Tag: geeky

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.

New tech, old software, same issues

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November 14, 2022

10:53 pm

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Hello everyone,

I must stop apologising for it being a while between posts and actually post some more :-D. Last time, it was near the start of a week off and I’d been fighting new laptop issues all day. And I have to admit, getting a little stressed about it. Especially about the iTunes thing. If you’re here about iTunes not talking to iPhones, skip ahead a bit (keyword “victory”). Or hopefully enjoy my rambling too :-D.

Buyer’s remorse and all that. I get that a fair bit.

There’s been a birthday as well …

Cute animal meme. We're looking at a ginger kitten standing on their back legs and looking sad. The captions are "I want to wish you a very happy birthday" and "Just so you know ... I love cake..."
Cake !

Yep. Added another bit of age again. An away trip happened last week and I’m definitely still feeling that now, even after a chilled out weekend. It was only 1 hour of time difference but that meant getting moving at an equivalent 5.30am for a few days, plus travel followed by highly disrupted sleep times.

I can’t talk much about work trips though, things like the location you went to can give far too much away about what you’re working on and who you work for. And we have to protect that kind of stuff from the weird people on the internet.

Yep, I know, I’m a weird person on the internet but I don’t inflict anything bad on anyone on the internet, I just have fun drawing chuckles out of people. Must do more of the art again, to add to the memes. The memes still happen, if a doable idea pops into the head the memes quickly follow. It’s like having a toolkit that you can apply as you need it. Turning a photo into a meme can happen very rapidly especially if the photography cooperates. Drawing a new sketch, that takes a while even with the rapid style I was going for.

Buyer’s remorse ?

Meme picture. We're looking at the top half of a tiger's face with the paws on top of a fence. The captions are "After Black Friday and Cyber Monday comes Buyer's Remorse Tuesday and Hiding from my Creditors Wednesday."
Black Friday is nearly upon us …

Hmm. Looks like they’ve updated the WordPress editor and it’s a small change where instead of there being a + button to press when you’re adding a picture, you need to press /. I’m not a fan of changes like that, they seem like changes for change’s sake. Unlike twitter where the changes seem to be to set a record on how quickly you can burn down a multi billion dollar business.

Laptop ? I think I mentioned that it’s an Acer Swift 3 this time around. I went down a little on spec with a smaller hard disc than ideal in order to take advantage of a bigger discount. It’s also a little smaller at 14 inches. The important spec bits are 1.2kg, 14″ screen (IPS), 16GB memory and 512GB SSD. And all that is working very nicely. The catalyst for buying was to drop from the 2.7kg Asus gaming laptop (which I never gamed on) to something more suitable for travelling around. Oh and the screen in the Asus laptop was dull and terrible, this one is far superior. The keyboard is nice too. That’s the things that made me go for the Acer in the end, it felt nice in the shop (although I bought from the Acer online shop)

It’s Windows 11 too, which honestly isn’t too bad. It’s another unnecessary change from Microsoft in order to relieve more money out of people for updates but it feels like the switch is necessary in order to introduce cyber security architecture in the Operating System which is vitally important in today’s increasingly dangerous online environment.

Apart from that – the Settings area is more confusing than before. It appears to be another extension on what happened to Windows 10, with its awkward mix of old Windows 7 era controls and the newer style. I haven’t found the settings yet to enable different power modes for on battery and on mains power. I just did a check and apparently it does have these. You can tell in the Task Manager, which gives an accurate frequency meter. It’s 2GHz on power and light loading, down to 1.3GHz on light loading. Less speed = less power draw = more battery life.

Time for a disclosure note – I bought the laptop, although I did get £150 off on £800 value via the discounts you can get on the Acer store.

The SSD makes it much smoother than the Asus. Either that or Windows 11 performs better than Windows 10. Not sure there, it could be a change from 8GB up to 16GB, that extra memory gives breathing room for Windows. Taskbar behaviour is different. Windows 10 gives you more options. Handy tip – Windows key + X is a shortcut to many very useful features like Task Manager, Device Manager, Run, Search etc.

I used Device Manager to fix an iTunes issue … I insist on using iTunes 10.7 because it was the last one with the iTunes DJ feature. (Auto generated playlist which adds tracks if it runs out). This means I also have to keep my iPodPhone (iPhone 5) on old software … Anything above iOS 6 won’t talk to the iTunes. Apparently it can’t take anything past iOS 8.3 anyway so that exphone won’t be getting any data again from anywhere that isn’t the iTunes library. Long story short (and popping a search engine optimisation in !)

My iTunes 10.7 was not detecting my iPhone because the iTunes 12 driver was causing a conflict. If you’ve come here via a search engine and have the same issue, here you go : The Portable Devices entry for Apple iPhone didn’t fix it. I needed to go down to Universal Serial Bus controllers where (if it’s not working), you’ll see an entry for “Apple Mobile Device USB composite driver”. This is the one that doesn’t work. Reinstalling the “Apple Mobile Device USB driver” (yep, is subtle) has gotten the iPodPhone talking to the iTunes again. VICTORY

I haven’t sorted out the Homeshare system yet though, I’ll keep that one for another day. I’ve managed to listen to 1642 unique tracks so far, which puts the chance of a repeat being randomly chosen down to around 1 in 10.

I think the exhaustion is starting to really hit now though, so it’s time to wrap up.

Still here, hanging in there after realising that the burn out probably hit around Mar/Apr 2020 when the world changed a lot. Been looking to try and recover from that, although it might need more of a reset to do so.

It has been good being out and about more though. It seems like the pain that follows the out and about is lessening as I do it more, although it has definitely caught up to me today.

Anyway – time to close with : looking forwards to the run in to Xmas. Lots to do. Things to see. The markets are open, so I’ll look to visit those at least a few times. Hopefully the cookies are back ! It’s been good seeing people more regularly again. Work situation is way better than before I changed last year, I have the confidence again to own what I’m doing and be able to make stuff happen with it.

