Toys – Page 7 – Fooyah

July 16 2020July 16 2020

You Gotta Get About

It’s been interesting removing oneself from the shit-show that is 2020 and enjoying my Minecraft server world. In the server world things aren’t perfect. I die sometimes, normally from entering the Nether, creepers seem to blow up my most treasured aspects of the world and occasionally I get lost and spend days walking back home. All of this still makes Minecraft better than 2020 or almost any of the last four years. My favourite time is when it rains in Minecraft. I love it. The sounds, the smell, the not getting wet. Now, I’m a little gutted as this is the second draft of this I’ve had to do. My first draft disappeared into the ether[net] and I don’t know what I wrote. I know I was happy with my prose but something will be lost this time around and you won’t get the chance to read my brilliance.

So, here we are, another video which is a screen clipping from the PS4. I looked into doing this properly with a voice over and all that jazz. I downloaded some software and recorded some screen clips on my computer and then starting meshing all that stuff together and having a go at a voice over. What did I learn? I learnt that I hated speaking out loud. I can just about do it for work stuff when I record lessons but I did not enjoy trying this out. Then, I also learnt that I spoke too many “ums” as I tried to commentate on a five minute clip. So I decided that I wouldn’t do it. Now, I do know that learning a new skill takes time and practice. I am giving it neither at the moment but I think that might change in the future and maybe I’ll give this another go over my summer break. What follows is a written description of the sort of stuff I was going to say.

This video takes about a Minecraft day. In fact I go to sleep at the beginning and the end so it is pretty much a day. We travel from one end of the Empire to the other but there are still aspects that are missed and maybe I will cover those one day.

So, we open at night and I am atop the Mountain Base. I sleep in the mountain top hall that I built and then head down the stairs to the internal secret hall. I think I want to make all the walls by the steps the same as I feel it’s a little messy at the moment. It was meant to be a secret staircase and so didn’t matter but every time I use it I think it needs smartening up. At the bottom of the ugly steps I look in a chest and take a rail – I’m not sure why because I didn’t even put it in its rightful place in the basement later, then I head out into the main hall and get a minecart from that chest. Then the journey starts! We get a tour of the underground railway I built.

Mountain to Harbour 2

The journey from mountain to harbour 2 station has smooth stone blocks and the railway lays on wooden planks. The lights start out as yellow stained glass and all the torches are placed one block rearwards from the track and with smoothstone surrounds. The emergency doors into the mountain base open and close automatically keeping the different areas secure. Once the yellow accented lights run out we get shroomlights. The whole idea of this was to give each branch of the underground from the main Meadow House a certain look and feel so you always kinda know where you are in the system. At Harbour 2 station we can see it has a purple concrete and smooth stone design to it. The way to the surface is a long ladder. The station at the top is designed to be similar to the platform area. We get a short look at the mountain base. Then, there is the harbour with the flip-flop switches that are operated by buttons and open and close the water exit to the harbour.

Harbour 2 to House

This section of the journey doesn’t take too long and we head to the main house and store room. House station is designed in white concrete with a light blue concrete ceiling to match the store room. The floor is glass and most of the lighting is torches under the glass. It costs a fortune to keep the glass clean of soot and dirt! Then we head up stairs to the Basement Storage Area which I built. It’s all nicely labelled and everything has a place. Every now and then I have a tidy up because other players on the server leave things all over the place. There is an enchantment room and a portal to the Nether. The doors to the station look hidden but are a bit obvious if you are the type of player who likes to go around pressing every button that you find. I do like the flip-flop circuit.

House to Harbour 1

Harbour 1 was the first harbour I built. I spent quite a while rowing around the rivers trying to map out the land. I have stairs places on all explored rivers which point back to the main house so if you come across a river you can find your way home. These walls on this line are a snazzy stone effect that I can’t remember the name of. The lights are white on this stretch of track. I think my favourite part of all the railways is the bit on this section where we go through a cave. I think it just looks nice considering every other part of the journey all looks the same. Harbour 1 station is red glass and wood accented. I think there’s even a tree growing up through the middle of the ground level building. We also see the first harbour and a glance at Meadow House. When looking at Meadow House you can see two platforms that were designed to give an overview of the meadow. The top one is called The Top and it’s just slightly too high for all the animals to be rendered when you get up there so you can’t actually see a great deal of detail. It’s nice up there though.

