Author: Sleepypete

In the North, with creators

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October 3, 2023

8:29 pm

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Hello everyone,

I had an away trip over the weekend … It was for an event called Creator North, run by the ever bouncy adorable bundle of fun that is Tashnarr, the effervescent Billietrixx, the lovely LookitsTilly and Maddog, assisted with the cameras by Brookie.

I don’t have many pictures of the event itself (was enjoying talking to people a bit too much) but … the weekend involved a bit of wander around Sheffield and this fella happened :

Picture. We're looking at a small red dwagon with a white chest sitting on a laptop keyboard, with a screen behind showing a chat window. The dwagon is made out of thread, woven into life.
Yep. I did a rescue

Links time ? Lots of links. The event itself has a home here : https://creatornorth.uk/#page-top

It’s an event that came about to be a gathering point for creators who weren’t able to make it to other events. Almost all of the creator events that happen in the UK are concentrated around London, or maybe a bit of Scotland’s two cities too. There are events at Birmingham NEC but most of them, like the Twitch events and the EGX gaming expo have moved to London. That’s less than ideal for a lot of people. Actually including me and I live in the South too. So our fab foursome set up Creator North as a meet up for creators living in the North of the UK.

And although I’m South and it was 180 miles away for me, I thought I’d take the chance to meet these wonderful people and add that little bit of support to the day. I’m really glad I did too, it was a very enjoyable little event. Cozy and still with a lot of lovely people.

So who were the organisers ?

There’s Tashnarr (Twitch link), who doesn’t stream so much now but it’s always fun when she can find the time outside of organising other events. Tashnarr is an adorable little bean and it’s been a treat to be able to follow those streams. Although there is that … guilt? feeling (not sure it’s guilt) where you missed out on so much of their earlier content due to just simply not knowing about them. You might also recognise the name from such things as …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at a somewhat diamond shaped spaceship. There are two engine pods at the back (top of shot), a notch where the pilot is at the front and two long antenna like things at the corners. The ship is dominated by the reflection of a sun but we can see blue with yellow highlight colouration. In the background, the disc of the galaxy.

That’s Zoomnarr, the ship which was my third attempt at speed running to the Galactic Core in Elite Dangerous. I do like to do tribute names for people with my spaceships (it gives me an excuse to say nice things about them). Zoomnarr was the second ship named for Tashnarr after the rather weakly named Grabnarr and then the rather better named Manic Minarr followed. It’s a sign of how high I regard this lovely one that three tribute ships happened 😀 (Oh and I thought of Manic Minarr and that pun had to happen).

Next one up is Billietrixx (twitch link again), I’ve only been following Billie for apparently 9 months now (that’s how long the Twitch sub has run) and found her through raiding into Tashnarr’s channel and Tash raiding into Billie. That’s how most of the cross connections happen, people you like raiding other people that they like. (When a streamer finishes, they’ll raid over to another channel to give their audience someone fun to continue watching) Billie another one who brings her own special energy to the streams, it’s mad, maybe a little manic but always passionate about the game and enjoying the game with chat. Pleasure to watch, fun to natter to via stream chat. And a lovely one to introduce the event to everyone on Saturday.

It was a pleasure chatting with Billie, Tashnarr and we need to mention LookitsTilly (Twixxer link) who organises events, is a lovely Twitch mod and was also a pleasure to talk to on Saturday. And then there’s Maddog (Twixxer link), if you play any of the Guitar Hero type games, you may be using his song request bot …

And I also got to meet Bentham again, aka Mangledpork (here’s his Twitch). He’s a lovely gent, I’ve been steadily realising that me and him resemble each other a lot (if not in appearance, there’s a picture on the Creator North discord of Bentham accidentally looking way more dapper than I ever will). Bentham likes his factory and crafting games. He’s currently playing Valheim and I so nearly would be watching now if not for another new person to me from Creator North called Curlylocks.