Be safe and well everyone, see you again sometime soon.

Reading, Gaming, Thinking Diverse

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August 9, 2022

12:12 am

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Hello everyone,

Had a quiet week off last week, which was pretty much the plan. I did think I’d find my way over to Cardiff or otherwise out of the house. I’m a little disappointed in myself that didn’t happen, although when I think about going to places like Cardiff, I’ll go to regular haunts, see what I didn’t buy before and … don’t buy it again. It would have been good to get out and about though.

Picture. Meme. We're looking at a sad grey cat with blue eyes looking over the top of a sofa to left of picture. The caption is "I spent all day sleeping ... Now I'm tired."
Why does this always happen ?

So what did I get up to outside of hiding indoors all the time ? Lots of gaming. Lots of reading. Lots of music listening. Thinking about the next laptop, although the trojan scare I talked about last post is resolved. The warning popups haven’t been back. Phew ! So the laptop will hang in there for another little while. It’s let me catch up a bit on the new music, which includes acquisitions from a recent steam sale in the Skyrim, Rimworld and Fermi Paradox soundtracks.

Still not played Rimworld.

I did have a look at this one though :

Game screenshot. Frostpunk. We're looking at a dark scene where snow covers a barren land except for a circle in the centre which is bare and thawed. In the centre, there is a tall cylinder structure with a fire coming out of the top. There are tents clustered in a circle at its base. The words are "Our city. Day 1. Population 80."
Chilly out

That’s Frostpunk, which is a survival base builder strategy game. A new ice age has hit the Earth and your ragged band of survivors are huddled around a steam generator that is the only thing between them and a frostbitten demise. It’s a hell of a game, superbly balanced (I’ve watched a few playthroughs of the scenarios) and really, really hard. I got my city up to about 300 people and almost the end of the Londoners storyline before abandoning that run. I couldn’t get them harvesting coal fast enough to keep the generator running and could see the inevitable death spiral coming.

I’ll probably be back in this one. Other first looks for me include Fermi Paradox, which is a very simplified thing where you have a cluster of star systems that independently evolve intelligent life. Will they survive ? Will they thrive ? Will they embark on conquests of the stars ? A curious game, maybe not ready for a recommendation though.

I also completed the last achievements on Car Mechanic Simulator 2021, so I’ve been looking at CMC 2018. It’s ok, the newer game is better in pretty much every way and it has mouse acceleration which can’t be turned off. Never put mouse acceleration in your games people … I’ve also been looking at Rover Mechanic Simulator, which is the same thing with a limited number of rovers that you rebuild from your pod on Mars.

There’s something about the mechanic games … and other simulator type games have carved out their own little niche too. With the car one, it’s that feeling of progress as you tear down a car and rebuild it into something shiny.

Sacrificed some of the life in my neck to Rogue Tower – I could do with looking at my chair and replacing it with one that still allows it to raise. That’s an odd thing that … The posture I’m in at the moment is ok for eye height with my eyes being roughly level to the top half of the screen. That’s ideal … But when I’m in a game like Rogue Tower, I’ll lean forwards which lowers my head so I’m looking up and wrecking my neck. Oops.

Oh and there’s the truck games too. I’m enjoying these again now having recognised and gotten used to some of the irritations with the AI of the other vehicles.

Game screenshot. Euro Truck Sim 2. We're in the cabin of a lorry, looking right towards our passenger. He's the yellow of a Pikachu (small cute animal with a lightning shaped tail).
Where to Pikachu ?

I’m doing that thing again … Where I thought I’d rattle through some stuff fast and not have that much to talk about :-D. Reading ?

Finished The Human Division by John Scalzi, it’s book 5 in the Old Man’s War series that I would happily recommend. It’s like an inspired by Starship Troopers book, where the lead character in the first 3 books finds himself leaving Earth as a 75 year old to be reborn into a super starship trooper body that’s then thrown at Humanity’s enemies. Of which there are many. Yet there’s more nuance here, as they’ll talk about what’s actually going on in the universe. And you steadily get a feeling of “Are we the baddies ?” I’m curious as to where it’ll go in the last book, with its foreboding title of The End Of All Things. But not yet, because I’m indulging the diverse reading thing by going into Elizabeth Bear’s Ancestral Night.

I mentioned diversity … a comment in a conversation got me thinking about the people I follow and support through things like twitch subscriptions. I like to try and keep myself honest there with a little bit of internal watchdogging. I have a little concern about what I’ve spotted there …

First up is the subscriptions – I’ve moved these around a little bit. I’m down to 9 Twitch subscriptions now, they’re all actually women now. I was actively subscribing to a bloke but ended that because he wasn’t doing the interesting content any more. Similar with another lady streamer. And the other bloke streamer lost my sub due to behaviour in his community. They’re all white too, none are people of colour. Not sure what that says about me to be honest. There are a couple of threads there :

The streamer communities I’m involved with don’t raid into people of colour streams much at all, so the exposure to hook me in doesn’t happen. However, I will mention Nathan Whatiskiss who I know as a wonderful roleplayer (but I haven’t seen his gaming content) and TrooperSJP who is another wonderful roleplayer. I don’t follow Trooper because he misbehaves with how he self promotes his own streams (he breaches rules on discords that aren’t his).

I think that’s the main reason why my follows are missing the people of colour, because the rare times people raid into them, I’ll quickly skip into a stream done by someone I do actively follow. Maybe I should give the raided a bit of a chance more often. Perhaps it’s a problem more on Twitch’s end, where people of colour might not be getting the same exposure.

The male female split is slightly deceptive too, as I actively maintain Patreon subs to 1.5 men. (The 0.5 is shared between Tashnarr and TheWanderingInn for the 40k layers model painting show).

The question someone asked was actually more about LGBTQIA+. The split on there for my subs is 3 straight, 1 bi, 1 pan, 2 lesbian and 2 where I have no idea. And that last ? is something I’m very ok with because we should only know where people are on those categories if they want to tell us, it’s not something that really should matter. Oh and there’s a trans person in that list too. And a person who would quite happily be first in the queue for the Probing when the aliens land.

