Year: 2023

Thinking cars, fishing, bugs and … miniature ?

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August 8, 2023

10:04 pm

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Hello everyone,

I was probably due to post something again late last week but had a little illness episode again … Seems like when I get the bugs, they blow through quick. I seem mostly back to normal now. But first … thumbnail ! What shall we have today …

Picture. We're looking at the Hero Forge website with the header at the top. In the centre, we see a green skinned Dwagon figure, standing up wearing blue robes with red trim, holding a staff and adorned with a skull helmet. On the left, are a series of options for customising. An information panel is to the right.
Dwagon is poised for action

Isn’t it adworable ? Perhaps not the right word but I’m pleasantly surprised by how much customisation is possible with their site. I could even have Dwagon riding on a motorbike.

Disclosure note – this isn’t a paid thing, someone posted the link to the site and it went from there. I am highly tempted by Dwagon although it looks like it’d be $45 to get one (30mm scale) miniature over here in fully painted form. Crikey ! Here’s a link to the site. More disclosure stuff – they have a “(If your show/channel is not monetized in any way, you may use Hero Forge® assets without completing this form.)” note on their site so we’re good to go with posting the pic because this site isn’t monetized at all.

I’ve been watching / observing various people play Baldur’s Gate 3 and I’m getting far more tempted by that one than I had been. It’s also been amazing watching Amelia Tyler’s narration outtakes on the Youtubes. (Youtube link to the latest – audo only, very NSFW) I wonder if you could make something suitably dwagony in that game. I haven’t bought it, mostly because I always seem to bounce off games like that, such as Baldurs Gate 1 and 2, Solasta, Divinity Original Sins (1 and 2). They’re all there in the library waiting their chance to get played.

What I have been greatly enjoying is Dredge :

Game screenshot from Dredge. We're looking at the back of our boat which is in the middle of the ocean. In front and to the portside (left) are a pair of huge fish, under the water except for their tall fins. Lost in the fog in the distance in front of us looms an array of land features.
Follow the fishies

I’ve been describing this one as a cozy spooky game with excellently implemented tight and fair gameplay. And the story is (short but) good at bringing you into its world and giving you things to do. Here’s the Steam link for the game. I’d highly recommend it. Also on discount until 17 August.

I only have 3 more achievements to go before getting 100% in the game. That’s : catch all the right fish, catch all the wrong fish, get all the other achievements. It’s been a fun journey and I’ll keep going back to this one to replay it. It’s been very enjoyable and easy to play.

But about those bugs … I was in Dredge last Thursday evening when I suddenly noticed I was feeling extremely cold. As in wanting to find a blanket. And as I did more of the session, my arms went numb. Both of them. The left one too !

It’s not supposed to do that ! Going numb is the job of the right arm !

(I’m joking there of course but that was something pretty new and weird)

I’m pretty much ok now, it feels like the worse of it burned through on Thursday evening on Friday afternoon. Just waiting for my insides to return to something resembling normal as I barely ate anything until Saturday evening and that takes time to work its way through.

Last up for today is cars … which has been on the brain a little bit.

Picture. We're looking at the Hero Forge site again, with the same header and customisation parts as above. Our Dwagon is riding on a silver motorbike with blue wheels. They're headed off to the left of screen.
Easy dwagonin’

I’m not in danger of doing a car change any time soon. I’m very happy with Red and the more it’s driven, the more it seems to be freeing up. Red is a Lexus CT200h (aka Posh Prius) from the 2018 model year and it does what I want it to do. I like the smaller hatchbacks, they’re flexible enough to be able to support shopping, travel and occasional carrying of stuff around while being little enough to have fun throwing around the roads.

But the varied ranges of cars seem to be dying out these days in favour of SUVs. I’m not a fan, they’re higher up which makes it more difficult for my crunchy hips, they’re higher up which means they’re more awkward to through round corners. Oh and they don’t seem to be particularly Sport or Utility. I can’t see how you get the shopping in the Lexus UX without putting the back seats down.

Then I looked at the sales figures. They’re curious reading and it’s good of Lexus to make them available (Linky). What I’m getting out of them is that after being around 10k sales per year, the sales started dipping in 2007 before starting to recover in 2011 when the CT came out. It and the IS300h made the brand accessible to a new range of buyers like me. Half their sales in 2011 were CTs. The new IS joined the party in 2014 followed by the NX in 2015. (All hybrids) The ES300h came out in 2019 and stole the sales going to the IS300h (which went in the bin) and the UX came out in 2019 and immediately stole the sales from everything else in the range.

So I think that was the clear message that went out – people wanted SUVs. Or Lexus people still wanted Lexii and their options had been cut to the ES and the SUVs.

I wonder if it’s a factor of families owning multiple cars ? The small SUV becomes the flexible economical car that can take all the family, while they own a bigger car with a usable boot that gets used for the shopping or longer away trips.

I think we’ll see more trends come out in the future as a move to electrification causes a gentrification effect on car ownership. With fossil fuel cars due to go in the bin, the people being able to operate cars will be the ones who can spend the time to charge them up with them secure(ish) on the drive.

I’m not in that position, I barely have room for one car here and if I were to charge it, I’d need to stretch a cable over the public pavement. That’s not going to happen.

It’ll be curious keeping an eye on movements in the market over the coming years, with politics having its impact as well. We don’t exactly have credible or competent politicians over here at the moment.

On that note … time for me to hit post and go back to reading Deliverance, book 1 in another series by the prolific M R Forbes. I’ve been enjoying his books and the 5 Forgotten Colony book set was next up after completing the Starship For Sale series. It’s been a good, tense read so far. Would recommend.

Later everyone !

Cozy game, fun game, scary game, travelly game

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July 30, 2023

10:14 pm

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Hello everyone,

Thought I’d talk about a few games today. Yeah, I have a fair bit of game addiction but as addictions go, it’s a fairly benign one. (Unless you have the tendency to be still playing when the sun comes up. Oops).