When CausticPhoenix finishes up (hi Caustic!) in a minute, I’ll head over to the Curly one. Who’s Caustic ? Here’s the old Twixxer link. Most of the time I see Caustic, she’ll be hosting a working stream but Caustic will also get super passionate and drawn into gameplay streams. So passionate it leads to super excitable (and hilarious) clip moments for victories, scares and the unexpected. Caustic has a few fingerprints on this blog too after dropping in a few comments, hugely appreciated. I need to get back to applying some more of those comments too. Constant improvement is always good.

So, that was Creator North ! Lovely meet up, very glad I went up there to Sheffield for it. Would totally do it again. Hopefully they can put another one on soon.

Other things about the trip ? I could do without the behaviour on the roads at the moment, Friday saw a lot of inexplicable stop start traffic. Like the outside lane suddenly just stopping … That’s supposed to be the fast lane. Other drivers will also make it awkward for you to get past, by speeding up as you’re going past them. They’ll be doing (I’m being charitable) 60, you’re going past at the 70 speed limit, they’ll speed up to match you. And worse behaviour. I don’t get it, drivers shouldn’t get involved with other drivers like that. I like to think of my awareness as a box of 9 (3 by 3, you’re in the centre) when I’m driving. When people go outside of that box, I don’t care about them any more unless they’ve identified themselves for special attention. And then I’ll keep an eye out for shenanigans.

But yeah, behaviour on the roads is poor, mostly because other drivers seem to insist on getting the better of other drivers. I really don’t get it.

Hotel for the weekend was Novotel. It was a nice room with all the facilities (that I don’t use, just had water) plus secure parking. Staff were nice, full of smiles. But … I think I got overcharged for breakfast and parking (double charge for 2 nights stay), which is what I’ll remember of Novotel. There are other chains, I’ve never been overcharged on the work trips with the other chains.

Sheffield was a good city to have a wander around. It’s a little odd in that the main shopping areas are split. Most cities have their shopping area all clustered around one place. Moor Market was a good one to check out, plus there was a festival with a stand with the Rescue Dwagon you can see up top.

So that was my weekend ! It was lovely to see everyone at Creator North. Little events are just right for me. Too many people trip something that might be social anxiety ? Dunno there, perhaps it’s splitting attention between so many people.

Anyway, Creator North was great. Oh ! I haven’t mentioned yet ! There was cake.

Drawing. One of mine so it's a bit crude. A large cup cake is on a table to the right. To the left, a forlorn looking green dwagon is standing on tip toes with chin and paws resting on the table. The cake is out of reach. The dwagon is thinking "Caaaaaake"

The cake was lush. The people were lovely. And it was great to meet a bunch of people that I’ve only known from the other side of the screen.

Disc trials

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September 22, 2023

10:16 pm

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Hello everyone,

Gosh where did those two weeks go. I know where the first one went when I was on leave, I kinda disappeared into a Little Big Workshop addiction (again) followed by opening up Trans Road USA again and disappearing into that. And then this week at work pretty much disappeared in a flash.

Picture meme. A small grey cat is looking at the back of a television. There are three wires plugged in, with yellow, red and white plugs. The caption is "Wait I'll fix it"

So after writing last time about having a flare up and that I was upgrading the desktop with a new SSD, there was a bit more drama there last week …

So the flare up continues, my arms are less scary now than they were last week which is good. They’re still scaring people and I’ve been putting them under tubigrip to protect them but there has been at least some improvement this week. Slow and steady repairs are what I’ve been used to. It’s the quick setbacks that are why I still have the problems.

I think I have more of an answer though. I had a suspicion about garlic bread last week, still got that but I think I have another one about tomato. Yep. That’s a new mystery one connected to me enjoying tomato cup-a-soups more lately. Ah well, looks like I can’t have nice things so much. I’ve had one minor reversal since stopping the tomato cup-a-soups and I think that was from a chicken arabiatta which had tomato in it. We’ll see. The pattern has been a few good slow repair days followed by a quick set back, possibly coinciding with tomato stuff.

Talking about nice things …

Picture meme. A kitten is looking at a monitor. There is a progress bar on the screen. The captions are "my eevilll plan ... iz 7% compleet!!"

