September, 2021 - Sleepypete's Pillow

Upgrades and adventures …

September 25, 2021

10:51 am

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deus ex, gaming, internet spaceship, picture

Hello everyone,

I thought I’d been back to posting more ! Oh well. Been a bit distracted by seeing what the new graphics card can do and going back to Deus Ex Mankind Divided. Prague has got prettier …

Game screenshot. Deus Ex Mankind Divided. We're looking down a city street with high sided buildings on either side. The buildings have railed balconies looking out over adverts on the lower walls. A Police van is on the left with a few other vehicles parked. In the distance is a pedestrian bridge with a person looking out from the centre. They are framed in the centre of a sharply triangular roof of the distant train station. — Prague by day

I’ve never been to Prague so I don’t know how real the map of the city we have in game is or how it compares to the real thing but … the architecture they show off in the game is super pretty. The police get a bit of a drubbing in comparison but they’re a hostage to the increasing rhetoric the game has about prejudice against augmented people.

I’ve taken the opportunity with the new graphics card to turn the pretty options up to maximum (with two exceptions …) So with the not long ago rained level of water on the tarmac, there are all sorts of amazing reflection and even better lighting.

Game screenshot. Deus Ex Mankind Divided. We're inside a building. 3 people are dancing in the background, with a DJ dancing away behind a mixer desk festooned with switches and sliders. A 5th person is leaning on the mixer desk. The walls in the background are covered in graffiti and we see the blue lines of light projected on the wall behind and the mixer desk. — 5 Ravers raving ?

This is one of the side quests where you’re investigating a drug that kills augmented people. Side quests in these games usually involve getting loot and experience which makes your character more powerful in the long run. I’m playing a permadeath run where if my character dies, it tags the save game file so that it can’t be opened again. I’ll get all but 1 remaining achievement for the main game in this run, the bank robbery mission lets you save your boss later but you can’t do that and the mission for the achievement I’m missing.

It’s always good being back in these games. Instead of being all guns blazing, you can tackle the game in super stealth mode, slipping through unnoticed and leaving no trace. (Which gets you bonus experience as well). It’s possible to go all the way through the game without firing a shot, although it’s much easier to just knock people out so they don’t raise the alarm while you’re grabbing their stuff.

There are issues though … I had a false start where the game was crashing quickly when I had all of the graphics turned up to maximum. Here goes – search engine optimisation bit :

If Deus Ex Mankind Divided is crashing your graphics card driver, turn off the MSAA and VSync. The MSAA is an Anti-aliasing technique that smooths out any jagged lines and VSync stops the image tearing as you move around. Since turning those off, I’ve only had one crash to desktop during this playthrough, which I’ll put down to the game being slightly less robust than the first Adam Jensen game.

In terms of what’ll come next after Deus Ex Mankind Divided, I have a couple of options.

It’s highly likely to be Mass Effect Andromeda, as I like Sara Ryder as a character and it’ll let me push those graphics options up to maximum as well. This one can be a really pretty game although there is literally too much you need to do in a single playthrough.

The Outer Worlds is another one that has more to give than I’ve seen before … I bounced off this game though without finishing it. Got bored, didn’t like the characters except for Parvati.

Control is a more recent one that has a lot of new graphics techniques that have come to the new cards. But … I look at it and then back to Deus Ex MD and the older game is just a far pretty game compared to Control’s drab environments and repeated enemies. Yep, Control has some incredibly daft full motion video flavour stuff around its story but … while I own it courtesy of Humblebundle (didn’t buy it, just did the old sub), I have no interest in playing it.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking down on the front of our ship from slightly above, as she has her stern to a black hole. We see the black hole as a globe of clustered stars, with a clear opening in the centre, like an eye. A cloud is lensed around that spherical not-object in the centre. — Engines to maximum

This was me checking out the Tartarus black hole and having the happy sight that black holes, were indeed not broken in the latest expansion to the game. I’d visited another one and didn’t have all the lovely lensing that you see in the picture there, where the extreme gravity bends the light in wonderful and weird ways. You don’t get the full splendour of it from the static shot, when you’re moving around the black holes you get the stars in the background dancing around.

