internet spaceship - Sleepypete's Pillow

Where would you be in a science fiction universe ?

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.

Cozy game, fun game, scary game, travelly game

by Sleepypete

July 30, 2023

10:14 pm

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games, internet spaceship

Hello everyone,

Thought I’d talk about a few games today. Yeah, I have a fair bit of game addiction but as addictions go, it’s a fairly benign one. (Unless you have the tendency to be still playing when the sun comes up. Oops).

Picture, meme. We're looking at four cartoon pictures of a pink person sitting on a couch, with a blue doctor with specs looking at them with a notepad. The captions are "Doc, I feel like I'm getting old", "Hmmm... tell me, did you play Elite when it first came out?" "Yeah I played it as a kid. It's my favourite game" and lastly a scribble on the notepad "Patient is basically dead." — Yep, the 1984 one

I think that ticks off cozy and travelly game. That was a case of seeing a meme, going yoink and modifying it to something a bit more appropriate than the Tony Hawks it had been modified to when I got my mitts on it. I really got stuck in to the original Elite and we went from the cassette tape version on to the disc drive version when we got the disc system. That’s a tale actually, we started with the BBC B micro which was released in December 1981. It loaded all its games in on cassette tape at a quick 1200 baud (bits per second), so loading up a game could take a little while plus sometimes the cassettes went bad. It really limited what could go into the games, so when our BBC B died due to flood damage (burst pipes over a winter) we got an insurance upgrade to a BBC Master (released 1986) which had a built in disc interface.

The disc version of Elite added in things like music for the docking computer, a set of missions and more ships. And now we’re on the fourth Elite game (Elite Dangerous) where I’ve traveled around the galaxy several times now.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at the top of a spaceship in silhouette, there is a long central body with an engine on each of a pair of thick outriggers coming from the back of the ship. Behind the ship is a purple wispy stream. Behind that is a dense starfield with the Milky Way ribbon to the left of the wispy stream.

That’s the Searching for Chamomile doing a little bit of exploring while I was moving my carrier from place to place. My character is back in the populated Bubble area now, while the carrier and a few of my ships are still 20,000 light years away. The objective of the new Dungeon Food Truck is to rejoin the carrier and maybe help out with the fuelling efforts to move it back.

I haven’t actually gone back into Elite for a couple of weeks. That’s a combination of not really knowing what to do in the game at the moment plus issues with my hands that are making it a bit painful to play sometimes.

That’s actually a big factor in another couple of games … the two Truck Simulator games. I found that they were good ones to quietly chill in while having that objective of growing the truck fleet and the character by moving Stuff from place to place. I need to have those clear objectives in the games, or I lose my way in them and drift away. The way the Truck Games do that is to have a big long list of cargo you can take from where you are to somewhere else and I’d try and pick something new to look at.

That was one thing about Elite, either trading to new places or traveling to new places for screenshots. And they’re very pretty too.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at a space scene, with our blue and orange diamond shaped ship on the left. In the centre and right hand side, there are a pair of stripy, banded white and dark planets. In the centre and above them, is a bright white star. The starfield is very dense again.

But that’s not the ship game I’ve been enjoying lately. Let’s see …

Game screenshot. Dredge. We're looking at a daytime ocean with a gently rippling surface. Our little fishing boat is in the bottom centre. We can see outcroppings of land to the left and an islet to the right plus more land hidden in fog ahead of us. We've also got some of the game features on screen. — It “looks” calm …

That’s Dredge, at the really early days. The premise of the game is that you’ve traveled in your boat to a remote set of islands and you wake, with little memory of who or where you are. Pretty soon, you get your mission to find fish to sell to pay off a debt, plus more side missions as you go through the story. But … don’t stay out after dark …

Game screenshot. Dredge. We're looking at the ocean scene again but this time it's in the dark. The fog is close in, we can't see very much except the distant lights of a town and ... a collection of disembodied eyes on the water. — Eye aye

There we go … cozy game that I’ve really enjoyed. You’re not alone in its world, if you stay out at sea after dark then the scary things come out to say hi. And as the storyline proceeds, you travel to the four corners of the archipelago. I had a lot of fun with this one, I’ve finished the story (and it’s an excellent one) and I’ll hang around in there to finish the sidequests and the achievements.

Top game, would highly recommend. And for me, it guided me through its story in about 12 chilled out hours over a few sessions.

Another game I finished again just now is Deus Ex Human Revolution. I’m not sure you should really call a game where you play a cyborg soldier with swords in his arms a cozy game but this and Mankind Divided is one I keep going back to.

There’s something to be said for a really tight game that gets in, does its story and finishes off in a good amount of time. 12 to 20 hours is about right for that. Some sand box type games will see you taking far longer to play through. Mass Effect was a little cracker when it came out, with excellent gameplay, a great story and a length of around 20 hours again. Mass Effect Andromeda had improved gameplay (which worked) but fell down at being just too much, taking about 70-80 hours to play.

There’s such a thing as outstaying the welcome. The Expanse books do this a fair bit, although they are on the whole great books with lots of story and lore packed in. I’m on a quick book again now, Sons of Thor which is book 2 in the Star Breakers series by James David Victor. I rather enjoyed the really quick first book of the series of 9.

What’s next though ?

Another run through Deus Ex Mankind Divided at some point, finishing off the achievements in Dredge. I need to go back to Horizon Zero Dawn and Cyberpunk 2077 at some point. Plus there’s the cozy taxi game of Cloudpunk. One Military Camp is a curious builder game which I’ll run through. And I bought Offroad Mechanic Simulator in its release discount, this one looks like a move on from Car Mechanic Simulator 2021 which is another I really enjoyed.

One last pic before bed time ?

Game screenshot. Dredge. We're looking at a deserted island with a series of small houses and huts. Deserted, except for a scraggly rough looking dog that's looking hopefully at us. The caption starts "You reach out and gently pat the dog. Its eyes follow your hand, and it seems to understand you're not a threat." — Yes, you can pet the dog

Best sidequest ever.

Good night everyone.

Socials, tech and a send off

by Sleepypete

July 16, 2023

11:36 pm

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geeky, internet, internet spaceship, random

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 :

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.

Coming back from a little hiatus

by Sleepypete

February 14, 2023

10:21 pm

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books, hiatus, internet spaceship

Hello everyone,

It’s about time I posted again ! Let’s see. It’s been November since the last post and a few things have happened since then / are happening soon. First of all :

I’m ok. Just felt a bit burned out at the end of year and maybe a thinking that the posts I was writing were a bit all the same thing just minor variations ? Maybe. Oh ! Thumbnail pic.

A small pocket dragon standing on a cabinet top. He's holding up a heart almost as tall as he is. — Very 14 Feb appropriate ?

There we go. Very 14 Feb appropriate and it goes for all of you who are still around and reading this after the big long gap.

I think one reason for hiatus was being pretty burned out on Advent posts too, I think the Elitecember series was probably the last of those that I’ll do. (Plus the advent calendars haven’t been so good). Enough about hiatus, what’s been happening ?