Harbour 1 to Meadow Station

Meadow station was originally the start of the railway line to the beach because it meant I didn’t have to have so many resources to build the line. Over time I wanted to be able to avoid walking and now I have achieved that. The underground line heading that way has the same snazzy stone things and pink accented lights. All turns in the system have signs on them in case you get lost. Meadow Station is a glass topped glorious sweet design that makes me happy. It was my first ever use of sea lanterns. There’s not really anything else there now but the station. It looks so nice I don’t think I’ll get rid of it but I rarely use the station for anything other than passing through.

Meadow Station to Beach

This is boring and takes around three real minutes. It’s quite good if you need a comfort break while playing as you can just get on the railway and head off to somewhere nice and do stuff. I’ve spent a while adjusting the redstone torches from the last video and putting them under the track to make it all a little neater. The purple concrete blocks allow you to find your way if you get lost. The side with the torch points to the direction of Meadow Station. The monolithic spikes every now and then were waypoints for when I used to walk to the beach. They also have torches on them which point towards the meadow. Getting back home has been quite important to me. The railway heads due west and as we approach Beach Station you can see my mob farm off to the right towering up over the land. Beach station is a glory of green and glass. I like the design of it. Once off the railcart we head to the beach, the house there, the small farm and the beach bar.

The Beach

The beach has an area nearby where I practise my redstone skills. It has the mob farm which kinda works ok ish. I also have an extensive mine which I have used to gather lots of lovely resources and the underground railway to that is in the next video. At the beach we gaze at the monolith which was a suggestion of a friend and I really like it. I think it adds a certain something to the whole area. The ratios of the edges of the monolith are 1:4:9, although I made this one 2:8:18, which is the same ratio. Then we head to the beach bar and dive into the sea pool I made. From there we are able to swim underwater to my ocean viewing platform. The lower opening to this was open to the sea but waterzombie things kept getting in my house so I used trapdoors to block it off. Finally there’s my storage basement at the beach and a short journey up to the surface and another flip-flop for the doors to my summer house. We have once last glance at the monolith and then head to bed, the end of a busy day in this Minecraft world.

July 5 2020July 5 2020

TMA-2

After my video showing my Empire I had the following comment on Twitter:

Rather enjoyed that. Where’s the monolith?
— Richard O (@richouss) June 23, 2020

This was an omission I had to correct. So, I did. I went and built a monolith at the Beach House but it looked too small. 1 x 4 x 9 didn’t really work that well so I doubled it. You have to keep the correct ratios and here it is:

It’s a 2 x 8 x 18 which is a lot of obsidian that I had to make down in one of my mines. I have perfected my lava quenching techniques though! I think it looks good just floating in the air and although I touched it while building the thing I won’t be going near it, just in case.

This view has all the important bits of this end of the world. My beach house, the portal and the monolith. There’s also the remains of a tower showing top centre which was to indicate the way back – I’ve since got rid of most of it!

I’m currently working on a *secret project* and there will be another video released soon showing the Empire. I’m not expanding the area but I’m tidying up some of the impact of building in the meadow area. Ultimately I would like to continue the *secret project* to the rest of the Empire but I think that would be too tedious. I have other things I want to do, like learn redstone and also get a shulker box and beacon.

June 28 2020June 28 2020

Fastest

It’s been a little while since I wrote on here but in all honesty I’ve been struggling to find things to write about. You see, nothing’s happening. We are in this lockdown and work is odd at the moment. I have been in to work three times since 17 March. Those three times were supervising and not doing my real job but at least it was somewhere else to be. I’m in a couple of times over the next week and that might be more interesting. Working at home places really interesting pressures and thoughts on you. I keep trying to manage engagement with the time that I have. I’ve also spent time in a better world, my Minecraft world. Even though there are creepers and zombies and witches and I died in that world a few days ago, it’s a far more enjoyable place than the real world at the moment.

