Year: 2015

Yey ! Cheers 🙂

Happy Birthday. I'm sure that there will be something in the post when I get my act together!

I need to post more !

And I have another idea for an ongoing meme too. I really enjoyed doing the Xmas December Photo Challenge last year and I think it did some good in changing up how I do posts. As in … more pictures.

Talking of pictures … I have cake.

There was a third, which was as gertlush as the other two there look. I have lots of cake here at the moment (German market visit yesterday!) but those two there will be the ones disappearing first. Homemade cake always has a certain something extra that market or shop bought cake is missing.

Oh – those words … Yep. Another birthday coming … tomorrow. I’m getting older ! Feeling older too. Tiredness is hitting but that just means I need to find a way of unlocking the energy that is within the excess baggage I’m carrying around again.

What does help with the motivation is getting smiles and hugs. People on my Facebook will have seen a picture where I caught a special little lady in a moment of sheer joy. Huge smile and it gives an idea of those bubbly chuckles I keep talking about.

I had a lovely evening last night, one of the better birthday evenings for a good few years now. Presents, a film (Bond), tasty munchies (Wagamama) and excellent company. What more could you want :-).

Bond was pretty good, although I do remember back to the old Bond films which were all about the entertainment, the toys, the corny jokes, while still keeping the spectacular and often silly action going. New Bond is far grittier, the scripts are better and they don’t descend to the level of cliche that spoiled Die Another Day. It does help that Daniel Craig is one of the best Bonds to have played the part.

Yep. Spectre is a pretty good film, way up there in the standard of Bond films. It is very brutal though, not suitable for kids (this is picking up on a discussion on the radio). There are scenes there that would give kiddies nightmares (some adults too I bet), which is not what Bond films should be about.

Oh that cake is being very tempting … but I shall resist until I hit Publish and make sure it’s on the Facebooks and the Twitters.

That gets me to hype, which is currently bridging both the film and the games. Bond is heavily hyped, as are others where you probably see more minutes of trailer and advert before you see the film than there are minutes in the film. The Star Wars film is a classic example, hopefully it will live up to the hype. Hype is a dangerous thing, it raises expectations past a point which is utterly unrealistic. I’ve enjoyed films best where I go in with no expectations at all, except to be entertained by what I’m about to see. When I saw Star Trek Nemesis, I’d read the book before and the book was fairly ok. The film, however, was an absolute travesty that killed off Star Trek until the new films came out.

There’s a lot of hype in the gaming world as well at the moment. There is a category of game called the AAA title, which are the games with most money thrown at them. You’ve probably heard about Call of Duty, Fallout 4, the Star Wars game and a bunch of others …

Call of Duty – I avoid these like the plague although I did enjoy the first CoD. It was a solid, well made single player game. The newer CoDs are all about the multiplayer, which is a format I do not enjoy.
Fallout 4 – has massive hype and I’ll enjoy watching the Hannah playthrough (linky) but … I got grabbed far quicker by the start of her Rise of the Tomb Raider playthrough (linky) which is written by the ever fantastic Rhianna Pratchett.
Star Wars Battlefront – meh. Another bad multiplayer online shooter with no depth and apparently very poor balance. Just living on the licenced setting. Try Team Fortress 2 or Planetside 2 instead. Don’t pay the EA idiot tax.

Yeah – I won’t be buying any of those games, in fact I swore off getting anything that DICE (makers of Battlefield and Battlefront) are involved in after being unable to play Battlefield 3 due to game breaking bugs. I built a computer for that ! (Ok, it was to showcase the graphics a new machine I was building anyway was going to have).

I may acquire Rise of the Tomb Raider when it comes to PC. They’ve released it on a console as an exclusive and it’s coming to other platforms later. That’s not a bad way of doing it, means the game is properly sorted out instead of being the mess that Batman Arkham Knight (another megahyped game) was on launch.

Hype comes from two different places :

People who have experienced something and who are telling everyone how awesome it is.
People who want you to buy something, it hasn’t been released but the expectations are out there.

The first is me with that German Market and the Happy Cookie Place. It deserves its hype. The other is people being blind to past performance by the people making what the hype is about. In the case of Fallout 4, it’s by a company called Bethesda who have a massive reputation but I’ve never really got on well with their games. The games are gorgeous :

That’s Skyrim from a few years ago. But they are also deeply flawed in terms of their gameplay (this matters in games above all else but is quickly forgotten under the hype), storyline and evolution of that ongoing free to explore world.

I’ll give Fallout 4 a miss, although I’ll watch the Hannah playthrough to see how it evolves. It’s telling that she’s completed Rise of the Tomb Raider already. I guess that one is going to be a 10-15 hour game, so I’m looking forward to lots of videos. The best games grab you and their story keeps you playing when you should really be going to bed before the sun comes up.

Oh – one reason I’ll keep watching the Hannah playthrough is because her commentary genuinely adds to the experience. Must play through the first Tomb Raider at some point, I’ve watched the play through twice ! And enjoyed it both times, both for story and the added commentary. (Link to Hannah-channel)

That cake is becoming irresistable now so it’s time to hit that Publish button :-).

PS The meme will be from a book called The Alphabet of the Human Heart. I see lots of trigger in there for things to write about. Cheers to little Cupid’s Gift for the gifts ! 🙂

I like fireworks. I miss them too.

Those are some from quite a few years ago now, taken at Thornbury fireworks just up the road. Actually a lot of years ago …

The 5th of November is remembered in Britain for Guy Fawkes, a revolutionary mercenary who almost succeeded in an attempt to blow up our Houses of Parliament. If I remember my history lessons right (they were from more than half my life ago!), he got taken in by a bunch of amateurish noblemen who had been thoroughly infiltrated by the spymaster of the time. The plot got them all out into the open where they could be quietly arrested. Guido was caught under the Houses, close to being able to blow them up. This was in a flour warehouse … And flour is quite flammable and explosive under the right conditions …

Yep. Plot failed, although I suspect more than a few people would like to see a contemporary equivalent. There’s nothing wrong with our system of government, except for those who sit in the house. The unelected privilege based house appears to have the voice of sanity at the moment, unlike the elected house. Well, a majority voted for the elected half.