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our spaceship is in front of the sphere of stars that marks what we can see of a black hole in the upper right. There is a tiny bright star with purple white streamer cones going left and right. The background is a creamy white. Our spaceship is in the foreground. It is black, with an engine to each side near the back. It is streaked with red lighting in lines. — Tiamat visits an impossible star

I’ve been doing the Space thing again. I’m off around the galaxy but this time I’m taking the big fleet carrier with a selection of ships. So Tiamat’s Chariot is along for the ride and had a little run out for a short 700 or so light year hop.

Christmas has been and gone during the break, it was great seeing family and dogs again. Perhaps a quicker run than it could have been ? I think that’s part of feeling run down, wanting to escape back to the sanctum to be able to fully switch off. Work’s driven part of that, it’s been busy but also rewarding. We’ve been getting Stuff done and the feedback I get is the polar opposite of what was happening in my last team.

Yep. Good seeing the family again.

Last time in the current car too … Yep. That’s one of the bigger news things from the break. I’d been steadily getting more and more unhappy with the current car. The main issue is that it’s too long and therefore really tough to manoeuvre. It also suffers from the Lexus apparent tendency to beta test their cars before settling on a Good car, which is weird because they got it bang on correct with the CT. Issues with the current one include that it’ll go Wibble as soon as you drive over a broken up road surface. Apparently the back suspension is completely revised on the facelifted model.

Which car is next ?

Picture. We're looking at a blue hatchback car parked up. Not much more to say there, it's a pretty standard box of a car ! — The original Tardis Blue Car

That car was number one in google search results for Tardis Blue Car for a good while. I was happy with that. The next one will be in red and has more toys. More pictures in a few weeks.

Oh – one crazy thing with the current car is that it literally got lost. I’d broken a work journey up to get a leg stretch and coffee. When I started up again, the GPS track was steadily diverging from the actual road, until it found a side road and merrily thought it was heading down that. And then that got worse as the car literally got more and more lost. I was fine. I was on the A road heading to where I needed to be. (And I switched over to Android Auto as a fix) It’ll be good being in a smaller car again, although I am sacrificing power for the size.

I’ve been devouring books again. Figuratively, not so much literally. (Ipads are crunchy). I’m going to see if I can read through a 52 book year this year. I’m already at a reading streak approaching 100 days now on the Kindle app. The year started out with 2 Starship for Sale books by M R Forbes. Blue Burn finished on such a cliff hanger that I had to go straight into the next book, Eight Ball. I’ve since read book 7 of the series, Kill Spree. They’re good fluffy space sci fi books that speed through a story. They’re pretty pulpy but I’ve been enjoying them.

L J Cohen’s Halcyone Space books are a little more serious and have had an interesting universe and story developing. I enjoyed book 4, Parallax, and I’ll be back for the concluding book in a few weeks. I’m properly engaged in the characters and will be looking for more from the author.

Maybe dipping a bit was the third Thrawn book by Timothy Zahn, Thrawn Treason. It held the attention, including shining more of a spotlight on how the Chiss (a Timothy Zahn introduction into Star Wars) do their space war business. It did feel perhaps a bit contrived though.

The dip continued with Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds. This is a collection of stories in the Revelation Space universe and to be honest, I could have done without reading this one. The stories aren’t great and I actually skipped one of them after giving it the chance of a few pages.

Another book I grinded through was The Satan Bug by Alastair MacLean. That’s a weird thing to say isn’t it. A renowned author who’s books I’ve enjoyed previously. The film and others including Where Eagles Dare and Guns of Navarone are legendary suspense stories. The Satan Bug sets up a super scary premise …. and then flip flops between investigation elements that never feel as if they’re going anywhere solid. A disappointment but I’ll go back for others of his books when I find them cheap. Santorini is one I’d highly recommend, HMS Ulysses is an incredible WW2 naval war story.

And then there’s the huge highlight of the year so far : Artifact Space by Miles Cameron. This was the most I’ve enjoyed a book for a Very Long Time. It’s a space sci fi again, with the central character being a young lady who has had to run away from a terrible situation and finds herself heading off round the galaxy with a huge conspiracy erupting around her.

It’s a curious mix of space navy procedure and character development. I hugely enjoyed Artifact Space and I’m looking forward to when the story is continued.

Other stuff ? I got back into the Idle Champions game. And space has been happening again too. The laptop continues to go through the music in there, I’m approaching having listened to half the library now.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous,. We're landed on a sandy looking orange planet. It's daylight and we can see the blueish atmosphere in the background. Our small orange ship is parked on craggy ground, with a stony looking plant in the foreground which is twice the height of our astronaut. — Tea 89 finds a rather large plant

That was a different part of the trip. One of the additions to the game has been planets with thin atmospheres which you can land on. Here’s me checking out an Osseus plant with the little Warp Factor Potato. Not so good an experience because it lands very close to the ground, which makes it difficult to get the buggy out.

I think I’m running out of things that want to come out of my brain. Time to close off with … 14 Feb is for very good friends and … I found a frond.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're on the sandy orangey planet again. Our astronaut is in the foreground, looking at a cluster of fern like plants. The buggy is behind and to the left and in the background, the rear of our spaceship with the engine outlets glowing orange and blue. — Iceangel finds a frond

I’ll leave it there. It feels good to be writing a post again, there’s like a pressure that steadily increases when you have a hiatus like this. You want to write but there’s also “I haven’t written for a while, a bit more break is ok”.

Definitely be back with pics of the car when it arrives and I need to figure out a photoshoot location. Sainsburys car park isn’t the best place :-D.

Last thing ! Current book : Leviathan Wakes by James S A Corey. First book in the Expanse series. They did an overall good job with this series. Bits are great, bits are poor. But they set up their world building in the books incredibly well and they pull off a very fitting ending.

Laters everyone !

Techie Space

by Sleepypete

October 25, 2022

11:00 pm

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health, internet spaceship, technology

Hello everyone,

It’s been a while again. I think that might be partly down to burn out that I realised might have been going on for perhaps 2 and a half years now. It’s an insidious thing, burn out, you know something’s going on because your patterns change but it tends to creep in and make those changes to your behaviours without you realising.

So for me, it probably started at the beginning of the covid period and there were a few work things that really brought it out. Yep, even more than the extreme skin condition that I had for too many years before that. Perhaps that just wore down the reserves so that the anxiety of the first lockdown periods (and probable covid around March to June 2020) coupled with the work stuff activated the burn out. One symptom may actually have been the creation of this blog, as a knock on to getting annoyed with how Google/Blogger were changing how you use that system. I think that’s been a positive change overall though as it’s let me learn a few things that I took for granted with Blogger. Oh wait ! Caption.

Meme picture. A contented looking sleeping cat is resting underneath blankets. The captions are "I can't get out of bed..." "These blankets have accepted me as one of their own and if I leave now I might lose their trust." — Trust in the blankets

I’m off work this week, it felt like I’d been running backwards and went straight into a wall. Some of that is increasing anxiety about things I should be getting sorted out but don’t have the energy to attempt to start. Which is its own feedback loop as well. Because the job isn’t started, the anxiety increases. I need to look into other ways of getting that sorted out.