Picture, meme. We're looking at four cartoon pictures of a pink person sitting on a couch, with a blue doctor with specs looking at them with a notepad. The captions are "Doc, I feel like I'm getting old", "Hmmm... tell me, did you play Elite when it first came out?" "Yeah I played it as a kid. It's my favourite game" and lastly a scribble on the notepad "Patient is basically dead."
Yep, the 1984 one

I think that ticks off cozy and travelly game. That was a case of seeing a meme, going yoink and modifying it to something a bit more appropriate than the Tony Hawks it had been modified to when I got my mitts on it. I really got stuck in to the original Elite and we went from the cassette tape version on to the disc drive version when we got the disc system. That’s a tale actually, we started with the BBC B micro which was released in December 1981. It loaded all its games in on cassette tape at a quick 1200 baud (bits per second), so loading up a game could take a little while plus sometimes the cassettes went bad. It really limited what could go into the games, so when our BBC B died due to flood damage (burst pipes over a winter) we got an insurance upgrade to a BBC Master (released 1986) which had a built in disc interface.

The disc version of Elite added in things like music for the docking computer, a set of missions and more ships. And now we’re on the fourth Elite game (Elite Dangerous) where I’ve traveled around the galaxy several times now.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at the top of a spaceship in silhouette, there is a long central body with an engine on each of a pair of thick outriggers coming from the back of the ship. Behind the ship is a purple wispy stream. Behind that is a dense starfield with the Milky Way ribbon to the left of the wispy stream.

That’s the Searching for Chamomile doing a little bit of exploring while I was moving my carrier from place to place. My character is back in the populated Bubble area now, while the carrier and a few of my ships are still 20,000 light years away. The objective of the new Dungeon Food Truck is to rejoin the carrier and maybe help out with the fuelling efforts to move it back.

I haven’t actually gone back into Elite for a couple of weeks. That’s a combination of not really knowing what to do in the game at the moment plus issues with my hands that are making it a bit painful to play sometimes.

That’s actually a big factor in another couple of games … the two Truck Simulator games. I found that they were good ones to quietly chill in while having that objective of growing the truck fleet and the character by moving Stuff from place to place. I need to have those clear objectives in the games, or I lose my way in them and drift away. The way the Truck Games do that is to have a big long list of cargo you can take from where you are to somewhere else and I’d try and pick something new to look at.

That was one thing about Elite, either trading to new places or traveling to new places for screenshots. And they’re very pretty too.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at a space scene, with our blue and orange diamond shaped ship on the left. In the centre and right hand side, there are a pair of stripy, banded white and dark planets. In the centre and above them, is a bright white star. The starfield is very dense again.

But that’s not the ship game I’ve been enjoying lately. Let’s see …

Game screenshot. Dredge. We're looking at a daytime ocean with a gently rippling surface. Our little fishing boat is in the bottom centre. We can see outcroppings of land to the left and an islet to the right plus more land hidden in fog ahead of us. We've also got some of the game features on screen.
It “looks” calm …

That’s Dredge, at the really early days. The premise of the game is that you’ve traveled in your boat to a remote set of islands and you wake, with little memory of who or where you are. Pretty soon, you get your mission to find fish to sell to pay off a debt, plus more side missions as you go through the story. But … don’t stay out after dark …

Game screenshot. Dredge. We're looking at the ocean scene again but this time it's in the dark. The fog is close in, we can't see very much except the distant lights of a town and ... a collection of disembodied eyes on the water.
Eye aye

There we go … cozy game that I’ve really enjoyed. You’re not alone in its world, if you stay out at sea after dark then the scary things come out to say hi. And as the storyline proceeds, you travel to the four corners of the archipelago. I had a lot of fun with this one, I’ve finished the story (and it’s an excellent one) and I’ll hang around in there to finish the sidequests and the achievements.

Top game, would highly recommend. And for me, it guided me through its story in about 12 chilled out hours over a few sessions.

Another game I finished again just now is Deus Ex Human Revolution. I’m not sure you should really call a game where you play a cyborg soldier with swords in his arms a cozy game but this and Mankind Divided is one I keep going back to.

There’s something to be said for a really tight game that gets in, does its story and finishes off in a good amount of time. 12 to 20 hours is about right for that. Some sand box type games will see you taking far longer to play through. Mass Effect was a little cracker when it came out, with excellent gameplay, a great story and a length of around 20 hours again. Mass Effect Andromeda had improved gameplay (which worked) but fell down at being just too much, taking about 70-80 hours to play.

There’s such a thing as outstaying the welcome. The Expanse books do this a fair bit, although they are on the whole great books with lots of story and lore packed in. I’m on a quick book again now, Sons of Thor which is book 2 in the Star Breakers series by James David Victor. I rather enjoyed the really quick first book of the series of 9.

What’s next though ?

Another run through Deus Ex Mankind Divided at some point, finishing off the achievements in Dredge. I need to go back to Horizon Zero Dawn and Cyberpunk 2077 at some point. Plus there’s the cozy taxi game of Cloudpunk. One Military Camp is a curious builder game which I’ll run through. And I bought Offroad Mechanic Simulator in its release discount, this one looks like a move on from Car Mechanic Simulator 2021 which is another I really enjoyed.

One last pic before bed time ?

Game screenshot. Dredge. We're looking at a deserted island with a series of small houses and huts. Deserted, except for a scraggly rough looking dog that's looking hopefully at us. The caption starts "You reach out and gently pat the dog. Its eyes follow your hand, and it seems to understand you're not a threat."
Yes, you can pet the dog

Best sidequest ever.

Good night everyone.

Looking at the tech again

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July 22, 2023

10:17 pm

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Hello everyone,

Been a busy week including an away trip where I was watching the mpg gauge in the car just go up and up, super tired now. (But mostly watching the road because that’s what we do). How did Red do ? The peak mpg was reading 61 at one point, which probably works out to an actual 59. Not bad for a petrol car.