The new Solid State Device disc drive arrived. It’s a 2TB nVME unit from Crucial and it fits into one of those m2 slots. (nVME stands for nonvolatile memory express) M2 is a credit card type thing, it’s an edge connector about an inch across and the drives are about 4 inches long. Yep. I use inches.

So I look in the motherboard manual (before buying) and it’s a good modern board with a current chipset, so it should support the drive properly. It even says it in there : 2x m2 slots and “Supports nVME SSD as boot discs”. That means I could put my current m2 SSD into one slot, the new one into another and then transfer Windows from one drive to the other. The software to do that comes with the drive, they give you a limited use copy of Acronis True Image, which is excellent software to do the job hassle free. The idea is that the copy is done and then you swap the drives over in the machine. Job done, easy.

(Disclosure note is appropriate at this point – I bought the drive myself, nothing was provided apart from that free limited use copy of the drive copy software, I recommend it because it works)

Does it work out like that ?

No.

Problem one – with the 2x m2 slots in use, the machine doesn’t go into the BIOS. That’s where you do the basic setting up of the machine, tell it what drive to load off and then it hands over to Windows. If you can’t get into the BIOS, then you’re pretty much stuffed.

I even tried swapping the graphics card over (electronic connections are somewhat shared between the graphics and the second m2 slot), this resulted in the board doing nothing but beeping in distress. Which was … not good.

Answer – I have a USB enclosure which the new drive is currently in. This happily proved that the problem wasn’t with the new drive … always gotta be wary of stuff being dead on arrival.

The USB enclosure is a bit slow though, so it took 3 hours for the Windows drive to get copied over and then you swap the drives over and boom, you’ve got the system running on the new drive.

No.

Where the manual says “nVME SSD as boot discs”, it means in a special RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Discs) set up which has to be carefully set up. It wouldn’t let me select the new drive as something to boot off. Without changing a setting to do that RAID thing, it wouldn’t allow me to go into the BIOS. So there’s no way to boot off that new disc (at the moment) and setting it up as a RAID array stopped Windows from being able to work with the drive.

The temporary answer, which has happily worked is :

Old SATA m2 SSD is back in there as the boot drive that the machine primarily works from. New nVME M2 SSD is in the USB enclosure plugged in at the back of the machine, whirring away as a data drive. And that works too, albeit with some issues. The drive access is nice and fast, Starfield plays very nicely but instead of giving 4000MB/s data rates, it’s limited to 40MB/s. I’m not seeing this as a significant issue but I am going to address it.

The permanent solution will be to acquire another expansion card to put in the machine and then the new drive goes into that, hopefully being pretty quick again too.

So drama on my outsides, drama with that new bit for the computer.

I did a quick test in Starfield and then promptly didn’t open the game again. Gaming habits be like that :-D.

Oh and look ! A power blip (that’s rare here) and it repeated another thing I said this week about systems reacting to power interruptions : Computer rides through it, lights flicker, telly was fine but the modem reset so I’m now waiting for it to connect again.

Time for a quiet finish to the evening watching Tashnarr play a bit of Apex Legends plus a bit of book. Current one is Descendant Machine by Gareth L Powell, he writes great books. They’re always intriguing, gritty and with interesting and varied characters. It’s in his Continuance series, where humanity has been evicted from the Earth and now wander the galaxy in a fleet of Arks. Part of the set up is that substrate (hyperspace equivalent) is dependant on a human navigator and machine AI ship combination. It feels inspired by The Culture from Iain M Banks but it’s its own unique universe. Well worth checking out, as are the rest of the books that Gareth L Powell has given us.

To the book !

PS I’m on Bluesky as well now, with the revelation that Twixxer might be going behind a paywall being a catalyst for some including me. Just look for Sleepydwagonman, that’ll be me.

PS2 I now need to reset the clocks on cooker, microwave, alarm clock … Oh well.

Technical Difficulties May Delay Cruise

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September 11, 2023

11:02 pm

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Hello everyone,

It’s been a curious few weeks since I posted last time. (I do like that word, “curious”, it covers a lot of meanings.) I’m on leave for a week now, it’s been delayed a little bit by me doing Work Stuff but I’m in chill out mode at the moment.

