Tag: geeky

Advent Day 9 and the Hero Ship

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December 9, 2024

10:02 pm

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Hello everyone,

Day 9 sees a favourite appear …

Picture. We're looking at the advent collection. In a semi circle above the middle we see from the left - Y Wing, X Wing, Super Battle Droid, Leia, AT-AT Walker, Sail Barge, Minikit and Tie Fighter. The Dwagon is lying down in front and in centre, the Falcon. This is a mostly round ship, with two prongs up front and a pilot area sticking out to its right hand side.

We have the Millennium Falcon today. That iconic ship for the whole series of Star Wars movies and one that helped define the term Hero Ship. These aren’t the biggest ships, they’re the ones that the heroes of a show or movie depend on. The Enterprise is a hero ship, in whichever series its in, although the Enterprise is on the big size for your usual hero ship.

A hero ship is usually something smaller, which can do everything the crew need it to do but with that sense of danger that comes from being completely outgunned by the big navy ships. And they’ll usually have a decent crew on board as well to keep them running because that gives the basis for a decent amount of cast and crew to keep the series going.

Picture. We're looking at a spaceship being held up by a piece of string. It's bare metal unpainted, there is a cockpit with windows up front, a centre box section with a large engines to each side (total two) and a cylindrical tapered section to the back.

Can’t talk about hero ships without mentioning Serenity, this one’s from the Firefly series which really deserved to tell a lot more of its story. This particular ship was centred around a main cast which had Captain Mal, pilot Wash, XO Zoe, Meathead Jayne (the actor is responsible for dumb attitudes and that pretty much sums up the character too) and lovely Kaylee as the savant ships engineer. Joining the crew for a fare and an escape were Shepherd Book and Simon and River Tam, with the final spot being Inara who would join for a while as a guest and ambassador.

The ship itself was a small tramp freighter, with living quarters and galley living area towards the front, with the central box section being where the cargo would be and the main engine being to the rear of the ship. Because the ship was so small, it could get into and out of places fast for … shenanigans, jobs other ships couldn’t do and the occasional bit of crimes, while still being so vulnerable that it would add in its own contribution to the drama.

If you haven’t seen Firefly and the follow on movie, Serenity, I’d massively recommend trying to catch it.

Game screenshot. Mass Effect Andromeda. Our hero character is standing on a balcony, she has brown hair in a ponytail and is wearing a blue jacket with white sleeves. In the distance, we see a long, sleek ship with wings at the back. It's perched on a landing pad.

The Mass Effect series has had a collection of hero ships, starting with the SSV Normandy of the first game. This one was a small frigate, a stealth ship that could get in anywhere, go anywhere and was that game’s vehicle (literally) for getting the main character travelling between the various locations. There was another, bigger, Normandy later and the ship in the picture is the Tempest from Mass Effect Andromeda. The Tempest was more a very light scout ship with just about enough room to accommodate all of the crew.

And that’s the main role of the hero ship, it’s usually the home of the main characters of the series. It’ll tell its own part of the story. Like Serenity being a little bit unreliable at the most convenient times for the story. It’s there to enable the story to move along and to enable the main characters to get up to shenanigans.

We’ve got some more from the world of books … Like :

Trouble Dog from Gareth L Powell’s excellent Embers of War trilogy. This is a Carnivore class ex warship, which has an embodied AI which is a fully fledged and key character in the series. Trouble Dog is a quite powerful ship, although nowhere near invincible. She’s small enough to get in where the story needs to go and has her own past and personality, plus a fantastic crew to look after.

(Embers of War is another series I’d thoroughly recommend, although a little warning – it does get a bit dark and grisly)

Another I can’t go without mentioning is the Rocinante from The Expanse …

Picture. We're looking at a black spaceship with occasional red highlights. We see it from three angles, side, top and landed upright on legs.

This ship is at the core of The Expanse novels starting with Leviathan Wakes. As your typical hero ship, it goes anywhere and this one fights hard too, being an ex warship. It’s a frigate, out of the box coming with 6 rapid fire guns covering all angles. But at the start, it’s outclassed by bigger ships that have railguns that can punch huge holes in other ships. The Rocinante is the home of the crew for these novels and while the ship doesn’t have an AI or distinct personality, it’s a solid and dependable core base for the main characters of the series.

Any more ? There’s a whole bunch more, like Moya from Farscape. Moya is a Leviathan class transport, a big living ship that becomes the home for Crichton, Aeryn, Dargo, Rigel, Chiana, Zhaan and Pilot with a few more characters occasionally living on board for periods.

And I think I’m running out of steam there. Let’s finish with a blast from the past …

Picture. We're looking at an empty starfield, with a spaceship lower right. The ship is in light colour metal. There is a central spine, with turbine like vanes around the centre. There's a glowy green ball at the back. On three spines, there are big cylinders with pointy bits out front.

That’s the Liberator, from Blake’s Seven and the hero ship I grew up with. The series was probably not something a 4 year old should have been watching but that was ok because I was just looking for the spaceship and couldn’t understand the absolutely nuts 70s era weird writing that was going on. We had some very odd stuff going on the telly back then and when you rewatch it now, stuff like Space 1999 (and Blake’s Seven) make you wonder what non-prescription pharmeuticals were going through the heads of the writers, aided and abetted by actors completely going ham with what they were given.

(I’ve just done the alt text for the picture – hover to see – and I think my brain is melted, I do apologise for people who depend on that for this particular crime to alt text!)

Fun to watch though and Blake’s Seven probably has the best and most nonsense hero ship for that time. It makes absolutely no sense, although that design is literally for space and only space. Like the Enterprise where it was an absolute crime seeing it being built on the ground in the Kelvin Timeline movie. NOPE. The Liberator was thought to be a derelict, found in space. Our characters get sent aboard as expendable prisoners and … manage to reactivate the ship and make off with it. The series sees them being fugitives from an overpowering Federation and … takes them from place to place enabling shenanigans along the way.

Would I recommend watching Blake’s Seven now, almost 50 years after it was made ? Maybe. If you can watch it on a streaming service or similar, go for it. It was a good series for its time, although you will wonder what on earth is going on at times. Don’t touch the Paul Darrow (RIP) book, it has the Blake’s Seven name but it’s not in the same universe. Afterlife is a far better sequel.

Picture. We're looking at a tiny diamond shaped white spaceship with yellow and red trim. We're looking at the cockpit up front, there are docking circles to left and right and engines at the back.

Back to Star Wars for the finish and that’s the Ghost from Star Wars Rebels and an advent series from a long time ago on a sofa not that far away from where I am right now.

Gotta go, brain empty, have a lovely rest of evening 🙂

Talking cameras …

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July 9, 2024

10:30 pm

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Hello everyone,

I’m just looking at that title again and am now wondering about cameras that talk. Would they look at the picture you just took and start describing it like alt text ? Would they critique your style or make suggestions ? Could it say “Bright light bright light” if the exposure is too much ?

I think we need a picture …

Picture. We're looking at a brown dog, lying down on a sofa. He's looking up and left, with a very greying muzzle.

Aww. That’s lovely dear heart Ben who was with us for quite a few years. Always a little bundle of staffy bull terrier love, very inquisitive and deeply protective of his people. And the perfect model to start off the post with. Good to see the old chap again.

I was wondering about cameras and what to recommend people get. That picture above is with the ancient iPhone 5 camera, apparently downscaled to 960×720 from the camera’s native resolution. Bit fuzzy but still a nice picture there, if you ignore the crack in the lens :-D. The crack was actually the catalyst to me changing phones over to the Samsung Galaxy S7 which kept me going until I switched to the exceptional Pixel 4.

(side note – gotta admit I’m struggling for mental batteries at the moment although I was able to demolish a couple of books over the weekend, we’ll see where this post goes).