Each day I try and have two races on Gran Turismo. Sometimes I’m not in the mood but mostly I am. It’s a nice half hour distraction from the world and it can be really enjoyable. The issues with racing online still exist and the idea that you will lose because someone else is entirely incompetent is annoying but normally it’s worth it. Of the current daily races I have enjoyed racing around the Mount Panorama circuit at Bathurst. I’ll probably write a little about my favourite cars sometime soon as I noticed I’d completed over 3000miles in my Mazda! That’s more than some people drive in the real world in a year.

Anyway, in a race yesterday I started in second position. My time of around 2’07” is pretty good but the person on pole had 2’05” and I’ve no idea how they got that. I’m not convinced I’ve really hooked together a complete decent lap but to lose a further two seconds from my time would be hard work. Also, I suspect there are people out there even faster. It looks as though GT matches you with people of a similar ability and time so I don’t know what the fastest time in the world is. Mind you, I guess there are people playing a lot more than me. I know I’ve been playing from 1997 ish but to get loads better at these circuits you just need to get practising.

For whatever reason at the start of the race yesterday the person in pole didn’t accelerate at the start and I zoomed past them. I was in the lead from the first corner and didn’t look back. Well, I did, I used my mirrors to see what was behind me but you know what I mean. The thing about being in the lead is that there’s a lot more to lose if you stack it going into a corner so it does make me more hesitant and cautious on corner entrances and exits. This can cost time and so I have to monitor the gap to the car behind. For this race it was around 1.8 seconds for the whole race and only moved by a few tenths. I sometimes get an adrenaline build up on the last lap as I get excited about winning. This time I calmed that and kept telling myself to keep a clean lap and remember where I tend to oversteer on the exit of corners when I put the power down early. Mount Panorama is a glorious circuit and very tricky, the section at the top of the mountain is horrible and fantastic at the same time.

Below is a screen video clip of the final positions along with my “win” celebrations and the delivery of my daily workout car. If you complete 26.6 miles in a day you get a free car. Most of these I don’t use. There are around 500 cars in the garage and I’m not fussed by them.

I’m pretty sure this was my first ever fastest lap in a race. I’m very happy with that. I don’t know what lap times other people got but it doesn’t matter. I was out in front with a clear road and that does make it a lot easier. You don’t have to judge what other people are going to do and brake slightly early because of the concertina effect. You can pretty much put down qualifying laps, just while hoping that you don’t get nudged or whacked by someone forgetting to break, or by someone who is just an asshole.

I am quite convinced that the physics of the car is different in the race compared to qualifying and I’m not sure why. I get a little more understeer during races and I suspect, but do not know, that it’s due to the air modelling the game does. Driving a car through mostly still air is very different to driving through disturbed air and I have noticed a very minor difference in steering and braking while racing in the pack with other cars around. There is a definite effect and the car doesn’t behave as it does on qualifying. It’s something I think I need to investigate.

June 22 2020June 21 2020

Empire

I’ve been building my Minecraft empire bit by bit. The last few days have had me experimenting with redstone and what that can do. I’m now upgrading different bases that I “own” to have automatic doors and security systems. Once I get quite good at the basics I’ll try to make bigger and better things. I have an area near my beach house where I practice certain builds and I have even gone to sleep realising I could have made things much simpler but, hey ho.

Here’s a video of the journey from one end of my empire to the other. You will move from my “secret” mountain base to the beach house. It’s changed a little since I made this video as I’m trying to add more stations to the system but this still represents most of “my” land.

Once I’ve got the railway system working well I’ll try and post another video to show what I’ve done.

June 8 2020June 7 2020

One Metre Cubed Blocks

Lockdown has led me to have the chance to learn how to play Minecraft. I know it’s not that hard, but I’ve found it interesting and fun. I’ve also had the chance to explore parts of the world that I can’t do in real life. I had started thinking that I would write today about systemic racism and privilege in our modern society but I’m not going to, yet. I think there’s been enough said over the last while and if you read these communications you will see what side I’m on. What I will say is that if you deny systemic racism then you either a purposely not reading or learning anything about our modern society or you are racist. I think my favourite thing I’ve seen written recently was – We hate Trump because he is racist, you hate Obama because you are racist – and don’t you go thinking this is just an American problem, it is rife in this little island over here too.