Personally, where people place themselves on the LGBTQIA+ doesn’t really matter to me. I’ll go back to the series Another Life there (scifi series, in space, very tense and atmospheric, dramatic) where the character I was most interested in was Zayn who is played by the non-binary JayR Tinaco (imdb link). The character was interesting from an intelligence and challenging dialogue point of view. They also came over as knowing what they were doing, which was key in this particular series.

That’s the thing about diversity – our differences make us strong. And interesting. They give different perspectives on how to live, laugh and love. And what people get up to in the bedroom and with whom really isn’t any of our concern. If people love each other, they should have the chance to explore that without prejudice.

What really matters is (easy geek points on offer here) being excellent to each other, in all ways.

Picture. Meme. A sad looking cat with big eyes is laying down looking at us. The caption is "It hurts when someone you love says mean things like..." "It's time to wake up"
One more minute ?

It was definitely a bit of a wrench this morning switching from the time off timescales to a work from home timescale where I’m actively working from 7.50am.

I think I’ll leave this one there. I’m a little concerned as to whether a bit of prejudice has crept in with the stream watching, although that’s mostly down to who I get raided into (A stream raid is where a person finishes and takes their audience over to another person to watch). I should give the raided a bit more of a chance, it’s how you find fun people to watch. That said though, of the channels that twitch is showing in the shortcut list at the moment, none of them look like people of colour. (Oh wait, there’s Caustic Phoenix coming in with the Pink Pixels show – there’s one !). There are none being promoted on Twitch’s front page at the moment. I’m not watching the lovely Caustic because I was watching Tashnarr already and Ashlinaa (new name !) on the laptop and the Pink Pixels show will run on too late.

Perhaps it’s twitch that has the problem.

Stay safe everyone, be well, be good to each other.

Relax, chill, maybe laptop, BOOK

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July 31, 2022

10:09 pm

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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.

Picture. We can see a tiny dragon perched on a normal finger. The dragon looks very overheated. Caption "Please take great care out in the hills and mountains of Wales today. The heatwave is prematurely hatching the eggs of the Welsh dragon (Y Ddraig Goch). If you come across a baby dragon just leave it be. Do not take it home! Dragons do not make good pets, they very quickly get too hot to handle."
Take care of your dragons

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 :

Picture. We're looking at a stone statue scene. A woman is sitting on a throne, looking left towards a small lady holding up a tablet. It looks suspiciously like an open laptop computer.
What’s that ? The Amazons will deliver ?

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 ?

Picture. We're looking at a computer with a simple keyboard. On top of it is a small cathode ray tube monitor and to the right is a disc drive with the multicolour Apple logo on it.
Bit beefier than my last Apple product

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).

A poster picture. We're looking at a sleeping cat, curled in a ball with front paws gripping tail. The caption is "Relax it's what cats do best"
Cat gotta cat

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.

Picture. A person sitting in a chair, reading a book. The caption is "I found a 100 per cent foolproof way to prevent sunburn. It's called "Stay inside and read a book." Subtitle on there is "someecards" user card.
Seems legit

And it’s good for avoiding sunburn too. Stay safe everyone, be well.

May resemble puddle

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July 17, 2022

9:01 pm

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Hello everyone,

We have a heatwave on …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our spaceship is parked on a planet, to the right of shot. We're pointing towards an orange sun that is dominating the horizon. We can only see half of it, stretching across three quarters of the picture.
Fetch the sunburn lotion !

It’s been a while since I did spaceships actually ! One of my strategies for not getting too hot currently involves adding as little heat as I can to the situation :-D. And as Elite Odyssey maxes out the graphics card, I haven’t been in that game for a while. Computer do work, computer make heat. But that’s ok because there’s other games that are still really enjoyable but don’t need the computer to do as much work.

Like Motorsport Manager, it’s now reached the mid 2050s in my campaign and I’m about to move up to the next higher up league. I still play this one so much because it gives good racing to watch and it’s still a challenge to get the win in there, although I do know a lot of the tricks and ways to make strategies work. (A lot of that is math).

American Truck Simulator has been good as well.

Game screenshot. American Truck Simulator. Our mostly black truck is on a road in the foreground, driving to left of shot. Behind, is a sandy scene sparsely populated with light grasses. Mountains are in the distance but a bit closer, there are a series of radio telescope dishes pointing upwards.
Hunting for signals

The Truck Games are nicely chilled out. I think one reason I like them is that I can set a route up through the World of Trucks system (or the non online options) and just go. And that’s about the limit of the thought required. I can give Brain a rest while being in the game. Other games need a bit too much Brain than I’m willing to give in order to learn them, or the gameplay isn’t restful.

I might actually be taking advantage of the heat … got the freezer doing a defrost at the moment. It’s actually been a good opportunity for that, I’ve only had to chip away the ice a couple of times in the last month to break my ice cubes free.

I know, being domestic. Out of character.

Not looking forward to tomorrow, we’re expecting temperatures around 37 degrees C, in UK houses that aren’t set up to handle that kind of temperature. I’ll have my fans going all day … I may actually do an out of the house run tomorrow evening … The car got the air con and so will the cinema for a potential hiding in an air con building for a while.

Going into the office isn’t viable, it’s not going to be particularly habitable in there at the moment. (Air recirculation, no cooking and buildings that catch the heat). I do need to be going back into the office more though, being static at home isn’t doing me much good.

What else has been going on ? Lots of cricket on the telly, with series ongoing involving the England ladies and England men teams. It’s been good to watch, especially with newcomers like Issy Wong coming through to the senior side. She’s raw and has a lot of potential with the bowling. Sophia Dunkley is already regularly turning that potential into match winning performances. It’s good to see. Not sure if I’m seeing similar potential come through to the men’s side but we’ll see there.