I didn’t have the Pixel 4 for that long before disappearing over to Canada for work … and then a pandemic broke out and I wasn’t taking pictures of much except for apparently my old sketch art.

Picture. We're looking at a fairly rough sketch of a green dwagon sitting on his butt. He's wearing a pair of glasses and has a book held open in front of him.

Hopefully the more processed version of that is visible at the top of the page. I should probably attempt the sketching again, I kinda moved back to more digital art and the photography stuff in particular.

Picture. We're looking at an enormous dark green 20 sided dice. Around it is curled the 3d printed rainbow crystal dwagon.

That’s a more recent one, taken on my desk. Yep, looks like I was using my little pen torch for extra illumination too. This actually gets me to a first point about mobiles vs cameras … usability !

I knew we’d accidentally stumble upon the purpose of this post eventually :-D.

I’d been thinking about whether it’s worth people getting a full sized camera these days, or if it’s ok to stay with a mobile phone. The phone cameras have come a long way since those early days. Ignore the number of pixels (although I’ll come back to that), just think about usability and how much the camera does for you.

In the case of the dwagon dice, that could have needed 3 hands because a phone is actually a bit awkward to hold as a camera. There’s no strap with them usually and you can’t be touching the screen. So you have to hold them by the edge and with a spare finger for the shutter button. Add a third hand if you’re using a separate light. However, you can get round that by using the timer. Sorted !

Depth of field can be a curious thing to play with as well … For this close work, I’ll traditionally hold the camera away from the thing I’m taking the picture of and cut it to size. Try it with your own cameras … see what you think. If the camera is close, it’ll all go a bit fish eye. If you hold it back a bit, then it’s a flatter image. Check it out ! Experiment, see what happens and enjoy learning how to get the best out of what you have. And there are so many pixels in our cameras now that we can easily crop out the extras (no one sees my desk 😀 ) and still have an amazing image.

I could use the R50 for these but … is it necessary ? One big difference is that with the strap to hold it normally, I can quickly pull that camera up with one hand and tap the shutter button. Maybe the left hand is operating the in and out of the zoom lens. The Ixus was a bit different there, as the zoom was on a ring around the shutter button. Actually physically moving the lens works better.

Proper camera time ?

Picture. We're looking out over a cricket field with the stumps in the centre. A wicket keeper is standing behind the stumps, gloves ready for the ball. The batsman has his bat held in front and they're about to set off to the right. The white ball can be faintly seen in front of the stumps.

There’s a cricket one taken by the Ixus a few years ago. One thing here is that the picture is taken with the camera braced on my knee, with it maybe being a bit too small to comfortably sit in an exact position. The picture isn’t quite centred there because it would move on the shutter. If you’re able to zoom in there, it’s a bit more mushy than …

Picture. We're looking at the cricket field again, with two players in the centre and a third player looking on behind. The white ball can be seen slightly behind the batsman.

That’s from the R50, taken this summer. It’s kinda night and day there with the sharpness, especially when you consider that it looks like the Ixus picture was taken in much better light conditions.

That gets me to another point ! Is it worth buying a cheaper digital camera in this technological age when mobile phone cameras are so incredibly good ? I don’t honestly think it is.

Let’s see :

Mobile phone camera – easy, portable, maybe a bit difficult to use one handed but includes a timer function that helps there. Huge amount of intelligence in the software tools to help make a perfect image. (Except for that tool that picks out different faces for people – I think that’s a bit of an abomination). You can take selfies with them.

Cheaper digital camera – don’t bother, they’re too compromised. It was exceptionally difficult to reliably get a good picture with the Ixus, although the image stabilisation has hopefully been improved. However, you can’t change the lens, you can only work with what’s been provided. Selfies were impossible with the Ixus (too blurry).

DSLR or Mirrorless camera – if you can afford them (and I got the second cheapest Canon), then they are massively worth the investment. The R50 has made it ridiculously easy to take snapshot pictures that have all turned out really well. Another one ?

Picture. We're looking across the central hall of the Excel Exhibition arena at a motley collection of 5 characters in assorted fantasy style outfits.

That’s actually a resurrected one from Comic Con. The original saw the people there in silhouette due to the lighting behind them. You couldn’t really see their outfits. This is with a basic Auto – Equalise filter in GIMP which has started bringing out the colour again.

Whereas I’ve done that in post processing in GIMP, a recent mobile (my Pixel 4 is from 2020) will include similar enhancement abilities.

One issue though is the battery. I did a precautionary change of the R50 battery on the Lords day with over 294 pictures taken with it on the day with a bunch deleted because they weren’t interesting. If you’re looking to use a mobile phone as a camera, you’ll need a couple of power bank things to take with you and that leads to awkward when you need to charge them up.

So …

Cheap camera like the Ixus’s and Powershots – don’t bother, use a mobile phone instead (with a powerbank to feed the battery regularly). It’s just so much easier to do stuff with the pictures via the mobile, you can upload them direct to where you want to show them off.

Mobile phone – I’m really impressed with how much they can do now. However … they do have their limits imposed with the space they have to fit in to. It’s pushing the boundaries of the physics of how the light travels around. (And battery life is nasty)

DSLR or Mirrorless camera – I think they’re worth the investment if you’re going places with a camera and want to share what you’re seeing with people. The ability to swap over lenses adds a lot of flexibility there. The bigger R50 (compared to the tiny Ixus) is a lot easier for my suffering eyes to set up a shot.

I think that’s it for my brain for tonight. Hope this was useful for anyone thinking about cameras.

Just remember, it’s your money to spend, you don’t have any obligation to spend it if you’re not comfortable that it’s going to the right place. Check out what you’re looking at via independent reviews. I don’t count me as independent, even if I’ve had no freebies, I only have recent knowledge of the Canon cameras (haha, no free samples to test the opposition with!) and older knowledge of a massively battery hungry Nikon.

And if you do go to fun places and want to share, enjoy the day out, capture the memories and share the best ones.

Goodnight everyone, have a great rest of the week.

A Dwagon and Friend go to Comic Con

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June 7, 2024

7:49 pm

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Hello everyone,

I was thinking that it’s been a while but actually just a few weeks. I’m actually a couple of posts behind, even after this one. It’s been a good but draining month or so, I’m definitely in need of taking a break from things for a while. (Don’t worry, I’m working next week then have next week off). So, what happened on the May Bank Holiday weekend ?

Picture. We're looking at a gathering of lovely looking people people dressed in elaborate and very cute anime character style outfits.

We haven’t been able to get to a Comic Con since before the pandemic, so it was a lovely day to be able to make that trip with Comic Con Friend. It’s been 5 years since we’ve been able to make that trip together (there was the Oct Comic Con trip too but that was just me.). And there was another smuggle again 🙂 It was a good smuggle.

So, what happens at Comic Con ? Lots of merch, lots of stands with things to see. Comics, anime, very creative art of all different kinds. Wonderful cosplay like what we see in the picture above, from all genres.

Picture. We're looking at two people standing side by side. One is in t-shirt and trousers. The other is ... on bladed stilts, has a pair of bladed poles as arm extensions and a helmet with an extremely long proboscis.

I have no idea what genre that’s from but the amount of work that’s gone into making something that good is incredible. Top job, totally salute you there. I definitely haven’t done it justice with the alt-text.

There’s always lots to see and it’s much better to experience it with a friend coming along too. I like seeing the different artists work, especially the stuff that comes from their own imaginations instead of being inspired by the other media out there. That’s the best thing, seeing what everyone has to say and produce to show us. Be that super cute cards, detailed art to go with stories, quick funny cartoons or stunningly well realised artwork that needs to be seen.

Picture. We're looking at a Doctor Who Dalek, gliding through a crowd of amused looking people. The dalek is a grey pepper pot style machine, with gun and manipulator stalks in front (left of picture). The lower half is ringed by black hemispheres.