But this isn’t going to be about that bit of tech, although I’m very happy and quietly pleased at how they’ve taken what I think are the same mechanicals from my first CT and improved them. Good times. Thumbnail ?

Picture. We're looking at one of the green dwagons, It's on a cookie that's about 3 times its size.
Protect the cookie !

Thumbnail. And it’s been too long since I’ve had a cookie that size. I do miss the Happy Cookie Place from the Xmas markets … they didn’t go even for a few years before all the lockdowns started happening.

Anyway, what’s this one about ? I like to occasionally look at the PC market, just to see what the moves are in it. What the trends are. What’s available, what’s listed for sale but isn’t actually available. Whether it’s worth me looking at investing in an upgrade or an update. The quick spoiler is that the almost 4 year old Meltdown (my desktop) is still going strong and I don’t need to replace anything significant on there any time soon.

The laptop, which found the name Dwagonsong, has been a very happy upgrade over the last almost year. It’s an Acer Swift which is much lighter than the Asus gaming laptop I had before. That’s ok, the two laptops had different purposes. Saying that though, the Asus was poor in its display and I didn’t appreciate that they tried to block the upgradeability by using threadlock on the screw that would hold in an expansion drive. That’s really poor Mr Asus. So what’s out there ?

Picture. A cat is sitting in front of a very large fan. The caption is "Using technology to efficiently and evenly distribute cat hairs around your home.
I do like the big air coolers

So … PCs … I’m going to do two build ideas this time. The first is one which would be a mostly like for like for Meltdown, the second would be a worthwhile upgrade. They’ll both be AMD Ryzen based machines with an nVidia graphics card. The Ryzen machines are excellent for performance and I have my doubts for the Intels now, especially with the work laptop which is suffering hardware defects (although these aren’t significant enough to get it replaced). And I haven’t got that trust back in the AMD graphics yet after having a card go boom 1 month after warranty and headaches with their cards in the Radeon 1800 era. (I think they were 1800s)

Ahem. Starting out with what everything plugs in to … you have the motherboard. These look like they’ve ratcheted up in price now. You select these by checking what the processor needs and then the motherboard determines what memory is required. DDR4 memory won’t fit into a DDR5 board. Things like that.

Better machine motherboard : Asus Prime X670-P wifi with Socket AM5 – £275

Like for like : MSI MAG X570S Tomahawk MAX Wifi (they do like the long names) with Socket AM4 – £240 and these boards look like they’ve gone rare.

Processor : AMD Ryzen 5 7600X Socket AM5 for £250 or AMD Ryzen 5 5600 Socket AM4 for £150.

Memory : 64GB in a pair of Kingston Fury Beast 32GB DDR5 5600 sticks for Better one costing £210 or 32GB of Kingston Fury Beast (again with the silly name) DDR4 3200 for £87. The DDR5 is what the X670-P board needs, the X570S board needs DDR4. The X670 and X570 say what the chipset is. The motherboard is the foundation of the machine so it pays to get a good one. Meltdown has been rock solid in a Asrock X570 board, which I think cost around £180, so that £240 is a chunky increase in price.

One thing is that the stocks level seems to have mostly recovered to pre-pandemic and global electronics shortage levels and the prices are getting there. But they’re still up on the whole and some items like power supplies are still hard to get hold of.

Moving on to graphics and the equivalent to mine is the 4060Ti card (Meltdown has a last generation 3060Ti card), these will cost £400.

Powering everything is a power supply unit box, which will slot in and then you plug it in to everything. I’ve used Corsair power supplies for a long time and they’ve done me well … but the cheapest good enough one that’s available today is a 850W version for £148. That’s a bit much in both money and size. But if you find yourself needing to replace in a hurry, you work with what you can get hold of.

Disclosure note time ! I’m using prices off Overclockers UK this time just because they’re the first ones I thought of looking at. I’ve only ever had one freebie from an electronics company and that was a mouse won in a raffle. Everything else has been bought by me.

Every PC needs a bit of storage to put the Operating System on and all of the games. I’m still looking at using a Solid State Device drive to put Windows on and a selection of games, paired with a conventional hard disc to put everything else on. I like having a huge supply of memes but those don’t need to be on an SSD. So :

SSD : I’ve been very happy with Crucial again and they supply M2 NVME drives in 1TB for £48 and 4TB for £200. That’s way more than we need. An M2 drive is one that plugs into the motherboard, for extra speed and NVME means it has the electronics to fully unlock that speed.

Hard disc : Arbitrarily going for Western Digital and we have 2 7200rpm drives (they spin faster they send data out faster) for £190 for a 6TB drive and £240 for a 10TB drive. Thinking about it there, you’d be better sacrificing a bit of space and just putting the 4TB SSD in there.

I mentioned cooling earlier and this is actually one thing where I differ significantly between what I’d advise at work and at home. Water cooling is a really efficient way of taking heat away from one place and dumping it out at another. But home isn’t a place that actually benefits from that. You really don’t want fluids around your electronics if it’s not necessary. So I go for massive air coolers instead :

Picture. We're looking at a box with a computer cooler on the front. It's bigger than my red plushie dwagon which is to the right of shot. Both are resting on a dark blue towel.

My usual thing with computer coolers is to go for the really big ones with a couple of huge fans. Meltdown has the Coolermaster MA610P in the picture above. It runs cool (50 degrees C on idle going up to 70 when pushed) and is super quiet. The idea is that the big fans push a lot of cooling air through and don’t need to spin fast to do that. Spinning fast leads to noise and noise is bad. So the other week when we had a power cut, I was confused why nothing happened when I turned my monitor on. Turned out that I wasn’t noticing that the PC was off. It’s that quiet. Anyway, Cooler Master MA612 Stealth cooler for £70. It’s worth investing more there so you get less noise out. Oh and add in £20 for a bit of metal to stick on that M2 drive, those get toasty.