Books have been happening too. Still in the middle of Helsreach, but I did complete Starship for Sale by M.R. Forbes. That one’s well worth a look. It’s worth mentioning that you can dip in and out of this one quickly due to the chapters being really short … And it rattles along at a merry pace with our two boys Matt and Ben being whisked along on a wild ride as (spoilers …). It saves up some surprises right up to the end too. Worth a peek, not just for Matt and Ben, and I’m curious to see how the story unfolds during the next books.

I’m currently in The Worst of All Possible Worlds, third in the series by Alex White where we have magic and technology intermixed in a sci fi space universe. It’s good and I’m very curious as to how he wraps up this trilogy. It’s been pretty blood thirsty (and caution warning – creative with that too, there’s lots of description of gore).

Right – I’d better sign off and fetch something cold again … Tashnarr stream is on (which is also convenient because it takes very few cpu cycles to show a stream, therefore less heat!) and I’m feeling like diving into book again.

Stay safe everyone, hopefully find some chilliness amongst the heat.

Hello it’s toasty

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July 9, 2022

11:07 pm

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Hello again,

Me again – I think I’ve needed a bit of a rest from writing things. Could be because I’m diving more into the work stuff again, where I put the energy into what I’m doing in working hours and feel more like chilling out with reading or games in the evening with that resulting in me not really wanting to write stuff. But it’s more like having trouble hitting the Add New Post button despite having things to talk about.

Picture. An orange dog is lying down in a big collection of ice cubes. The caption is "It's too bloody hot today"
Yes I know. I have summoned the spelling bees

It has gone very warm here … I last did spaceships on the 12th of June and there’s no way I’ll go back until things cool down a bit. Elite pushes the graphics card really hard (because it’s an unoptimised mess) and that turns into heat going into the room. So no space ship for a bit. That said though … it’s still pretty.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at an icy white planet marred only by the tyre tracks of our buggy. Our pilot is standing on a rock to the bottom left. Our buggy is parked behind, with 6 red lit wheels. A spaceship is parked beyond. The sky is a lovely pink on the left transitioning to purple on the right.
Preparing to scout

This is the latest ship in the fleet, the Searching for Chamomile. The callsign is T-CK13 after the lovely Teacakes 13 (Twitch link) who battles various health issues (don’t we all !) and time availability (same again – day job!) to bring us no commentary gameplay streams of No Mans Sky. That’s another space game which I should have a look at but I keep bouncing off it for some reason.

Anyway, I thought I’d make my latest objective be one of exploring planets again and checking out the wildlife. All my scout ships (well, most of them 😀 ) are named Searching For … things and this time Chamomile came up as a hardy plant. Haven’t done much in that quest yet, I’ll wait for things to cool down a bit.

One thing spaceship related that I have been enjoying is watching Psyche’s streams. She’s a bubbly bundle of chaos from Northern Ireland who likes streaming the space games and there’s also been lots of Rimworld chaos too. Well worth checking out. Here’s the old twitch linky thing. I haven’t been watching long at all but with me rearranging who some of my Twitch subscriptions go to, she’ll be getting one of the ones that have been cancelled.

So – Twitch subs … what’s that mean ? The benefits include little emote pictures that you can use across Twitch chats. Plus it gives a bit of money to the streamer which means they can continue entertaining us on the screen instead of having to … quit that and get an actual job in order to afford rent, food and electricity and the other things.

Twitch is feeling like a rough place for streamers. The organisation takes way too high a cut of the money that viewers send in, plus because it’s live, you pretty much have to choose one (or maybe two) only to watch at once. So at the moment, it’s having fun watching Tashnarr playing Subnautica. She’s doing hard core runs where if you die, it’s new save time. Not dead yet tonight but there’s been a couple of close calls. Tash is always great fun to watch and put daftness into chat with.

Oh and sometimes the Twitch people will play a game you’re interested in and give you an idea of whether you’d want to buy it. Or they play games like No Mans Sky where you enjoy other people playing more than you enjoy the game itself.

Game screenshot. American Truck Simulator. We're looking at a roadway on a small bridge. In the distance we can see a shallow waterfall. Our green truck is on the right.
Water … falling

I’ve been enjoying switching from the European roads over to American Truck Simulator with map packs appearing courtesy of the Steam sale that’s just finished. It’s curious seeing the differences between the two games. Both ATS and European Truck Sim 2 use the same underlying engine, the trucks and roads are different. American trucks have the long noses, European trucks are more of a slab front with the engine underneath. It feels like the loads are heavier in the US trucks, although that could be what the World of Trucks service offers. The US roads are definitely more forgiving than the occasionally very tight European roads. But the European maps have more features in them and things to look at.

Whereas I was feeling frustrated in the Euro game, I’ve been enjoying playing with the American trucks.

Oh ! Did I get anything in the Steam sale ? I bought Fermi Paradox and Disco Elysium plus soundtracks for Skyrim, Rimworld and the two games above. Fermi Paradox is a game about development of alien civilisations, Disco Elysium is a role playing adventure game where you’re a cop who’s lost his memory and he has to investigate a rather curious murder. But not all is as it seems.

I’d better wrap up soon so I can dive into book … Reading has been happening, much reading. Completed books from the last few weeks are :

Dune – think I mentioned that. I’m not sure if I’ll even go into Dune Messiah to be honest.

Machine by Elizabeth Bear was an interesting one. Perhaps a bit too much in the psychology side but I was kept in there by a highly intriguing unfolding mystery.

The Last Colony by John Scalzi was book 3 in his Old Man’s War series. This is in a developing universe of his where humanity goes to the stars, to find that they’re pretty crowded with alien races. Most of whom don’t like humans much, mostly due to how humans treat them. Nothing new there, good commentary :-D. I’ll be curious to see how this moves on in Book 5 (book 4 is an alternate perspective retelling of book 3). J.Scalzi is a good author to keep coming back to.