I’m still on and off in Elite. It’s a sad case where the game is perfectly playable now, although frame rates are really bad when you get close to the surface. The performance is far better since my new card arrived but it’s the 5th best nVidia card you can buy right now. It should be good. However I know that the performance will drop off again when I get back to the populated areas … as that’s what people have been reporting.

It’s gone to a “we’re not angry, we’re just incredibly disappointed”. The latest attempt at a fix came out on Thursday and it apparently brought a bunch of fixes with the logic that runs missions and other things in the game but … it’s done nothing to fix the graphical bugs. Those are the ones that cause the really bad frame rates that make it dangerous to fly low level, the ones that cause massive pop in of terrain* and the one that really frustrates me, the massive change in lighting as you near the surface of planets which turns Pretty And Interesting Screenshot into either bleached out white or everything’s lost in the dark.

*Terrain popup is where you’re flying towards a mountain range or a cliff and what you see of the ground keeps rising in front of you. It’s where you thought you were heading just above the crest of a cliff but instead, more ground pops up and you’re heading for the cliff.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're landed on a dark moon, we're just lit up by a dim sun off to right of shot. Our pilot is centre bottom looking at the camera in a white flightsuit. The purple bodied buggy is just behind and our pink spaceship is landed in the distance behind them. Over to the left, a dark grey planetoid is on the horizon. Behind all that at centre top is one of the neon green gas giants, we can just see the planet's rings. — Camping at Abeonas Blessing

It’s still a pretty game though and the Kamd site is giving me some tasty waypoints to check out, although not all of those are actually translating to the features still being available to look at in the game. I’m also using my own rules to find nice places to stop at. I’ll be looking for ringed gas giants with moons orbiting them that you can land on. Planets you can land on with thin atmospheres are a particular favourite for stopping at. But it’s mostly a question of whether I can set up a pretty screenshot with something interesting to look at.

Oh and they’re going on to Instagram as well now. The world needs more pretty pictures to look at.

I am suffering a little though … My dodgy right arm has been complaining again both from the shoulder end and the wrist is giving me the messages as well on a “be careful” level rather than the actual real pain level. It’s one of those cases where the pain signals I get from it are ignorable without painkiller support but it’s a warning that if I keep going with the piloting and the spy games, I’ll have trouble.

You know what that means …. less game more book !

I think that’s enough for today.

PC upgrades are working nicely – temperatures are well under control, the graphics are pretty and I’ve been enjoying visiting an old friend again.

Game screenshot. Deus Ex Mankind Divided. We're standing in front of a shop area. The lighting is subdued but there are a few brighter point light sources dotted around, plus a sigh above the entrance that spells out "Entity" with an arrow in those dot lights again. A masked bodyguard stands outside the entrance. — Shop !

Yep. Visited Entity again. She isn’t in the game very much, with her appearance being limited to a shop in a location you only travel through once. I adore the character though. She doesn’t have much to say but she’s fun and very realistic in what her situation is. She’s in the ghetto because she couldn’t do her old job any more and she knows that it could either be running the shop or being in a brothel. It gives her a flirty attitude which also reflects the “need money by any means in order to live” situation.

I like the character, she’s a fun addition.

Stay safe everyone, be well.

Thinking PC market again …

by Sleepypete

September 16, 2021

9:50 pm

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internet spaceship

Every so often, the thought hits me that I need to be checking out the PC market again to see what’s available and how much it would be. I don’t think I’ve done that for a little while, so here goes !