Finally, you need something to put everything in. I’ve learned a few things with Meltdown’s box :

Not getting Bitfenix again, the quality was low and I almost needed the mendstick (big hammer) because a manufacturing defect had distorted the case almost enough to stop me getting the power supply to go in.

Drive bays are useless now, it’s easy to use a USB DVD or Bluray drive.

USB ports that are on the top of a machine are a total dust trap, including if they’re at a 45 degree angle.

I’d recommend having a look at a case before buying it, although I’ve never actually done this. The one that got the eye on OCUK was the Silverstone Fara R1 mid tower case for £65 but only because it had ports on the front instead of on top. I don’t think it’s worth spending that much on the case but you want a sizeable one that you then hide away somewhere. Big is easy and means the air can get through it easily.

Last bits – not including keyboard, mouse or screen, those are very personal preference. But you will want to do your research before going for anything there. Oh and you want Windows, which is currently £110.

How much is all that ?

The upgrade one is around £2000. The cheaper one is around £1500 with both hard discs. The only upgrade for the cheaper one which would really help Meltdown is the big SSD (currently got a slow 512GB one), so that’s £200 for the 4TB one, everything else is a small improvement. It would be around £1500 to upgrade Meltdown to the Ryzen 5 7600X machine. It’s worth noting though that PC Specialist could build something close to the £1500 machine for £1400. But … they’re putting in components like Corsair memory (like their psus, wouldn’t touch their memory) which I heavily avoid.

So … that’s not going to happen 😀 although I can’t be held responsible for the consequences if that big SSD appears with a big discount.

Picture. Meme. We're looking at a note for 50 something folded in half. At the fold is an electric wire. The captions are "Have been charging it since yesterday. Still not 100".

That’s all for today. One lesson is : if you don’t get benefit from spending the money, keep it. The laptop change was very worthwhile, especially because I’m travelling more. The desktop will hang in there for a few more years yet.

Means more money for Lego (and a bunch of house things that need doing).

Nite all !

Socials, tech and a send off

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July 16, 2023

11:36 pm

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Hello everyone,

While wondering what I left out of the last post, I’m currently trying to remind myself of what was in it ! I dunno, mind like a goldfish.

Picture. We're looking at two black and white cats on a tiled floor. One is appearing to hold the other one back. The captions are "Say Nothing" and "They'll blame the dog"

I wanted to have a little natter about socials and social media … There’s been an eruption of talk about these since a certain individual bought Twitter and then proceeded to set about destroying it. I’m still hanging around Twitter but I’m still very rarely posting on it. I’ll post the new blog post tweets but that’s pretty much it, unless I’m replying to someone else. There’s still a fair bit of good on there but it heavily depends on those who you’re following and therefore choosing to have fill your timeline. And you have to have a hair trigger for blocking those who you don’t want to have an interaction with.

Like the individual who picked up on me complaining at the World Endurance Championship twitter people … There were two things in that post :

Chat behaviour – didn’t care, I’d actually closed the chat the evening before because without moderation, it have gone toxic.

Stream stability – the WEC sportscar races are currently behind a paywall and as a combination of annoyance at Eurosport (they do about 25% ads to coverage) and likely covid, I signed up for the season. It let itself down badly at Le Mans by needing to have a browser reload every 90 seconds or so for a portion of the last hour of the 24 hour race.

So there I am complaining about stream stability (the “if they don’t know about a problem, they won’t fix it” theory) and someone jumps on that with a heap of venom about me complaining about chat. Ho hum, they went in the block after the second interaction, I should really have blocked them with their original snowflake comment.

Anyway – was talking socials … Twitter is really the hell site now. You have to heavily curate the feed with who you follow, which includes unfollowing those who were fun in the past … but have turned bad usually due to being tainted by their interactions with others. Like George Takei used to be the meme king but then politics happened and the tone got nasty.

Twitter has also got rid of pretty much all of the ways of reporting harassment. If you see harassment and poor behaviour on sites like Twitter, don’t call it out or interact with it, that’s what they want you to do. Interaction drives the algorithms to promoting that type of content. Just quietly report it. If you can.

The other socials I’m on are a private Facebook. It’s somewhat linked to my Instagram but I think I have that controlled so it doesn’t doxx me. I’m on a small heap of discord servers too, as the mostly anonymous Sleepydwagonman. The discord communities are really good places to be, although for all the acceptance on discord there are several where inexplicable prejudices come out and make themselves know.

Like the one which suddenly went off on one about cruise holidays, cruise ships and there’s me thinking that I’d quite like to do a cruise ship holiday at some point and oh there’s also the live on a boat plan.

Picture. A dejected looking black and white cat is sitting at the front end of a row boat. The captions are "You can give a cat a fish and he'll eat for a day." and "Or you can teach a cat to fish and he'll sit in his boat, pouting all day because nobody gave him another fish."

I’m aware of all of the other social media exits happening at the moment, with all of those various start ups. I haven’t gone for any of them yet because they all appear to have their own particular flaws, with the worst being total security nightmares. Like Threads … That one is a hard no.

One bit of advice for everyone : let someone else be the beta tester. You don’t need to be the one to find out all of the bugs, you’re not getting paid for that. You’re not getting any incentives at all for that. There’s more to come with the social media landscape, I’m not sure that we’ll see another site pop up before the end of the year that has the reach that Twitter had. And I suspect that Twitter’s creditors will have the plug pulled before the end of the year.

What was that about send offs ?

I’ve been out amongst the stars again … And back. One of the major players was a man called Michael Brookes who set up a lot of the lore around the Elite Dangerous universe. He passed away just over a month ago and that triggered a quest to madly rush back from literally the other side of the galaxy to return for a tribute.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at a small fleet of starships against the black of the void, all heading off away into the distance. Mine is in the lower left of shot, with a pair of white engines and glowing lines of heat radiators.

