New computer bits, Easter Bunny ?

Hello everyone,

Not sure how much I’ll be able to put into this one because you know I tend to underplay how much things hurt sometimes ? Well I kinda wrecked my wrist and arm so if it starts pain spiking, I’ll need to hit post.

Picture. Meme/ We're looking at two black cats just peeking over the back of a chair. Behind them is an old computer with a blue error screen. The caption is "Dunno what happnd We dint touch it"

What I am hoping is that my poorly arm has enough in it for building a new computer … What’s up with the arm ? It’s been tending to RSI for I dunno how long now but I kinda crunched it on opening the car door yesterday. Like high pain level plus I’ve apparently strained a muscle in the forearm. So I’m holding off on doing more of the gaming that involves more activity, like the hauling in Elite Dangerous or the Truck Sim games do. I’ve also been looking at trains …

Game screenshot. Derail Valley. We're looking at a train heading away from us. It's pulling several flatbed railway cars with wood planks strapped down on them. It's going over a stone brick bridge heading into landscape obscured by mist.

That’s Derail Valley, which is a train driving simulator with its own little area to play in. It’s a curious game, which sees you carrying various bits of cargo from station to station and you can build up what you haul and fix up bigger and better locomotives. There’s a link to Squirrel’s play through on youtube on the last post. But I think that’ll take too many chances with the wrist, so I’ll hold off on it.

What’s happening with the PC ?

Picture. We're looking inside the open box of a very old computer. We can see three kittens climbing inside. The captions are "Thank you for calling Tiny Kitten Repair" and "We accept Visa, Mastercard, Cuddling and Shiny Things"
Will build PCs for pizza, shiny things or cuddles but especially shiny things

There we go. Pizza is life especially if you’re planning to try and all nighter and can therefore don’t need to worry about the tummy not liking all that cheese.

PC ? We’re kinda being pushed into moving off Windows 10 because Microsoft are ending patch support for it, unless we pay through the nose for extended support. So after October, all those vulnerabilities that let the hackers in won’t get patched. That’s for definite. What I also suspect is that as we approach October, Microsoft will get more and more obnoxious with pushing us towards going to Windows 11 and the paranoid / experienced part of my brain also thinks they’ll push out updates that actively harm the performance of Windows 10 machines. Because that’s what they do.

The answer is to put them in the bin … You probably want to do your own research on this and whether it fits you personally with the level of knowledge and expertise you yourself know you have (and be honest with it too, it’ll save heartache later!). But it might well be worth doing the research on what alternatives are available for Microsoft (and Adobe, don’t forget them here too) products and whether you actually need to stay with them. Let’s see what I do on this desktop :

BOINC science – runs on Linux as well.

Gaming – since Steam brought out their Linux based Steamdeck, far more games are being made available either natively (without layers) on Linux or they run as well or better than on Windows via translation layers like Proton. However, if you enjoy the multiplayer online games like Fortnite and League of Legends, research very carefully whether you’d be able to play those.

Stream watching – happens on a browser …

Web browsing – yep see above there …

Picture making and memes – I use GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program) for photo editing, which has a native Linux version.

Also consider that if you have an Android phone, that runs on a Linux version that’s been phone-ified.

So Bunny PC is increasingly likely to be a Linux based machine, which saves £110 which can go towards a more expensive graphics card. And I get full control over the machine, without Microsoft changing stuff on their whim, usually without making sure that it’s actually a positive change.

Picture. Meme. We're looking at a chestnut coloured cat looking down into an open PC box. The captions are "The doohickey has uncoupled from the thingamabob." and "Bring me the duct tape"

Enough about the bad bits though, what am I looking at getting ?

The core upgrade will be the Ryzen 7 9800x3d processor in probably another Asrock board. Meltdown’s Ryzen 5 3600 has been rock solid in its Asrock board (after I disabled the overclocking that earned it the Meltdown name), so I’ll stick with that combination. This should be maybe double or the more the cpu grunt that Meltdown had. We’ll see.