Current books are Starship for Sale by M.R.Forbes. It’s heavy on the world building with it being the first book in a series but that’s ok. It’s good world building. Our two friends start out going to a Virtual Reality games place and before they know it, they’re being hustled into buying an odd starship with a very curious occupant. I’m enjoying it, will come back for more in the series. Oh and “books” is Helsreach from the 40k universe. I have a 30+ day reading streak going in Kindle at the moment and Helsreach is a paper back. So I’m in two books to keep that Kindle streak.

Nearly went to see cinema things yesterday, chose chilling out instead. It’s been a while …

Picture. A hopefully looking dog is looking up directly at the camera. The captions are "I see you haz a hot dog ..." and "I too like hot dogs"
Hmmm. Hot dogs

I like hot dogs, good cinema munchie. Oh, another reason I didn’t go is because Everything Everywhere has pushed out and while the latest Thor and Top Gun sequel have potential, wasn’t feeling it yesterday. Maybe next Friday. I was feeling a bit blasted yesterday after I closed up the work laptop.

Work’s been going well after I switched late last year. It was good catching up with one of the people from the old team too when being in the office on Wednesday this week. But if you know what I mean by Spoons, I throw all my spoons at the work stuff at the moment and it doesn’t leave that many over for home stuff. That’s one reason why I like the Truck Games, they don’t need much real thought while giving a definite sense of Progress happening.

Motorsport Manager is another I’m continuing to enjoy, after almost 1900 hours now. But that one needs a bit more thought.

Time to devote some of those thoughts to enjoying Tashnarr (still not dead yet) and Starship for Sale.

Be well everyone ! Stay Safe. Try not to let what’s happening in the world (it crazy innit) get you down.

Thinking about tech …

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May 22, 2022

10:30 pm

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Hello everyone,

After seeing a few people talk in the discords about getting tech upgrades, I thought I’d check out the market again. I’m highly unlikely to get any tech for me but it’s good to keep an eye on the market to see how it’s doing. Especially as we seem to be coming out of a period of extreme scarcity where components like graphics cards just haven’t been available to buy. But first ! Thumbnail pic.

Picture. A black dog and a shaggy brown coated dog are looking up at a grid of cookies. The captions are "We are from Tech Support." "We are here to delete your cookies"
I too, have cookies

I am starting to look into laptops but to be honest, my current one is still above what I needed it to do. The trigger point for the laptop will be when I want something smaller (it’s a chunky 15″ gaming laptop), when the battery fails (it’s lost 25% of its capacity) or when Windows 10 goes out of support and they stop releasing patches for it. Because cyber security is a much bigger thing now, the cyber threat is not something to be taken lightly. Case in point, 2 laptops ago when being infected with a keylogger led to my Eve Online accounts getting hijacked. I think the keylogger came from a 3rd party advert on the Eve site as doing a bit of dual boxing in Eve was literally the first thing I did on that laptop … and it was only Eve that got hacked. (Maybe GoG too but that was years later)

We’ve got until October 2025 by the way for the shuttering of Windows 10 support, so there’s lots of time to go. My desktop may have an easy route to go for a Windows 11 upgrade but the processor in my laptop isn’t supported and I don’t want to bother fighting that, the laptop will need replacing by 2025 anyway. Maybe. A memory just reactivated about me replacing the Macbook Air that I had before due to its keyboard failing … that Macbook Air bore the brunt of my outsides being in terrible condition and it would have been bits of Me going in the keyboard which made it bad. I’m healthier now. I’ll see what happens with my desktop Meltdown.

Picture. A wizard with a grey cloak and a very white beard (Ian McKellen's Gandalf) is sitting behind a laptop computer that's on a desk. The captions are "Please Wait" and "While the wizard installs the software."
Me, yesterday

The one thing I might do with Meltdown is to give it another Solid State Device disk drive. There’s 120GB of space on my current SSD which is about the kind of space something like Star Citizen would want to consume. I looked at that yesterday in a very rapid peek and a conclusion was to believe their strong recommendation to put it on a SSD instead of a conventional hard disc. (An SSD is much faster at loading in the textures that get painted on the structures of the walls). Specs !

Cookie Monster (laptop) has an i5-7300Hq laptop processor, with a 1050Ti graphics chip and 8GB of RAM. I’ve never played games on this gaming laptop :-D. It seemed like a good idea at the time, plus that class of laptop was the only one that allowed easy installation of 2 hard discs, which was a hard requirement at the time because SSDs weren’t big enough or cheap enough and my iTunes library is too big to fit. When I go away, I’m rarely thinking about doing gaming. I’m usually too tired from the day’s activities or I’m watching stream or video and generally chilling out instead.

If I were to replace Cookie Monster tomorrow, I’d get something like this (at the link) from PC Specialist. I’d change the spec there to 16GB of memory (in 2x8GB because that works better) and I’d increase the SSD to 1TB for an overall cost of £675. I’m not convinced increasing the price for a Quad Core chip is worth it for my use case. One thing extra I would acquire is a memory card reader. My digital camera uses a full size SD card and it’s just easier to import the pictures across by using a memory card reader. Oh, I’m a little uncomfortable about the PC Specialist link as I’ve never seen any of their hardware … I picked the one at the link to show because it’s slimline and it has an IPS (In Plane Switching) screen, which gives better and more consistent viewing angles.

Picture. A sad looking dog is on a sofa. The captions are "Someone figured out my password." and "Now I have to rename my dog"
See earlier about stolen game accounts …

What’s Meltdown got ? My desktop Meltdown was built in July 2019 and it has a Ryzen 5 3600 6 core processor, 32 GB of memory and it now has a 3060Ti graphics card. I upgraded its data drive to a 3TB and it runs off a 500GB SSD. Those specs are still pretty good now, which is another reason for not needing to look at upgrades for a while. (Except for maybe a big SSD because I made an error with the 500GB one).