Enough politics ! That way lies insanity …

We used to do an annual meet up with the work-ish mob (CQ, CK and BD) to let off a few hundred pounds worth of fireworks before retreating into the warm with pizza and movies. Those were fun chilled out nights and it’s a shame we don’t do them any more. Part of that is not having suitable places to let off the fireworks. That brings me to point one :

Pets and fireworks don’t mix. All that unexplained banging is really bad for the nerves. Mine too ! Ish. I can put it out of my mind immediately and possibly even look out the window for them (not really fast enough to do that). For me, it’s not as unnerving as when the car alarm decides to disgrace itself by going off mysteriously. (It happily hasn’t done that since I started turning off half of the alarm system).

But yeah – it’s a really bad time of the year for pets with all those noises going off. (This is one reason why one of our firework hosting places is off the list). It’s worse than just one night a year though, People seem to think it’s acceptable to let the fireworks off for a period of around 3 weeks around the 5th.

That’s partly policed by the supermarkets, who will stop selling the fireworks soon. There’s scary point 2 actually …

This time of year, you can buy explosives freely in the supermarkets. (They happen to go up in the sky and make pretty explosions but they’re still explosives). And we sell these to anyone, including those who cannot give any evidence that : They can read, Can follow safety instructions*, Are sane, Have any good sense. I’m going by what I see daily on the roads there. There are a huge number of morons out there.

*(Let’s be honest, you’ve read that “25 ft minimum safe distance” warning and followed it every time right ? right ?)

One of my biggest fears around this time of year is hearing a knock on the door, followed by a “TRICK OR TREAT” and shortly after that, a bang as a firework is let off under a car. Yep. I have that high/low an opinion of modern society. Perhaps that’s why I’d like to escape to somewhere with less people ?

But being around people can have its positives :

Happy Cookie Place is back and it has Happy Cookie Customers ! Yep. They’re expensive. But they taste so good (as well as being massive). There was no one there when I rocked up but by the time I’d started walking away with a bag full of cookies, there was a tidy queue there.

Yep. German Market is back, complete with lots of stalls selling touristy type stuff plus assorted munchies. There’s a Cake Place as well but their standard may have dropped somewhat. I’ll check again on Wednesday but the cakes there yesterday weren’t as good as I remember from last year.

After picking up the cookies (first stop ! VITAL!), I had a lunch of bratwurst and hot chocolate. Word of warning – be sure to ask for your deposit back on the cups. It’s a £2 deposit that I really shouldn’t have had to do a “And the deposit?” for after handing the cup back.

And then 3 (4) cds walked out of HMV with me. Yep. Got caught by a 2 for deal where I didn’t have much idea what the second would be. The cd’s are Laura Marling’s Alas, I Cannot Swim, Carly Rae Jepson with E-Mo-Tion and Iron Maiden’s latest which is a double album. I have to stop buying things now because it’s the birthday soon and it wouldn’t do to buy anything that someone else might be looking to buy me.

Did I mention cookies ?

Let me take a moment to explain how that picture got taken … My camera can talk to my phone. You can run an app on the phone that controls the camera. It means I could point the camera without having to look at its display, as the view was being replicated on the phone. So :

A dishcloth that I wish I’d ironed formed the backdrop, dangling from the front of the sofa.
The dwagons and cookies were on a plank of wood that forms my makeshift table (no room for proper table!).
Diorama posed to satisfaction (and then picture retaken as I realised that crumbs from the cookies were on the plank!)
Camera propped up on my knee (as all this was on the floor)
Phone on the floor within easy picture taking reach.

Yep. First time I’ve taken a scene like this. Perhaps I should have gone for the blackscreen backdrop as I have done in previous diorama type pics ? That’s where I put the scene on top of my subwoofer with a black PC box base behind that. I think this one would have been a bit big for that. I also like to pose the light as well, which limits where in the room I can pose it. Natural light is far better than flash light.

Did I mention I’d be checking the German Market out again soon ?

HURRAH ! Wednesday. Looking forward to it because I’ll have a little bundle of chuckly smiles along too who I suspect will encourage me to acquire more cookies. Not seen her for ages and it’s only in the last week or so where her wounded ankle has improved to the point where she can get out and about again.

Watching Bond too. Am looking forward to a really fun evening.

PS And the dwagon pic drew a comment of “Holy mother of god” from one of the Twitter people. Made my day.

I think I have that elusive thing.

A possible story idea. I don’t think I’ll dive into doing NaNoWriMo, although it would be fun to see what would happen if I did so. When I write posts like this, it’ll start from a basic idea and usually just flow into a Wall of Text. With occasional picture.

I’m curious what would happen if I shunted the writing over to story writing. I’ve thought about doing that before but didn’t actually translate much into story. I think I’m in a better place now though, after coming out from recovering from bad outsides being what dominated my thinking. It’s weird looking back at posts from even just one year ago and remembering what I was like then. And that was when the decline had been arrested and I’d started to very slowly recover.

Hell, it’s been a year and a bit now since that recovery started and I’m still not all fixed up yet. It’s getting closer … but it’s still a state of always improving, never actually fixing. And although work tends to tire out my brain to the point where I don’t really want to exert the thinking too much at home in the evening, I think writing stories would be somewhat cathartic.

You know that feeling when you’re reading a book or watching episodics on telly … where you wonder what would happen if they went further, did things different or just didn’t fall into the scifi trope of having a magic solution happen in the last 5 minutes of the episode. Where you think you could write a better story. Where you think they missed opportunities. Yeah, I get that a bit.

One of the really magic space scifi series of the last little while was Firefly …

I think my story would owe a lot of influence to that series, although I would set it in a different universe. It would be Post Diaspora Earth universe. I.e. humanity’s home would still be Earth in our Sol system but we would have spread out through the stars. Firefly has humanity jumping ship to a massive solar system with loads of planetoids. I love the series but I’m not a fan of the setting.