There was a small cadre of Daleks patrolling the show, possibly in search of the Tenth Doctor who was there in the very tight blue suit outfit. I saw him there (perfect cosplay down to the appearance and body language) but he zipped away too fast for a picture.

Picture. We're looking at a statue of a dragon, sitting on its haunches. The dragon is perhaps 8 foot tall. Their scales are dark green, with a yellow belly stretching from neck to paws. The inside of their wings is blue.

Also dragon.

Talking of dragons, I haven’t got to the loot yet … Scorch’s Pyrography was there and it was great to see her making it to the show. She’s been in the wars recently breaking all four limbs in a bus related accident (ambushed by pavement) so it was good to see her recovered enough to make the show. There was also Ocean City Crafts … They do wonderful things with 3d printing :

Picture. We're looking at a trader's stall. A black cloth is covering a table which is absolutely covered with mythical creatures of all kinds and colours.

That’s all 3d printed creatures, including multiple types of dragon and all different colours too. They’re fully articulated as well, with the resin segments linked together. I was a little doubtful but bought one (will show pic later) and I’m rather impressed. Well worth checking them out, hopefully we’ll see them going to more shows.

Gosh, think I’m running out of steam. I did get bitten mildly by something while at Comic Con (was ok, just a little out of sorts for the week after!) and I’m heading towards the end of the energies so I’ll close up soon. My outsides have considerably worsened as well, hopefully that’s turned the corner now into actively healing.

There are more pictures than I’ll show here, mostly because I’m very careful about putting pictures of me or friend people on the blog. When something’s on the internet, it’s very difficult to take it back again. So while selfie pictures of the shoulder dwagon are on Facebook and various Discords, they won’t go here. Same as there are a few lovely pictures of Comic Con Friend from the Sunday and other people which I’m careful about where they go to.

Shoulder dwagon ?

Picture. We're looking downwards at 3 objects on a dark table. On the left, a blue green dwagon made up of crystal like spines, with orange paws. Lower right, a chocolate chip cookie. Behind, a large green 20 sided dice with gold coloured numbers.

There we go. Possible deceptive sizes there 😀 The dwagon is the perfect size to sit on a shoulder, the d20 there is HUGE and that’s a decent size cookie there too.

Lovely day out, really enjoyed catching up with the wonderful Comic Con Friend (it’s been a while!) and sharing in seeing all of the wonderful things at the convention. Time for me to sign off now I think and pop the dinner on but … one last loot ?

Picture. We're looking down at out blue green crystal dwagon on the right, a green dwagon behind, the large d20 in the centre and a collection of black dice with lit up numbers on to the left. A dice box is behind and to the left.

I got shiny light up dice too 🙂 And t-shirts from Teeturtle. This was also the first Comic Con with the new camera, I think it’s done a wonderful job. (Some of the pics are from the mobile 😀 )

Have a lovely weekend everyone, see you all next time. Wait … one more ?

Picture. We're looking at a collection of dice. From left to right - a red six sided dice. The rest are 20 sided, with a small grey shiny one, a normal sized red one, a larger green one and the very large dark green one that's almost as tall as the green dwagon to the right. In the background, our blue green crystal dwagon.

I needed to show just how big the dice was :-D. The d6 and the red d20 to the left are normal sized.

Later everyone !

A life of pane ?

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April 21, 2024

5:54 pm

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Hello everyone,

Picture. Meme. A tortoiseshell coloured cat wearing glasses. The cat is in a sitting down pose on a chair, with paws up on a folded newspaper. The captions are "The face is like a work of art." "It deserves a great frame."

I meant to do a post last week but something happened which meant having to ration the rational thought for a while :

Picture. We're looking at a pair of broken glasses and a dwagon. We see one half of the glasses, with the dwagon in the background holding up the disconnected glasses leg in outstretched paws.

Eek. That happened while I was cleaning the reading glasses while at an off site meeting a couple of Thursdays ago. The optician and me didn’t think it was fixable but they were able to pop me in for a rather emergency appointment on the Friday. And the new pairs arrived Friday two days ago. I could have done with an upgrade anyway, that pair were done during covid times and the mask was making the machine fog up … so the prescription was a bit off.

So what happened there ? The learn from experience wise after the event thing points me towards that join there. Most of the frames in the shop look like they’re made with a bend in the metal or plastic to make that 90 degrees between the lenses part and the legs part. A bend means the metal is somewhat gently formed through that 90 degrees and it’ll keep the bonds between the atoms intact. Those frames were made with a fold, which will break the bonds between the atoms and introduce a weakness that’ll lead to cracking and the fairly clean break you see there.

If you see the metal formed into a U shape throughout the bend, that makes it still more stronger.

So I have new glasses now but for a week I’d gone back to an ancient maybe 25 year old pair which were before my broken nose. I think they’re actually the pair that mean I still have 2 intact eyes, because they withstood the impact of a cricket ball. And I can still read in them ! The misalignment (my nose is still 2mm off centre) leads to headaches though and a rationing of that rational thought.

Pictures. A set of 4, top left showing my red plushie dwagon looking at a comprehensively wrapped and taped cuboid box. Top right, the outside is off and we see dwagon looking at clear white bubble wrap. Bottom left, dwagon is looking at a white box, with a tall camera lens on top. Bottom right. Dwagon is beside camera, with the new long lens fitted pointing upwards and the shorter lens in front.

I’ve had another couple of arrivals and deliveries as well since last time. The Canon R50 did remarkably well at Insomnia, with all of the pictures coming out looking great and most importantly … properly sharp. Love that, people were loving the pictures I was sending out as well.

That’s a big thanks to Geraldine of the MS Maud cruise too, Geraldine was the ship’s photographer and part of the expedition team. Early on in the cruise, Geraldine was leading workshops on how to get great photography pictures out of the cruise. Because it’s not just about the time on the ship, it’s about getting those memories to look at afterwards as well. There were separate workshops for those with DSLR and Mirrorless (like the R50) cameras which I didn’t go to but a couple of tips from the main presentation are things I’ve tried to keep with me … So that’s :

Be selective about the pictures you send to the world. The Insomnia day collected 109 pictures, of which 18 went to the bigger collection on Facebook. That might still be too many for a day :-D. That’s the thing though – people will turn off their attention by picture 25, if they even get that far. With this age of digital photography and big memory cards, take lots of pictures but just show off the best ones. Hold back the mediocre ones or the ones that didn’t quite work.

Composition – it helps a lot to turn on the 3 x 3 grid facility that’ll be in any camera (if you can find it!) Our brains like to see things in certain places in the pictures. The 3 x 3 box grid helps to set everything up for best effect. Maybe that works here …

Picture. We're looking out across a dark grey sea, rippled by waves. Above is a light blue sky, with white clouds dominating. At the horizon, we see the two vertical towers of a bridge that marks the horizon. A faint rainbow can be seen to the right.

Or maybe I need to upgrade my tripod :-). That was from the first little field test of the new lens. It’s a 55-210mm lens to fit the R50 camera. That means it picks up from the maximum zoom of the lens I got with the camera and extends all the way out to get pictures like that of the nearer Severn Bridge between England and Wales. That first bridge is 10km away and you can (on the native resolution ! This is 1/3 height and width) electronically zoom in to see individual suspension bridge cables.

Happy with that, looking forwards to seeing how it does in the cricket at Lords. I took that picture at Portishead’s Battery Point, which has the advantages of 24 hour parking, easy roads to get there and great access to cafes.

Picture. We're looking at the assorted building of a town, clinging to the side of a hill overlooking a very stony beach, with the tide and sea approaching from the lower right.

Good little trip to the sea side, with it taking about an hour for my fingers and eyes to thaw out again. Shoulda brought my scarf :-).

Not sure whether the bridge pic was on the tripod or not but it was a good trip out and test of the new lens. Found some wildlife too :

Picture. We're looking out over a field of light green grass, with centre stage being taken by a black and white bird, looking right. Hedges make up the background.