Looking at Overclockers, I’d pick out these bits. I’m going to zoom over the logic here because I’ve covered the what everything is in previous posts …

You start with a processor and then the other bits follow from there. I’d go for an AMD Ryzen 5 5600 for £190, which is an upgraded newer version of what I have. (Worth noting that the faster 5600X is on offerr at the moment for £210, down from £300). The processor goes in an AM4 socket and wants 3200 to 3600 MHz DDR4 memory. The Asus TUF Gaming X570 Plus is a compatible board in stock for £210. It’s a standard sized ATX board so it needs a full sized case, which you’d want anyway for the graphics card. Add in 32GB of DDR4 3200 Kingston memory for £140, that’s what Meltdown has and it’s been a rock solid machine.

With graphics, it looks like there’s a lot more stock now although it’s starting at £500 for a 3060Ti which is still higher than the £470 that I paid for mine last September (I think it was September!). The 3060Ti isn’t in the same league as something like a 3080Ti … but those are £1200 and I’ll never spend that on a graphics card.

Picture. Two kittens are sitting in front of a laptop computer with a third kitten behind. The caption is "Ok, just one more click and the dog is sold!"
That’ll help

What’s next – storage. The mistake I made with Meltdown was to buy the wrong type of drive. The key thing to look for is “PCIe 4.0 NVME SSD”, these are a thin strip of board with memory chips mounted on them. The form factor is called “M2”, however there are slower SATA drives and the faster NVME drives. If price is equal, buy faster. I’ve been very happy with the series of drives I’ve bought from Crucial and they do a 1TB one for £113. (That feels a bit high). The conventional drive that I’d pair with that is the 3TB Blue drive from Western Digital for £75. No need to go fancy, if something needs outright speed in this machine, it goes on the SSD.

Last up is the more mundane stuff – it’s wise to go for a named brand assured power supply because they do break … and when they fail you want them to fail in a way that doesn’t damage anything else. I’ve been happy with power supplies from Corsair and they have a 750W one for £92. That feels high too. It’s also wise to over spec the power supply, so it isn’t being strained and therefore lasts longer.

That’s a theme in the PCs I build, I don’t overclock any more and I run them within their capabilities. I like them to last a long time, like the 8 years that the i5-2500k based Pumpkin lasted. (And it could have run longer too). Everything needs to go in a box, this is one where I’d go to Currys and inspect a couple before picking one up. Things I’m looking for include access, general size and quality of build. I wouldn’t get another Bitfenix case again, it was awkward to put the power supply in due to a small dint distortion. (OCUK have a bunch of suitable looking cases for £35). I don’t think it’s worth requiring the case to have drive bays to put CD/DVD/Bluray drives in now, as it’s very simple and viable to run these drives off USB now and the need for these drives is much less now due to streaming services.

Last bit – it’s advisable to get an uprated cooler for the processor as well, although the AMD chip has an acceptable one included. Around £60 is about right for what I’d get. You’re looking for a big lump of a cooler with a 120mm or 140mm fan, the bigger the better. Fans make more noise when they’re spinning faster and the big fans can run much slower for the same effect. The Coolermaster that went in Meltdown is essentially silent … but I learned with this one that it’s well worth seeing if you can find the instructions first. It was a lot more Interesting Times to install than was desirable, due to needing to unclip and clip leads on it in extremely limited space.

So that’s all the bits ! How much is all that ?

Picture. Two cats are on a blanket looking at each other. The captions are "Oh, No." "Too expensive"
And there’s the rub

All those bits come out at £1415 and that’s before you add in the Windows license, monitor and keyboard and mouse.

That’s the real reason for holding off … gradual inflation in prices and a hefty entry price for graphics cards have pushed that price up to where it’s something you want to do like the 8 years that Pumpkin gave me instead of the older days where technology would demand an upgrade every 3. Hopefully the prices will settle down again and reduce to more affordable levels. For the moment though, we’re being rather priced out of the market.

I’ll be ok with Meltdown for a good few more years yet. The lesson from this little excursion into the price sites is that it would be far more than I’d want to pay for something that would be pretty much the same level as what I have now.

So I’ll close with – getting shiny new things is great but … ask if you need to spend the money on that, or whether it can go to other things instead. (Like an RC car!)

See you all next time, be well.

May the Fourth Cup be Earl Gray Hot

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May 4, 2022

10:54 pm

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Hello everyone,

Oops, I blinked and another fortnight went by since the last post. What’s been happening ?

Picture. It's a meme picture of two Ewoks (about 3 foot tall bipedal bears) wearing hoods and a tie. One is holding an open book, the other a picture of a golden bipedal robot. The captions are "Excuse me sir ...." and "Do you have time to talk about our Lord and Saviour C3PO ??"
Not now Goldenrod

No remote control car yet, although I found a different site that seems cheaper, has a wider choice and also gives very clear advice on what’s needed to have a complete thing at the end of it. What’s stopping me ? Firstly, no idea where to put it, I need to rouse myself from eternal tiredness and do a number of jobs around here, not least of which is clearing out some of the clutter.

Oh and also, none of the normal car type models really speaks to me in a “I connect with that model” kind of way. I’m not that interested in the Porsche, Ford GT and Merc models ? Maybe the Toyota Supra, maybe the Miata / MX-5. Here’s a car I was close to going for back in the day :

Picture. A mostly white coupe car with flashes of red and grey paint. It has an aggressive body kit with widened wheels and spoiler wings front and back.
Yep. It’s a Capri

When I was looking to move on from the Astra Mk1 I had, the Ford Capri was one of the cars on the radar. It never happened, partly due to the possibility of finding one. Also because … the Capri was a little bit rubbish and things worked out to put me in the rather spicy and much superior Belmont SRi instead. There’s another bit of Stuff’s Gone Weird here too. I just looked at Autotrader to see what Capri’s are going for now, here’s a link to the cheapest. Yep. That’s a 2 litre Ford Capri going for £12,000. It’s not even one of the good ones ! It does look good though. Crazy things have happened to the classic car market now, there’s been hefty increases in prices happening. Perhaps it’s because all the not so good ones have rusted away and only the excellent and looked after ones are left.

