects I kept lying around for later. Come to think of it, since most modern story based games are laid out as one long hallways they probably don’t need the notes.

Level design is a masterpiece too, although it is required to go back and forth, the game always opens a shortcut once a sector is cleared so it makes it easier to navigate the large space station.

Voice acting is top notch, albeit I found it distracting that the voice does not match the text description, so I ended up reading everything twice.

Can I go in there, or is it just another wall?

One thing I need to rant about is the cyberspace sections. These are unnecessarily tedious, mostly because of the transparency of the walls making it really hard to know where to go at some points. Especially for someone like me who has already hard time evaluating distances and knowing my left from right. The controls are quite wooden and combatting ICE nodes requires a dose of luck and patience more than anything else.

I like how Shodan gets progressively madder at each step you make. This is something I don’t remember from System Shock 2 but I’ll have to replay it and see. As an antagonist she is really one of the best out there.

I don't think it's me who has no hope.

System Shock has left me with more than just good feelings. I have also kept something physical: my notes I took during the playthrough, to keep track of codes and objectives. At some point the player has to find a malfunctioning relay. I have missed the data log specifying its identification number so I had to scour the engineering level and find all of the relays, then enter them into the diagnostics tool and find which one was broken. Paper and map notes were wery handy in this instance.

Since I have not kept track of the numbers given by the destroyed comptuers, I had to take a scenic route just before the ending and re-visit all of the previous locations and find all of the places where the computers were.

I went into the last room doped on every possible substance.

Due to my play style I have ended up with a ton of grenades, ammunition and healing drugs to last me for the final combat twenty times over. I wonder if it would be possible to design a game in a way to force me to not squirrel objects that much. At the same time, the laser rapier is a mighty good weapon once you have found the closest power station. The end fight was relatively easy and final cyberspace section ended surprisingly quickly.

See you on the Von Braun!

DOS Game Club Podcast Episode 39: Worms

Sat, 25 Apr 2020 12:08:26 +0200

Episode 39 of the Dos Games Club podcast is out, join Martijn, Florian, Tim, Elias and me to discuss Worms, the legendary game that started the franchise with over 20 sequels.

In this episode we also assist live to the final match of our club tournament between Florian and Tim.

DOS Game Club Podcast Episode 34: UFO: Enemy Unknown

Thu, 24 Oct 2019 22:42:11 +0200

Today, my friends at DOS Game Club released a new episode of the podcast. I was one of the guests and together with Martijn, Tyler and Matthew we sat for a long chat about an old-time classic: UFO: Enemy Unknown, published by Microprose. In North America this game is known as X-Com: UFO Defense.

This game started a long series of games in all genres and is one of the longest going series.

Enjoy!

DOS Game Club Podcast Episode 30: Blackthrone

Sat, 15 Jun 2019 08:24:56 +0200

A new episode of Dos Game Club podcast was released today.

Martijn and Florian invited Oddvar me to discuss Blackthorne, one of the early Blizzard games. This game is a “slow” platformer, similar to Flashback.

DOS Game Club Podcast Episode 25: Six Small Games

Mon, 18 Feb 2019 13:45:12 +0100

Over at the DOS Games Club we have played six small games¹ during the cold month of December. I have suggested playing UGH! and joined Florian, Martijn, Mike, Philipp and Tim on the 25^th episode.

In February we will be operating on unfortunate patients in the Life & Death.

Ugh!, Bolo Ball, Micro’s Dilemma II, Lode Runner, Alley Cat, MinerVGA ↩︎

DOS Game Club Podcast Episode 22: The Secret of Monkey Island

Thu, 25 Oct 2018 21:38:01 +0200

A new episode of Dos Game Club podcast was released today. This 22^nd instalment is about a legendary game: The Secret of Monkey Island.

I have been fortunate to be able to join Martijn, Florian, Mike, Philipp and Esko to discuss this great game during an epic 3 hour session. If you enjoy retro gaming and especially DOS games, give this podcast a try!

Every month we select a different game to play and discuss on the forums and IRC. Martijn and Florian then invite a few guests do discuss the episode and record a podcast session.

More gratuitous hate

Thu, 29 May 2014 22:21:03 +0000

This has been in Rennes for some while now. One has to wonder what this particular person’s feud with Google is to express their hate like this.

In any case, it is quite an impressive feat.

Fixed the Atom feed

Wed, 21 May 2014 04:06:00 +0000

So I have fixed the atom feed. Hopefully.

Moving to static website

Mon, 05 May 2014 21:54:00 +0000

So I have jumped on the bandwagon and decided to generate my website statically¹. For you, it basically means that the site will be a lot faster. For me, I can finally write stuff in markdown only and not worry that some web-editor will butcher it.

Also, the search field has disappeared, but I am looking for a different option. Either Google custom search or Bing. I will see.

Ciao

I am using the Middleman with a modified Bones theme ↩︎

New look

Sun, 23 Feb 2014 21:11:00 +0000

Update to a newer theme is now complete. Fonts should be nicer and faster on Apple hardware or anywhere with Helvetica Neue and Avenir installed. I have removed the web fonts as they were slowing down the site for no reason.

The mobile theme now works with Disqus. I have not figured out why it did not work in the previous one.

Code snippets are handled by highlight.js instead of the Syntax Highlighter. Code snippets also fit into their pre-defined frames and bounce on touch devices.

The “big” news is addition of my Instagram profile to the sidebar. Please go take a look, I promise not to post photos of my face or shoes. Cannot guarantee the amount of food pictures though.

I have several articles in the pipes. I will try to post more often.

Maintenance

Thu, 13 Feb 2014 11:29:15 +0000

It is 2014 and the old theme was derived from an old TwenyTen Wordpress theme. Time has come to update it to more modern technology and fix a nasty bug where Disqus would not load the mobile version on phones.

See you soon.

Publications

Wed, 03 Jul 2013 14:12:42 +0000

I have updated my biography page. I have added a link to my PRESENCE paper and citation for the T:CIAIG one.

Putting old stuff back in

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 00:10:39 +0000

I have decided to re-publish the old articles from my old Chyrp blog here. I have not got to it before as I was too lazy. Not that anybody cares but at least it will look like there is something here.

Cannot be unseen

Mon, 21 May 2012 02:07:46 +0000

On my trip to London I have stumbled upon a bridge with a curious design of the cable holding contraption.

Once seen, this cannot be unseen. Well, at least it gives an interesting picture. Would be probably better in worse weather though.