It was definitely worth heading back for that one. We gave Mr Brookes a good send off in an emotional and respectful stream from Drew Wagar. Here’s the clip for the mass hyperspace jump at the end. o7 Cmdr Brookes.

I’m currently using my time back in the populated Bubble region of Elite to do a little trading in the latest spaceship :

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at the interior docking bay of a spacestation. The lighting is an industrial faded orange. Our ship is in the middle, displaying a flat square profile.
Dungeon Food Truck has food, honest

That’s the Dungeon Food Truck, callsign KN-00T. The ship is named for the lovely lady responsible for this clip about the Dungeon (twitch clips) … I don’t watch her stream enough* but when I do tune in, it’s a mad fun bunch to be involved in. She throws all her energy into the stream, giving us madcap antics for a few hours, guaranteed to bring out the grins. Would recommend adding Knightenator to your follows, here’s the Twitch link.

*I rarely swap between streams when I’m on Twitch … I’ll start watching a stream and stay with it. So if someone starts off a bit later, then I wouldn’t normally swap over to the later person. That’s the thing about Twitch, I could occasionally have two streams going at a time but it does tend to make my brain a bit too toasty if I try and do that too much. So at the moment, there’s this post happening on the desktop, Splattercat on the laptop and semi-random between album tracks from the laptop being played on the hifi.

And as yet another random – the Marantz amplifier I bought at Xmas as an emergency replacement is still doing pretty well. It’s doing exactly what I want it to do (play music), I should really watch a movie with it at some point. I dunno, at some point I just stopped watching blurays. One observation though, my Bluetooth link for the hifi was really suffering for a while. The Marantz amp can also receive via Bluetooth, which, of course, I set up. It also does Airtunes, which got disabled because it wasn’t working for me. (Probably my iTunes being ancient). I had to unlink the amp though because the Bluetooth link would break.

It’s a great protocol but seems to have issues with contention.

Don’t we all 😀

So today we had – social media, space and a little bit of techie.

More techie later probably … I started looking at PC upgrades again, mostly out of curiosity. Stocks seem to be very available again but the prices are still much higher than I’d want to pay. My old expectations would be £100 for a motherboard, £200 for a graphics card. That’s now £250 minimum for a motherboard (the thing you plug everything in to) and £400 for a graphics card.

The quotes were either £1500 for something with very similar performance to what I have now or £2000 for a somewhat worthwhile upgrade. I think that means that the 4 year old Meltdown will be the main desktop for a significant amount longer, there’s no reason to upgrade it at the moment. The laptop that appeared late last year is proving to be a really good buy. It’s really light, so it’s far kinder to travel with. It performs as I would want it to. The screen is a massive amount better than my last laptop. And Windows 11 is not a bother. The only question mark is that it might be developing dodgy wifi … Which would mean I’d get a plug in USB wifi widget.

Later. I’m more likely to invest in a dashcam for the car first.

And that’s a whole other story …

Later everyone ! Have a great week.

Greetings from the bunker

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July 11, 2023

11:29 pm

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Hello everyone,

Gosh it’s been so long the editor has changed again. I have to admit I’m not a big fan of stuff like that, especially when it’s not a change I expected to have happen. Haha, oh well. Ah ha ! I can get rid of it too. But first … thumbnail.

Picture. We're looking at the face of a black and white cat. His eyes are staring at us. The captions are "I let my mind wander." and "It never came back"
Yes. This is me

It’s been a decent few months actually, if pretty tiring. I’m pretty sure I put myself in another lack of essential minerals hole but I figured that one out and addressed it with another round of supplements to take every day. (Modern day scurvy exists …) But enough about that one … What did I talk about last time ?

Ahh, way back in March, I’d just picked up Red. Red’s been great actually. It doesn’t have the outright speed of the IS300h’s and the slightly less speed of the ES300h but it’s an extremely willing buggy that gives all it has if you ask it to. And that’s far more accessible in those hybrids than it ever was in a manual gearbox car. It goes round corners super quick too. Also, whereas the IS300h’s started as essentially beta test cars for that powertrain, the CT200h started off with a well proven Prius powertrain which received a good little incremental update around 2017 which I’ve been enjoying driving. Mostly for work … that’s something actually.

Something I need to do is get out and about more. I’ve been noticing an increasing possibly agoraphobic tendency. Except it’s not so much fear of the outside, it’s more like it’s easier to stay in and do stuff inside. And yet I do Need to get out and do stuff, it’s just been Easier to hang around and watch the cricket. Talking of cricket …

Picture. We're looking at the wide open green grass of a cricket field. In the lower foreground are seats of the viewing stand. In the distance from left to right, we see the scoreboard, an orange brick pavilion and stands circling round to the right. The sky is blue with occasional wispy white cloud.
A sunny day in May

That’s from the Interservices T20 cricket at Lords back in May. It was a good day out although it was cut short partly because I didn’t feel comfortable there this time. My mum had a little stay in hospital, she’s ok and they figured out what put her in there but I was thinking I should have been there instead of at Lords. That’s behind the privacy wall though so that’s all I’ll put here.

The other thing that cut the day short was rain, it brought an especially dramatic but sudden end to the last game. The RAF had kept the Army to a challenging to reach score of 150 for 8 and they were keeping ahead of the required Duckworth Lewis* score, right up until the last ball. The rains came right at the end of the 5th over … which is the point where if the game’s called off, it’s considered a valid game with a winner instead of being a tie or draw. One of the RAF guys decided to go for glory, and got caught out on the boundary … And that wicket changed the result from RAF win to Army win.