I’ll drop 64GB in there (in 2 sticks of 32GB) which is honestly excessive … but it future proofs the machine a bit more. I’d like the Bunny to last at least 6 years preferably more, with the only changes done being graphics and possibly storage. I’m likely to acquire one of these boxes for it :

Picture. We're looking at a PC case. The frame is blue, with clear windows to front and one side. There are 6 fans spread around the case with lighty up bits.

That’s a Montech King 95 Pro. (Linky to Montech’s site) The advantages of that are the reports from people around the discords who have got one, it’s a very positively reviewed case. Meltdown’s Bitfenix case very nearly needed an application of the Mend Stick (hammer) to allow the PSU to be fitted, because it was supplied with a very small distortion. BAD. I won’t get the case with all the fans (maybe) but that one does have very key features – it can fit a very large air cooling fan, plus the ports are vertically on the front. A bit of learning from this case is that if the ports point upwards at all (Meltdown’s are at 45 degrees), they will trap dust and eventually not allow the plugs to go in properly.

The cooling is another direction where I have my own big opinions there … There are three main ways to go with cooling a gaming PC :

Air cooling – a big lump of metal attached to the processor with big fans to push air over it.

All in one cooling – a small waterblock goes on the cpu and moves the heat to radiators with big fans on to do the cooling. The whole thing would be sealed unit simple.

Home brew watercooling – same as above but this would be a lot more custom, where you figure out the waterblocks, the pumps, the filters, the radiators, the fans etc.

All in one and watercooling are both very well sorted now and I should probably check them out properly at some point but … I see the fans and ask if you actually really gain anything with these ? They’re more expensive, you have to consider the fluid inside (air bubbles get in, so the radiator goes at the top so the bubbles don’t go at the cpu part) and the chances of having a disaster where your expensive gaming PC gets drowned by its own cooling system.

Nah. I’ll just go for a big lump of metal and big slow fans. It’s less complicated, very little can go wrong with air cooling and it’s still very quiet if you go for the big slow fans. It’s one where opinions differ :-D. I go my way, I look at curiosity at those who go other ways, we see what we can learn from each other and mutually hope that we both get many happy gaming hours from our respective rigs.

That’s one for the rest of life too – respect each other’s choices, cheer people on and support them in the direction they go.

Picture. Meme. We're looking at the cats inside the PC again, this time the captions are "Keep calm and let the professionals do their job"

Note I won’t be going to a shop for the PC again. I’ll buy off the shelf laptops but … there’s too much potential for off the shelf desktops to have components in from OEMs that I wouldn’t touch with a bargepole. Or they’ll put substandard components in to save pennies, like an under specified power supply that will explode after 12 months and a day (warranty period) and take other components with it.

Oops, small eek there as I leant on the arm a bit too heavily and nearly provoked a bigger ouch.

There we go – if you’d like more of a look at what I’m lining up to get, here’s a Partpicker list link. The actual bits I get will diverge from that a little, so I’ll transfer the 2TB SSD from Meltdown and its expansion card over to Bunny. Plus I think I’ll transfer the graphics card over for the near term too, because the graphics card market is in a big state of flux right now, so it’s not a good time to buy.

(Plus politics is happening, you see too much of that everywhere else though)

Picture. Meme. We're looking inside an opened PC again. There is a cat in the bottom right. The captions are "I'm in your PC" "stealing all your memez"

I’m not ordering tonight part because it’s getting late, part because I try and avoid spending big money when I’m feeling the pain at increased levels. The other reason is that I need to transfer over all the data I want to keep to the 2TB drive that’ll go into Bunny PC.

That might take a while ! So many memes !

Nite all see you all at a later date :-).

Thanks for reading, would you like to share ?

Time to resurface

Hello everyone,

It’s been a while ! I think I needed to dive under the covers for a little while. But first ! We need that thumbnail …

Picture. We're looking at two dinosaurs perched on the only part of a mountain still above water. They're looking over towards a wooden boat sailing away. The captions are "Oh crap was that today?" and "The first senior moment"

I think the big reason it’s been so long is a steady realisation that I’m probably descending deeper into the burn out, instead of thinking that I’d hit as far as I could go down and therefore the only way was to improve. Nah. I think the burn out is getting worse, if that’s possible. I’m hanging in there but there’s a general shell shocked feeling where I think I’ve retreated back within myself somewhat. Will have to see what I need to change to start recovering and improving. But first, what’s been happening outside of going into the shell for a couple of months ?