Cartoon picture, credit to "Regan". We're looking at two dinosaurs sitting on a rock jutting out of a rising ocean, there is the top of a tree to the left. In the background, a ship with pairs of animals on board. The caption "Oh crap! Was that TODAY?"

Yep. Could have been on a cruise this week. The why not is because I’ve been dealing with another flare up with my outsides again. The pattern there seems to be about a week of slow healing followed by a day where it’ll suddenly reset back to the start of that again. I think it’s steadily improving but I’m not wanting to be too far away from the gunk I’m using to medicate it at the moment. Including an overnight away for work last week … It was threatening again on that.

How come it’s bad ? To be honest, not sure. I think I’m reacting to something I’ve been eating again but I can’t localise what it could be. Outside of maybe something garlic related. I know, weird thought. But I did get a reset this weekend after garlic butter infused bread with my dinner on Thursday and pizza garlic bread on Saturday. Need more data.

After living with this condition for over 10 years now, it’s something I have to keep a very close eye on. The psychologically damaging thought is “will it ever get better ?” And that thought does keep running through my mind. That’s partially answered by “It has got a lot better” because I can somewhat remember what it was like over 5 years ago when it was at its worst. I’m not going to go into too much details but one curiosity is that a large amount of my legs is smooth now, hairless. The hair didn’t come back.

Try not to think too deeply about that !

I do need to get myself out of the house for a decent amount of time though. I really need a good holiday I think, not just one spent being lazy in the house.

Picture. Meme. A cute little mostly white with black patches is sitting up on a tiny boat floating on calm water. The scene is just lit by the moon. The caption is "When you're just a cute dog on a boat, looking for a tennis ball"

There were a couple of cruise options I’ve been looking at. The main criteria are : not too far away, not hot, good places. I did enjoy the flying trips in and out of Norway and would like to see more. So … Option 1 :

Picture. We're looking at a map of the coast of Norway. There is a thin black line, joined with many red dots. It's the route of a cruise ship from Bergen in the South, to Kirkenes in the North.

That’s from Hurtigruten cruises (link) although I found that one from one of the cruise search sites. This looks like a very interesting cruise, especially in the shorter one way trip. Must research it a lot more to see if it could be made to work. The problem, is getting to or from Kirkenes in the North. You can fly there … from Oslo. So the travel around the cruise would be Gatwick to Bergen, then on the way back it would be Kirkenes to Oslo to Heathrow. I couldn’t see how I’d make that work. The there and back option would work a lot better.

Picture. We're looking at a map of Northern Europe. It's zoomed in a lot, showing just southern Norway and Sweden, Denmark, the top of Germany and a slice of the UK to the left. There's another route marked for the ship journey.

That’s another, much easier option going from Copenhagen to Molde Fjord and then back again with a side hop to Kiel in Germany. I think the flights worked out to going from Heathrow to Copenhagen, which makes it far easier for things like where do you leave the car. It’s a little awkward getting across from Gatwick to Heathrow, especially after being tired for travel. Better just to pile into the car and then use the remaining energy to cruise back down a hopefully quiet motorway.

Anyway, cruise didn’t happen this time because I was a bit too concerned about going away from home for an extended period where I wouldn’t be able to pop the medication to attack this ongoing skin condition.

Another option is a narrowboat cruise in the UK. This would be really valuable for informing the choices about the off in the future plan to get out of here and live on a boat. But I think I’d need to have a friend along for a narrowboat cruise for a) company and b) assistance with the locks and tying up the boat.

What’s these technical difficulties from the title ? I’ve had a look at another new game …

Picture. Meme. We're looking at an otter, swimming underwater. He's gripping a pair of water pipes quite tightly. The caption is "he needs those parts for his space ship, he's going to otter space"
It’s an older meme but it still checks out

The game I’ve been trying out is the brand new just released Starfield. I’ve been enjoying half watching a series of streams on it and it’s been intriguing up to what I’ve seen on it. I’d quite like to lose myself in it but … and this is a big but. It’s not unplayable when not installed on an SSD but the play experience definitely suffers to the point where I don’t want to open it again until I’ve migrated my system across to a bigger and better SSD.