Picture. A brown and white cat is sitting on a computer. The caption is "I had to rebutt your computer." — Indeed

I’ve just done some overdue upgrades to Meltdown, my desktop, and they’ve turned out pretty good. Tuesday saw a rather traumatic upgrading of the cpu cooler from the cheap stock one to a top end air cooler. More on that in a bit although I did write something on the results the other day. I also upgraded the data hard drive from 1.5TB to 3TB and did the copy overnight, so I now have 1.2TB available on that drive up from 150GB.

Yesterday saw a new graphics card arrive, a 3060Ti. Graphics cards are still very pricey but I spotted a good enough deal when I was finishing up my lunch break on Tuesday. So that went in yesterday and there was a little shakedown run in Elite happening.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at the rear right of our pink spaceship as we're parked on the edge of an impact crater on a dusty orange moon. The little buggy is behind and to the right. — Before the upgrade

That’s before changes happened …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking down on our pink spaceship at the rear right quarter again. The picture is very similar to the last, except a little around to anti-clockwise. There is no buggy this time. — Any difference ?

One thing you always end up doing when doing upgrades is think : Was it worth it ? Did it improve pictures ? I’m not so sure in Elite to be honest. I’ve turned the detail up much higher so the shadows and textures should be much sharper and it’s creating the image at 1.5x what my display can do which has been making the lines look better. The landing I did yesterday was much smoother than it has been before but the real test there will be when I get back to a planetary base … that’s not going to happen for months on my current course :-D.

So. PC building ? The first thing I always say is that if you’re confident enough to pick your own bits and put them together, always do that. Pre-built PCs always tend to come with compromises that bite later. Like shaving £20-£30 off the price by putting in a substandard power supply. If you’re running a system like Meltdown is now, anything less than a 600W power supply (mine is 750W) will start getting strained. If it’s not a brand named supply with protections built in, it WILL damage components when it WILL stop working. My previous desktop, Pumpkin, had a power supply fail (it was in service for 8 years, so that’s ok) but it happily didn’t break anything.

It’s worth sacrificing something like the cpu down a step or two in order to get the foundations right. Yes. I said that :-D. And I meant it too. Graphics is a bit more of a thing there though. Previously, when cards were £200, I’d get that certain price point. Lower would mean losing too much performance, higher was too expensive. That’s out of the window these days and you’re lucky to find graphics cards, let alone having them at an acceptable price.

The second thing I’ll be saying about PC building at the moment is – Don’t. The supply situation has been daft for almost a year now. It’s gone to the point where you have to ignore that advice about pre-builds because the vendor builders have better access to the parts.

So … foundations. I learned something with Meltdown … don’t buy a Bitfenix case (build quality). Case first as that’s what everything goes into. Bigger is better because that means more access and you’ll probably hide it somewhere out of the way. Budget £50 for a case but … you go for your preference because it’s something where looks count, just make sure it’s got room for what you want. Drive bays are irrelevant now as it’s ok to go to dvd or bluray drives that you plug in. You’ll want front panel access for USB sockets though so you can plug in the drives.

Processor and board drive a lot of the build. I’ve been impressed with my AMD Ryzen 5 3600. It’s a good processor. I was about to say that AMD’s Ryzen 5 5600G was a good buy here but it’s out of stock (oh well 😀 ). It’s a bit expensive at £240 but it does come with graphics hardware inside which is important in these days of scarce graphics cards.

This goes in a motherboard and the cheapest suitable X570 (the processor expects certain chipsets of which X570 is one) board is an Asrock at £160. This is an example of being sure what you’re getting, there are a couple of cheaper MSI boards but they don’t have a graphics output. Oops.

Memory goes in pairs and the thing to look for is the telltale “DDR4-3600 support”. The DDR stands for Double Data Rate and the code says how fast it can push the data out. Faster is better … There’s a certain break point though. When I built Meltdown, the advice was that 3200 was good enough, lower was bad. I went for a future proofed 32GB on Meltdown. 32GB of DDR4-3200 is £140 from Crucial (cheaper available but I recognise and trust Crucial) or £180 for 32GB of DDR-3600 from Kingston, as per what’s in Meltdown. One trick here is that you need to buy the memory in pairs as the systems are designed to take in data from both sticks of memory at the same time.