What has been going on ? Been doing space again …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at a small trapezoid shaped spacecraft on a landing pad. It is green on the outside with a yellow circle in the centre. The circle has a demonic grin and eyes in black. — Tea 89 is after your Tea

That’s my old Cobra Mk3 again from Elite Dangerous, with one of the free paint packs from the latest drops campaign. Good seasonal paint job although I think when Tea 89 comes out again, I’ll put it back to the orange and white livery. There wasn’t a special paint job for Tiamat’s Chariot :

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at a star filled area of space. To the lower left, we see our spaceship with purple flame coming from a series of engines. The ship is mostly hidden in silhouette with a small sun in the centre. There is a planet in dark eclipse to the right, we can see the city lights. — A trading we will go

There’s actually a bit of unfinished business there with a Community Goal in progress. With today’s activities, I haven’t had a chance to drop off the cargo I collected on the weekend. Oh and I had a look at another space game too :

Game screenshot. Eve Online. We're looking at a starfield with cloudy backdrops. There are user interface features to the right, a ship status display at bottom centre and our little ship is in the middle of the screen. — Humble beginnings

It was good to have another look at Eve Online. It’s a persistent online universe space game, where you fly with I think it’s 10,000 other pilots. The large battles can have 1000’s of players on multiple sides with everything from little tackle frigates to titan super capital ships. Around that, there are epic battles for territory and industrialists supplying the ships to fuel those battles. Everything in the game is player built or supplied. Oh and the game is (in)famous for its espionage as well.

I got curious so I installed the game again but it’s one game I’m going to have to stay well clear on lest I do get drawn into it. Too many games, not enough time and Eve has heavy expectations on player time.

I’ve also completed the achievements on Little Big Workshop. Indeed, this might be another sign of the burn out. While I’ve dived into games like LBW, I’ve been very wary about going back into games like Elite which take a bit more energy and effort to play.

But … there is a new toy here that has taken a fair bit of mental effort today …

Meme picture. A cat is sitting on a laptop computer. They're both on a table with chairs tucked in. The caption is "To unlock your computer turn on the electric can opener" — But ! There is still food in the bowl

I splurged on a laptop … The motivating factor was with me traveling more for work, the old laptop is a bit too chonky. It’s a 2.6kg lump, the new one is a 1.2kg light 14″ screen laptop. There were other motivations as well, the screen on the old laptop is pretty poor.

What didn’t I get – HP and Dell because their performance and reliability in the work laptops is nasty. The work Dell I have now struggles to interface with the screens. It’ll sometimes refuse to connect to a screen when it’s plugged back in and suffers from worrying graphical corruption if that interface is stretched a little. I avoided getting another Asus due to the screen quality of the last one, plus I think they charge for the name as well as the equipment. Lenovo … weren’t offering the spec I wanted plus I didn’t get good vibes.

So I went with Acer again, the family has had a string of these machines and they’ve all done really well for us up to the point where they ran out of capability due to the software moving on. (Disclosure note – I bought and paid for laptop 100% although they do run fairly substantial discounts on the Acer website).

Today’s activity has been figuring out the differences with Windows 11 and starting to get everything copied over. I got worried early on because the laptop was showing signs of being unresponsive due to hardware issues but those went away as soon as I switched wifi. (Oh and after ripping Norton out). So I have the old laptop, new laptop and desktop talking to each other over the network now. It connects to the various bluetooth devices ok too.

iTunes is being more of an issue, because I’m having to authorise the computer and copy the library via Homeshare in iTunes 12 before I downgrade that back to the usable iTunes 10.7. I’ll have to look at that issue again because the Apple ecosystem isn’t sustainable there. I use iTunes 10.7 for the DJ feature, which is the only way I listen to music on it. The issue with switching laptop is that 10.7 isn’t allowed to sign in to Apple store stuff now which means alternate means required for copying the library over. Only 7000 more tracks to go (it’ll be running overnight).

Another issue I’ll be looking to sort is the sound again. Windows and laptops (especially Realtek hardware) seem to really suffer for loudness, although that might be down to me having them fight for dominance among music, stream and desktop. But Chrome does always feel quieter than the audio test and the levels from Chrome never seem particularly high. I’ll be looking into this more. One really happy thing is that Chrome has pulled my settings and tabs across from old laptop to new laptop, although the various cookies needed to be set up again.

What I do need to do is get myself out of the house. Maybe Thursday ? I think tomorrow will involve attempting to get better sleep tonight (it’s been at a premium lately) and then doing the Elite Community Goal stuff tomorrow afternoon. But I do need to get out and about because being in the house too much isn’t particularly healthy.

So … am suffering with the burn out, not really seeing an end to that at the moment but I’ll keep monitoring and attempting to look after myself better than I have been doing. The last couple of months feel like they’ve been rough too, with me going from a tummy issue on the away trip, into ginger poisoning, into probable covid again and then physical issues with a cramp tear in my leg and the shoulder coming out again.

And in the meantime, people seem to think I’m doing all right with the work now which helps a lot. The last post descended into feeling utterly devalued due to a management chain that went pretty weird. I’ve been doing better since getting out of that atmosphere.

And I’m looking forward to listening to all that music again with a fresh ear. That’s one thing proven, laptop can talk to hifi ! Hurrah. And the physical issues were starting to relent at the end of last week. Just need a proper sleep pattern again now.

Sleep well everyone, be well. And there are only 6500 tracks to copy over now.

Addendum – I was having problems getting into the laptop BIOS to reverse the rather offensive reversed Function key behaviour (where F2 does airplane mode instead of F2). You’re supposed to press F2 or something while the laptop is starting to be able to get in. This wasn’t working. However ! These people at Tenforums (link) have a very comprehensive and helpful answer. Sorted !

Mining for bugs, chaotically

by Sleepypete

May 16, 2022

9:36 pm

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cars, games, internet spaceship

Hello everyone,

I need to hit that “Add post” button more often ! Things are in my head that aren’t getting chance to escape. First though, one of my more weird thumbnail pics …

Picture. There is a blue implement with handles at the top and some black fittings between. There are a pair of arms below a hinge in the centre. The arms curl round to a couple of yellow pads facing each other. (It's a clamp) Two green dragons with flying goggles are on either side of the handles. — Get it good and tight boys

I got that a few weeks ago but hadn’t applied it to its given purpose since acquiring it. What’s it for ? My flightstick and throttle are a bit chunky … Let’s see :

Picture. We're looking at my red fluffy dwagon sitting on a very chunky joystick. The stick itself is about 8 inches tall, slightly taller than the dragon. It is covered in switches, most of which have lights. — Dwagon at 9 o’clock !

If you pull back on that, you’re giving it a fair bit of leverage. I had the joystick and throttle on a wooden (chopping!) board to extend the reach on my desk so that I could push the throttle all the way forwards without it clashing on the upper deck of my desk. Trouble was, pulling back on the stick put in all that leverage which made the board come with the stick. The clamp stops that.