Jargon buster – SSD is a Solid State Device storage thing. Whereas the older Hard Discs worked by having spinning discs with material that stored what was saved to them, Solid State Devices do that with electronic memory devices instead. Hard Discs take a lot of time to find what’s needed, SSDs just zap over to the data. They’re much faster in both finding stuff and retrieving stuff. But they were also subject to a massive premium on price, such that when Meltdown was built, it got a big for the time 500GB drive. I’ve now acquired a faster 2TB drive, I just need to install it.

The technical difficulties is definitely a TLDR. Basically, I have two suitable slots in my machine but one of them isn’t working. I think I know why … but available mental effort isn’t wanting to fix it that way. I’m having to ration that a bit at the moment. Anyway, instead of trying to make the dodgy slot work, I’m just going to acquire another slot. We’ll see how that goes.

Anyway, Starfield ?

Game screenshot. Starfield. We're looking at the side of a spaceship with all sorts of protrusions coming out of the sides. An orange planet is above us, half in shadow.
I did a space

It’s an intriguing game so far. It’s been heavily described as Skyrim in Space, which is a blessing and a curse. Skyrim was such a successful game with a go anywhere, do anything format. Translating that formula across to space makes for a very promising game from my point of view. Curse ? It looks like it’s inherited some of the user interface awkwardness from vanilla Skyrim. But … this is a Bethesda game, there are already mods out there to improve the user interface.

Game screenshot. Starfield. Our pilot is standing in front of a futuristic city. She's of medium skin tone, with faint blue hints in tied back hair. She's wearing a dark grey jumpsuit. In the background is a selection of people, standing around having a chat.
I did a ground

The thing I noticed a bit later there is the group of non player characters in the background. They’re all in different but lifelike poses. I walked past a different scripted conversation on my way out of the spaceport too. It’s a nice touch, whereas less technically complex games will quite happily do limited, unnatural poses, it looks like there’s more life in the background this time.

It’s a little thing but it’s tickled the geek in me.

Either way, I’m quite looking forward to going back into Starfield, hopefully I’ll be all up and running with the PC upgrade soon.

Time to sign off though – Hoping to enjoy a quiet week off work, it’s been a while coming. No sea cruise this time, I’ll keep that for later.

Talking about hybrids again

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August 29, 2023

9:38 pm

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Hello everyone,

Oops I blinked and a couple of weeks went by again. I think I nearly posted a week or so ago but may have got distracted by a) a flare up and b) a game again. Oh well.

Picture. We're looking at a white fluffy dog that's looking at the camera with an open mouth. They're riding in a small red fire truck model. The caption is "No time to explain just get in."

Yep. Had a flare up again, which got my legs a bit miffed with me (but not badly) and my arms quite angry with me. Enough for me to get a bit worried about it, sufficient that if the measures taken hadn’t addressed it I might have actually gone to the doctor. But using a tubigrip to protect it at night and more of the topical steroid gunk helped it out a huge amount and it quickly turned course into becoming much better almost immediately. It isn’t fixed yet but it’s not uncontrolled leaking now. (Too much info ? Maybe !)

I’ve been wanting to talk about cars for a while and specifically, developments with the hybrids and electric cars … Actually electric cars is a new one on that and it’s come from watching a The Car Care Nut video looking at a Tesla (youtube link). They have some stunningly amazing tech in those cars. And apparently atrocious build quality. I’d recommend that Car Care Nut video, he talks a huge amount of sense and can explain everything in a way that’s very easy to understand.

He’s mostly about Toyotas, from learning his trade in the Toyota system looking after their cars. As regular readers will know, I’m a firm convert to the Posh Toyotas aka Lexus cars. I like their hybrid system, the tech appeals to the geek in me and the way they drive aligns with how I want to drive instead of taking a few minutes to figure out what you want to have happen like that one Volvo.