We need a cooler to go on top and I always go for Big Coolers. The idea is that they give better performance and because they’re massive, the fans are barely turning so they’re very quiet. I can barely hear Meltdown’s coolers at the moment. Crikey, looks like they’ve gone up … I have a Coolermaster MA610P and the nearest looking equivalent I can see on Da Vendor Site is the MA620M at £90. I didn’t pay that much 2 years ago. Budget £50 for a cooler and always remember that bigger is way better because a bigger fan pushes way more cooling air with less noise.

Water cooling ? Don’t do it. It has advantages but it also has huge potential of mixing Water and Electronics, which never ends well. You also need fans to get rid of the heat anyway, I just don’t see the benefit of it in the domestic environment.

We need a power supply to drive all that and I’ve been happy with the Corsair supplies I’ve been using for many years. You don’t need modular (you plug in the power cords separately) so you can save cash there. A 750W supply from Corsair starts at £65. Shaving £20 off that for the no-name brands is a false economy.

Graphics is the really frustrating thing at the moment … Between covid hitting manufacturing and cryptominers and scalpers gobbling up the supply, it’s been really tough to acquire a new graphics card. My 3060Ti was an opportunity buy at £470 and the cheapest one at Overclockers is currently £650 or £670 for the one in stock where I bought mine, which was Scan. Which card ? Much of a muchness at the moment but I wouldn’t go beyond the 3060 or 3060Ti cards, or the equivalent from AMD. However, going for a processor with graphics built in means it isn’t crucial that you have a graphics card.

Rounding out the thing is the things you put the data on …

You want two hard discs to run a Windows PC. You need a Solid State Device drive for Windows and hard disc heavy applications. They’re lightning fast at finding the data on the disc because there are no mechanical moving parts involved. I’ve been using Crucial’s SSDs for years and I think the one to go for here would be the 1TB NVME P2 drive at £90. The “NVME” part is important because it means faster access. Numpty here didn’t know that when I built Meltdown, so I have a slower one. A keyword here is “M2”, as these fit into a slot on the motherboard and can go faster. There’s a 500GB drive for £60, that’s the size of the one in Meltdown.

But … speed costs money which is why you need a data drive as well, especially if you’re gaming. When I acquire Horizon Zero Dawn, that’ll take up 100GB of space … Some games would go on the SSD though if they’re cursed with slow loading times (Battletech had to go on my SSD) but most of the time, you’re ok with a big normal hard drive. These are the classic spinning platters things with a reader arm that finds the data. It takes time for the arm to move around, which is why these drives are sloooow. Looks like my “new” drive is still on the market. It’s the Toshiba HDWD130 3TB drive available for £60 now. The keyword here is “7200rpm” as these pull the data off faster than the normal 5400rpm drives can.

And that’s the lot ! You need a bit more to build the PC. Windows 10 costs £100 at the moment for the OEM box. You will need a keyboard and mouse as well, these are very much personal preference. Oh and a monitor so you can see the shiny pictures. The keyword to look for in monitors is “IPS” or In-Plane Switching and it gives you far better picture quality and viewing angles. If you’re off the straight viewing angles on other screens, the filtering starts to have a massive effect. IPS is mostly immune to that.

Oh, speakers as well. Monitors tend to have speakers but they’re really, really bad. Get some powered speakers for your ears.

All the bits pretty much go together as It Can Only Fit In This Hole type things but it pays to read the Stuff through before putting everything together. Things like memory being best in some of the slots and working less well in others. And it’s definitely a Very Good Idea to test fit everything first.