We left things last time in the middle of January. A massive highlight for this year was heading off to Megacon at the end of January. This was over in London at the Excel arena and I’d thoroughly recommend checking out this particular convention.

Picture. We're looking at a green haired lady in a yellow dress with black trim and white boots dancing in the middle of a square. She's facing us, holding up a purple fan in her right hand. In the background, a multitude of people looking at stands.

It’s a smaller convention than Comic Con, covering a lot of the same things. It’s perhaps a third of the size, so I was able to get around there a few times as well as just enjoy and soak up the vibes coming from the anime dancing ladies at the Performance Square. There was a lot of joy coming from watching them bounce around their stage. And wonderful vibes coming from the other dancing ladies off to the side, who were bouncing around as well.

It was just a wonderful, happy thing. And then there was what looked like an impromptu mass dance party later on. Amazing lovely happy vibes and it was wonderful to see.

I came away with some awesome loot too. The main reason I knew about Megacon was because I’d seen it on the wonderful Aby of Trayed and Tested‘s (Etsy link) Etsy page that’s at the link there. It’s always lovely to be recognised and a surprise too considering I’d only met Aby once before, at Insomnia 2024. Good to see them again and have a little natter.

Picture. We're looking at two red dragons, with a dice tray in the background and two sets of dice in the foreground. More info follows in the text.

The bits there include (there’s too much for alt-text there so here’s the list) :

A dice tray with rainbow coloured dragons flying.

A set of mostly transparent dice with real clouds inside (the d6 was hiding under Eeyore)

A set of larger green dice with yellow patterns and numbers on them.

A leather pouch to hold the dice tray and I keep the dice in there too.

A pink 3d printed dragon from Printing Like Rabbits.

And the Eeyore dragon that I picked up at one of the Welsh castles last year.

I’m definitely a person that mirrors the vibes of the people that I’m around, which can be a good thing and a bad thing. (Happy people make me happy, toxicity frustrates me) It’s why I went back to Trayed and Tested at Insomnia last year and why Megacon caught the eye as somewhere to go. Looking forward to Comic Con later in the year, plus there will be the UK Games Expo the weekend after.

Picture. We're looking at a cute white kitten with orange fur on the top of their head. The captions are "I need" "Hugs"

And then there was the day after … I had what I’ll call a health event. I won’t go into details except that there was a decent amount of blood escaping, I should have taken myself off to hospital to get seen to. I’m ok, it was messy but was under control quickly, hasn’t recurred since and I still have all the bits we should have.

But whereas I’d have quite liked to get the Megacon details locked in to memory with a post, that health event is something I’d quite like to delete from the memory. It rattled me for a little while that one.

Gosh, what else has been going on apart from that ? I haven’t been getting out much. I think that’s part of the burn out. I did take a week off a couple of weeks ago, I was thinking about going up to the Lake District for a few days. Kinda like the Conwy Castle trip up to North Wales last year, except doing all of the arrangements myself this time.

Is it bad when you’re too mentally done to arrange stuff to help recover from being too mentally done ? Probably.

One thing that has happened since the last post is me doing the Space thing again …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at four buggies on an airless rocky planet. The buggies are parked looking away from us, in a line left to right. In the sky, we see dots of stars plus a small white blue sun.

The interest happened again due to the lovely Ninja Space Unicorn (Twitch link) kicking off an expedition in Elite Dangerous to head off to the far side of the galaxy and back. It caught the interest and so I’ve joined in with the streams so far. And they’ve been fun too, including the picture above where the 4 of us that day were all set up to do a buggy race around our landed space ships.

The expedition has been paused for a few weeks now due to IRL Stuff (we lost a friend far too soon) but having fun on the expedition made me look again at the second account I had from a giveaway from a different distributor (Ok it was Epic) … so I’m playing Elite on two accounts now. My main account is still 1000 light years above the centre of the galaxy but their carrier is supporting the alt account build up a star system.