Which means …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at the back of a spaceship with several engines firing away. The paint scheme is dark purple at the back, light blue at the front. We're in the midst of a dimly lit rock field and above the ship and to the left, we see a light orange yellow planet which the ring system is orbiting. — Awaiting an unsuspecting asteroid

Yep. Been back in Elite Dangerous again, with a new ship. This one is another tribute ship, the Dances with Snowmen. The callsign there is -K1R1-, for 2dKiri, who is a lovely Austrian lady who streams games in the afternoon. A happy soul who will make you feel better as she’s playing through the games. And I managed to catch up with one of the names on my ever expanding names list there with a miner. The Dancer has just been molesting rock type rocks so far but I think I’ll take it into ice belts at some point to do core mining. That’s where you blow up ice balls to get the very precious Void Opals inside.

It was good being back in … although Elite is a hard game to love at the moment. There are a few too many bugs in the game right now that just aren’t being fixed. So on Saturday, the bugs list started at not being able to see the good bits of the belt (didn’t matter), through to the market bug and topping off with my first trip through hyperspace from the carrier bridge ending up with :

Screenshot. We're looking at a Crash Reporting dialogue window with a browser window hiding behind it. — Yep. It’s the crash reporting tool

Yep. Crash to desktop. Everything was ok when I logged back in again and I got enough mining done to pay for the new ship and a selection of new services that went to the carrier. That is, before another bug stopped me checking out any rocks for the remainder of that session. (You use a prospector to see what’s in the rock and then mine the best ones – the prospector bugged out).

But yeah. First time back in for a while, I enjoyed chilling out blasting at the rocks for a while.

Keep ‘er warm, back soon

Today’s jump through hyperspace actually worked ok as well. Ok so … explanation time – Elite does its travel between stars using hyperspace. The main ships you fly typically make jumps of 20 light years or so, although you can shove that up to 75 or more light years with special stripped down fits. But 20 light years is good for a fully laden trading ship. It takes them about 50 seconds to go from star to star. (4th wall explanation – it’s taking that time to load in the info for the system you’re jumping to). The fleet carriers can jump 500 light years at a time … but it’s a special system that takes 15 minutes from command to execution and you need to specially mine the fuel.

Yep. Good being back in, there are a few too many bugs still in the game though that should have been eliminated by now.

Going from one Frontier developed game and a Frontier published game, you can tell the difference with the new Chaos Gate game. I’ve enjoyed 6 hours of that so far, although I think I’m going to restart a bit easier with lessons from the first play through. Oh, the developers have been listening to the player base and actively adjusting the game to the feedback since launch. What’s Chaos Gate ? I think it’s a remake but I didn’t play the original so I have no knowledge there.

It’s been described as an XCom game with Space Marines. You have your 4 high powered super human marines, being sent into missions against followers of Nurgle. That’s the Chaos God for plagues. Nurgle is looking to eat a sector with a plague and your people are recruited by an Inquisitor lady to stop it. Easy to play, really tough to win.

Last thought before today’s closing picture … I mentioned small cars last time. Not got one of those yet although this vintage Escort Mk II rally car is very promising. (Modelsport link) (Tamiya Link).

Nah. This time it’s big cars. I’ll need to make a Decision there in the somewhat near future. What’s next ? Lexus aren’t selling a car I want any more, plus I’ve kinda fallen out of love with their offerings due to the quirkiness and other issues. When the carpocalypse comes around 2030 and petrol cars stop getting made (I honestly don’t think this will happen then), I’ll need to find a petrol car to keep around. That is, unless I move to a place that’s compatible with electric charging or electric car charging becomes actually convenient.

What’s the thinking at the moment ? There are 3 cars on the radar … first is the Ford Puma hybrid. Yep, a return to the cars I used to own quite a bit. Calling the SUV a Puma is a bit of an abomination to this previous owner of the old Puma sports car but it feels like this one is a good balanced car worth checking out.

Second up is the Toyota Corolla 2.0 hybrid. It’s back to a smaller car (the ES300h is way too big) with a good balance between going quick, having space and being frugal. The last one would be going backwards a bit … the blue 2011 Lexus CT I had is quite probably the best car I’ve owned. The build quality was stunningly good, it had bundles of space inside, it just wasn’t as fast as I’d have liked. But if you just go for chilled out motoring, the CT was an incredible car for that. And going used (they stopped importing them to UK a few years ago), you could get a top of the range version with more toys than mine had for an acceptable cost. (Linky)

Time to close up, one more Elite picture … Found this guy on the carrier.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're inside a spaceship, looking at a couch against the wall. 2 people are sitting on the couch, on the right is a fella in a green and grey uniform suit. One the left, is a fella in a blue uniform. He is asleep. There is also a potted plant to the left. — Bosun ! Prepare the airlock

Yep. Totally going out the airlock. Crime – drooling on the upholstery. Sleeping on board is indeed, permitted. We have cabins. Sleeping in front of the command deck door … No. Drooling on the upholstery, you know what’s coming …

😀

Stay safe, be well, don’t drool on upholstery that isn’t yours.

Carrier, Book, Printer, Meme

by Sleepypete

March 6, 2022

9:55 pm

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books, internet spaceship, picture

Has it been a week again since last time ? Time’s flying by at the moment isn’t it …

I’ve actually been out amongst people, although it was just a run into the centre of Bristol after a necessary trip to do some recycling. (Too many plastic bottles) A Lego McLaren nearly came back with me … although at £160, it feels a bit pricey for me. That’s one thing about watching the build videos, you get an impression of what’s in the box before laying out the money. It has some smart bits in there for the suspension but … I think it’s a hype kit more than a wow kit to be honest. I also had my eye on the Globe but at £175, that’s a bit rich for me too.

Thumbnail for post ?

Picture. We see three pocket dragons in a line. On the left, he's sniffing the air. The centre one has a bib with "Feed me" written on it. The one on the right has a slice of pepperoni pizza almost as tall as he is. The caption on top is "The three types of dwagon". From left to right at the base it's "Smells Pizza" "Wants Pizza" and "Has Pizza". — Someone mention pizza ?

There’s been a 3 types of Pokemon meme going round at the moment which people have been borrowing and adopting and that creativity part of my brain sparked into making the picture above. It’s felt good that those creativity ideas have been coming back in and I’ve mostly had the physical stuff to make them happen. 2 things there :

I think my creativity was being heavily damped down by the Work Stuff that was going on last year. It was a rough year, despite getting stuff done. Or perhaps we were getting stuff done despite the new guy who came in. That’s in the past now though, the new role has been building into something that should also be getting Stuff done while being enjoyable. But I won’t talk about that too much here.