That’s something we can all do with our cameras as well, with modern ones with so many pixels in the sensors. The native resolution is 6000×4000, that little cut is just the 1078×768 pixels in the middle with it mostly arranged to have Birdy in the centre of the 3×3 grid. The rest of the pictures from the R50 here are the 6000×4000 reduced to 2000×1333.

I might be looking at my tripod though because it was being very awkward to adjust it to the optimal angle. It’s gone a bit stiff and there’s a huge change in angle when you tighten it all up. Perhaps fixable by taking it apart, might be looking at one with a ball joint instead though. That’s one for when I go hunting for pictures of the stars again though, wonder when I’ll get that chance ? (It’ll need a late night trip now – lots of daylight)

Thinking of late night trips …

Picture. We're looking at a collection of five boxes, all different colours with Naked Marshmallow banners and the flavours marked. In the centre, the head of our red plushie dwagon is poking out.

Last delivery – a consignment of goodies from the Naked Marshmallow Co. At the back, there are Chocolate Orange and Mini Egg marshmallows. In front, Vanilla Bean, Candy Floss and Salted Caramel. I’ve gone through the Candy Floss and Mini Egg marshmallows already, on to the Salted Caramel and they are as lush as you can imagine them being. More from Naked Marshmallow, thoroughly recommend them and they still have some last chance sales going.

Link to camping ? I knew I wasn’t going to be in so I opted for the “deliver to pick up”, with the chosen spot being the camping place. (I’m not going to give them free advertising this time). A wonderful recent video discovery has been Wildbeare (youtube link). She’s a lovely person who goes off for camping expeditions and comes out with fun, quick videos to capture the adventures. Hugely recommend giving her a watch, both for the lovely chilled out vibes and also for very honest and open opinions on how the gear does in the conditions she takes the gear into.

They’re inspiring stuff and picking stuff up from the camping place let me evaluate with my own eyes what’s available and what kind of size and weight it might be. Cos chasing those stars is looking like it might need an overnight in a tent in a place where Dodgy People won’t be.

I think I need to change car though again before I think of doing that … as my current physical condition (aka potato from legacies of the condition of my outsides and pandemic living conditions) would mean I wouldn’t want to be too far from transport. And while Red is a lovely little car, it also suffers from only having 140mm of ground clearance and I’m worried I might tear something off the bottom of it on the more rugged roads and tracks.

Time to close out though (10 minutes left in the Imola World Endurance Champ race). Time for pre dinner noms ?

Picture. Our green dwagon is on the right, adorning an apron with "feed me" written on it. To the left, a faintly pink cube of a fluffy looking marshmallow.

Have a lovely evening everyone.

Where I let the geek out with cameras

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February 9, 2024

6:20 pm

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Hang on, I haven’t done anything rash with money … yet …

Picture. Meme. We're looking at a cat, with paw held up to their mouth in a thoughtful looking pose. The caption is "What if that red dot is both particle and a wave?"

We might hit that as we go into what I’m about to launch into … Hopefully not that deep but let’s see how far it goes.

One thing wasn’t making sense to me yesterday with the camera specifications. If a lower f number for the aperture is better, what’s the advantage of getting a mirrorless camera with a lens that goes down to f4.0 over a mobile phone camera that was taking pictures at f1.7 aperture and the little Ixus that was going to f3.6 aperture. Lower number better right ?

And then I realised that I wasn’t talking like for like. The phone camera is the smallest, the Ixus camera is in the middle and the mirrorless camera is a bit of a whopper. Time to look at numbers :

Pixel 4 has 2 main cameras. Camera 1 is 12.2 megapixels with aperture f1.7 and the metadata told me it was a focal length of 4mm with a 35mm number of 27mm (I think they compare everything to a 35mm camera standard). Camera 2 is 16 MP over a 50mm telephoto sensor with aperture f2.4 and a 2x optical zoom. The Northern Light pic would have been with the Camera 1. Oh and the resolution is 96 dots per inch with each pixel being 1 micrometer (0.000001m) so the sensor will be 4mm across.

(note to geeky tendency readers – run a check over numbers as you do them to see if they make sense. A 27mm sensor in a phone doesn’t feel right, a 4mm sensor feels right)

The Ixus 265 has a 15.2MP sensor with 180 dots per inch resolution. The focal length is quoted as 4.5mm to 54mm (the lens comes in and out on a motor) for 35mm numbers of 25-300mm. The f numbers for the aperture go from f3.6 to f7.0. It does actually have 2.5 stop image stabilisation … (Spec sheet link) The sensor is 1/2.3 inches which is apparently 6.16mm across making it 50% bigger than the phone sensor. (Dunno about the sums there, feels about right again).

Let’s see what the chonky camera has …

Canon EOS R100 has a 24MP effective pixel sensor that’s 22.3mm by 14.9mm. So that’s 5.5 times the size of the phone camera. Peek back at yesterday and the focal length is 18-45mm for a 35mm equivalent of 29-72mm. The f numbers on the lens go from f4.5 to f6.3.

Picture. Meme. A very confused looking little grey cat with a white chest is looking at us. The captions are "What did the confused cat say?" and "I'm purr-plexed"

What do all those numbers really mean though ? Let’s look at the sensor first. The bigger the sensor, the more light can hit it in a set amount of time. So the mirrorless would bring in over 5 times the light information in a given amount of time, compared to the Pixel 4 camera. The little Ixus sensor brings in 1.5 times the information of the Pixel 4 sensor but …

The Pixel 4 won with the Northern Lights pictures because the Pixel could be set for a far longer exposure time. Yesterday’s picture was over a 16 second exposure, the best I could get from the Ixus was a surprisingly short 1 second. Let’s invent a unit called the Light Wibbly, the Ixus pulled in 6 LWsecs (Light Wibbly Seconds), the Pixel 4 pulled in 16LWsecs with the 4 second exposure pictures. Result, you can see Northern Lights in one camera and can’t in the other. The EOS R100 can do shutter speeds as fast as 1/4000 seconds up to an exposure of 30 seconds. So, bigger sensor, more light getting in per second, much bigger range of how long it’ll take the light in for. The R100s would pull in 22LWsecs with a 1 second exposure, which is how people can get those time lapse videos of the Northern Lights.

And that all adds up to me looking at future Google searches for “star seeing viewpoints Bristol” :-D. The Pixel was just starting to pick up galaxy background pictures … I really, really want to see those. But I’d need to be somewhere relatively remote with minimal light pollution and those areas are tough to find in the UK.

On to the focal length – a big number means that distant objects can be brought much closer. That’s how I get the really zoomed in pictures of the cricketers at Lords, the camera is operating at a really high zoom level. I’m curious as to how the 25-300mm numbers of the Ixus 265 compare to what could be gotten out of the starter 29-72mm lens of the R100 pack. But … that’s one other reason you get the cameras with interchangeable lenses. There’s a lens that goes to 800mm for being able to read the road signs in London from Bristol but that’s also £1100 so maybe not. There’s also a more affordable high aperture one for low light photography which I might have to check out (£200).

Oh gosh. Big yawn. It’s Friday afternoon / early evening and I’m going to be catching up on sleep all weekend. Time for a sum up ? First another link for some optics theories, it’ll help peeking here (linky).

Mobile phone camera – they’re doing an AMAZING job with these. They only have a tiny amount of real estate to work with in terms of space for the sensor and the depth to turn the picture from light into 1’s and 0’s. As you’ll see from the Visual Education link above, cameras benefit from having a lot of depth to focus up the image. Mobiles do a fantastic job with the space they have available and the software is incredible at making the great pictures happen. Cost is minimal because they come with the smart phone you likely have already.