That’s been another big draw, there were rumours at the start of the year that colonisation was coming to Elite. We could claim a system for our own and build stuff in there. Mine’s the Col 285 Sector ZU-L B9-2 gosh that’s a mouthful here’s an Inara link system. There are just two installations completed so far but I should be able to finish two more this week with what’s in the carrier … and then it goes faster from there for a little bit with smaller bases. And if you’ve had a look at that link and noticed something …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at a spaceship mostly in shadow lower left. The engines are flaring out a white exhaust as the ship heads towards the opening into a cubical space station. The name "Here be Dwagons" is emblazoned below the entrance.

Yep. My home station is called Here Be Dwagons. It had to be :-D. And it’s been making me grin every time I go past the name in the list of things in the system. I do have a few more names in the Book Of Names. One will come soon because I have a farm station quite early in the build list. The other big name needs to wait until a medical facility is built. Other than that, looking for some really good names. There could well be a Space Unicorn themed name in there at some point.

Other stuff ? It’s April Fools Day tomorrow, I don’t have anything planned for that … although I did go back to childhood times by acquiring a game called Derail Valley. It’s a train driver simulator. It’s really early days in there for me but I’d point you towards Squirrel’s playlist of the game over on Youtube. He’ll tell you more about an interesting curious game with that progression system inside that you know I go for.

I think I better hit the post and publish button in a moment though … I’ve been keeping the reading going, I lost the reading streak again (oops) but I’ll be looking to do an A to Z of books thing this year. It’s supposed to be authors but I don’t think I’ll find enough variety there for all of the letters, so I’ll go with authors and titles.

Good to post again, I’ll try and not make it two months until the next one !

Have a great evening everyone.

PS Social media stuff ! I’ve abandoned Twixxer (the owner), I keep up to date on Bluesky (the author / creator communities are barmy wonderful fun) and most of the discords I’m in … I’ll post to Farcebook but I don’t keep up to date with what gets posted there (bad algorithm, too much).

Thanks for reading, would you like to share ?

Insert Meme Title Here

Hello everyone 🙂

Oh dear that’s a bit of a weak title innit … Couple of memes caught the eye this week that I thought would make an excellent theme for things to have a natter about. But first … thumbnail !

Picture meme. We're looking at a black and white cat that is sitting up. There is a loading wheel above their head and the caption is "Pls be patient, his brain cell is loading."

I think I broke my brain a little bit today. It’s a work related thing where we’re looking how we can add one bit of equipment to a bigger bit of equipment but it’s not entirely obvious how best to do it. So I started thinking about the problem in an abstract way. Ask not what the obvious solution is, ask what the problems actually are and what you’re trying to achieve. And you may end up with a completely different answer to what everyone has assumed the answer should be.

Actually that cues me up for a mini rant … I bet you’ve all been subjected to websites that are massively overkeen to get you to sign up for their cookies and especially their surveys or their newsletters. I had a suggestion to do that here, where one of the third party people were recommending I use that newsletter popup.

Nope. I hate that. It’ll never appear here.

You know the one I mean, where you’ve mostly randomly found a news site (often techie geeky stuff) and as soon as you move the mouse off the window, you get a popover that obscures the article that’s demanding you sigh up for a newsletter. If any website owners are reading this, PLEASE don’t do that. It’ll make random readers annoyed with you for having to dismiss the newsletter pop up and if they’re annoyed, they won’t ever sign up for updates. Whether or not someone signs up for a newsletter depends entirely on the quality of your content. If their first impressions are tainted by having to click too many links to dismiss cookies, or by a newsletter popup, then that first impression is pure annoyance and the first impressions stick.

Think of how you see the websites you look at, then apply what your impressions are to creating the style of your own site. And I have to admit to being a little bit lazy there myself with how I’ve got this site set up. It could be better, at least I hope it’s not annoying.

Because annoyance overrides being interesting. Put that newsletter or subscribe link at the end of your post. If someone’s enjoyed reading what you’ve contributed, that’s the point where you want them to see the “would you like to see more?”