*What’s Duckworth Lewis ? It’s a system invented by Mr Duckworth and Mr Lewis, which the system used to fairly resolve games of cricket that are shortened by the weather. It’s easier to score fast over a shorter time, plus the more wickets a team has left, the system allows for them taking more risks later to score faster. So if a game is shortened, the run rate needed would be 8 or 9 runs an over instead of the 7.5 runs an over that the 150 target would need. Similarly, if a wicket falls, the system ups the target to account for the batting side being able to take less risk.

Comic Con didn’t happen this time, it was back at London this year but we couldn’t make it this time. Next time ! I very nearly found a way to get myself over to Twitch Con EU over in Paris last weekend. I have to admit, I’m not a fan of high outside temperatures so Paris in July was scaring me off a bit from that side. I’ve been hugely enjoying the stories and pictures coming from the people who went though, there were a few groups and they had a fantastic time over there.

Did I mention a growing tendency to hide in the house instead of going out to see stuff ? Yep. Needs to get in the bin.

There was a work reason as well for holding off from going, which isn’t something I’ll talk about here. I’ve been enjoying the job change since it happened in Nov 2021 but there are so many reasons why I won’t talk about what the job is.

More cricket ?

Picture. We're looking at a cricket batsman. He's wearing a red top and black trousers and he's holding the bat up in front of him having completed the shot. He missed ... and the ball has hit one of three blue vertical wooden stumps, knocking it backwards.
How’s that !

That was picture of the day, it’s nothing more sophisticated than having my camera braced on my knee at the maximum optical zoom it can give and pressing the button at just the right time. No tripod … and I should look at selecting from a batch of pictures. You know, the mode where the camera takes a heap of pictures in quick succession and you pick the best one. I’m not as sophisticated as that with my picture taking but something they really work out well.

Cricket’s been good on the telly too lately, with 3 excellent games with the men and more excellent games with the women. Thoughts :

James Anderson has been a fantastic player for England over the years but needs a good game now, he may have had his time.

I really enjoy watching Sophia Dunkley bat but I do miss the brilliance of the legendary Sarah Taylor. Like when I quit, she’s happier away from the game now and that’s how it has to be.

I don’t like Ollie Robinson. He’s had his luck over his time in the team but he’s very Nothing Special … and also a bit of an objectionable so and so. There are better players.

Thinking of that … where’s Izzy Wong (lady fast bowler) and Matt Potts :-D. Would love to see them get a game.

And the Australians know what they did. You can’t argue to be given respect when you show no respect. They’ve been shown a lot of leniency in decisions on and off the field.

Yep. The cricket’s been attracting its controversy and it’s been extremely compelling to watch. The sportscar racing has been similarly compelling, with a very welcome win for Ferrari at Le Mans in their return to the top level of sports car racing. It’s also great to see world class drivers who became a joke in Formula 1, show what they can do in the sportscars. Like Antonio Giovinazzi turning from being dumped from F1 into a race winner for Ferrari’s sports car. In F1, it’s all about the equipment, not so much about the driver. Sports cars are subject to Balance of Performance, which makes it about driver speed and how the team supports the car.

Whereas I’m having serious thoughts about just not keeping up with F1 lately, the sports cars are still very compelling. And it does help there that we have the ladies teams and drivers showing what they can do too. They’re seriously quick. Like Lilou Wadoux who would get in the car with it trailing a bit … and then take it to the front of the class. Like the Iron Dames team who always outperform the Iron Lynx team, even when the Iron Lynx team included the ultra fast Giancarlo Fissichella. Fissichella has always been quick, if your team is quicker than his identical car, then that deserves huge respect.

I might be running out of time to talk music and books …

Lots of reading’s been happening. I’d just been about to go into Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation last time. Didn’t enjoy that one, the film is better. Mortal Engines was good … but the adaptation was better again. I enjoyed LJ Cohen’s Halcyone Space series and M.R.Forbes Starship for Sale series, they told their tale well and most important, wrapped up very satisfactorily.

Book highlights have been John Scalzi’s mad Kaiju Preservation Society. It’s a fast paced charge into a bonkers world with crazy huge monsters. I’m becoming a fan of Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya Universe books, with the latest being the utterly charming The Red Scholar’s Wake. It’s a love story between a ship and someone who was a prisoner at the start of the book. So many AWW moments in this one. Both are well worth picking up.

Not so good : Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War. There’s a decent story there but it didn’t really gel with me. And Star of Damocles from the Warhammer 40k universe, it started ok, changed tack totally in a poor middle and then stopped just as it ran off the rails. Rogue Star is good, Star of Damocles is definitely not.

I’m currently in Caliban’s War, book 2 of The Expanse. That’s a good series, with the story told over 9 fairly self contained books. One thing I like in books is where you can never tell what’s going to happen. A certain amount of plot armour is ok but when the plot armour is limited to keeping just a couple of characters alive with the rest being likely to meet their end at any moment, it adds a certain edge and tension to the book. The Expanse series has that, Gareth L Powell’s books definitely have that.

I actually need to get some reading in to preserve a reading streak that’s now at over 100 days ! So I’ll wrap up there.

Good night everyone. I’ve been in the bunker for a while as my personal burn out evolves. But I’m ok. Hope you are too.

Oh ! A couple of changes happened to the blog template while I was away too, hope they’re improvements. I might have to look at the background picture though because the sleeping dwagon is a bit too light coloured and obscures the text.

Picture. We're looking at a metal disc that is covered in thick dust. On the surface, written in dust, is a phrase in strange flowing script. (It's the One Ring To Rule Them All rhyme from Lord of the Rings)

I better wipe away all the dust. Cya all !

Bye Blue, Hello Red

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March 6, 2023

10:01 pm

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Hello everyone,

It does feel a lot like time is going whoosh by at the moment. Oh and something might have changed around here. What’s happened since last time ? Let’s see : more book, car stuff, boats and Space. First up … thumbnail !