I’d have a setting with faster than light travel, possibly hyperspace. There’s a few examples of that :

Star Wars – has hyperspace and a magical means of space drive when not jumping between the stars. The type of drive that seems to depend on drag and other weirdness.
Star Trek – faster than light warp drive and sublight impulse. This makes a lot of sense, although it wasn’t really used much in the series or it was dealt with in an inconsistent fashion when it wasn’t just ignored for thin plot devices.
Firefly – I think this uses sublight exclusively. It takes a while for them to transit from planetoid to planetoid in that system.
Farscape – lol. Again, love the series but its means of travel made no sense whatsoever.
Andromeda – probably the king of scifi space travel. This had a slipstream drive where ships travelled rapidly across the galaxies by riding cosmic strings and then by sublight when in system.

And there are more, like David Weber’s Honorverse using gravity drives that go quick in system and go to higher dimensions for interstellar travel. They don’t explain that one all that well.

Yeah – I’d want to go with a warp drive and sublight. Gene Roddenberry was a genius for making scifi sound realistic, although a lot was sacrificed to allow it to get to our screens.

But this time, it’s not about the journey. Errrm … misquote. It’s not about how you make the journey, it’s what happens on the journey.

Interstellar mailman ? So much scifi ignores communication delay. They have a magical system where base can talk to ships many light years away, in real time. If your comms are bound to light speed like our’s are, then if you beamed your message to a neighbouring system 5 light years away, they’d get it in 5 years. That’s bad.

So my story could well be based around an interstellar mailman. One of many. They’d be contracted to move the messages from system to system. They’d file a course plan jumping through several systems and would load up with the messages that needed to be sent on. That way the messages get there so much quicker than beaming them from system to system.

That wouldn’t be all they did though. That’d be kinda boring and … it sounds like government contracting. That doesn’t pay very well.

Enter the Firefly influence …

If a ship is going from system to system, lots of people will want to move more than messages. There’s also the potential for nefarious dodgy deals to happen before moving on. Exciting things. Way more exciting things than just delivering the mail.

I’d want to go a bit further too. There’s potential for things happening on the home ship. It’d be an old battered, beat up tramp freighter (how many times have we heard that trope !) with a character of its own. But we’d want to do things off ship too.

One of the better books I’ve read for getting the feels out is one called Time Enough For Love by Robert Heinlein. That’s a series of shortish stories woven together by the central character, a protagonist of many Heinlein books called Lazarus Long. One who is so in love with life and those he comes into contact with that he just keeps on living. Several thousand years and counting. One of the more memorable parts of that book is where he goes homesteading. The intelligent mule character is adorable. Anyway yeah, one of the miniplot ideas is that our protagonist has to disappear off the grid for a while and he just happened to be carrying homesteading kits* along with the mail.

*A homesteading kit would be a wagon with all the bits needed to start off a homestead away from support from a town, Time Enough For Love sets up the concept pretty well. There’s more to it than you’d think … And the people going would need to be jack of all trades to survive without that trader/crafter support.

Curious concept. It’s bubbling away in part of my head looking for the ideas to develop into something more usable.

Actually there’s another couple of influences popped up while I took a moment or two away from keyboard … 3d printers ! Essential for that homesteading kit. Except that I think that 3d printers now are restricted to cutting nylon. The future 3d printer would do that with metal for hardier bits and pieces. And you’d have another machine for getting the metal.

Dragonsdawn by Anne McCaffrey is also a great influence. It goes several thousand years backwards from her Dragonriders of Pern series and it is a fantastic tale of setting up a colony from scratch.

So many influences. The challenge is to keep them all consistent and come up with a tale that’s truly Your’s. Or Mine.

Hopefully the tale will still be coherent by the time it escapes from my head. That’s what has happened before, I haven’t had the mental energy to go keyboard tapping and the idea fades before I do type.

Or it turns into something completely unrelated to what I started typing. Wall of Text Alarm ! I better stop there :-).

I mentioned writing the other day didn’t I ?

I feel there’s a novel or few in me wanting to get out. Tomorrow sees the start of NaNoWriMo month or National Novel Writing Month. It’s a challenge to write a 50,000 odd word novel inside a month. I have it on that list as something I want to do someday.

I have 2 modes of writing that I do normally. The first is this blog. I try for a conversational style, where I attempt to make each post a conversation between me as the writer and you as the reader. I try and anticipate the questions that you’re asking as you read and to provide answers. I attempt to keep you engaged in the post, so you come back for the next one.

I hope I do ok in that, although I don’t get much feedback on what I write. What feedback I do get is hugely appreciated. Whether it’s a like on the Facebook, a chat about what I’ve written or a “Good post” “Great post” from some very lovely people. The April Fool post got a lot of chuckles when I showed it around the office.

The other form of writing is quite different. It’s the report writing I’ll do at work. This writing is far more formal and structured. It’s Formal English far more than Conversational English. But at its heart again, I have to keep the reader engaged and I have to ensure they keep up with what I’m talking about. That means not diving immediately into the detail. It means warming up the audience before hitting them over the head with something very heavy.

Yep. Death By Powerpoint.

But yeah, I see too often where senior people have forgotten how to brief what they know to others who’s buy in they need. I have a saying I live by : “If you cannot explain something in the simplest possible language, you do not truly understand it”. Buzzwords are bad and turn off people’s attention.

The key thing is knowing what level to talk at.

I read so many books and the better science fiction books share one major narrative theme. They will have a character central to the plot which will have very little idea of what’s going on. Iain M Banks (RIP you are missed) did this multiple times in his Culture novels, where a non Culture person took up that position of reverse narrator. The character would have the situation explained to them and in doing so, the author was explaining to the reader what was going on.

Other authors like Terry Pratchett would refer to what you know of this world to make comment and humour in their writing.

That gets me back round to NaNoWriMo.