Rant complete 🙂 First meme of the day is a question that a good friend on Bluesky asked. What would the title of your autobiography be ? I had a ponder on this for a minute, looked away for a second, had a random moment of inspiration and …

Picture. Cartoon strips. Top left, a red dragon is saying "Here to slay me? With that little thing". Top right, an armoured man holds up a sword saying "Oh, no I needed this to get here." Bottom left, a conical mountain with captions "I thought you'd be lonely up here so I'm here to sit with you, if you'd like". Bottom right sees man and dragon sitting quietly beside each other looking at the sunset.

I got that from Google images from probably a collections site but I might look up @Beardedhorse there for more. Ah ha ! Cool, they’re on Bluesky.

ADHD Brain says “stay on topic”, the daft idea I had was that my autobiography would be titled “Here be dwagons.” What would yours be ?

Next meme … if video games cause violence, what would you be going to prison for based on the last game you played. I’m not counting Idle Champions there, I’ve played Motorsport Manager today but when I answered that meme, the answer was “Running a sweatshop style factory impriso—- employing hordes of adorable little gnomes to build products with no thought for safety”. Yep, it’s the rather special Little Big Workshop.

Game screenshot. Little Big Workshop. We can see the rooms of our factory laid out before us, filled with little machines and small gnome people with Xmas hats. In the centre, a box with a bearded fellow in red hat and blue waistcoat thanking us for delivering items to make the festive season happen.

There we go, that’s from the end of the Xmas event that the game has at a particular time of the real world calendar year. It’s a cracking game, very addictive with definite “one more job” tendencies to keep you sucked in playing the game.

Last meme was about games that you have and own in the Steam library but have never played … I have to admit to having more than a few of these. Sometimes it’s because I just haven’t gotten round to trying to learn them. Let’s see a few of these highly regarded games that I really need to have a good look at :

Puffin Planes has 5 minutes – it’s an airline management game where you’re looking to encompass the globe with your airline taking people from place to place. Just haven’t felt the Brain to learn to play it.

Sky Haven is an airport management game where you build your airport. I did enjoy setting up Airport CEO but didn’t have Brain to learn this one at the time.

Dustland Delivery – post apocalyptic truck game. You’re not driving the truck like the Euro Truck Sim / American Truck Sim games, it’s more a strategic transport game.

Stardew Valley and Graveyard Keeper – they’re both farm type games, with Graveyard Keeper having you manage sending the dead off. And harvesting them for bits to make other things. These are both legendary standard games that I really should invest some time in to learn.

Space Crew was a freebie and I added it to the library for the soundtrack. It’s a follow on to Bomber Crew (which I did own and look at) but didn’t play it because the gameplay videos and reviews I saw for it suggested that it was a bit of a soulless grindy hard for the sake of it game that I wouldn’t enjoy. And it doesn’t have the nostalgic connection to WW2 that Bomber Crew has.

Kenshi – is a post apocalyptic wasteland game where you roam with a small band of warriors trying to carve out your place in the world. I really should play this one, it’s a unique one with its own special character.

Papers Please – another legendary one where you play the part of an Immigration and Passport Control Agent in the totalitarian authoritarian country of Arstotzka. You decide whether people are allowed in or not and they’ve included enough weird character to make this an interesting cult classic.

Parkitect, Project Hospital and Model Builder – these all arrived in the same bundle as Little Big Workshop.

Humble is responsible for a lot of the unplayed games in my library, because I’d add the games I acquired as part of a bundle but wasn’t actually interested in.

Last one for today – Disco Elysium is another legendary game. It’s a mostly text adventure game set in a future scifi world that’s descended into neglect and dystopia. There’s a lot that’s very familiar to what we have in our 21st century world, with more advanced technology mixed in. But it’s not about the technology, it’s about a murder, an uncaring city, a long suffering partner and a cop charged with figuring out what’s going on at the same time as piecing together who they are from the fragments of extreme amnesia.

It’s another classic. I really must find the time to play it !

I need to get my daily at least one chapter read now though, so I’ll bid you goodnight, have a wonderful timezone everyone.

Thanks for reading, would you like to share ?

Winter wonderland, for a day

Hello everyone,

We had snow ! It’s always a big event that in UK because it’s quite rare. Although maybe it’s increasing as the weather gets wilder ? It didn’t last long but it was good to have a little wander in it while it lasted. Still chilly here … but the occasional clouds aren’t turning to rain or snow.