Picture. We're looking at the front end of 2 cars. The closer one is a red hatchback. The further away one is a sleek blue saloon. They're in a couple of parking bays. The red one has my red plushie dwagon sitting on the dashboard.
Red vs Blue

There we go. Deed done. The blue one is my last car, a Lexus ES300h. The red one is the car I’ve switched to, a Lexus CT200h. It’s actually a return to the CT after time away in their other cars. I’ve gone back to a used one because they stopped making the CT a few years ago. Lexus don’t make a car I’d want to buy any more though. The ES is too big (and I wasn’t a fan of its size and handling) and their UX is a nasty SUV with no boot. If a daily driver car can’t take the groceries, it’s not really suitable. A sporty car is kinda allowed to have a tiny boot, I don’t think it’s acceptable in an SUV. Kinda takes the U for Utility out of it.

So why did I change ? (And this is a bit for the memory banks too to remind me in a year or two !)

The ES was an incredibly good motorway cruiser. I could drive it for hours without really noticing. And that went for the 5 hour trip back from Gatwick when everyone had to come off the motorway and the other roads were gridlocked. It had lots of toys too, although perhaps not quite as many as I was expecting (the manual made me think I had the HUD, back seat radio controls and self opening boot).

But I also think it was broken. There was very excessive body roll when going round corners, plus the traction control would kick in at the slightest of slight breaking up in the road surface. It also had a heavy understeer tendency which gave me no confidence going round the corners. I’m curious that they’ve revised the back suspension set up in the car (not just the set up, they completely redesigned the rear running gear).

That said, they changed something I’d wished they’d changed in the hybrid system a while ago. It’s an excellent system. Instead of having gearbox, clutch, alternator, starter, the Toyota/Lexus hybrids have a couple of big motor generators, the battery and an inverter to control the power. The motor generators are the gearbox and I think it works really well for driveability. What they’ve changed is the target battery level. Old ones – it’ll charge the battery up to an 80% hold level. (More means the battery makes heat, which is bad). The ES would hold the battery around 50% on the motorway. Why is that better ? If you’re going at 70mph, there’s a lot of kinetic energy that has to go somewhere when you come off the motorway. The lower battery hold point means that the kinetic energy can all go in the battery.

That’s kinda geeky innit.

Picture. We're looking out of a window at a paved area with a water pond area behind. The ground behind the pond rises into a grassy path. The water is quiet and only slightly rippled. Sunlight off screen is causing tables and chairs on the paved area to throw well defined shadows.
Cup of tea ?

Yep. Visited the farm shop place on the way back. It’s kinda required :-D.

Picture. We're looking at a chocolate teacake (hard chocolate shell, marshmallow on the inside, biscuit base) that is the same size as my little green Dwagon with the Feed Me bib.
Tasty

Yep. Things escaped the shop with me again. The brownie didn’t survive long enough to be in pictures. They never do.

Anyway – latest car. Lexus CT. It’s a little bit older than the last car. We record the ages of our cars in the registration plates. Blue was a 21 plate, which means it was registered in the first half of 2021. Red is a 68 plate, as it was registered in the second half of 2018. Older means no lead time (electronics shortages are still a massive problem for the car industry) and it’s 25% cheaper on payments too. Oh and they stopped making the CT a couple of years ago.

Red’s a Premier spec model, so it’s got the better radio, various nice toys (the satnav is a nice improvement) and better lights. Heated seats have been appreciated, plus they’re the electrically adjustable leather ones with (first for me) a button to remember the seat position.

The CT is slower, at 10 seconds to 60 instead of the probable 8 to 8.5 of the IS and ES cars. But I have massively more confidence to point it at a corner and press the pedal to make it go Fast. The IS could do that too but my 3 had other issues. I gave up on fast cornering quite quickly in the ES due to its road barge understeer tendencies.

So there we go. Car change, I’m very happy with new thing so far.

Picture. We're looking at the boot of the new car. It's a hatch back car, so we can see the outer body to the right. Taking up a fair portion of the floor of the boot is a box of Lego holding the Lego McLaren race car.
What’s this ? A second car ?

Yep. I may have weakened and at the mention of what might be a tradition now by the garage people, found myself acquiring not one but two cars that day. My models to build queue is now :

Wooden dragon

Wooden trimaran boat

Lego McLaren car

Need to get to it some time ! But not tonight because I’m wanting restful times before heading off to bed and I’ve recently been watching something lovely who streams under the name BillieTrixx. (Twitch link). Fun to watch and she’s got a wonderful hyperactive streak going too, so you never really know what’s going to happen next. But it’s all good vibes and I’ve been enjoying watching and she has a good community there too.

Time to go back to stream and book too. I just re-read Leviathan Wakes, the first Expanse book. It felt like a bit of a grind to be honest, as I mostly remember it from the first time around. It makes more sense overall than the series. Books have more time to breathe through a better ability to show the timeline. Series are more tuned for drama and they are totally bound by the vaguaries of the TV networks. Books usually get a chance to go for their full run. Series get cut off early before they can fully tell their story.

It’s Annihilation next, the book from a very intriguing film from a few years ago. I’d recommend checking out the film.

Later everyone ! (Must stop rambling) (Must post more because I’m thinking I’m rambling more while trying not to dive in to other stuff)

Coming back from a little hiatus

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February 14, 2023

10:21 pm

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, ,

Hello everyone,

It’s about time I posted again ! Let’s see. It’s been November since the last post and a few things have happened since then / are happening soon. First of all :

I’m ok. Just felt a bit burned out at the end of year and maybe a thinking that the posts I was writing were a bit all the same thing just minor variations ? Maybe. Oh ! Thumbnail pic.

A small pocket dragon standing on a cabinet top. He's holding up a heart almost as tall as he is.
Very 14 Feb appropriate ?

There we go. Very 14 Feb appropriate and it goes for all of you who are still around and reading this after the big long gap.

I think one reason for hiatus was being pretty burned out on Advent posts too, I think the Elitecember series was probably the last of those that I’ll do. (Plus the advent calendars haven’t been so good). Enough about hiatus, what’s been happening ?