Last bit of advice – electronics are less susceptible now to shocks but it’s very wise to earth everything before opening bags. What I’ll do is install the power supply in the case first, plug it in and very definitely leave it turned off … at the wall. Our UK 3 pin sockets give an earth connection through and with the power supply earthed, it earths the case. You then open the bags when they’re in contact with the case and make sure you have something fleshy (arms will do) in contact with the case as well. Everything’s earthed, no sparks should happen.

Woolly jumpers are not advised :-D.

I think that’s it for me for today. PC building isn’t scary but it definitely pays to research with sites like Tomshardware to see what the optimal bits are going to be. Bear in mind whether they’re trying to sell you something too.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our spaceship is parked on a desolate planet. The sun can be seen a little above the horizon to the left of shot. A thin band of a greenish atmosphere can be seen. The buggy is to the right of shot and our pilot is standing on a little rise to the left. — Sunset campsite

Good night everyone;

Picture. Meme. On the left is a computer monitor with indistinct white text on the classic blue screen of death. The back of a chair is to the right with two black cats looking over the edge, you can just see their eyes. They look worried. The caption is "Dunno what happnd. We dint touch it" — Oops

Hope nothing breaks. (Although I had Chrome crashing earlier while I was editing this post while a Tashnarr stream was on in another Chrome window). Stay safe, be well !

Trauma but Chill

by Sleepypete

September 14, 2021

9:13 pm

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computer, geeky, internet spaceship, picture

Hello everyone,

I managed to get an opportunity buy in at lunchtime today … There I was, finished with the usual Twit/book scan and there’s a little bit of time left before switching the work brain back on again. And one of the vendors has a 3060Ti card for £470. They didn’t last long, disappearing within about 10 minutes … but I’ve got one coming tomorrow. £470 is more than double what I thought was an acceptable price for a graphics card 2 years ago but things have changed there. I’m hoping for a good few years out of this one.

Picture. A cute green pocket dragon is standing on a red button labelled "PANIC". His forepaws are on the button, his back paws are behind and in the air. His mouth is open in alarm. — Don’t panic !

The picture is from someone else but the Pocket Dragons copyright has always belonged to Real Musgrave and co so that’s who I always credit when I nab a Pocket Dragon picture.

Anyway … upgrades have happened today in preparation for the graphics card arriving. I’ve had a couple of components for a good long while but have held off on fitting them for a few reasons. I’d always been able to get by on hard disc space with the 1.5TB drive that was in there before. It’s split 1TB for a data drive that has my games and more on it and 500GB for what got used for video creation. The new drive that’s gone in is a 3TB drive, so I’ll be able to fit in more than double the space for the games drive.

This is kinda important when being able to go for the newer, flashier games because they take up a huge amount more space … I’ve had to manage how much they take up by uninstalling a few as I go for different games. One I’ve had my eye on for a while is Horizon Zero Dawn, a game set in a future with a mix of bows and arrows and machine animals. It’s a fantastic game … and Meltdown hasn’t had the graphical power to handle it until the 3060Ti comes. But it also takes up 100GB on the hard disc which is a lot.

Meltdown is the name of the PC by the way, after it was being rather too hot when it was built on what felt like the hottest day of 2019. And it was getting pretty toasty … This was the situation in February this year when it had been running science sums for a while.

Screenshot. The box is titled "Core Temp" and below is "AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core" followed by 3599MHz (100x36.0). There are 6 full bars underneath of varying colour from yellow to violet. A temperature of 88 degrees C is displayed. — Toasty

That was getting a bit too warm and I was getting concerned enough to stop the machine running the Asteroids at Home software which for some reason I haven’t figured out, makes the processor 10 degrees C hotter than the other science sums. 88 degrees C is getting close to the thermal limits and it’s one reason why I stop the machine doing sums over the summer. I don’t need that kind of heat in the room.

Anyway, that’s with the stock cooler that comes with the processor. How about an upgrade ?

Screenshot as before. The box is titled "Core Temp" and below is "AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core" followed by 3599MHz (100x36.0). There are 6 empty bars underneath. A temperature of 33 degrees C is displayed. — What name now for Meltdown ?