I’ve been having physical issues again … It’s part shoulder, part arm plus some digestion issues in there as well. Nom trouble aside, the physical issues have been limiting game time at the same time as that more active creativity side wants to do gaming. I think I’m finding somewhat of a balance with it and using a controller for driving games will help. I managed to do a fair bit of Elite flying again since Thursday … Let’s see :

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at two starships, with the lower segment of a brown moon above. The closest ship is all curves and purple at the back fading to white at the front, with two engines coming out of the sides of the centre fuselage. She's perhaps a third of the screen wide. Behind her is a much larger ship in a mixed livery of blue and white. There is a flat section near the front. This ship is perhaps 80% of the picture width. — Behold the Herald

Thanks to lucrative trading opportunities in Elite, I had just about enough to cover the acquisition of one of the big Fleet Carriers. These aren’t ships you fly about in direct control like the rest of the ships, they’re more like small mobile starbases. The flat section disappearing off to the right has the landing bays. It has 8 big enough to accept the big Tiamat’s Chariot, 4 medium sized and 4 small. One of the opportunities with these ships is to make it far quicker to haul the commodities needed for the community goals. So instead of making 5-6 jumps to go from place to place (maybe 30 minutes round trip), I could park it near a station and just have about 5 minutes round trip instead if that. They’re a pretty powerful tool but they cost 5billion credits to buy and have a steady upkeep.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. The off-brown moon dominates the upper part of the picture, with the ribbon of the Milky Way stretched across the lower half. Our ship is pointed away from camera, engines flaring purple as she heads towards the Herald floating in the distance with all of the rectangular landing pads illuminated. — Tiamat arriving

That’s Tiamat’s Chariot heading into the Herald of Bakunawa (that’s the name of the carrier). Where did the name come from ? I figured it had to be something suitably epic and I wanted the dragon theme to continue as well, so I went to a name list for mythical dragons. The name Bakunawa stood out (wiki link). Bakunawa is a Philippine Dragon God, believed to be responsible for eclipses. I.e. a dragon god that eats the Moon. Perfect. And Herald seemed right because the fleet carriers mostly spend their time hovering in orbit around moons.

A good few sessions in Elite over the past few days. It has massive flaws and I keep spotting more (like terrain errors around an engineer base and shadow errors) but it’s been good to have there as a chill out space trucking game. It does help that Tiamat’s Chariot is an after end game level ship that combines massive cargo capacity with defences and armament that can take on nearly all comers. (I run if a fighter gets involved).

Picture. It's a print out of my reading dwagon. He's sitting on his bottom pointed towards the right of shot. His tail is up in the air, the wings are taut as if he's enwrapped in the book that he's holding. There is also a pair of glasses perched in front of his eyes. The dwagon is mostly green, however there are regular vertical bands of yellow throughout. — Ermm …

When you see something like that coming out of an inkjet printer, it’s usually followed by an “oh bugger” because it’s the main sign that you haven’t been using it enough, the jets have clogged up and that’s usually terminal for the printer. What makes it worse is if the built in cleaning processes kick out a test page which has pretty much nothing on it. However …

Picture. We have a good quality version of the one above (with the reading dragon). There is a book on the right by David Weber titled "The Armageddon inheritance" and above the book, there is a tan leather bookmark with a line picture of a dragon burned into it. — I think he’s eyeing up that book

Ahhh the relief that I hadn’t killed a printer that’s just 6 months old :-D. The book on the right is the next book. It’s the second of three in the Dahak sequence, which starts with Mutineer’s Moon where Colin the astronaut finding himself in the middle of a 51,000 year mutiny where the mutineers have been exiled to Earth from a starship that’s actually Earth’s Moon. Oh and the ship has become sentient over that time as well.

Armageddon Inheritance starts up straight after Mutineer’s Moon and covers the other threat … There’s an apocalyptic sized battle fleet that circles the galaxy wiping out all intelligent life in its path and it’s almost back to Earth. And so Colin, Dahak the Moonship and the collective resources of Earth have to try and survive in the face of that threat. There’s some epic stuff in the book, like the aliens getting so fed up with how resilient Earth’s defenders are that they essentially give up on conquest and just throw one of Jupiter’s Moons at the planet.

I thought it was good enough for a re-read. That Moon thing was a big a OMGWOW book moment as the Project Orion starship reveal in another book. That’s not the lander type ship which is the current Orion starship. It’s the cruiser propelled by nuclear bombs. Super cool concept, achievable (maybe) with current technology, incredibly nuts. Here’s the wiki page. Hell of a concept.

Anything else ? I enjoyed a little more Forza. I have a Pikachu Lexus in that game now and I was enjoying the dirt racing far more than I thought I would. I was even getting smooth and fast race driving going on my flawed (50% travel gives 100% output) controller.

Time for book now though. I try not to game too late in the evening nowadays … although Skyrim mod testing happened yesterday. I’ll be restarting my game again there as the last character was saddled with mods that aren’t completed and have a fair few issues. So I’ll reset with the defeat mod replaced by another that ties into a mod called Caged Followers. It’s a curious one, if your party is defeated then instead of Game Over, stuff happens to your character like being ransomed for money or becoming a prisoner of vampires. With Caged Followers, your companion gets taken off somewhere and you have to rescue them. That’s going to be an excellent excuse for exploring the Skyrim world more …

Must go back to Horizon Zero Dawn, finish off the Car Mechanic Simulator achievements and enjoy the other games too. They’re a good chill out and let me block out the world for a little while. Like books !

Stay safe everyone, be well.

Out and About and Spiders

by Sleepypete

January 24, 2022

9:16 pm

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geeky, internet spaceship

Hello everyone,

I’ve been People-ing since the last post … Several times ! And not just for the usual reason of resupplying the food cupboards.

Photo. On the right, we see the arches of a shopping arcade with varied signs in front of the shops. The only readable one says "Bird Blend Tea Co". The arcade is lit throughout by hanging lights and we can see sunshine at the far end. On the left is a shop window with many packets of tea on the shelves. — Anyone for tea ?

That’s Cardiff and I had another run over there a couple of Fridays ago. I like Cardiff, there’s a good selection of varied shops to wander around over there (although I don’t actually go in many of them !). In particular, there’s Troutmark Books which can kinda be seen in that picture. The Bird Blend Tea Co is just a couple of doors up from Troutmark. Wearing a mask does kinda complicate book shopping due to the glasses steaming up but that’s no actual hardship. I was tempted to look at the tea, although I usually have coffee or hot chocolate instead.

The other shops I usually head into are Wally’s Delicatessen for their bonbon sweets selection. Those seem to be suffering at the moment, the selection’s been a bit limited both here and at the Farm Shop service station. Wonder what that’s about … Hopefully it gets back to normal, I’m a bit partial to chocolate mice :-D.

A shop that’s come into the rotation is Antics models. At some point, a remote control car will appear … In kit form of course. Remote control cars come in two types at the moment. There’s pre-built ready to race versions and the older form of cars that come in kits. I’ve had a remote control car before, a Tamiya Grasshopper 2. I was continually taking it apart and rebuilding it. I have this thing where I can look at a mechanical object and visualise how everything works on it, how everything moves and interacts but there’s no substitute for actually taking it apart and seeing how the various components play with each other. So I’d want to have a kit in order to properly understand how it all goes together.