So … Hybrids. When I started driving them in 2011, it was pretty much a choice between Toyota and Honda with a bunch of other expensive ones in the Coming Soon bracket. There are a lot more now … I’m back in a similar car to the 2011 one now with Red being a Lexus CT200h. A few of the myths and legends are things like they weigh more so they can’t be as good. Reliability is in question as well. The truth there is that they’re Different, some of those reliability and weight things just don’t apply. I’ve had multiple alternators and starter motors die on cars over the years, there is no alternator or starter on the Toyota system. There’s no gearbox, no clutch. The air con pump doesn’t work off the engine, so it doesn’t take 10% of your engine power when you turn on the chill.

Instead of alternator, starter and gearbox, you’ve got the two motor generators that work together to make the car go. Plus an invertor and battery placed around the centre of gravity of the car. (Which means it makes the weight balance better). The electric part is also pretty well balanced. The 1.8 litre engine gives 97bhp and the electric gives 71bhp for a combined total of 134bhp (they don’t add), so the electric can easily take the car up to 40mph on its own. The torque combines to give the car 300Nm of torque. The 0 to 60 is slower at 10secs but the car is much more flexible than the performance orientated Focus ST170 I had before (170bhp/195Nm torque). The driveability in traffic is outstanding.

So how come this idea popped into the head ? Mostly because an advert from another car company was annoying me enough to check out what they have.

(Ok it’s the Renault)

What are Renault doing now ? It takes a bit of digging to get to their actual tech specs but they’re saying 96kW for the engine (128bhp) and 50kW (67bhp) and claiming 200bhp for the advert. Oh dear, that’s a red flag. Firstly because you can’t add the power together because the power doesn’t come at the same time (motor power is max at 0rpm, engine power is max at high rpm) but they got their sums wrong there. Most people would call that misrepresentation. The torque is actually really good at 205+205.

On the surface, that looks like a pretty decent combination, with a turbo charged petrol engine combining with the motors for good performance (as good as my IS300h’s) and economy.

A very good friend is getting a Hyundai hybrid soon, that’s got a 105bhp engine and a 44bhp motor. Not so sure about that one, the motor might be a bit small. But … I’m not sure that my bigger motor combination is being driven at 71bhp all the time, I’m very curious to see what she thinks of the Hyundai set up. I hope it works out well. One thing about the CT hybrid is that it gives you everything it has when you ask it to, so a 10 second to 60 time works out similarly rapid to the 9 second to 60 time of the old Puma sport coupe.

Picture. Meme. We're looking at several dogs looking out of a car window. One is looking very shocked at us. The caption is "It was then that Carl realised they were going to the vet."
It’s ok Carl

Talking of vets … or mechanics … and Pumas. What’s Ford giving us now with the Abomination Puma ? Firstly, don’t buy one. The engine has so much designed in self detonation potential I’d be surprised if one lasted 50,000 miles. Nice range of engines and specs though but I’m not seeing anything about how big the electric part is outside of it being 48V. The Lexus system is a 220V battery that runs the motors at up to 650V. Higher volts are a good thing, they mean less Amps for the same Power. Less amps means less heat and less losses in the cables. Low volts is bad. 😀 It’s why a kettle takes twice as long to boil in a 115V country compared to how quick we can make tea with 230V kettles.

Don’t buy the Ford. (Also, don’t buy the Renault but I’ll come back to that).

I’ve had several Vauxhalls before but I’m not counting them or the other Plug in Hybrids here because I’ve got no way to support plugging in a car.

I’m struggling to think of more though (bit out of touch with the market) but Auto Express has an article recommending the Kia hybrids. No idea on the motor size again but it’s another 48V system. Sure, if they’ve made it work … that’s great but the numbers work against it. Heat is very much the enemy in electrics and lower volts means higher amps means heat.

Picture. We're looking at the front dashboard area of a car. There's a big screen area, except we can't see the screen, it's being used as a bed by a cute fluffy doggo.
Sleep well Fido

I better close up there … The specifications aren’t important though at the end of the day. What’s really important is what you think of the car on the test drive. How does it handle ? Is it comfortable ? Does it have the speed and flexibility you want in a car ? Does it have enough space ? What toys does it have and are you ok with how you can interact with them on the road ?