Compact digital camera – they do the best they can with the package available and the little Ixus is a really flexible device. It has massive zoom capability and it fits inside a small pocket. Portability is a wonderful thing but … you have to be really careful about keeping the camera steady and it’s almost useless in minimal light conditions. The latest Ixus 285 is £270 but it looks like they’re being phased out for Powershot cameras.

Mirrorless / DSLR modular camera – they have the size and versatility to get professional level amazing photography but … they’re also way more expensive. I’m still going to get one though because I do enjoy taking pictures of Stuff and sharing them with people. The pack I’m looking at is currently £650 or you could win the lottery and get the R3 camera body for £5500 and multipurpose RF28-70mm f2L lens for £3400.

No I’m not going to be spending nearly £10k on a camera system :-D. That’s actually double what you could get a Rolls-Royce for. (True statement ! Autotrader has a 1976 Silver Shadow for £4,675) I’d actually save a few pennies more for the pretty Mk3 Spitfire going for £16k.

Oh there I go dreaming again. I wouldn’t actually want to drive a Triumph Spitfire (horrifically dangerous suspension set up) but they are a very pretty old car.

Picture meme. A red squirrel is standing on their back legs, reaching their front paws to the sky. The captions are "Stop Typing" "Stop Typing" (there was a repeat)

Ok ! have a great weekend everyone.

Land ? Huskies Ahoy, Lights Ahoy

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November 26, 2023

1:16 pm

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Hello everyone,

Last post from on board ship today. It’s a case of LAND AHOY on each side of the ship as we start making our way up the Thames. But that’s something for a later post. It’s been a wonderful cruise, talking to the other guests has been lovely and we’ve been incredibly well looked after by the crew. I’ll definitely be doing another cruise holiday at some point when I can see how to fit it in and it’s almost certain to be with Hurtigruten again.

Picture. Photograph. We're looking at a snowy scene, with a lady and a dog standing on a platform. The dog is a white furry Husky coming up to between her knees and hips. Husky is looking over to the right, surveying all. The lady is reaching down to give Husky a bit of stroking.

Saturday saw us heading into Tromsø, which is a larger Norwegian city set on an island in the fjord, with additional settlement spreading into the mainland on either side. We had a little look around the city itself with a little bit of scouting in the local souvenir shops. But it was a little limited for me because ….

HUSKIES

Yep. I didn’t sign up for many of the additional trips but I didn’t want to miss the visit to the Huskies. And it was a magical couple of days too. The Huskies were just one evening, we’ll get back to Sunday later. We visited a farm where they breed and train up the dogs, taking the best ones into the racing team and looking after the rest of them. Whether that’s using them as sled dogs or looking after them until they can be adopted by loving homes.

And they’re lovely dogs too.

Picture. Photograph. We're looking at a man standing up, holding a dog in his arms. There are more people in the background, everyone is wrapped up warm with coats and woolly hats. The dog is looking directly towards us, with a curious white and grey face as he's enjoying a view from higher up than usual.

That’s one of the puppies. Very curious, very bouncy, totally acclimatised to the conditions. Ready for running across the snow, very happy to have all of the attention they can get.

Picture. Photograph. The foreground is lit, showing a snow covered field extending into darker fields in the background. We see a wooden snow topped dog kennel in the lower right with the names Fjord and Katla. In the background, a series of sleds with dogs harnessed eager to run.

And there they are, ready to run. And run fast. No rides for us because the snow isn’t old enough yet to support guest safety but it was a definite case of feeling the excitement in the air as the dogs were getting ready to do what they were born and bred for.

Picture. Photograph. We're looking at a wood fire in the centre of 4 posts. In the background, is a table with cups and a kettle. Everything is lit by a faint purple.

And then we disappear back inside a hut and enjoy a warm fire, a bit of cake and some hot chocolate. Best trip of the cruise. And I have a few more pictures too, including a couple that went to Geraldine, expedition photographer. We’ll be getting all of her stunning photographs later (I’m in some !) and I’ll be sure to drop the link when we get it.

And then there was Sunday. The morning was in Narvik and one thing about this trip has been educational about Second World War history. Terrible things happened all of the world, Norway definitely wasn’t spared. We don’t hear enough about it … The northern parts of Norway above Narvik were essentially Scorched Earthed as the Germans made their way out and that’s just one of the terrible things. It’s well worth educating about it, more than I’d want to go into here. And it does make you ask the question : we seemed to be winning the Battles of Narvik and pushing out the Germans. And then we abandoned the town to try and protect France. What would have changed if we’d held that northern flank of Norway ? That’s a definite one for the alternate historians.

Yep. Check out the Norwegian side of the WW2 story, it’ll be illuminating.

Picture. Photograph. We're looking out over a faintly lit ship deck, with the railing on the right and chairs stacked in front. In the sky, there are a couple of dark clouds but behind them, a band of green glow in the sky going from centre bottom to up and left.

And then there was the continuing transit south … With a break in the overhead conditions too ! I have to admit, the pictures are much better than I could see. The assembled Northern Light Hunters were limited to seeing a grey on the horizon as our eyes couldn’t make out the lights.

Picture. Photograph. We're looking across the deck of the ship towards the rail. Above the horizon, there is a patterning of dark clouds with a green aurora glow behind them. You can perhaps make out bands in the green. Oh and in the centre foreground, a grinning idiot in a bright yellow hat, a dark jacket and a blue and white scarf.

I’d mostly figured out how to get good pictures out of the Pixel 4 camera by this stage and then had a bright idea involving the camera timer … A guess at a good spot, a tap of the timer, a gentle saunter across to the rail and there we go.

This was about the last chance we got (except maybe last night, faintly) to see the Northern Lights, the remaining nights saw the clouds coming in a bit too much. It was an amazing sight to see though, definitely a Bucket List thing if you do those.

Picture. Photograph. We're looking across to the ships rail again. Clouds are on the horizon but above, we see the green bands of aurora stretching across and upwards. Quite pretty. Oh and there's the grinning idiot in yellow hat, dark jacket and white and blue scarf over in the bottom right.

There we go. Last one for now, this was just after midnight on the same day. It’s the Pixel 4 camera again on a tripod, with me gently sauntering over to the rail to do the timer selfie. This was the best spot on board for these, there wasn’t enough incidental light on the flight deck to pick up the grinning idiot.

I should probably hit post now and start to pay more attention, docking soon !

I’ll do more steady catching up later. Tilbury Docks are very nearly in sight …

Lighting up and a little ceremony

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November 17, 2023

11:47 am

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Hello everyone,

I’ve now seen the Northern Lights ! We’re also above the Arctic Circle now so it’s definitely a case of wrapping up warm when we venture outside. We were greeted by this fellow, after a rousing cheer to wake him up.

Picture. Photograph. We're looking upwards at a manic looking figure leaning over the white deck rail and gesturing upwards with an open right hand. He's wearing an orange tunic under a thick white woollen cloak. He is wearing a pointy white hat.
NJORD

That’s King Njord, who led the Arctic Circle crossing ceremony on Wednesday morning, where crew and guests were (optionally) baptised with a spoonful of codliver oil followed by a “drink” of water. And by “drink”, we mean a bucket down the back of the neck.

I’m sad to say that I kinda hid when the baptising was occurring, mostly because my back has been giving me the warning signs to tell me to look after it better in case the pain levels increase to where I’m going to have to restrict the movement even more. But it also let me disappear to the stern of the ship where …

Picture. Photograph. We're looking out across a sea with small waves. Above the horizon, we can see a scattered low level of darker thinner cloud with blue sky above. On the horizon, peeking out behind low hills is a very bright sun, with a reflecting glinting off the waves below to the left of the wake of the propellers of the ship.

Sun says hi. We’ve been treated to some lovely sunrises and sunsets as we go up and down the coast. It’s a fairly extended period too, so that picture was at 0935 and it was already pretty light outside at before 0900 when we passed this lighthouse.