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our spaceship is in front of the sphere of stars that marks what we can see of a black hole in the upper right. There is a tiny bright star with purple white streamer cones going left and right. The background is a creamy white. Our spaceship is in the foreground. It is black, with an engine to each side near the back. It is streaked with red lighting in lines.
Tiamat visits an impossible star

I’ve been doing the Space thing again. I’m off around the galaxy but this time I’m taking the big fleet carrier with a selection of ships. So Tiamat’s Chariot is along for the ride and had a little run out for a short 700 or so light year hop.

Christmas has been and gone during the break, it was great seeing family and dogs again. Perhaps a quicker run than it could have been ? I think that’s part of feeling run down, wanting to escape back to the sanctum to be able to fully switch off. Work’s driven part of that, it’s been busy but also rewarding. We’ve been getting Stuff done and the feedback I get is the polar opposite of what was happening in my last team.

Yep. Good seeing the family again.

Last time in the current car too … Yep. That’s one of the bigger news things from the break. I’d been steadily getting more and more unhappy with the current car. The main issue is that it’s too long and therefore really tough to manoeuvre. It also suffers from the Lexus apparent tendency to beta test their cars before settling on a Good car, which is weird because they got it bang on correct with the CT. Issues with the current one include that it’ll go Wibble as soon as you drive over a broken up road surface. Apparently the back suspension is completely revised on the facelifted model.

Which car is next ?

Picture. We're looking at a blue hatchback car parked up. Not much more to say there, it's a pretty standard box of a car !
The original Tardis Blue Car

That car was number one in google search results for Tardis Blue Car for a good while. I was happy with that. The next one will be in red and has more toys. More pictures in a few weeks.

Oh – one crazy thing with the current car is that it literally got lost. I’d broken a work journey up to get a leg stretch and coffee. When I started up again, the GPS track was steadily diverging from the actual road, until it found a side road and merrily thought it was heading down that. And then that got worse as the car literally got more and more lost. I was fine. I was on the A road heading to where I needed to be. (And I switched over to Android Auto as a fix) It’ll be good being in a smaller car again, although I am sacrificing power for the size.

I’ve been devouring books again. Figuratively, not so much literally. (Ipads are crunchy). I’m going to see if I can read through a 52 book year this year. I’m already at a reading streak approaching 100 days now on the Kindle app. The year started out with 2 Starship for Sale books by M R Forbes. Blue Burn finished on such a cliff hanger that I had to go straight into the next book, Eight Ball. I’ve since read book 7 of the series, Kill Spree. They’re good fluffy space sci fi books that speed through a story. They’re pretty pulpy but I’ve been enjoying them.

L J Cohen’s Halcyone Space books are a little more serious and have had an interesting universe and story developing. I enjoyed book 4, Parallax, and I’ll be back for the concluding book in a few weeks. I’m properly engaged in the characters and will be looking for more from the author.

Maybe dipping a bit was the third Thrawn book by Timothy Zahn, Thrawn Treason. It held the attention, including shining more of a spotlight on how the Chiss (a Timothy Zahn introduction into Star Wars) do their space war business. It did feel perhaps a bit contrived though.

The dip continued with Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds. This is a collection of stories in the Revelation Space universe and to be honest, I could have done without reading this one. The stories aren’t great and I actually skipped one of them after giving it the chance of a few pages.

Another book I grinded through was The Satan Bug by Alastair MacLean. That’s a weird thing to say isn’t it. A renowned author who’s books I’ve enjoyed previously. The film and others including Where Eagles Dare and Guns of Navarone are legendary suspense stories. The Satan Bug sets up a super scary premise …. and then flip flops between investigation elements that never feel as if they’re going anywhere solid. A disappointment but I’ll go back for others of his books when I find them cheap. Santorini is one I’d highly recommend, HMS Ulysses is an incredible WW2 naval war story.

And then there’s the huge highlight of the year so far : Artifact Space by Miles Cameron. This was the most I’ve enjoyed a book for a Very Long Time. It’s a space sci fi again, with the central character being a young lady who has had to run away from a terrible situation and finds herself heading off round the galaxy with a huge conspiracy erupting around her.

It’s a curious mix of space navy procedure and character development. I hugely enjoyed Artifact Space and I’m looking forward to when the story is continued.

Other stuff ? I got back into the Idle Champions game. And space has been happening again too. The laptop continues to go through the music in there, I’m approaching having listened to half the library now.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous,. We're landed on a sandy looking orange planet. It's daylight and we can see the blueish atmosphere in the background. Our small orange ship is parked on craggy ground, with a stony looking plant in the foreground which is twice the height of our astronaut.
Tea 89 finds a rather large plant

That was a different part of the trip. One of the additions to the game has been planets with thin atmospheres which you can land on. Here’s me checking out an Osseus plant with the little Warp Factor Potato. Not so good an experience because it lands very close to the ground, which makes it difficult to get the buggy out.

I think I’m running out of things that want to come out of my brain. Time to close off with … 14 Feb is for very good friends and … I found a frond.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're on the sandy orangey planet again. Our astronaut is in the foreground, looking at a cluster of fern like plants. The buggy is behind and to the left and in the background, the rear of our spaceship with the engine outlets glowing orange and blue.
Iceangel finds a frond

I’ll leave it there. It feels good to be writing a post again, there’s like a pressure that steadily increases when you have a hiatus like this. You want to write but there’s also “I haven’t written for a while, a bit more break is ok”.

Definitely be back with pics of the car when it arrives and I need to figure out a photoshoot location. Sainsburys car park isn’t the best place :-D.

Last thing ! Current book : Leviathan Wakes by James S A Corey. First book in the Expanse series. They did an overall good job with this series. Bits are great, bits are poor. But they set up their world building in the books incredibly well and they pull off a very fitting ending.

Laters everyone !