Remote control cars ? Here’s a link to the Zakspeed Capri model page, the model from the picture. That’s Modelsport’s pages and I do like that they give the Bundle things as an option for getting the bits. Without clicking, it would be £222 for car, radio gear, batteries and charger. Not bad and probably a good kit for a learner person.

Time seems to be going whooshing by at the moment doesn’t it ? Perhaps it’s because what we do isn’t being broken up as much as it used to be due to the working from home pattern. Or it might be a much better state at work because what I know is being properly utilised instead of being shunted aside and pretty much ignored. That got grating after a while and it’s been good to have the old knowledge reactivating again. It’s kinda like doors in my mind reopening.

Gaming has been happening too, which might be a reason why the time is whooshing by. The Motorsport Manager campaign was completed tonight. It’s been an epic run going over I think 35 seasons and finishing in game year 2049. The target was to win the championships in all 3 of its single seater, GT and endurance racing. It’s a cracking game, it’s certainly kept me interested and engaged for (uhoh) 1795 gameplay hours since picking it up pretty much on release in November 2016.

There’s another motor racing manager game coming, this time by Frontier. I have my doubts over this one. The genre is horrendously difficult to make a good game for. I’ve previously played Grand Prix Manager 2, GP World and F1 Manager … and bounced off them because they were either annoying (GPM2) or fatally bugged. I can’t even remember what was wrong with the original F1 Manager. One issue with GP World is that campaigns could only last a couple of seasons before inflation made it impossible to run a team, plus it had fatal bugs. Hopefully the Frontier one is a good game, they certainly need to reverse their fortunes after the disasters of Elite Odyssey (still bugged) and Lemnis Gate (meh and ignored). Chaos Gate is looking good on stream, although that’s published by Frontier, not developed by Frontier.

Other gaming ? I just installed Mass Effect again … This is the Remastered version, so it’ll have all sorts of graphical updates, including better lighting so you can see their world better. That’ll be good to play again, although I suspect I may drift away from it during Mass Effect 3. The Mass Effect games tell a terrific story and there’s a wonderful fresh new world to explore during the first two games but … I do like a happy ending and ME3 is anything but that. It’s one reason why I’ll enjoy reading The Expanse novels again, they pulled off an excellent ending there.

Game screenshot. Euro Truck Simulator 2. We're looking at our truck on a 2 lane motorway. The camera is looking from behind and from the right. The truck is green and towing a flatbed that has an orange tracked digger on it. There are tall wind turbines to the left and right of the road which curves gently to the left. In the distance there are blue skies and pretty clouds.
Keep on truckin’

I’m still playing the Truck Game, although the addiction isn’t quite as strong as it was. It’s a good chilled out game when you’re on your own on the road, going from place to place and delivering varied things. Especially with a graphical mod or two installed like improved headlights so you can see more than a little postage stamp of screen when it gets dark. I looked at trying modding to put in a custom paint job, that needs a bit more brain cell activity than I was willing to give though. I’ll attack it again at some point.

Other stuff :

Netflix is gone now. I just wasn’t using the subscription and their output isn’t that interesting any more. It’s part annoyance at them setting up good series like The Expanse and Cowboy Bebop and then letting them go. At least The Expanse got rescued by Prime (need to watch s6) but it’s sad that Bebop was ended early. It was its own story inspired by the anime and was building in a rather promising fashion. It’s a shame Faye wasn’t in more, I liked the live action character more than the anime version and she didn’t really get enough episodes to have fun in.

There’s a few too many streaming services out there now. I haven’t watched any of the new Star Wars stuff, or the various Marvel series. I don’t feel like I’m missing anything there. So that’s Netflix, Disney, Apple and I dunno how many more. It’s a lot … The fear of missing out is quite active. Oh ! Paramount+ coming soon here for Star Trek. I’d very much like to watch Strange New Worlds, the Enterprise crew that was in Discovery season 2 was excellent, especially Anson Mount being a very charismatic and commanding Captain Pike.

But I’m not wanting to sign up to a I dunno how much a month service just to watch one series.

Oh ! Getting late. Time to get the Tashnarr Chaos Gate stream centre stage again and I left A Bad Deal For The Whole Galaxy at a rather delicate cliff hanger yesterday.

Be well everyone !

Late Easter

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April 22, 2022

10:57 pm

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Hello everyone, a belated Happy Easter to you all. Gosh it’s been a while again. I have had a few ideas simmering on the brain for a post but the “New Post” button wasn’t getting pressed to initiate them … However, one thing I did manage to do was break the sketch block that had been going for about 18 months …

Picture. A rough sketch of a dwagon. He's standing with his feet pointing to his right (our left) in black strokes intended to be shoes. His right paw is raised above his head, his left paw is on his hip. He is winking his left eye.
Friday? Night Fever ?

I probably gave away the muse but hopefully you recognise the pose from the movie. The inspiration was Knightenator, who I just recently started watching on Twitch (link) after she was raided again by the ever lovely Tashnarr (link). Raiding is where a stream takes their viewers over to another streamer when the time comes to shut down their stream and it’s fantastic for discoverability of streamers similar to who you were watching. It gives you an immediate suggestion for “If you like me then you should like this person too who is continuing after I go offline”.

Hmm. This could be a randomised post. I can see it coming :-). Knight was on earlier playing more multiplayer Apex Legends (not something I play but she makes it curious to watch) and is another one who indulges in the Truck Game, European Truck Simulator 2. I’ve been enjoying that game a lot although I think I might take a break from it for a bit because they’ve tweaked the AI and made them pretty dangerous (which has been annoying me).

So … what have I been up to ? The post ideas in my head are things like : Truck Game and how it relates to modern day logistics. You know, things like when you click the button to order something online, what’s involved in getting it to your door. Or to the shop you get the thing from. That’ll be for a later post I think. I think I’m due a music post at some point too. I was in Cardiff on Wednesday and picked up some more cd’s, 3 from Morcheeba, 1 from Enya, a Nerina Pallot cd and something speculative from Beverley Craven. Haven’t listened to them yet, I’ll weave the new tracks in between the other music I listen to and gradually figure out what I think of them like that. And then I’ll weave in the whole album along the way too.

