Hello everyone,
Feels like the planet has calmed down a bit since the last post, it no longer wants to roast us alive. Perhaps it wants to drown us instead … I’ve been enjoying watching the cricket while it’s been on. There’s been series of England vs India and both the ladies and the men have been playing in England vs South Africa games. And while the ladies dominated their games, it was a bit more balanced in the mens games.
I do like it when you’re watching something sporty and have no idea what the result is going to be, right up to near the end of the game. That’s a more interesting type of game to watch and follow. The cricket has definitely been like that lately, although it’s been a bit rain affected.
It did get pretty toasty. The fan in my room was reading 32 degrees C at one point, it’s down to 26 C again now. When I put my graphics card in the machine in I think September last year, it was idling at 46 C. That reached 56 C at one point … (54 now but I have a twitch stream running which means it’s not quite idle).
Curiously though, it felt hotter when I was building Meltdown, my desktop PC. That might have been down to me being more physically active when putting that together. And one way I have of counteracting heat is by reducing physical activity, especially since the probable covid of Mar/Apr 2020 where the slightest bit of extra physical activity was making my own temperature go into meltdown. That’s been with me for quite a long while since as well. Maybe I’m just not great at regulating my temperature now.
Talking of technology … I thought for a bit today that I might have to retire my laptop. It’s 4 years old and still does what I want it to. It’s actually capable of more as it’s a gaming laptop. I haven’t actually played any games on it, which feels a bit wasteful. Ok, so reasons for retiring it :
Ok, it’s only from 2018, so it isn’t due to it being steam driven. It’s actually more than capable of handling what I want from it, which is pretty much just web browsing, stream watching and hosting the iTunes. It can also easily link into my camera (via the SD card reader) and my phone via Bluetooth. Although a replacement could be able to do that too.
So what’s wrong with it ? I’ll do what might be the clincher last.
It’s heavy, it’s big, the screen isn’t what I wanted because the visual quality isn’t great when you’re not looking straight at the screen. The sound is awful. On a gaming laptop too. It’s just too quiet. But then again, it’s competing against my desktop (which I think is cheating with volume levelling) and the hifi or telly.
But the clincher might be that a tenacious phishing trojan might have crept in. It was detected when I turned on the laptop yesterday, supposedly dealt with … and detected again today. I’ve done an offline Defender scan and another full machine scan but if it’s popping up again then I think I’ll have to retire the laptop. Sounds drastic that doesn’t it …
The laptop is also the machine I used for my online banking and the answer to the “how did it get in ?” may be a coincidence but the detections started on the reboot after I paid off the credit card this month …. and I don’t web browse on that laptop much now, I usually do that on the desktop. (Could have been American Truck Sim related).
It needs to be a safe laptop. We’ll see what happens when I fire it up tomorrow. One thing that will mean is copying the iTunes library over again. That’s reached 19,000 tracks now … I won’t copy it all over, there are a few game soundtracks on there which don’t really have much going for them, they’re a bit generic, boring and not special. There’s also some albums in there by people like one E.C. person who stole I Shot The Sheriff amongst other bits of music crime. He’s a racist piece of trash and I don’t think I want his greatest hits album in my library any more. So I’ll trim down some stuff like that … and other albums that are a bit boring.
So what would it be ?
I’ve actually used one of those … A very good friend from when I lived in Northern Ireland had one. It was a good machine too, although that’s a long time ago. I won’t get an Apple laptop again, they have curious ideas about who gets to decide what people do with their machines. Me, I believe that I own the machine and the hardware and I should be able to do what I want to it. Apple believe otherwise, so they do things like disable the ability to use a 3rd party wifi USB stick, which I was using because the wifi in the laptop was having trouble. I’m also running iTunes 10.7 because it has the iTunes DJ feature which was removed in later versions of iTunes. I’ve spoken about that before – updating iTunes and losing that feature isn’t an option. And …
Ok. We’re ranting. But Tashnarr does that so much better. (Twitch clip link)
Probably use iTunes 10.7 still, which links to my iPhone 5, which can’t be upgraded past iOS 6 because then it won’t talk to iTunes, which means the iPhone 5 isn’t allowed to connect to the internet any more. Because Apple gotta Apple. I would be rather interested in knowing about music playing applications that have an iTunes DJ type facility. It’s an automatic playlist, where you can add songs and have them in a particular order and then the software will randomly pick more songs to add in if there are less than a certain amount in the queue. So I’ll queue up an album and some more songs and then shuffle in what the software suggests.
Before I move on from it, if I get a laptop it’ll come from PCSpecialist and I’ll go back to a thinner and lighter 14″ model with 16GB of memory and either a 1TB or 2TB SSD. Big SSDs are viable now, whereas they weren’t when I bought Cookie Monster (current laptop).
I’m off work this week, I was getting the “take a break or be made to” messages from inside and this week was a good opportunity to get away. What’s the plan ? I need to get out the house a little bit, my health is going to need me being more active. And I need to counter an increasing reclusiveness tendency. We’ll see there. Cinema is likely, as is another wander around Cardiff.
As well as lots of music listening, there’s going to be games and books …
Games is likely to see me in the truck a fair bit. I was back in Euro Truck Sim 2 for the first time in a month today after getting fed up with the narrow roads. American Truck Sim has much bigger trucks and loads on much bigger roads. It’s curious seeing the differences between the two games. The Motorsport Manager campaign has continued, I’m about to go back into the top tier with my 4th team in a campaign that’s reached the year 2060.
Last thing – book ! Since seeing a “reading streak” thing appear in the iPad Kindle since allowing that to update, I’ve been getting a little or a lot of reading in every day. And I’ve been really enjoying that. The Worst of All Possible Worlds had a very satisfying conclusion to that trilogy and I’m intrigued by where John Scalzi is going with The Human Division, which is book 5 (really book 4) in the Old Man’s War series. He’s setting up an interesting universe situation where things may not go well for the humans and I’m curious as to where he’s going to go with it.
I’m also looking forwards to heading into Head Case, book two of the Starship for Sale series.
Reading is fun. Would recommend.
And it’s good for avoiding sunburn too. Stay safe everyone, be well.