There are cars that have gone through the family which I’ve refused to drive more than once. Like the VW Golf TDI which had its weight distribution so bad, it would plough straight on instead of rotating through corners. Like the Volvo which had the complete opposite vibe to how I wanted to drive a car. We didn’t get on.

The IS300h powertrains were great in specification but it took a few iterations before Toyota/Lexus got it right. And the software in the car felt like it was constantly being tweaked between versions of the car with varying levels of success. The mouse like pointer in the CT looks like a great idea but the dial selector in the IS was actually easier and quicker to use. The ES didn’t have a pause button for the hifi. This doesn’t feel like much but when you’re pulling up to a gate person who you need to talk to, it’s really handy to have an actual pause button.

And that’s without getting into reliability. Toyota and Lexus built their brand on reliability and outside of damage (stone in the power steering pump, pandemic induced 12V battery death and a couple of on build defects), the 6 Lexus so far have been top notch reliability. I wouldn’t trust a Renault for electrics … even before considering the extra complexity of drive by wire hybridness. I wouldn’t trust anything in the Ford.

I’m very curious about that Hyundai though, I hope they’ve cracked it with the car my friend is getting.

I haven’t looked back since getting the hybrids, they work extremely well for how I want to drive. (50+mpg is great too) One legacy from the cricket is a lower back injury which affects my left leg. Driving the ST170 in traffic with its clutch would lead to actual high degrees of pain. That’s completely gone with the hybrid autos.

I’d definitely recommend the hybrids. But … as always with cars, make sure you know what you’re getting. If they’re being cagey about specs, like with the Kia and the Ford, then walk away. If you don’t like the driving experience, then walk away. If you’re suspicious about certain “CVTs are the bane of car existence” reviewers, pay attention to different ones. Yep, CVTs send the engine revs up high when you ask for speed … they’ll also send the revs high on part throttle, which those reviewers know full well about and they post the footage to let them grind their axes. How good the electronic brain is determines how quickly the CVT figures out that you want to go fast, you’ll be able to check that on a test drive.

What’s under the hood is pretty irrelevant. What really matters is whether you connect with the car, in all facets of how you interact with it. I like little cars that go round corners quick and quickly go fast with a nice noise when you ask them to. I like good sounds from the sound system too.

But that’s just me, other people want different things from their cars, like being able to freely rev the engine or make the gearbox go crunch. I prefer seat heaters and the simplicity of Left Pedal Made Stop, Right Pedal Make Go.

Must check under the hood some time.

PS The game was called One Military Camp, nice little base builder game with a strategic aspect to it as well. Would recommend.

Locking in the drama

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August 15, 2023

8:06 pm

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Hello everyone,

Bit of drama yesterday to follow a bit of a flare up on my outsides …

Game screenshot. World of Warcraft. We're looking at an old and low quality picture of a group of characters. A couple are on this side of a lowered portcullis on a brown stone floor. One is shouting "let me out"

So I get home … and the key turns in the lock. Which is kinda what you want a key to do. Except you want it to open the latch to let you open the door. Oh well. It just turned in the lock. It let me in eventually but I took it as a sign that I needed to do something urgently. (You can get past a latch lock by means I won’t put here but it doesn’t want to become your door key).

Of course I took it apart after doing a little investigation. And changing the lock and latch over to a new one :-D.

Picture. We're looking at several lock components on my desk. A dwagon is looking on from the top right. More description to come in the text.
It’s fine it’ll fix right up

It just came apart in my hands. Honest. Well, actually it kinda exploded while I was trying to remove the broken bit and parts were propelled out of my hands by the spring there. So … what’s the bits ? It’s a pretty standard night latch lock, you may have one of these on at least one door. Reasonable security but you want a second bolt type lock as well. These can be bypassed with the right implement.