The new cooler that’s gone in is a Coolermaster MA610P. It’s a hefty lump, almost too big for my case and it comes with a pair of fans blowing air through it. 33 degrees C for an idle temperature is really good. It’s around 20-25 degrees cooler than the stock cooler was on idle. I haven’t worked the system hard much yet. Not feeling like gaming this evening so I’m watching FuzzyFreaks play Deathloop (Twitch Link stream’s finishing now though). Back to reading after I publish this post. I did do a quick test though :

I have to say here that the AMD processor isn’t as clever with showing temperatures as the Intel processors. I’m currently on a chip that has 2 compute units, each with 3 cores within that can run 2 threads each. Whereas the Intel processors show you the temperature on each core, the AMD processor only shows one temperature for the whole chip. It’s not a big difference but the Intel way would tell you if one part of the chip was running hotter than the rest, which would tell you perhaps if the thermal paste was missing. (Thermal paste connects the chip to the cooler)

That 52 degrees C temperature is from Climateprediction’s set of sums. They have a nice long deadline on their sums, the rest of the sums people only give a week or two to get results back, so when you download the work you’re kind of obliged to send it back. That temperature will probably go up to 60 ish with Asteroids at Home. But that’s a test for another day.

One thing the graphics card change will do is let me turn the graphics options up again … Shinier pictures !

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our diamond shaped ship is silhouetted, with a bright white neutron star hidden behind it. We see the streamers from the star going up and left and down and right. In the background, a sea of stars with a mottled greenish with orange clouding. — Ride the light

There we go. Searching for Pixels, visiting a nebula with a neutron star at the centre. Another stop on the way to the Core regions where the stars like to come out to play.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. It's night time on a planet. The flat outline of our pink spaceship can be seen on a landing pad to the lower left. Spires can be seen above and behind to the left. Top right, we see a reddish planet with lovely brown rings around it.. — Stopping at Sacaqawae

Nice random assignment of landing pad there with the 07. That’s become text code for a salute around the internet. Picture the o as someone’s head the the 7 being an arm bent in salute. People like the symbology so if I get given pad o7, I’ll usually take a screenshot opportunity. This is one of the planetary bases between our bit of space and the Colonia region, which is 21,000 light years away and a bit West of the galactic core.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our ship can be dimly seen, with her lights illuminating small parts of a pink hull. Behind and to the left is a circle of a planet with part of a ring system visible. The planet is an odd black in the centre with a light blue circle near the edge tending to white at the outside. — No idea what’s happening there!

As the caption says, I have no idea what’s going on here :-). I think it might well be another of the lighting bugs that are still in the game. One of those times where you see something odd so you stop and take a picture.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our pink diamond shaped ship is on a rough landing pad at the bottom centre of the picture. The terrain is a light grey/orange. Hills rise in the distance behind the base. In the distance, before the hills, are a set of greenhouse type complexes. We're in the day time and the shadow is on our side of the ship. — Is there tea over there ?

This is where I stopped in this particular session. It wasn’t a main base but one of the additional settlements that have popped up with the Odyssey expansion. It’s good to see a bit more variation coming in. I think this was a Biological site with the buildings in the distance there being greenhouses. Perhaps they were growing tea for the local bases. Or coffee. Coffee is life.

I think that’s it for me for tonight, struggling to put the new cooler in, taking it out to connect the fans, putting it back in again has wiped me out. The thing gave me a scare because I dropped it but all seems good still. It’ll be good to be able to turn the graphics options up with the internet spaceships. I’ve been on a hybrid of medium and high settings, dialing it back from the Ultra that it was on before Odyssey. There will still be frame rate issues in places but the new card has around 4 times the parallel processing capacity of the last one and over double the memory. That means it can handle more complex environments and the parallel processing all goes towards creating the images.