I’m not going to take part in it this month, I don’t have a coherent enough idea of a novel which I would want to write. I have several ideas for a core theme of a book but here’s what I think of them :

Post apocalyptic Earth – interesting but it’s done loads. How can I make mine believable and different ?
Space scifi – this is the story I want to write. But … how to make it interesting ? I think it would follow what I’ve been doing in Elite but … that’s a cathartic activity for me and I don’t think anyone looking in on it would be interested.
Magic fantasy world.

And a couple of other themes. How come I don’t think the space stuff would be interesting ? Firefly was a fantastic series and I think I would follow that analogue. Or there’s the legendary Blakes 7, where they are fighting a guerilla war of survival against a despotic galactic Federation. Dark Matter is an interesting world developing, where the galactic situation is dominated by corporations rather than a government.

But that’s other people’s stories. Mine should be uniquely me and in a style that I think other people would read. And then come back to read later.

I’ve just finished reading Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke. He’s an author who writes stories that could be quite interesting. Science that gets your attention. Drama that should hold the attention. However … his lecturing style gets in the way of keeping you focused on the story. Other authors lose your focus in other ways, by having very complicated things going on which you can’t keep up with.

That’s where keeping it simple is a really good lesson to remember. I’m watching Doctor Who at the moment, there’s a huge amount of backstory for that but the key to it is The Doctor, his companion and the TARDIS. And a bit of magic too. Star Trek was about the ship and the crew. Firefly was another ship and the crew with lots of magic coming in from the crime and misbehaving.

I think there are stories in me that are the equal or better of some I’ve read. But there is that factor of having a cracking beginning, a middle that holds your interest and an end that comes at the perfect time in the story. A lot of stories I read lose you in the middle or misjudge the ending. The conclusion is either rushed or it drags out too much.

Yep. No NaNoWriMo entry for me this year, although I am very curious to know what would happen if I started writing. Where would the story take me ? Would be it readable ? Could I end up being a JK ? Ha. Not likely. But I think I’d be better than even a legend like Arthur C. Clarke because I hope I’d hold the interest of the readers more than his books have done with me.

I need to read more to get more ideas. And not just fiction ! That post apocalyptic scenario idea has a protagonist and friends living on a boat, which would end up being just another character. That boat would translate across into a space situation as well. Just need to avoid getting lost in the details.

Because it should be about the story and the characters that live in that story.

I’ll have a try at it someday, although as a wise little person once said “Do … or do not. There is no try.”

Thought I’d add a bit more about the techie hunting stuff today. But it won’t all be about that. (Ed – ok, it was, will talk about writing things tomorrow maybe!)

It’s coming near sales season which means bargains to take advantage of. I know some of you reading this will be looking to replace old techie stuff with shinier, faster, newer techie stuff. So what kind of thought process do I go through when I’m looking at things like keyboards, screens or laptops ?

Let’s start with laptops because they cover the lot.

First up – ignore anything the shop points you at like Sort By Relevance, Sort By Bestseller. These are metrics invented by the shops to support them selling you the stuff that they want to sell, not what you want to buy. This is very important. You want to come away with something you will be happy with for years after. The shop is interested in throughput. If an item is clogging up the storeroom because no one wants to buy it, those will be the items that draw the biggest discounts. Try to avoid being seduced by the massive discounts, target instead what you want to buy.

I’ll add there that it is worth looking out for the big end of line discounts that clear the stock room. I’m hugely happy with the router I bought a few months ago, it has been perfect so far and I don’t have to do the unplug/plug in with my audio stuff I had to do before. That was an end of line item in Argos, a £90 router for £43. It just happened to be what I was looking for. If you can find those kinds of bargains, that’s awesome.

For all you buy, remember that it is your money and you are duty bound to spend as little of it as possible to achieve your objective : getting something shiny that you’ll be happy with for years.

Ok – laptops. What have I been looking at when scouting ?

Definitely not the spec, although I’ll come back to that later because it is still important. But not critical because the specs on offer will be fairly indistinguishable between the competition at the various price points.

Will it last ? A couple of laptops ago, I had an HP laptop. I bought that partly because the HP laptop it was replacing was bombproof. It took a lot of punishment. And there was a massive discount on the new one … (see above for warning …).

Look out for build quality. That terrible HP laptop had bad alignment on the case, where the case was distorted. This is a massive warning sign that it has been built very cheaply. That’s important because computers benefit from being built well. See later. Anyway, that HP started dying on 6 months because it ate something which slowly destroyed the processor fan. It finally carked it after just under a year and … PC World had nerfed the Sales of Goods Act warranty down to 6 months. Naughty.

Will the trackpad hold together under continued use ? Will the keys fall off ? One reason I retired my first laptop is because the keys were breaking as well as the trackpad buttons.

Most important !!! How will you be interacting with it ? That’d be the keyboard and the trackpad. Look out for odd layouts, like my Macbook Air is missing the number pad but that’s ok because it means the keys can be full size. If they’d added a number pad, it would have been awkward to type with. Tap out a few sentences on the keyboard, see how it feels. Does the activation travel and maximum travel fit with what you get on with ? I usually type something with lots of different letters. Here’s an example from when I tried a nasty one :

“I am trying out this keyboard to see what it feels like and HOLY CARP IT IS NASTY”.

Yep. Use caps too. Use that keyboard like you mean to type out an essay on it. Or is that just me with Wall of Text blog posts. Or if you’re another way inclined and want to use it for games, look for robustness again. Backlights are handy too, I miss that on my new desktop keyboard. If you are buying a separate keyboard, check the features. This one does me very well because … it’s just a keyboard. It doesn’t have the faffery that gaming keyboards have, which make it wider. This means I can plonk keyboard and flightstick on my desk side by side. Couldn’t do that with a wider one …

Trackpad – see how you get on with this as well. Where are the activation zones for clicks. One complaint with the new HP laptops was that left click was in the middle, I’m used to using bottom left of the pad for that. I would find that frustrating quickly. Also check out activation pressure and consistency. Do a few operations, including multitouch, to see how you find it. Me ? I was going through the operations to get to Display Advanced Settings, to find out the native screen resolution. There were enough operations there to check out clickiness as well as multitouch.