Picture. Photograph. We're looking out over the sea towards a lighthouse on an island. The lighthouse is a tower painted in bands of red and white. The light at the top is shining towards us. There are a couple of small houses at the base.

That was from Wednesday morning and at time of writing, we’re headed past glacier covered hills on our way into Alta. But that’s for a later post as I catch up more. Alta is a northern town/city and we’ll be visiting their Northern Lights cathedral. I’ll have the old (yep, the one I’ve owned for 7 days) tripod with me and we’re hoping for clear skies so we can see more of …

Picture. Photograph. We're looking at a dark night sky, with occasional dots of light from the stars. But the main thing here is a thin strip of green light, hazily starting to the centre left and going upwards to the right hand side.

That’s from my Canon Ixus 265 as I steadily figure out how to get the best out of it. I think I’ve learned a fair bit so far. One of the expedition team is the lovely Geraldine, expert photographer. While there isn’t much scope to do much with my little Canon camera, Geraldine’s tips to us all have pointed me towards the settings needed to start getting pictures like that on the little camera (high ISO, long exposure and the tripod is coming in handy too). And I’ll hopefully get more aurora pictures soon.

Geraldine’s excellent tips and advice also let me figure out what was going wrong on the more automatic settings … like a night setting with ISO 100. ISO is a sensitivity setting. Lower settings are less sensitive, so pointing the camera at an aurora at ISO 100 and long exposure time was just giving me a black screen. The picture above is ISO 1600 and I have another click to ISO 3200 to try. I have some decent pictures of one of the bridges that we passed under that may make it to a later post.

But one real start with the aurora is …

Picture. Photograph. We're looking at Aurora Borealis again, with a much bigger green glow covering most of the upper part of shot. Down below, we see the rail in black, with three ghostly figures with red jackets visible.

Cor. Looks good doesn’t it. That’s from the Pixel 4 mobile phone camera in its night sight mode. It’s given me some spectacular looking views of Trollfjord. That’s on an automatic setting, on a tripod and I’m really impressed with how that one has turned out. Maybe a bit over exposed at ISO 5877 but I really like the picture, especially having the ghostly figures below.

I’ve really enjoyed seeing the lights and also learning how to get the best out of the tools to capture the memories of them.

If you’re curious about the equipment, the compact camera is a Canon Ixus 265 and I’m now doing the night shots in P for Program mode, which lets me open up the ISO settings. It’ll be sitting on a tripod for these shots and I bought the cheap £30 National Geographic tripod. It’s simple, does the job, although I have trapped fingers a couple of times with the smart phone attachment. (It’s a springloaded thing with sharper edges than need be). The mobile phone camera is a Pixel 4, running the automatic settings of Night Sight.

I might be steadily catching up with posts. Since King Njord gave us his blessing yesterday morning, we visited the pretty fishing town of Svolvaer, with a longer visit coming up to Alta today. Pictures later ! For now though, I’m wondering how they fit everything they need to into this boat …

Picture. Photograph. We're looking over a rippled sea towards a short ship. She's blue below upper decks painted white. In the small space are winches, a crane, the bridge with radar and communications above, a small orange boat and then the engine exhausts with more winches and crane at the back.

That’s not processed or squished at all … She really is that short and is packing a lot in there. She’s the fishing vessel Skolmen and is just 27.4m long. (Marinetraffic link)

The port there is Svolvaer, with drying racks for cod visible in the upper right. More about Svolvaer later. Sadly no souvenir because I forgot to bring my wallet with me … oops :-D. I’ve seen several Orca as well this morning but sadly wasn’t fast enough to bring the camera to bear.

It’s probably getting time for food though before a couple of activities prior to the ship coming into Alta. More on the weekend :-D. Have a lovely day everyone.

Comic Con and other travels

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November 1, 2023

10:11 pm

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Hello everyone,

I’ve been off to Comic Con again ! It was a run to London MCM Comic Con on Friday just gone. Pretty good day out overall, although that was with its ups and downs. But first ! The thumbnail. Let’s see what it’ll be …

Picture. We're looking at two flat pieces of pale wood. Burned into the top one is a cute dragon looking at us, sitting on his haunches with front paws between back paws. The caption is "Have you hugged your dragon today?" The lower one is a cute dragon standing up, short arms to the sides, holding hands on sticks to make their hug wider. The caption here is "I love you THIS much!"

I saw those at Scorch’s Pyrography stall and knew I needed to take them home with me. Very cute. After using an AI assisted picture for Halloween, I’ve now turned the top one there (Have you hugged your dragon) into my latest avatar.

The day started with me rushing in to try and meet someone before she had to disappear. I had a Thing that I needed to drop off and she wasn’t going to be there that long after my ticket would let me in. London’s always a slightly awkward place to travel around in a car. The trick is to go in just far enough to swap to the Underground and then you go the rest of your way from there. The Underground has always worked really well for me, although certain stations (Baker Street) and peak travel times make me very nervous about being around too many people. And that’s from the Before Times too, when we only had to worry about pickpockets.

So this time, I head in via the Westfield next to the Shepherds Bush stations. It’s a big shopping centre with a massive (and cheap) car park, so it’s a good place to drop off the car and change to train. It also allowed me to pick up something for the Shenanigan. I don’t think I’ll be using Westfield too much more though, one of the downs of the day was the last mile or so getting in and the trip out to the motorway again. It’s probably a bit too far in to London and traffic was nasty on the way out.

As usual for Comic Con, there were some amazing outfits on display.

Picture. A slightly blurry image that doesn't do justice to the lady's outfit. She's wearing a floor length dress, the centre panel is light coloured with patterns of roses. The outer section is light red. She's carrying a big axe, with hearts and more roses. Her hat is emblazoned with more roses.
Definitely a Queen of our Hearts

Absolutely stunning, I hope she managed to get to the drink and munchie she was on the way to when I interrupted her. (I was taking a quick stop too before my legs exploded).

Not the lady I wanted to catch before disappearing though. I’m not going to say who that is here. I’m not sure she wanted it known that she was going to be there that day. I have pictures but I’m similarly keeping those off the internet because while I think they’re some of the better ones I got that day, she doesn’t like them :-D.

Always respect people’s wishes like that.

This particular lady’s going through some rough moments currently. Hopefully she can get to bouncing and dancing around again soon and that the pain subsides to tolerable levels quickly too. She’s a very special one and you always hope that people like that are feeling up to brightening up the days of people they’re around, because of the wonderful people they are at their core.

So while she’s having the rough times, I hope I balanced that a bit with the gift that brightened up the day. The chat we had definitely brightened up my day and I was floaty happy Sleepy for most of it.

And that’s what we should all do where we can, enable people to be the best they can be. Enable them to have a better day. And when we’re not having a great day ourselves, then if we’re around the right people they can enable us to feel a bit better. And we respect what they want or need to do as well.

We all have vulnerable times, we all have times when we’re not feeling too good whether that’s from physical, mental or other kinds of illness. It’s up to us to enable people to feel better, whether that’s celebrating their wins, or giving them that metaphorical hug when they’re down. The “Thinking of you, hope you’re ok, feel better soon, you Matter.”

Oh ! I got more loot on Friday too …

Picture. We're looking at a t-shirt, with a grey haired fox standing up. He has a sword in his right paw, in his left is a very long scroll. He's between trees to the left and right. The caption is "I'm not procrastinating, I'm doing side quests"

It was a bit different going round Comic Con this time, without my usual Comic Con Friend. You kind of bounce off each other there. One person sees something fun, tells the other, both enjoy it. And vice versa for other things that might not have been spotted. Always taking pictures too. Maybe even a bit of helping each other when the physical-ness of the day might be getting too much.