Picture. This is a Grasshopper 2 remote control buggy made by Tamiya. It has a white bodyshell with stickers above a black plastic underbody or chassis. It has two thin wheels at the front and two fatter spiked tyres at the back. Suspension springs are visible. — Ahhh Grasshopper

That’s the Grasshopper 2 I had a few decades ago. It’s powered by an electric motor at the back, with radio gear and the battery in the middle. The radio I had was an old 26MHz radio with 2 channels. One channel does the steering, one tells the motor how much power it’s allowed to use. Each transmitter and receiver pair had a couple of crystals that governed the channel used and there were 6 of these available. Looks like that’s changed now, with the radios working at 2.4GHz, which is an open band which your wifi is highly likely to be using. Trouble is, it’s also becoming a bit of a congested band (because it’s open, everyone uses it) which is why your wifi might drop out. But for the purposes of a remote control car, it should be good … (Uhoh, I’m descending to geeky) Your home wifi would drop out because it wants to push lots of data around and that high bandwidth application is more susceptible to interference. When it’s down to just sending Channel A value, Channel B value, that’ll be a lot more resilient. I’ll have to see how it goes when I get one.

There’s a lot more research to come though, including looking at which type I’d get. There’s a few main types. The buggies like the Grasshopper 2 still exist and they’re ideal for buzzing round a grassy field and tracks will be built up with jumps and obstacles that the buggies would eat up. The other main type is more like a tarmac racing car …

Picture. On the lower half, we see a medium sized red hatchback car. Above, we're looking down from above at the chassis. I'll put a description in the main body but the basics are fairly normal. 2 wheels at each end, a red tub with components in the middle and suspension components for each paid of wheels. — Zoom zoom

Attribution notice – both of the pictures of remote control cars are for Tamiya models.

That’s the type I’m looking at currently. Tamiya do a whole series of cars based on their TT-02 chassis, with different bodies that clip on top. The chassis itself has all the electronics in that central red tub. Above shot, right side of car, there is a servo that links to the steering. Central, that box is an electronic speed controller that is a cleverer version of the simple resistor thing in the Grasshopper. These do power and regenerative braking for the car. (Actually looking again, not so sure ! I think it’s an integrated receiver and servo with separate speed controller – look at the wires). There’s a motor in there as well, driving a 4 wheel drive transfer box at the back of the red tub. In the centre of the tub, that’s a propeller shaft that connects the front axle to the transfer box. In the left side of the tub we see the battery. These cars work off 7.2V, which usually comes from 6 1.2V rechargeable cells in a sealed pack.

Each end has double wishbone suspension for the wheels to let the car cope with the bumps. All sorts of improvement parts are available for these little cars. My Grasshopper 2 just had springs and friction dampers but you can go all the way to miniaturised versions of the coil over dampers that you’ll have on a road car. (A suspension spring to cope with the bumps and an oil filled damper to stop bounciness). Oh and there are also miniaturised bearings all over the place too going from simple nylon toruses up to ball bearings.

Yep. Wanting to build one of these again, race it and then take it apart and rebuild it multiple times.

There are more types of remote control cars too … You have the dedicated flat surface racers that’ll look like F1 cars or Sportscar prototypes. These tend to have minimal suspension and are stripped for speed. And there are the Nitro cars which have tiny engines inside like the FTX Force Pull 18 (link). The 18 is for the size, or 0.18 cubic inches / 3.0cc. Pretty tiny ? It’ll send a remote control car above 50mph. But I don’t want to be messing around with nitro fuelled cars, I’ll stay to electric only for the time being. It’s cleaner …

Where would I get one ? Antics (link) have a few local stockists … I’d go through them first and then there’s a few local clubs around that will hopefully be able to open up again fully soon. But I do need to learn more first though so that when I do spend money, I avoid mistakes through having a bit more knowledge.

Oh ! Cardiff also has a Lego shop, which tends to get a visit.

Photo. Standing on top of two books is one of my pocket dragons. We see him from the side, looking up at a penguin adorning the front of a lego box. The red fluffy dragon can just be seen to the right. — Loot happened

Yep, a couple of escapes … The books are Titan by Stephen Baxter and Eon by Greg Bear. I’ve had my eye on these authors for a while and the thing about cheap book stores is that they make you more likely to spend a little bit in there speculatively … (I keep looking for another copy of Red Mars though).

One place I would like to find in Cardiff is a good music shop … There’s an Oxfam with charity shop second hand cds and another shop with cds. The Oxfam shop is worth a peek but the other shop makes it quite tough to actually browse what they’ve got, so I don’t go to that one.

Note to shops – make it easy for us to buy stuff from you. Make it easy for us to spend our money. If I have to flick through every cd on the shelf to see what’s there, I’ll walk away.

Talking of music, a track from The Outer Wilds just came on. It has a wonderful chilled out soundtrack with a few recurring themes. The game itself is … worth a peek. I don’t own it but I’ve watched a couple of playthroughs of it. I’m being light on description because even a small description is a big spoiler, I can probably say that it’s a mystery adventure where you need to figure out what’s happened and what’s going on in order to fix it all.

Maybe when I get Game Pass, which is definitely going to be a thing … sometime. I haven’t been too great over the past week. I dunno, loss of appetite and still general total lack of energy although it’s somewhat there when I need to draw on it. Why Game Pass ? Since getting the 3060Ti upgrade, I haven’t really pushed its limits to see how pretty it can get. Elite is still a great screenshot generator and I did enjoy heading back in there to get a hyperspace upgrade (not yet delivered!).

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. Our Imperial Cutter starship can be seen descending to a rugged planetary surface. We're looking over the ship from behind and the starboard side. Purple engine exhaust is flaring from a wing engine and several central engines. The ship is white at the front and on the two wings, blending to purple at the back. — Tiamat arriving

That’s my flagship, Tiamat’s Chariot, descending to another planetary base on a trading mission. I’ll have a Fleet Carrier at some point to make it easier to get silly amounts of contributions for the community goals. The carrier needs a name though … I haven’t had the appropriate idea hit yet.

Yep. Elite’s pretty but it only pushes the graphics card because the Odyssey expansion is an unoptimised mess that should be better. I do own Control courtesy of Humble Monthly, this is apparently a benchmark game for graphics but … I find it drab, dull and uninteresting, so I won’t be playing that. Outer Worlds might be worth another look. But the thing I’m likely to indulge in is the racing game, Forza Horizon 5. I haven’t played racing games since 2013 ish, when I was unknowingly suffering from a concussion which meant I just couldn’t play those games. Better now.

And there’s a few more interesting titles on Game Pass too. It would have to shove Idle Champions aside though, yep, still addicted to going through the stories in that one :-D.

My shoulder is starting to rebel though at all this typing. Dunno why there, my posture’s ok. I have People’d more over the past week. I’ve actually been in to work instead of working from home all the time. I needed to pick up a replacement car pass and to remove the stuff from my locker before those go away. Including a set of coffee mugs that surprisingly didn’t say hi let us out when I opened the locker for the first time in almost 2 years.

Spiderman No Way Home happened on Friday too, in a completely empty similar. I’m not sure how that particular cinema stays operating but I have no complaints. Apart from lacking headrests for the seats, the food’s good, the films are good and it’s totally quiet. So I keep going there when I’m on a solo cinema run.