My last laptop was a big Acer Labs Aspire. I actually turned off multitouch on that because it basically just didn’t work and got in the way. But it’s a wonderful thing on a Macbook Air. But you are paying for that quality.

Screen ? I didn’t think to check this on Monday but check the bezel. Is the screen recessed into a bezel or is it flush fitting like on a tablet or phone ? If it’s recessed, you know where the dirt is going to go and you know how difficult it is to get out. Oh and I don’t think touchscreens are a good way to go. Think fingerprints …

I don’t think I can put off talking specs for any longer … Note that all the above is all physical stuff. The keyboard, trackpad and build quality will never be listed on the spec summary they give with the price tag. Yet these are the most important things to consider with things like laptops. If you aren’t comfortable using it, then it’s not the laptop for you.

Now for natter about the specs …

I bet a lot of people share that thought when they look at the specs. Here be dragons. And not of the cute variety …

Processor – go Intel. Avoid AMD. Intel chips run cooler. This means the machine won’t overheat when you ask it to do something strenuous. My Acer with its AMD chip couldn’t keep up playing videos because it would quickly cut its speed back so as to not cook itself. Cue jumpy, low res videos. I had a reasonably performing laptop, except when I wanted to use the performance. And then the performance would be taken away.

Processor number jargon gibberish. The better Intel chips have an i number and a generation tag. This desktop is an i5-2500K. The i5 means it’s middle of the range. Avoid i7 because you don’t get much value out of the extra money. The 2 in the 2500 means it is a 2nd generation Intel Core chip. My Macbook runs off an i5-4250U. The 4 means it is 4th generation. This is a VERY good thing for a laptop, try to avoid laptops of 3000 series and before. The 4 series is codenamed Haswell and Haswell laptops have literally double the battery life of the earlier chips. We’re now seeing 6th generation Skylake processors appear. Ask Google what the processor code means, that U in the 4250U means it’s a laptop chip that gives better battery life. The 2500K is an enthusiasts desktop chip.

Memory and storage – 3GB is enough for Windows 7 but it’s the minimum. With the drive, if you have a choice between a 250GB (ish) Solid State Device machine and a 1TB conventional machine, choose the 250GB one. EVERY TIME. SSD machines are so much faster and smoother, the drive is the major limiting factor in performance. And you can always add in an external drive if you want to store loads of movies or other things like that.

That said … gaming … This takes a lot of space on a machine. But I wouldn’t want to do any serious gaming on a laptop. It’s a bit cruel on the laptop. And they’re not really set up for gaming either, the screens are a bit small and at a bad angle.

But gaming does point to another bit of hardware – graphics. Unless you have any interest in playing fast moving graphics games on a laptop, avoid dedicated graphics … like the plague. It’s a detractor. The graphics hardware takes up valuable battery life and you won’t get much benefit from it. For ordinary stuff, including watching videos, the graphics hardware in modern processors is just fine. That said, pushing the cricket from the internet to the telly is just about the limit of what my Macbook Air seems happy to handle.

I think I’m nearing my limit for what I should post here … Time to sum up ? Look at :

Robustness – will it fall to bits
Keyboard and trackpad – can you work it ? Will it cause aggravation ?
Screen – is it clear, cleanable and consistent ? Can it keep up with rapid movement ?
Performance – is it smooth, responsive and how does it handle getting busy.
(might be tough to test in a shop unless you can stream 1080p video)
Meet the need – stick to a limit, don’t go beyond that. I didn’t need the extra processor and graphics performance of a Macbook Pro, so I saved the money.

And one last bit to close on – Research. Check out what you’re going to buy before you buy it. I wouldn’t necessarily buy from Amazon but their review area is chock full of what real people say about stuff. And I don’t believe Amazon curate out the bad reviews … Also ask Google questions. If you see a specification that you don’t understand like “why is that IPS screen more money for the same size?”, ask Google. You’ll hopefully get answers that support the “Is it worth it ?” question.

It’s your cash – be careful how you spend it !

An honest tired though.

First day back at work today after the week off and I found myself throwing myself back into it.

I think I’m mostly caught up with what’s going on now, although there’s more to do to get caught up with the situation, gotta get the work done as well as know what work there is to do.

But that said, I have a clearer picture now of some stuff we’re doing than I had before. Now we need to implement it … Normally we buy small numbers of Very Big Things. However, one of the projects I’m involved in is going to be buying a collection of Little Things. They all need to work together, so instead of doing what we did before – a requirements document to cover everything that then goes off to the contractor, we need to do something different. That requirements document will still be there, we’ll own that and it’ll be the picture of Everything. But the stuff that goes to contractors will be jigsaw puzzle pieces. We just need to make sure all the pieces make up the picture of Everything. No gaps and all fitting together nicely.

And that’s just one thing to catch up with at work.

Tired now though. But that’s because I wanted to be out of the house for a little bit longer and I had a bit of possible buying and definitely techie research to do. And then there’s the peek in HMV for Stuff.

Stuff first – I rather liked the Laura Marling album I bought the other week and if I end up spending money in HMV soon, I’ll get some more of her albums. There’s another album going for £3. Oo eck – I better get the Amazon wish list updated before birthday time … I’m also looking for blurays with San Andreas, Tomorrowland and Jurassic World being on my target list for stuff out recently.

They also have a full bluray set of James Bond films for £40 … interesting. I have a very few Bond films on dvd (Goldeneye, Casino Royale, Tomorrow Never Dies and that one with the gorgeous Sophie Marceau which I should walk across the room to check its name instead of relying on a bad memory) (It’s The World Is Not Enough). Pierce Brosnan was a pretty decent Bond, let down by some very ropey scripts. Daniel Craig is an excellent Bond supported by some fantastic scripts. Definitely looking forward to watching Spectre.

Yep. Stuff is wanted but I’m going to wait until it’s cheaper.

Other stuff ? Techie research !