Yep, I had to take breaks a lot :-D. I started cramping up fairly early, the Excel Arena is a bit overheated, especially with that many people inside. I didn’t quite heed the signs early enough and ended up with my legs locking on me a couple of times and probably microtears in the calf muscles that have only just about recovered. So after I’d been round once, it would have been good to head around again but the Homing Instinct kicked in and I was on my way.

It would be good to do one of these with a Comic Con Friend again. Hopefully my usual Comic Con Friend is feeling better now, she’s also been going through the Life Stuff and has been ill. Feel better soon ! It would have been lovely to see what you made of what was around at the show. Like …

Picture. We're looking at a display area with several people milling around. Taking centre shot is a display stand with a yellow creature built from blocks. It has white and black eyes, a black nose and red cheeks. The caption below is "nanoblock", they're a Pokemon Pikachu about 50cm high made from blocks.
PIKA !

Other loot I picked up was :

CAKE – there’s always cake. It was good cake too.

Lego Lightsaber – this will probably be in another post at some point.

More t-shirt – the other one is about mimics

Happy smiles. (I think there was more too).

So there we go, I’ve named the picture folder “Comic Con London 2023” in perhaps a hopeful thing. There’s another MCM Comic Con coming in Birmingham at the start of December. I am very tempted. But what I’m also tempted by is a cruise up the Norwegian coast starting and finishing at Tilbury Docks in London. That would be in a couple of weeks and in an older person (as in not kids) oriented cruise line. That might have to happen, if I can break free of the timid tendencies that have crept in over the last 10 years or so.

Might need to look at camera solutions if I do that Northern Lights cruise. I like my Ixus 265 but it’s got a tendency to blur … I’d need to look at vibration damping for it as it’s very sensitive to the small hand movements.

That’s another day, back to remembering a lovely lady blessing me with a little bit of her time on Friday before she had to rush off. I hopefully brightened her day with the Thing In Box, she definitely brightened my day.

And that’s where I’ll leave it today. If you can, help someone out. Enable them to do something they’ll enjoy. Give them a bit of confidence that they’re appreciated and they Matter.

If you’ve reached this part of the post, you most definitely Matter to me. Thank you for reading :-).

Where would you be in a science fiction universe ?

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October 23, 2023

9:44 pm

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Hello everyone,

Yep. Odd thought, it got into my head last night when I was trying to get to sleep. I don’t think I did actually sleep last night, hopefully better today. I suspect it’s been showing in what I’ve been saying about certain groups at work. Like the one who’s head should be on a pike in front of the offices (there’s a few of those) and I was saying I wanted to burn some people’s houses down last week.

Still kinda feel like that. Maybe I need another break again, burn out can creep up on people without them realising and it leads to being intolerant where you should be more ready to retreat, reset and try again from a different angle.

Picture. We're looking at the face of a brown and white cat. It's looking directly at the camera, resting on a blanket. The caption is "I let my mind wander. It never came back"

Quite. Where did the last fortnight go ? Feels like it’s gone by in an absolute blur. A couple of books have been demolished since then too, with Illuminations by T.Kingfisher (aka Ursula Vernon, Hugo Winner) being a highlight. Maybe not as good as the two Clocktaur War books but those were for a more adult audience and could be a lot edgier, grittier and had a definite sexual tension running through both books.

Good stories too. T Kingfisher books are very inventive in how they keep the story unfolding before you and they surprise you too. Great books can tell their story in the perfect time. They’re not too short, not too padded or drawn out. They’re just right. And that’s how I’ve found the T Kingfisher books … and a little mention for Aliette de Bodard there too.

I didn’t think so much with Wool, the first book in the Silo trilogy. It felt padded and a bit too drawn out. The one I’m reading at the moment is book 6 in a series of 9 by James David Victor. They’re good … but they’re also so fast that I’m reading them 2 at a time.

Science fiction universe ?

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at a space scene, with occasional stars dotting the background. In the bottom right foreground, we're looking at a red and white blocky spaceship flying away from us with two engines flaring purple exhaust. A ball like space station is in the distance, with white and black sections. Solar panels can be seen behind.
Dungeon Food Truck, departing

That’s the Dungeon Food Truck, callsign KN-00T after the lovely Knightenator (Twitch link). I don’t watch enough Knightenator, it can be a bit much sometimes for my brain, bit too much anarchy. Lovely lady though, well worth a watch and I couldn’t resist the meme this time with this particular ship. It’s a Type 9 Freighter Explorer, with the prime mission being to go out among the stars …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our ship is landed on a reddish brown plain, with several sharp mountains behind, casting their shadows. To the upper right, we see the black, grey and white rings of the planet we are on. Above and behind, we see a small globe of a planet in eclipse shadow, with a set of rings surrounding it.

I was in pretty much full on Travel Mode (Honk, Scoop, Jump, Repeat sometimes scan the good systems) with a mission. Yep. Get to a far flung station …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our ship can be faintly seen lower centre, lost in shadow. On the left, the circular shape of a space station with the lit up rectangular docking entrance in the middle. On the right, a white moon pockmarked with small craters. Behind that, a faint blue planet with the line of a planetary ring.

I’ll come back to the mission later.

That question though, if you found yourself in a science fiction universe, what would you want it to be ? We can draw on any of the settings, either our universe or something different. Near future or far off ?

The Star Wars universe is an obvious setting to look at. There’s so much variety here and it’s absolutely full of life. This is a good choice as well, I could see myself being a Han Solo type, with a spaceship traveling between the planets being led by the next big score. Or getting by with simpler cargoes to pay the bills.

Elite Dangerous has a similar spread of life throughout its little populated bubble of stars. It doesn’t have the variety of Star Wars though, with just humans and badly handled Thargoids who won’t be buying you a drink in a bar.

Star Trek is the other huge one, with it close(ish) future of warp drives, impossible science and more great variety of alien life. Star Trek would be a great universe to live in, although it does seem a little limited for starfarers outside the Federation and other Empires. The ships seem a bit big for independent traders, compared to the little ships of Elite and Star Wars.

And then there’s Warhammer 40,000 … Oh my. In the grim dark future of the 41st millennium, you’ll be dead before you hit the “May …” of the “May you live in Interesting Times” curse. It’s a bit too much of a stratified society for me, with very few people having any chance of an independent life.

It hasn’t really worked out that way for me (been held back by the health issues of the last 10 years and generalised inertia) but if I could be a ship captain visiting a different port with different cargo every run, yeah I’d quite like that. And the Elite and Star Wars universes both appeal to that with opportunities for the small traders. But you have to stay ahead of the criminal element.

Fun times.

Not so sure about the near future Earth universes. I think we’re exhausting what this planet has to offer, I’d rather be out in the stars seeing new things. I should book one of those cruise holidays though, so I can see a bit more of this planet.

(Back to reality) That’s one thing that has gone whoosh – a bit of a break out with my outsides with the usual thing of quick damage being slow to repair. But it’s getting there. Although I’ve had to add Lemon Sherbets to the suspicion list. Bad snacks. But I wouldn’t want to go away for that long without being able to use the healing gunk.

(Back to unreality) I do like playing in the near future universe of Deus Ex, although that might be more character than setting. Must go back to the Mankind Divided game soon. I don’t think I want to live in that world though, doesn’t seem that much future in it.

Big honourable mention to the Gareth L Powell universes too. He’s very inventive with his world building and can establish his worlds very quickly with the tight narrative. Another recent read was Descendant Machine, which is set in the Continuance series (2 so far hopefully more coming) where humanity has been banished from the Earth for being naughty with nukes. I’ve enjoyed both Descendant Machine and Stars And Bones. Without giving too much of the building away, humanity now lives on starship Arks, with smaller Vanguard scout ships investigating the space they go through. I’d see me being a Vanguard agent.

Yep. Put me in a spaceship and let me chart my own course and I’ll be happy. Journeying is better with a crew though.