I’ve also been researching the road cars too … but I think that’s one for another post, especially as that’s likely to be for 2 years time. The ES I have now is a great car, it’s just way too big and the smaller, cheaper ~~toys~~ cars pack in more toys.

See you all next time, stay safe out there.

Happy Holiday Everyone !

by Sleepypete

December 22, 2021

9:29 pm

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games, geeky, internet spaceship

Hi there,

It’s been a while again. I usually aim for a target of 100 posts a year and the advent posts of recent years have vastly helped out with that goal. It’s been another rough seeming year though and I think I’ve been heavily burnt out by what’s happening in the outside world and also what’s been happening at work over this past year.

I’ve been able to change the work thing but the outside world situation isn’t going away any time soon, mostly due to People. It would be good to get outside in the world again, amongst friends and to do things that have been held off on for far too long. But with things occurring like Omicron, I really don’t know who to trust. I certainly don’t trust the people who have started knocking on the door asking for money for services, without a mask on. They’re going round the neighbourhood doing that, talking to all the people, in proximity, how do they know that they haven’t picked up the latest nasty ?

Nope. If they can’t offer that small show, then it’s an automatic sending away. But that’s me getting into ranting again … I had deliveries yesterday and the other day … Today it was :

Picture. My Pocket Dragon with "Feed Me" on an apron is standing next to a sackcloth style white bag with a drawstring top. The bag has the words "Naked Marshmallow Co. Sack of Coal. Cookies and Cream Marshmallow. On The Naughty List." — Naughty and nice ?

Inside there are cookies and cream marshmallows, with a special black as coal coating. I haven’t opened the sealed bag that they’re in yet (more marshmallows arrived and I’m in the salted caramel ones) but I can report fluffiness inside the bag and they don’t photograph well against that black chair.

They’ve closed their doors for a Xmas break now but I’d highly recommend Naked Marshmallow Co (not sponsored). They make tasty things, they also have a toasty thingy which is something that would give health and safety people a nightmare or two. The other delivery is for something that is around my age …

Picture. A pocket dragon is standing in front of a large orange hard back book with a white header. It's titled "Moonbase Alpha Technical Operations Manual." — Life on Mars ?

This was one of those random things I saw advertised and I was a huge fan of the setting that the series Space 1999 was in, I couldn’t resist this one. (Setting was incredible, the scripts were awful). This is an extensive technical manual with descriptions of the moon base, the ships, the technology, the people. I’m 74 pages in, which is most of the bit about the base and I’ve been loving that so far. Next section is about the ships. It’s from the Gerry Anderson store … but I’m not going to provide a link there because their marketing emails are a bit too incessant.

There was also an event a couple of weeks ago now …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. A motley selection of spaceships (I think there's just over 40) of all sizes and colours can be seen. We're looking at the fleet from the front. Over to the right is a blazing orange sun. — Assemble the Fleet !

That was the Drew Wagar farewell to Elite event and it could well be the last time a lot of those pilots appear in the game. I might not go back in either (having bought X4 and wanting to check that one out). It’s not so much a matter of being mad about what they’ve done to the game, it’s more like severe disappointment.

We’re all looking for a great space game … but what they did in April was to give us a really poor first person shooter style thing tacked on to the space stuff. They broke some of the space stuff along the way, the big thing for me was them breaking the lighting and to some extent, the different possibilities we had for finding varied and interesting places to land in. Places seemed all the same after the expansion, with the light either being washed out white or just invisible in black. But the worst aspect is that screenshot above needed to be done in the old version of the game, the expansion still hasn’t been rolled out to consoles and the player base is split between those who log in to the Odyssey expansion not being able to instance and fly together with the pilots who are still on what’s now the base game.

So all in all, the experience became a bit meh and it came time to look to different things. Like setting up an interstellar pizza delivery service in X4. You can’t do that in Elite, even with a fleet that reached 47 ships, I can only control or use one at a time. Whatever you do in the game just doesn’t matter. In Eve, you can set up a spaceship manufacturing base … indeed most of the Eve ships are player built. Player interaction matters. In Elite, it just spawns it in when you buy or deletes it when you sell. Doesn’t feel right. In X4, you can hire pilots who then use your ships to mine, trade, escort or other things.

I do need to be a bit better physically though before really diving in to X4. I remember having issues last year as well, where I had an extended time away from Elite again. Currently it’s build up of damage in my shoulder, which has got fairly sure. The Idle Champions game hasn’t helped there …

Game screenshot. Idle Champions. The main part of the screen is a hallway. A total of 10 people are on the left, with a single creature and a few piles of gold on the right. At the bottom, we see 10 portraits for the characters and on top the headers are for damage and gold totals, with top right showing where we are. — Festively idle ?

Idle Champions is an idling game … where you have the game going in a window and it pretty much does its own thing while you’re doing other things. So it’s been active for a considerable amount of time since I went back into it last week. The longer it’s active, the more monsters are mown down by your people and all of the monsters drop gold. The gold goes to upgrades for your characters. The characters have a variety of equipment as well which helps in various ways. My latest character is Shandie, in a festive outfit in the centre of the formation. She’s all about speeding up the game so you get to the objectives quicker.

The game is built up around stories which have chapters of 50 areas at a time and when you’ve completed a chapter, you can go through again in free play or a number of variants which add conditions like faster monsters, less champions or randomised events. It’s curious for me due to the theorycrafting that goes into where everyone is in the formations you select plus I want to see the stories. Oh and when the chapter of 50 areas is complete, the characters go back to the start and do it again with monsters that are harder to mow down. When you hit the “complete” button and reset, the gold earned goes towards a Favour score, with that determining how fast you get gold in the next runs.

It’s a curious and odd game. It’s also free, although you can buy power by spending money on crates with them. You could get the same items by playing the game for a (very very) long time too. Anyway, the theorycrafting aspect has drawn me in again. The formation above is a bit of a mess but there’s a lot of room for picking different champions that work with each other for synergies.

Anyway, been in that one a bit too much over the last week.

Game screenshot. Deus Ex Mankind Divided. We're in the city, with buildings to the right and building over an arch in the background. A tree with protective concrete bollards is to the left. A police car with lights flashing it to the right. Two more trees with orange leaves are in the background. A police van is under the archway. — Just another day in Future Prague

I started up another Deus Ex Mankind Divided run, just before the Idle Champions addiction hit again. It’s a good game, it would be great to see a third title with the protagonist Adam Jensen. It feels like they left it with a bit of unfinished business that could do with closing out.

I think that’s it for me for tonight though. Have a great winter break everyone, hopefully you get to see people, stay well, have lots of food, relax and come back in the new year stronger and happier.

Stay safe, be well.

PS Addon – had my booster jab. Hurrah ! It took a couple of days for a headache to go away afterwards but that could have been headaches I’ve been having anyway (don’t think my two pairs of glasses are fully aligned). Get your booster if you can !