The parents are on the hunt for another laptop, which means I’m scouting stuff to see what’s worth buying. Personally, I think the techie market is a great big AVOID right now. The hardware is the best it’s ever been if implemented well but the software has gone massively downhill. Windows 7 is just about acceptable, although it does far too much. Windows 8/8.1 is garbage, Windows 10 feels slightly better from what I’ve seen in the shop but an Operating System should MOST CERTAINLY NOT be spying on you. It should be serving the user, not the writer of the software. If it is doing anything other than serving the user, it is not being as efficient as it should be.

And Windows has always been a security mess since they abandoned the heady enlightened days of the microkernel.

(Malwarebytes Anti Malware aka MBAM is a godsend).
MacOS X is just hanging in there as the better system to use, however its sponsors Apple have forgotten that they should be making software for the users. I’m unimpressed with what I hear about reliability issues when putting newer software into older Mac hardware. Like OSX updates and firmware updates that have bricked machines. The software on my Macbook Air is very close to Day 1 versions and I’m quite happy with that. The vulnerable software (Firefox browser) is updated, the stuff that Just Works is kept … just working. I think the current or last (Yosemite) version of OS X is the one to stick at.

Apple have been outstanding but I do disagree with their belief that they are god.

If I need to change my own PC hardware, I’m highly likely to go back to something Linux based. That’s a tough choice because you lose compatibility. But you do regain control of how the system looks and behaves. I’d need to have a good run with it before recommending it to people less familiar with techie stuff. That’s a choice that’s hopefully a few years off, the core of this machine is still going strong.

The graphics card is slowly dying though. Since the weather turned cold here, I’ve turned my PC into a heater again.

Seriously.

An electric heater will make a room warm by wasting energy. How about if you put that energy to good use instead of wasting it ? I’ve turned on the BOINC application for the desktop again. It’s a program that takes all that unused processor time and puts it to good use. At the moment, this computer is running 1 instance of Rosetta (medical research), Pogs (science) and 2x Asteroids (sky search). And it’s doing that without impacting at all on me doing Stuff.

(That said, it would be doing Seti alien hunting research but I turn that off when doing Stuff because it can interfere).

So having the computer doing BOINC research when I’m not gaming will keep the house warm just as well as an electric heater, plus it’s Being Useful.

But … I also used to run Milkyway@Home on it (more astronomy science) but that hasn’t gone too well. All results are coming back invalid … I suspect that’s due to my dying graphics card but it could also be bad software. I’ve updated BOINC since I ran it before and that may have caused problems. That graphics card does have problems though. Massive texture corruption in Endless Legend (must have a look at that again) plus the dots that run rampant over the screen.

I may be changing back to AMD/ATI … I’ve had a couple of nVidia cards (currently using a 760) but they’re another company that push bad software on to unsuspecting users. I’ll routinely run a version or two behind due to knowing their bleeding edge software has problems.

Yep. Brave choice is a R9 380, coward’s choice is a nVidia 960. Both are about £150 which I don’t really want to spend at the moment. The card I have has problems … but it still puts Internet Spaceships on the screen.

Which is enough for now. There’s a couple more games coming soon (No Mans Sky and Deus Ex Mankind Divided) which may need more power.

Enough techie talk ! Oh wait – laptop. I was going to recommend a HP laptop but … really nasty touchpads on all of them. That’s absolutely critical. Spec is irrelevant on a laptop, they’re all pretty much the same there. If you’re laptop hunting, only look and feel at 3 things : Screen, keyboard and trackpad. Those are the bits that make the difference. Everything else is largely irrelevant.

Haha ! There’s my wisdom on laptops. Buy what you can interact with, it’s what really swung it for me with the Macbook. Lovely keyboard, excellent trackpad, great user interface. Errrr … but you pay for that and Apple have this idea that they control your machine.

And I wouldn’t run that BOINC software on a laptop because … hotness. Laptops aren’t built for running full tilt 100% of the time.

Gosh – this is a long one. I feel better for the week off, although my knees currently hate me (they don’t like the cold) and my body needs to wake itself up again. I’m pretty sure though that I made the right choice by ditching the antihistamines and the remaining bad spots are gradually healing.

Hurrah !

It’s been ages since I did a music post !

Holiday time usually means listening to as much music as possible. Summer, not so much because the cricket is on and I’m listening to the commentary. Out of season though and it’s all open season to listen to as much as possible.

(I need one of those in dwagon)

It’s letting me catch up with stuff I’ve not listened to in over a year too. I have rules for lots of things (looking for rules to avoid making unnecessary decisions is something built into my personality). For the music, I’ll switch between two playlists for picking out what albums come up next. I have an automatic playlist for “Longest Since Played”, which has the 80 songs that are … you guessed it. At the moment, those are going back to September last year … Yep. Lots of music in the library to churn through and I love it all.

The other playlist is “Least Played”, which lists those songs I haven’t listened to much. That selects from the Z end of the alphabet first and it’s picking up the J composers and artists that have only been listened to twice since I started using the Macbook for music. (That’d be almost 2 years). Only 3 days of music to listen to before that playlist gets to stuff only played 3 times. I do like variation in the music I listen to, although that does mean some of my favourite albums don’t actually get much of a listen.

What’s been playing ?

At the moment it’s Gabrielle Aplin’s new album, which is pretty good. I’ll keep getting her stuff, she’s got a pretty decent voice. I think it kinda submerges below the rest of the group in this album though, it’s not quite as strong a voice album as English Rain.

Laura Marling’s A Creature I Don’t Know was a good pick up for £3. Don’t Ask Me Why is one of a collection of lovely songs on this album. I’ll definitely go looking for more from this singer.

I’m tempted by Carly Rae Jepsen too, after hearing part of I Really Like You in an episode of Castle today. There’s a bold brashness there that makes you sit up, pay attention and start singing along. Love it. Album coming soon …

What else has been filtering through ?

Due to how I did those first listens on the Macbook, the Longest Played is going through the L albums at the moment and one of the best is by Kate Bush. It’s Lionheart, which is full of lovely fluffy soaring vocal songs like Wow.