Oh ! Here we are …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at a space scene, our white and red spaceship is to the bottom left. We can just see part of a planet coloured white with thin dark bads. A couple of small interstellar clouds are to top left and between those, we see the lights of our fleet carrier emerging from a black cloud.

(That’s a little bit enhanced, the original was very poorly lit and Gimp has very effectively balanced it there)

That was journey’s end yesterday, with me meeting up with the fleet carrier for the first time in months.

Mission accomplished, carrier crew needed a consignment of Party Rings. (So good). Also needed to bring carrier fuel. But it was mostly about the Party Rings.

Time to post and enjoy more of a Tashnarr stream (Twitchy link). Have a good evening everyone, find snack, enjoy snack, be happy.

New Things Lead To Happy Thoughts

by

October 11, 2023

8:38 pm

Comments Off on New Things Lead To Happy Thoughts

technology

Hello everyone,

What’s this ? Two posts in a couple of days ? I’m ok, honest. Well, mostly but I’ll get back to that later.

Picture. Meme. We're looking at a cute grey and white kitten, sitting upright. Their back leg is in a long plaster cast. The caption is "My plan to dominate the world has been put on hold for *now*"

The widget I ordered yesterday arrived and it didn’t take too long (and one lost screw, I had a spare) to transfer my recent buy of a 2TB SSD from its USB enclosure into the widget that’ll see it living inside the case with a much better interface. The old performance numbers are in the last post (haha, that’s me shamelessly digging for an extra click for yesterday’s post!) and I’m happy to see a few orders of magnitude increase in performance. Numbers ?

Picture. We're looking at a series of benchmark numbers again for a solid state hard disc. More coming in the text.
Set speed to Zoom

So, looking at the numbers and comparing to last time …

Sequential read rates have gone up from the 40MB/s (megabyte per second) hard limit of the USB cable to 2765MB/s on reads and 4345MB/s on writes. That’s much closer to the theoretical performance of the drive, so I’m happy there.

The Randoms haven’t seen as similarly dramatic an improvement but I’m still very happy with 17 and 20 going up to 53 and 170. That’s still a significant improvement.

The Input/Output Operations Per Second have gone up from 4258 and 4913 to a massively impressive 13495 and 41717. That means it can zap backwards and forwards to find the right data before you’ve realised that the system has gone to the drive to acquire it.

The microsecond timer was good already at 234 and 203 latencys and is up an order of magnitude to 23 on the second number (74 on the first). So compare that to the conventional hard disc and it shows that the old system belongs in the last century.

The conclusion I take is that while you wouldn’t get the full performance out of the drive, putting an SSD into a USB enclosure is a perfectly acceptable way of adding a lot of space to a PC gasping for room. I was (mostly) happily running Starfield off the SSD-ina-box and Starfield will be notorious for demanding an SSD and not an older hard disc.

Jargon busty time … The newer solid state device drives are pretty much just memory chips, of the type that hold their state when the power is taken off. They’re ultra fast. The older ones are :

Picture. Technology. We're looking at the rectangular shape of an old style hard disc. There's a circular platter in the centre, with an arm reaching over. The "head" is on the end of the arm. The connectors are on the bottom.

The data is stored on a cylinder of round platters, which have coatings on top that are sensitive to the magnets in the end of the head. The head is on the end of an arm that will move to allow the head access to the full width of the discs. The thing is called a disc drive because the platters are shaped like discs. They’re spun up to usually 5400 revs per minute with faster ones going at 7200 revs per minute. The more revs, the faster the drive can get to the data and the quicker it can pull the data off the drive.

They were fantastic for the early days of computing but … there are a lot of drawbacks to this technology. Earlier drives would suffer from crashes, where the arm and head could contact the platter. That would dig a trench and pretty much wreck the drive. It didn’t happen too much though after the drives would park the head somewhere off the platters when the drive was powered down. It takes time for the arm to move, which means latencies on these drives are measured in milliseconds instead of microseconds. That makes a massive difference, especially with modern PCs.

And they’re pretty slow in pulling the data off too. That didn’t matter too much until around 10 years ago when improvements in processing speed meant we hit the limitations of how we stored data. (And perhaps some shenanigans by Microsoft too around the Vista times, which broke caching of data).

They did see us through a lot of decades though, going from the IDE drive in the picture through to EIDE, SCSI and into the SATA era. Lots of acronyms there …

IDE – Integrated Drive Electronics – the bits that make it go are on the drive and they’re connected up with a 40 wire ribbon cable. You could have two of these on a cable and the “Jump Block” would select between Master and Slave. There needed to be 1 Master on a cable. One really silly drawback here was that the Heads, Cylinders and Sectors values were mismatched between the various parts of the electronics which put an artificial (528MB) limit on the size of the drives.

EIDE – Extended Integrated Drive Electronics – saw an end to that limit through some nifty translation. It also saw 80 wire ribbon cables come in to the same connector. The extra wires provided shielding to stop the signals in each wire transferring over to their neighbours. IDE and EIDE both used parallel or many wires to make them quicker, which was ok up to a point.

SCSI – Small Computer System Interface – was a competing and much superior interface from around the time of IDE. If I remember right, it could handle 8 drives on a chain, was much quicker and because it didn’t have that Head, Cylinder and Sector limit, could handle much bigger drives. But it also needed an expensive controller card at a time when we needed the scarce room and resources for sound cards and graphics and a SCSI set up would add a zero to the cost of a machine. SCSI died out when SATA appeared.

ATA and ATAPI – was the logical side of the interface. It stands for AT Attachment, with AT being the original IBM PCs. From the 80s. ATAPI stands for ATA Packet Interface, where the blobs of data would be parceled up into packets to bounce around the system. Here’s a link about ATA. We’re still using this original system for modern SATA drives.

SATA – Serial ATA – saw the 40 and 80 wire ribbon cables thrown in the bin in favour of one wire to rule them all. Ok more than one wire but instead of all the signals chattering to each other in the parallel wires, there’s just one signal wire. It meant they could crank up the speed significantly. EIDE was limited to 33MB/s with “Ultra DMA” (Direct Memory Access), my SATA SSD goes at between 300 and 500MB/s. SATA was also much easier to wire up than the PATA, the cables go round corners much better than those 40 and 80 wire ribbons.

Picture. Meme. We're looking at a chubby animal I think sitting in a tree. It's holding up a paw, with the captions being "WHOA !! Now that's too much information"

I’m probably letting the geek out a bit too much there. I did mean to drop a link to the site I stole the hard disc picture from though. Here we are, I’d be curious to hear which you think is more understandable, this site (linky) or my ramblings above.

There is another drive type, the nVME or non-Volatile Memory Express. This was an interface designed for how SSDs, instead of SSDs being shackled to the ATA system from last century. It’s much quicker. But apparently it’s also too new for my desktop machine to handle so the new drive is going to be just games and data. I’m ok with that.

To other things !

I mentioned I’m only “mostly” ok above … What’s up at the moment ? Headaches and a poorly back this week. I think I have answers for my outsides, I apparently have a light tomato sensitivity. Too many cup-a-soups, or pizza and I’ll see the impact on my healing outsides. But it’s not a serious one, I should be able to have the tomato soup or pizza in moderation.

I think the headaches are resulting from my latest pair of glasses. The test was done with a mask on in pandemic conditions, so there’s going to be alignment issues there. I’m sensitive to those, they cause headaches. It’s sad to have to retire glasses that cost £500 (two pairs, distance and reader) but I think I’m going to have to retire them early.

And the poorly back is just … a reminder of an older injury. It should improve but I’ll probably have to look after it for a while. I have the poorly wrist as well at the moment, which means I shouldn’t be testing the Starfield out on the new SSD arrangements … Conveniently, there’s good streams on at the moment so those have my attention.

On that note … to the streams ! Nite all. Hope the geekiness isn’t too weird and obscure this time.