Thumbnail pic ?

Picture. Meme. We're looking at 4 panels all of a black cat with large eyes. The panels steadily get closer to the cat. The captions together say "I wish your year is full of nice things"

There we go. Purr.in.ink are good people and I must check that I’m following them on Bluesky if they’re over there yet.

Uhoh this could be a random post – quickly on the social media stuff … I’ve given up on trying to keep up with Facebook and Twixxer. I’ll occasionally scroll through the Facebook stuff but it is very occasional. Their algorithm is complete garbage now and hides things. I don’t bother scrolling Twixxer any more, definitely not on mobile due to how advert heavy it is. Plus both Facebook and Twixxer are run by … well you’ll have your own opinions there and I probably agree with most of them. It doesn’t help that both of these sites are now deeply problematic with who runs them.

Bluesky is great for keeping up with that selective curated group of people that I follow, as is Instagram. Plus I’ve trained Instagram to mostly suggest cute dog meme videos that it shows me when the people I follow haven’t posted an update. Good times.

Snow ?

Picture. We're looking at a snowy scene towards a road curving around a roundabout in the centre. We can see the patterning of the snow coming down. It's at night and there is light from streetlights and a car negotiating the roundabout.

We didn’t get much, although it was enough to cover up the roads with a light layer that was giving some people a few issues.

Picture. We're standing on a lightly snow covered pavement looking down a long straight road lined with lit streetlights on the other side. The road is covered in snow with ruts cut into it by the cars.

About enough snow there to make things interesting on the roads but it was a Saturday evening, so not many people were needing to head out to go to work or get supplies. Roads were pretty quiet actually and I think one of the local chippies were closing up early.

It was nice having the little walkabout. Not too cold and the snow was easy to walk through in the boots. I didn’t see any snow people about though and I didn’t stay out for that long.

Picture. Snow scene again. We're looking towards a small bridge. There is a wooden fence on each side, going up to about hip height. Beyond, the leafless branches of a layer of trees.

We did have the last remnants of the Christmas lights though.

Picture. Snow scene. We're looking down a lightly snow covered lane between houses, some of which we can see on the right with cars parked in short driveways in front. The screen is lit by streetlights and light blue white dot lights on the trees.

Pretty.

It’s taken me a few more days than I wanted to post this one ! Back at work this week and that usually leads to me being absolutely wiped out by the time it gets to the evening. (Especially as I did Mall on Monday evening and got back a bit late) So I’ve been gaming, with the trucks and a bit of Mass Effect, chilling out with the stream watching and enjoying the reading.

First book read of 2025 was Lords of Uncreation by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It’s the last of his Architects trilogy, set in a fairly near future universe where humanity reached the stars only to find monsters lurking in Unspace* which would come out and remake planets as works of grotesque art. *(Unspace is this universe’s faster than light travel mechanism). It was a great trilogy with lots of shenanigans and characters to enjoy and the author pulled off the ending really well.

Next up is Colony Mars Four Jezero City by Gerald M Kilby. It’s started out as a murder mystery set on near future Mars. They’re not as well written as the Lords of Uncreation trilogy but they’re still an enjoyable tale. We need these books as well as the masterpieces. And some of the really well written books can be really boring and dreary to read.

I’d prefer to dive through a bunch of great stories that pull me in quickly, than to slog through something I’m not enjoying. And I’m looking at the Peter F Hamilton book from last year there, I enjoyed part of that set up but could tell it was about to go into very dark places with very little narrative support for it going to even deeper dark places.

Oh ! Gotta get back to the book (and the ShoxxyQT* stream) so I can keep a Kindle reading streak going that’s over 400 days now. The last time I missed a day was on the return home day of the Norway cruise, which had a nightmare drive home through almost central London on a really bad traffic day.

*Shoxxy is a new find in the streaming world, she’s a Scottish streamer lady who I’ve seen a small number of streams from so far. Lovely person, has very cosy chill vibes and it makes me happy hanging out in streams like that. Here’s a Twitch link. Although it’s more disturbing horror vibes from the game she has at the moment :-D.

Back to the book ! Nite all, have a lovely rest of the weekend.

Thanks for reading, would you like to share ?