Next up after Gabrielle Aplin is an All About Eve album, their Live and Electric at Union Chapel. I never saw them but you can tell from the albums that they were good live, led by those Julianne Regan vocals. She’s always been one of the best with a distinctive voice doing full justice to songs like Martha’s Harbour.

There’s the Lily Was Here soundtrack. I used to use this cd as a set up album. Great music with the interplay between Candy Dulfer’s saxophone and David A Stewart’s guitar, with my using the tang of that guitar to set up my speakers just so. The setting where the guitar tang just started to ring out was perfect.

Into the J’s and you have the John Williams soundtracks. I have the soundtracks for Episode 1 and the original films. The music ages far better than the films. I’m looking forward to the new Star Wars film, although I’m refusing to get on the hype bandwagon. That way leads to disappointment. Better to go in with no expectations and just enjoy the show. That’s how I went into Phantom Menace and while the fanboys reviled that film, I enjoyed it. Soundtrack for Raiders of the Lost Ark is coming up too, there’s a film that’s still a classic now.

A singer I’ve been pleasantly surprised by is Kacey Musgraves and I’ve listened to her Pageant Material and Same Trailer, Different Park albums again this week. Check out High Time.

Going back to a golden oldie and there’s George Harrison with his Let It Roll collection. Not many songs make me stop everything and listen but My Sweet Lord is definitely one of those. Another golden oldie is Bob Marley with his Legend album, Could You Be Loved ? I hope so.

Kasabian have been going through the playlist as well. Not what I usually listen to but they have a lot of character, which keeps me buying their stuff. Velociraptor has huge humour in it.

Not that kind of humour …

I do like a bit of Avril Lavigne too, may she keep making music with lots of attitude like on Let Go with songs like Mobile.

The female vocalist trend continues with Gabriella Cilmi’s Lessons to be Learned. Another good but not spectacular album. They push the song Sweet About Me way too much (bit like Moves Like Jagger), which distracts away from other great songs like Don’t Want To Go To Bed Now.

Clannad have a heap of L albums, starting with Landmarks with the unforgettable Fado. Love that song. The also did the soundtrack for the Robin Of Sherwood series with Michael Praed (Legend) as well as the Lore album. There’s a couple of good ones coming in M too with Magical Ring and Macalla. Another highly impressive voice leading this group with songs like Together We.

Katie Melua sneaks in with Pictures and there’s even a little Kings Of Leon with Only By The Night. Not too sure about Kings of Leon but that’s personal taste.

According to iTunes, I’ve managed to listen to 732 different songs so far since starting the holiday, although a good few of those (like the Gabrielle Aplin and Laura Marling) have been repeat listens. I’m missing the Cardigans. May queue up one of those albums out of order.

That’s the other way I pick out what I listen to – if I go somewhere long distance in the car I usually let it pick out random tracks from a Best Of Library playlist but I’ll sometimes pick out a few albums to listen to as well. I’m not going to London for Comic Con (maybe next time !) but if I were, I can see me picking out albums like Cardigans Super Extra Gravity or A Camp’s self titled album. And then there’s any number of old favourites like Kate Bush, newer music by The Veronicas, soothing road albums like Goldfrapp’s Seventh Tree (going on a Road To Somewhere), amazing vocals of a Tori Amos album or happy poppy albums like Mindy Gledhill’s Anchor.

Must check out Mindy Gledhill’s forthcoming album.

Later !

PS Thoughts for a couple of people – a special little lady who I hope is going to get her mobility back tomorrow 🙂 and the mom of another special lady who’s going into hospital as well tomorrow. Hope they both come out with great results.

I think the chilling out is going reasonably well.

I’m still quite sore, that comes from a body that’s bounced off a few too many cricket pitches during my playing days. Cricket is how I started off this little break actually, I managed to tune in to the test match just as it exploded into … something a lot more interesting than it had been.

That’s the thing about cricket, it can totally change in the space of a couple of balls. The first 4 days of the game between Pakistan and England had been pretty turgid stuff. Bad enough that I didn’t bother with Plan A, which was to record the day’s play (starts at 7am) and watch it time delayed on the Saturday. But suddenly our new hope, legspinner Adil Rashid, starting taking wickets. And the game suddenly turned from bore draw into a frantic potential chase for an England win. And they gave it all their effort too. Another 20 minutes batting and it may have led to an unlikely victory.

Good on the lads. There’s also the rugby still going … I have to admit, the Rugby World Cups don’t excite me that much. I’ll watch all of England games and the Six Nations, because that’s balanced rugby with sides I’m interested in following. But the world cups (football and cricket too) have too many unbalanced games where it is obvious who is going to win before the kick off and too many games I have no interest in. They’re on the telly but the sound is muted while I keep an eye on other things, like the music on the hifi and the videos/game on the PC.

Music ? Next up is the soundtrack to Star Wars (the very first film). The films aren’t exciting me as much as they used to but the music is still incredible. Ah ha ! Thumbnail pic time …

I bet you can’t have failed to notice the almighty hype that’s going at the moment for a film coming out around Xmas … I’ll see that but hype tends to turn me off most stuff. If it can’t sell itself, then is it any good ?

I’ll see the new Star Wars film but I’ll wait until closer to the date until I get my tickets. I’ll freely admit that I think that Episode 3 may have been the strongest of the lot, although Return of The Jedi is still my favourite and not just for that outfit. You know the one I mean.

Oh there’s that fanfare going … For so long, I thought the movie studio fanfare before the opening story roll was part of the Star Wars soundtrack. It’s a very strong soundtrack, one of John Williams’ best and he was a master at them. His soundtrack for Indiana Jones is very strong too and I have that on my list of things to be watched very soon. I have to keep clearing stuff on the box though.