X, Advent, Racing

by Sleepypete

December 6, 2021

9:40 pm

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internet spaceship, lego, racing

Hello everyone,

I’ve missed posting again ! To be honest, I’m pretty burned out at the moment and I’m really looking forward to having the Xmas break off to try and recharge the brain a bit. Perhaps I actually need (hushed voice) an actual away from home holiday. I don’t think I’ve had something that counts like that since (checks photos) 2013. I was suffering from the issues with my outsides then but it was before it turned really bad. I’d been avoiding going to hotels since it went really bad until around 2019 ish. (I was leaking a bit too much).

Haha, that might have been a bit oversharing for the starting paragraph 🙂 But I think it’s part of why I’m suffering mentally at the moment. When I’m active, I can shift into that faster thinking gear, it’s just taking more of a kick to get me in that at the moment and I’m exhausted as soon as I close up the work laptop every day. Wait … thumbnail pic ?

Interstellar pizza delivery anyone ?

That’s from X4:Foundations and … the dwagon on there isn’t a photoshopping. I’ve not looked at this game too much so far due to a couple of reasons but I couldn’t resist making something Very Me after seeing a custom logo option in the various menus. Elite only has a small selection of decal logos that you can add to ships and I wouldn’t want to have any of them on the ships.

I might brighten it up a bit though. The default logos in game are all white monochrome, which I tried to follow with the edit of the Pizza Dwagon but I think it’s ended up more as shades of grey instead of a proud logo that stands out to be recognised by people trying out the interstellar pizza delivery service.

Picture. We see a Pocket Dragon standing on a plinth, holding a sign that says "Have I enough shades to audition plz?". The pocket dragon is in grey scale. — Don’t tell him …

Moving swiftly on …

I acquired X4 because of a rising dissatisfaction with Elite Dangerous. Elite is a wonderful screenshot generator but it needs a lot of issues fixing, issues that were introduced as part of the Odyssey update. I can’t see much point in playing the earlier Horizons edition any more, I’d rather stick to the new version. One of the issues is the lighting … I’d find a promising place to make camp at the end of a session, arrive and find that the lighting issue kicks in and you can’t actually see anything.

The criteria is : Find a gas giant with rings and a landable moon. If the moon has an atmosphere, that’s a bonus. And then I’ll head over there and try to land so the gas giant is on the horizon.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're landed on a rusty red barren moon. Our pilot is standing in the bottom right, behind her is the purple moon buggy. Behind there is a rock and landed behind the rock is our ship. In the background, there is a partly illuminated grey brown planet and the rings circle the planet disappearing under the horizon. — Camping at the Grand Rings

The pictures look great when you can find them … but when new bugs come into the game faster than the old bugs get fixed, you have to wonder whether it’s worth spending more time in the game, especially when all of the objectives I have (but one) in the game are completed. The only remaining thing to do that I’m bothered about is to own one of the Fleet Carriers as a mobile base …. but those require a decent investment of time in order to fund them. (Although apparently you can sit in an asteroid belt having an autobattling ship that earns credits at a happy rate – that’s not the kind of gameplay I’m interested in though).

X4 is the fourth game in a sequence of space flight games. It’s always been a very arcadey style of space combat sim, which isn’t a bad thing as far as gameplay goes. One thing it does have as well as the blasting is a more evolved economic model. So whereas Elite only has you flying one of the spaceships around, with the rest in the hangar, you can build up a business empire in X4. When you move up to a bigger or different ship, you can assign a non player character pilot to the old one and send it out to do more trading, mining or have them around to run shotgun on your freighters. Oh and you can build your space stations as well and manufacturing. Kinda like a friendlier and single player version of Eve Online.

I’ve bounced off the X series continually in the past though for multiple reasons, hopefully I can adapt more to X4. That said, the new little ship (unnamed so far) hasn’t left the pad yet partly because I’m still figuring out what you do in the game, mostly due to Pain.

Ouchies hit last week … I think the cold snap is one factor but I was also using the desktop mouse in the wrong position for an extended amount of time last week and that’s apparently wrecked me. Oops. If it’s on the upper deck, I use it with a straight arm which puts a lot of stress on my shoulder, putting an upwards and outwards pressure on it. And that’s still stiff after last week.

So I’ve been on the more hands off games with less movement of the mouse, like Motorsport Manager. Oh and perhaps a bit of Skyrim and Mars Horizon too as well as continuing the repairing things catharsis that Car Mechanic Simulator offers.

Advent ? No advent this year. It was a great theme to have over the last few years, with the themes giving me stuff to write about every day. But … the Lego models take up a decent amount of space, the advent calendar wasn’t particularly interesting this year (unlike the Xmas jumpers from last year) and I was definitely feeling that burn out.

Picture. Front and centre are two lego figurines. One is Darth Vader in his black helmet cape and a red Xmas jumper with a death star ball on it. On the right is a angry looking fellow with a green jumper with a white droid on it. There's a marshmallow to the left and more lego figures in the background. — It’s that time again

Yep. Almost the time of year for Mini Eggs to be back in the shops.

Haven’t had snow yet here, unless it happened in a weekend morning and I completely missed it.

Racing ? I’ve been following the Grand Prix racing still. Something has to change there. At the front, you have a driver apparently hell bent on having people run into him and throughout the field you have them slowing to make space for fast runs, which is going to lead to a massive accident at some point. I think it’ll be a close finish at the end of this season and there will definitely be more controversy happening. And at some point, the patience has to run out with a driver who is definitely incredibly talented but has also been incredibly dangerous on the race track ever since he came into the sport.

I suspect you know which driver I mean there. I think it’ll be different again next year, with George Russell coming into the Mercedes team. Whereas Lewis Hamilton has the skill to avoid car damage when he’s been getting run off the road, I don’t think Russell does. There will be more accidents happening next year. But we’ll see there. Hopefully the new regulations next year improve the racing, although Formula 1 has usually been a processional activity where the cars can get close but not overtake on a lot of the tracks. It should be the fastest car and driver that wins and often that isn’t the case.

Something for those who say – “I watch it for the crashes”. Take a look at yourselves please. Those are real people in the cars. Hopefully the two Formula 2 drivers who were injured yesterday make full recoveries. Other drivers have not. Your entertainment should not come at the cost of those bringing it to you. I was wondering when the big crash would happen yesterday. The new Saudi circuit is the second fastest … with many blind corners. It’s not a question of if an accident will happen, it’s when.

I have a vague memory of Frank Williams and Patrick Head having to avoid traveling to Italy for a few years because they’d have been arrested on manslaughter charges (later cleared) in the aftermath of the Ayrton Senna death. I can see the new Saudi traffic as being a track that could potentially kill someone.

And that’s not what I call entertainment. I genuinely thought we’d lost a driver last year with Romain Grosjean’s miraculous escape from a fireball. Seeing that again on Drive to Survive brought out the feels again.

I’ll say it again there – our entertainment shouldn’t come at a cost to other people.

Haha, he says thinking of the Pixel People in the games. Perhaps we’re Pixel People in someone else’s game ?

Anyway, I think that’s more than enough metaphysics for my head tonight. Time to disappear back into book with the music on. It’s currently Bone Silence by Alastair Reynolds and then I’ll be buying Leviathan Falls by James S. A. Corey, last of the Expanse books.

Have a great advent everyone, be well.