Stay safe everyone, be well.

Taps screen – is this on ?

by Sleepypete

September 8, 2021

11:01 pm

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Hello everyone,

It’s been a while since the last post ! I’ve had a couple of weeks away with work up in Scotland. Somewhere pretty :

Photograph. We're looking out to sea, there is a pebbly beach in front of us. The sun is high in the sky and reflecting off calm waters. A small triangle of a sailboat is near the horizon. There are a couple of occasional clouds visible. — No one prepared me for this

The usual rule applies with work related stuff, I don’t say what I work on here or what it’s about. Which also means being careful where the camera is allowed to point cos when it’s on the internet, there’s no control over it whatsoever. I’ve got a couple of pictures with features that would localise where I was to very little margin of error and from there, you just align it with the dates and you get what I was working on and who I work for.

Always have to be careful with that kind of thing because it can attract attention from people you don’t want attention from.

Suffice to say though, great bunch of people up there for the fortnight. Enjoyed it, got stuff done, learned new things. And it was incredibly sunny too ! We were really lucky to have such lovely benign conditions for our testing.

Oh ! I also injured my knee right at the start, twisting it as I was getting into my seat on the plane up. And then I did 80k steps on it over the fortnight. That’s down to an emergency buy of a knee support and being ultra careful not to aggravate it. I had visions of the knee snapping out sideways if I put too much power through it or if I landed on the leg the wrong way.

Almost better now though. It was good to be out and about though.

I did nearly post while I was out there, even going as far as copying over some Elite screenshots to the laptop. It was definitely a case of throwing everything into the daytime stuff though, not leaving much energy over for the evenings.

(Looks at last post) Erm, yep. Been travelling since that last post there …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. On the left, is a pin sized bright white star, throwing off curly streamers above and below. Our diamond shaped ship is on the right, hull part lit and part in shadow. — Basking in starlight

It’s always curious seeing new things too. Like comparing what I have in the internet spaceship to what we have in reality. I have a pretty decent control thingy now in the X52 Pro. Could be better, could be worse. (It’s a bit too sensitive around the middle due to game settings I can’t influence). It’s things like I have full 6 axis control in the spaceship. That’s pitch, roll and yaw that rotate you around the 3 axes. And a throttle for forward and back plus an up, down, left and right thing for translating around the 3 axes. So 6 axis – 3 see you turning in place, 3 see you moving around. The spaceship doesn’t interact with its environment as atmospherics are minimal in the game, although you do have to fight gravity.

Think of a car though and you don’t go up or down and you’re constrained by where the wheels want to go. An aircraft has to keep moving forward to make lift or it falls out of the sky. Unless it’s a special one like the Harrier or F35 Lightning II that can do Vertical Landing. (Or helicopters). Sea side stuff saw me around boats, which have their own special way of interacting with the environment to make them move around.

I still want to do that thing where I move away from the house and on to a boat. Lots of work to do on the house before I can even contemplate that though.

That’s one thing about the away trip, it forced me out of what feels like it’s become a comfort zone into a far more active mode. And I enjoyed that, partly due to a sense that we were getting stuff done. I’ve gone right back into that comfort zone since coming back though and need to break out of it again. Cos, you know, running low on snacks.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our pink spaceship is landed on a very bleached white planet. Our purple buggy is parked in front, with my pilot standing in front of both. Everything is pointing to the right. In the background, we can see half a neon green banded with brown planet. It's just peeping above the horizon. — Mint Choc ahoy !

The voyage of the Searching For Pixels continues, looking for the special sights around the galaxy to see if there’s been much change since the Odyssey expansion. That’s one of the ultra rare glowing green gas giants, with this one being the Viridian Dreams system. One sad thing about this picture is that as I was descending from orbit, the planet was a gorgeous sapphire blue. That would have made for an amazing contrast. Sadly though, when I got much closer to the ground, the Odyssey graphics took over and bleached out the planet. Oh well. It does still make a nice piccy though doesn’t it ?