Lots of Deep Space 9 at the moment, this is actually the first time I’ve rewatched those. It’s curious how memory works, I remember most of these episodes. It’s before Nose Job 1, which scrambled a lot of my marbles, particularly in my memory. I don’t remember things nearly as well since then. Interest level is pretty critical though and DS9 was on screens during that golden age of telly scifi. When 3 Star Trek series were running, followed by Enterprise. Stargate was in the middle of its run. Farscape was being … disgusting … and amusing. I think Firefly was having its chance too ?

We don’t see nearly as much space scifi as we used to and that’s a big shame. It’s a genre that can go anywhere and do pretty much anything. The detective serials are fairly decent but … one murder on those tends to blur into the next one. Their variation suffers.

I’ve been on the gaming too – this is a sight you really don’t want to see as an Internet Spaceship Pilot Person :

That’s the Mel and Sue, my Python after a fight with … something a little bigger. You shoulda seen the other guy. Wasn’t pretty. My ship is left there with 29% and a blown out canopy, I think I left the other guy on 10%. I maybe coulda got ‘im ? I didn’t hang around to find out. I was a few jumps away from safe harbour with a blown out cockpit and one of the game mechanics means you only have minutes to get to a hangar before all your air runs out. That picture is from when I was letting the docking computer plonk me on the outpost at the top and the air is getting a bit low in that.

Yep. I’ve been flying the internet spaceships again. I’m going to sell the Mel And Sue soon to get another Type 9 space truck. They’re horrific to fly but they make the money a bit quicker, which will get me into the biggest ship a little sooner.

I kinda miss the old Star Wars Space Pilot games too, those have just come out again on GoG.com and I will probably pick them up at some point. I loved Tie Fighter when it came out, I missed its predecessor, XWing, due to coming into PC ownership after it came out. Yep. I’ll have another look at those when they go on offer. They’re going for £6.60 at the moment on GoG.com, which is a bit much for 20 year old games. It’s great that they’re available again and packaged to run on modern machines but … wait for sales.

Sales mean you can buy more games ! Or stuff ! More stuff is good !

Erm. Maybe that should be … sales mean you can spend less. But you’re still spending, even if it’s on sale. The key is to only spend that cash on things you want or need.

I’m close to deciding to spend money on another graphics card. My current one has a problem which I think is in the hardware somewhere. Here’s an example :

See that weird dot pattern ?

That’s from iPlayer, which is unwatchable full screen because of it (I cheat, I make the window full size and zoom in so it’s full screen – no dots). The problem comes into Youtube videos but goes away when they go properly HD (the dots stay on iPlayer because BBC is a cheap ass organisation that doesn’t send proper HD over the interwebs). I see the dots in games too, sometimes it’s noticeable, most times it’s shortlived or restricted to bits of the screen that don’t matter. They may be on the hologram picture of the outpost in the Elite screenie. Endless Legend is unplayable, there’s a different texture hopping problem on that but I think it’s related.

The next graphics card may well see me jump back to the other side of the fence, to AMD. Computer stuff goes in cycles, sometimes one manufacturer is better than the others, then it flips. nVidia were strong for a while but have forgotten software quality again. That’s why I switched to ATI (now AMD) before. It’s tough to know where to go with PC stuff. Apple were amazing but they’ve forgotten the Software Is For Users since RIP Steve Jobs. Microsoft are now … weird. I’m not too sure what I’ll do when this PC expires and I’m definitely not letting Apple update any software on my Macbook Air. The new stuff isn’t as compatible as it should be. This is part of a computer industry theme of making new software incompatible with older hardware. Boo hiss to that.

Anyway, aside from that – I’ve turned the BOINC science sums program back on again. That has the processor and graphics card going full power, which keeps the room warm. The seasons have turned here and it’s suddenly got a lot colder. Almost Xmas and … a) the Happy Cookie Place appearing with the German Market (can you tell that I’m looking forward to that ?) and b) Mini Eggs are available again after Xmas.

I do like my Mini Eggs.

I think I’ve rambled on a bit too much though. Got a few things to be looking forward to :

I think I’m a bit healthier. The damaged parts of me are I think improving very slowly. Still never going away though. My right arm is still a mess though. I need to leave the bad bits alone so they have a chance to heal. They’re steadily getting more sturdy though.

I think ditching the hayfever tablets has had a positive and negative effect. I think they were helping my outsides but … I’m pretty sure the side effects were doing damage. One of those is sleeplessness and I’m still figuring out how to go to sleep again. Part of the sleeplessness is down to the itch/scratch/itchmore fact of life.

That was probably too much info ?

Managed to avoid World of Warships, I was tempted by that one. I even have it installed. However, there’s a massive grind involved with the Wargaming.net games and … they’re based around repetitive matches that last around 15 minutes each. There’s a grind in Elite but that you set your own story for that grind. One day it could be trading, one day combat, the next few weeks setting off to explore. You choose your path, the path is not dominated by that repetitive match framework.

More cricket starts on Thursday, which means tomorrow could well be an escape the house day.

I dunno. I’m feeling quite happily chilled out at the moment, although it would be great to :
Catch up with one person in particular (I think not though cos she’s still in healing mode)
See more sunshine (will Blighty’s weather cooperate ?)
Fill up on snacks again …

Oh and there’s a couple of Comic Cons next weekend too at London and Cardiff. I have to admit, I’m sketchy about doing another London Comic Con. I’m curious about the NinaSerina hairdo and whether that new fashion for brightly coloured hair dyes works as well in person as it does on screen. London is a very long day though. It’s 2 hours car, 1 hour underground and lots of walking around that. Perhaps with company ? Cardiff is closer.

Feeling a bit less tired too. May that continue to improve, this week is supposed to be about the recharging of the batteries after all.

Ohh – big yawn. Time for more sleep. Soon. I can’t remember the last time I went to bed before 11.30, let alone before 10pm. Not even on an early on the road day. If I did go to bed at that time, I wouldn’t get sleep, although I may well be yawning my head off.

Weird right ? Yawn but no sleep. Brain hates me sometimes. I think Brain had a lot it wanted to get out too. It does like to converse with people, even if it’s just over the medium of a post here.

Quite !