Top left is the main assembly. You can just see the lever that’s on the inside of the door. That works on the greasy clip thing on the left, which has a couple of arms that engage on the plate with the latch on it. That’s the silvery thing inside that assembly. The latch wedge is hidden to the right of the assembly. The deadlock fits in to the little notch on the top of that silver latch plate. If the deadlock is engaged, the latch stays put.

The black plate to the right is the back plate and in theory, it holds it all in place. The latch plate isn’t held in by anything else and if it lifts, the arms on the rotatey arm don’t engage and move it open. On the right side of the latch plate is a circular pin thing with a couple of cut outs in it.

Bottom left and we have a circular washer type thing with a couple of triangular inserts on the inside and a couple of arms on the outside. The arms withdraw the latch plate and open the door. The inserts engage on the lock key barrel. The spring is to the bottom right and it pulls the latch out.

So … apply force on the inner handle or the outside lock, latch slides in, door opens. Release force, spring pulls out the latch, door won’t open.

However, if the circly prongy washer falls off, it will a) not let you open the door with the key and … b) will jam the lock if it goes in the wrong place.

So I now have a new lock for the front door. The last one did well, that’s probably a 30 year old lock there although I had to replace the original barrel because it rusted solid.

Picture. We're looking at a cute little dog standing on a car seat (we're in the car) looking out the window. The caption is "Mom left me in the car alone. So I locked the doors. When she was writing an 80 dollar check to the locksmith I rolled down the window to get a better look at what they were doing."

Oops.

One thing I’ve been appreciating about Red actually is its door locks and automatic folding mirrors. I’ve had folding mirrors on the other Lexii since I think my first IS but none of them folded the doors in when you locked the car. It’s actually a really nice feature but not for the mirrors … It’s a very easy way to check if you locked the doors :-D. Yep, there’s the indication thingy on the inner handle but you can’t see that from 20 feet away from the car.

It’s the little things. Or the things big enough to see from a distance.

Other news before I close up ? After enjoying reading the intriguing Forgotten Colony : Deliverance by M R Forbes (aliens have infested Earth, we gotta escape, intense combat action from start to finish), I’ve been cracking up to Clockwork Boys by T.Kingfisher (Amazon link). It’s in a swords and armour fantasy world where our people live in a city state threatened by unstoppable, invincible constructions known as the Clockwork Boys. Our people have to travel to their source and figure out how to stop them.

It is, of course, a suicide mission. They’re unstoppable creations that crush armies. But they’ll be eaten by a semi sentient tattoo if they don’t. Yep. After a bit of time to let the characters settle in, the author (aka Ursula Vernon) is letting us have some fun reading their antics. Another recommended one after the wonderful A Wizard’s Guide To Defensive Baking and I need to collect and read more of her books.

Might be time to get back to that after maybe a little Motorsport Manager with dinner. There’s a new Formula 1 Manager game out but to be honest, they haven’t added enough and if they follow their form, they’ll abandon this one in November to concentrate on next year’s iteration. I’ll wait for the last one in the run.

Picture, comic meme. There are 3 panels. The top sees 3 figures kicking and laughing at a sad figure. They have the words "problems, stress and pain" on them. The middle panel adds a new figure, reaching out to the sad figure. The bottom panel sees the new one hugging the sad figure. Their words are "Video games"

Yeah, that was pretty much me last weekend. After finishing Dredge, last weekend’s game was One Military Camp. Another fairly new one. It’s a decent game but … maybe could have done with a little more time in the oven. Worth checking out though.

But I was hiding in the game mostly to stop me damaging myself even more. I’d been in the position where a flare up started on my arms and legs, worse than it has been previously. It got bad enough that I actually medicated it, which is something I try and avoid. The topical steroids are a quick hit to help but I think they actually extend the healing time.

Anyway, being lost in the game meant I wasn’t attacking my arms and legs, giving them a chance to heal a bit. (May have been some Skyrim played too).

Things have settled down a bit although I’m still not good yet. Getting there though. Dinner’s nearly ready so I’ll leave it there except for … Someone reminded me about the Kitten Marching Band.

Here you go. At the Youtube link lies a guaranteed dose of Happy. I bear no responsibility if you end up humming that for days. 😀

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 !