I got to another one of these as well later, which I’ll pop into a future post. It’s actually where I am at the moment and there’s a few more screenies to come first.

Oh, one casualty of the fortnight is one of the hard discs in Meltdown. It’s the ancient 250GB conventional drive that’s been grimly hanging on for the last couple of years. I turned Meltdown back on when I came back on the middle Friday to have a surprise of “it’s been a while, no Windows yet?” and it’s checking the drive for errors. I guess it probably couldn’t handle that time of not spinning and when the time came to reactivate, it couldn’t spin up. It’s no real loss, I’d pulled the data off a while ago because I knew the drive was failing. I do need to transplant in a new 3GB drive though.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We see our spaceship from underneath. We're looking at the gently curving horizon of a pinkish planet, with a thin atmosphere at that horizon. The sun is at the top centre. — Pixels on approach

Looks pretty, this was checking out a planet in the Conflux area. It’s a few thousand light years out and there are some abandoned settlements here.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our pilot is standing at the lower right, outside an airlock beyond which are corridors of a planetary base with a couple of dome like constructions behind. Our buggy is to the left by a gate and the spaceship is further off and behind. The planet surface varies between green and rusty red. — Anyone home ?

Now that we can walk around, I had to check. Nobody home this time and the doors were locked. I wonder if they left any tea or biscuits ?

I need to go shopping real soon. I’m running low on biscuits !

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our pink spaceship is lower centre, pointing left. To the left side, there is a red orange nebula that looks a bit like spread wings. Under or behind our ship are a set of very fine black rings with the occasional white ring stripe. In the distance to the right is a dark blue planet with tight white rings. — They put a ring on this one I think they liked it

I think that’s it for screenshots for tonight. I need to post more and catch up !

Good couple of weeks away. There’s a few completely unconnected things that were bubbling up in the mind too about things that have been happening in the world. Like seeing the racism feature around the cricket. There’s an increasing problem in the English game with racism. Yorkshire are getting the headlines at the moment but it’s wider than that. People of Colour aren’t getting the opportunities at the higher levels of the game that they used to. We need them in the game. Personally, I love cricket and want more people to enjoy the game, which means getting the opportunities to play it at the level they’ll enjoy and succeed at.

It’s fantastic to see Haseeb Hameed back in the England side and it’s always great to see Moeen Ali in the team. For Hameed, it’s part because he’s come through a trial in his game worse than pretty much anyone who plays the game. It’s great to see him beat that. It was even better to see his joy at being back around the England team. Like how Monty Panesar would celebrate when he got a wicket, it was pure absolute joy.

It’s great to see people like that enjoying the game. (I want to see Jofra Archer back in too, he’d be playing if not for his poorly elbow). But it’s becoming rarer now and a lot of that must be down to something filtering the players who make it to the higher levels. We had it in Lincolnshire where I played my earlier cricket. No one scouted our team. Ever, even when there was this young tearaway guy (me!) taking more wickets than anyone else in the team in just half a season, getting my name in the paper every week and contributing to a side that was winning most of the games and climbing up to second in our league. No scouting.

That’s not an axe being ground away by the way, I got a back injury that season too which restricted my bowling for the next year or so and then the shoulder injury came in a couple of years after that. The real axe to grind would be the university team. Performance in the bar was far more important there than performance in the nets.

I don’t want to be grinding axes though.

Good couple of weeks away. Great people. Good to be back and letting the leg heal up. Need to get out and about again and not just in the internet spaceship !

Photograph. We can see part of the brim of a straw type hat. Sitting on the hat is a blue fridge magnet, with "SCOTLA" visible, with the full word being Scotland. Above that, is a green serpent creature with coils coming in and out of the water behind a face with a cap. The creature is wearing a red and yellow scarf. — NESSY !

Yep. Couldn’t resist bringing this home with me.