I had this week off work, which has allowed for :

A bit too much Truck Game time;

Indulging in Skyrim again. I have a heavily modded playthrough going …

Game screenshot. Skyrim. We're looking at the back of our heroine. She's wearing heavy iron armour and is on a ledge looking down at a valley filled with thin tall trees.
A snowy view

It still looks good, it’s an easy game to play and the ease of modding it enhances it even more. That’s a curious one though, it’s an easy one to lose yourself in because they’ve buried stuff to find everywhere and the gameplay style I prefer of a big sword and heavy armour means I’m not having to think too much about hitting things.

The Motorsport Manager campaign continues and still provides interesting racing. As in, the team is winning races now but I’m having to work hard to get the wins or we’re getting advantage from being able to handle changeable weather better than the AI.

And a trip to Cardiff happened on Wednesday.

Picture. We're looking over a balcony with a golden railing at a clock in a steeple. It's in a wooden building above a row of market stalls underneath. There are more shops on a far balcony over to the other side.
Lunch with a different view

That’s the indoor market area in Cardiff and I discovered a bacon sandwich shop and a cd shop next door to it. One pondering after though is, places like the cd shop and the book shop don’t seem to change their offerings too much … I haven’t registered too much change to that Picture Of How Things Are in the book shop lately. How often do they get new stuff in ? A curiosity …

I’m mostly going to wrap up there though but one thing I did want to think out loud on was remote control cars again. I didn’t get one on Wednesday because homing instinct was kicking in (apparently I tweaked my knee again and couldn’t feel the pain from it yet) and I don’t like to make money decisions when my head’s not right. When I do get one, I want to make sure I get all the right things … What’s needed ?

Picture. We're looking at a remote control car. It has two thing wheels at the front and we see one (of two) wheels at the back, with a spiked rubber tyre. The shell is white plastic with stickers above a black plastic tub.
Ah ! Grasshopper

So – things you need include : The Car ! Batteries. These come in packs of 6 in a moulded casing. It takes about 15 minutes to fast charge (which you don’t want to do too much due to damage) and they give about 15 minutes run time. So you want two battery packs. You want AA batteries for the receiver and transmitter. The remote control part is a 2.4GHz pair. You need a motor, a speed controller and a servo for the steering. Oh and you probably want a toolkit if what you have isn’t up to what you want.

One thing I’m confused about is what’s actually in the box … The couple I have my eye on are the racing car style Porsche 911 kit (link) and the more buggy style 4 wheel drive Thunder Dragon (link). Yep. Dragon pulled it out of the pack. They’re both Tamiya kits. You can get “Ready to Race” kits as well which are fully assembled but I’d want to put it together so I can understand how all of the parts work together.

Both kits take the standard 7.2V battery module, both have a motor (RS540 is a standard size for pretty much all electric remote control cars) but whereas the buggy has a speed controller, the Porsche kit doesn’t.

Antics supply a collected kit for most of the bits : Carson 2.4GHz radio and receiver. That’s got the transmitter and receiver pair, a battery pack for the car, AA batteries, a servo that does the steering and a trickle charger for the battery pack. The Porsche would need a speed controller as well. Which might mean a different type of motor as well … Choices :-D.

Motors ? There’s lots of different types that run on different types of power. The ones that go in your vacuum cleaner or mower will be Alternating Current (AC) Induction motors. They rely on the waveform of mains power to work. It’s a wiggly (sine wave) waveform and the motor rotor (the bit that spins) basically follows the electromagnetic field in the stator (the shell) windings that have the power. These motors just keep going because there are very few contact points outside of the bearings that hold the rotor where it should be.

Direct Current (DC) motors that run off batteries can’t do that. Instead of the power waveform being wiggly, it’s a straight line of constant voltage. A brushed motor has contact points that connect the electricity to the spinning part. As the motor spins, the connection swaps over and the motor keeps turning. However, the brushes wear out over time and need to be cleaned and ultimately replaced to keep the motor working. Brushless motors are kind of a mix between DC motors and AC Induction motors, they rely on a speed controller to turn the power on and off at specific points in the rotation of the motor. (Is too complex to describe here but was probably inspired by how 4 stroke combustion engines work)

The speed controllers work by chopping up the power going to the motor. If the power is only turned on for 10% of the cycle, the car being driven by the motor goes slower. The brushless speed controllers apply the power so that the rotor follows the electromagnetic field.

Oops. Digression and nerdiness happened … Bits list ! I did say I’d be thinking aloud … If I was to go for the Porsche, the bill from Antics would be :

The car – £129.

Carson Reflex pro radio kit, 7.2V battery, charger, servo – £80

Etronix ET0103 electronic speed controller – £20

(A brushless motor and controller starts around £80)

Extra 7.2V 5300mAh battery – £35

Fast charger Perkins GTP0166 – £28

Mini toolkit for £20.

So … that all works out to £312 to get in to the hobby and that’s going cheap on a few items. One thing I have already is the boost starter for the car. That has a 12V car battery in it that can also do 240V mains power so it can feed the charger.

It’s a fair bit to get in there isn’t it ? One thing I’m very conscious of is there’s a big gap between what I currently know and what the magazines assume that you know. And the only way to bridge that gap is by diving in. Although i have just looked at the Ready to Go cars and there’s a buggy car for £125 which includes the radio kit. Maybe it’s all what you pay for again, like that extra battery is 4 times the capacity of the one in the £125 kit.

We’ll see. I think that’s enough thinking aloud for now. Book time ! I enjoyed reading Light Chaser by Gareth L Powell and Peter F Hamilton. A bit short again maybe but there’s a lot to be said for a story that gets in, tells its thing and gets out again fast instead of indulging in repetition of what you already read or having a promising beginning that dribbles out into a tame end. Worth the cash and well worth a read.

Good night everyone, I must post more !