This is how much of the current world I have explored. It is approximately 5km across its furthest points. The base is somewhere in the middle of all that! This is the second Minecraft world I have generated, the first had me on an island in an ocean and I spent quite a while on that world but I have to say that being spawned in the woods and on a land of large area is much easier. It’s much easier to find resources. I find that I tend to separate my playing sessions into three main types.

Building Structures
Off Adventuring
Mining for Materials

The loop top right is one that I spent a few “days” exploring. When exploring I always have a bed, food and compass in my inventory. The bed is to be able to skip the night so that I encounter as few monsters as possible. Food is a requirement and then the compass I use to find my way back to the world spawn point. My main base is close to the world spawn point and I think that’s important along with a compass. I haven’t yet figured out how to use the Minecraft maps properly I need to do some reading on them. Each session I play is between one and two hours. I find the mining good fun and I think I try to see too much logic in the placement of blocks but also need to understand that while it’s random it is also procedurally generated. Building structure is excellent and my plans are slowly getting larger. I haven’t really figured out the aesthetics of it all yet and I need to practise my use of materials cleverly to look good but I’m getting the hang of it slowly.

My Buildings - Minecraft — My Buildings – Minecraft

My main structures are marked with red blotches in the above picture. Starting far left they are:

Beach House
Beach Station
Meadow Station
Main Base
First Harbour
Secret Mountain Base

I found the beach while I was off on a wander and I decided eventually to build a pathway from the main base to it as easy access to the sea is helpful in this game. Once I had a pathway in place with lit towers marking the route I then decided that the “day” it takes to walk was rather annoying and I chose to make a railway from the main base to my beach house. I knew I would have to gather a lot of resources and that I did. I needed plenty of railway and powered rails along with lots of blocks to make the whole line one straight section of railway. I chose to do this as it’s easier to head in a single direction through mountains and over rivers than winding your way, it also requires less material. The resulting railing is just under 1,6 kilometres long.

It's a long way to the beach — It’s a long way to the beach

To travel this far in the minecart takes about three real minutes. From main base to the beach house is about five real minutes of travel. At least it gives you time to sort out the inventory and make sure everything is placed neatly. Once the main railway was in place I built stations at each end and I don’t have any screen shots of those at the moment. I then wanted to build two decent looking bridges over two rivers and a future job is to build a nice viaduct where the railway passes over the swamp biome.

Ill try and get some screen shots of my stations and secret mountain base and put them on here sometime soon. I wanted my stations to be fun and represent the areas they headed to. So the station near the main base is fun colours and looks like a sweet while the station near the beach is green and looks like the forests the line heads towards. I have really done any Redstone constructions yet apart from the railway. I think I will need to start these soon as I would like to have a switch which turns railway points so you can pick your destination in the station and the correct railway line is chosen automatically. While I don’t know if this can be done I am sure I could find a guide if I wanted but I will learn bit by bit.

Because I’m classically on the left of politics I’m going to mention some problems with this game. Is this important? It’s just a game you say. Well, yes this is important because all of this adds to culture and what people think is acceptable. What do the Marvel films teach us? That the world will be saved by gods and masked superheroes with immense damage and that all arguments can be solved through violence. This is partly why I don’t really enjoy these movies, that and they aren’t that good. So, Minecraft. Let’s look at the overall themes. I mine coal to power my cooking and smelting processes. I harvest trees for the wood but at least I can regrow the trees or even plant more than I have destroyed. Animals roam the land and I can use them for my own purposes. I get points for killing them and also for breeding them. If I’m trapped in a village overnight I can kick a villager out of their bed and sleep in it. I can destroy the villagers’ homes with no repercussions, I can steal their food and their possessions with no repercussions. I can kill them with no repercussions. I can take their lands and use their goods for my own purposes.

This game teaches you that there are no repercussions to stealing land, taking food, killing natives, destroying the planet, building whatever you want. I know this game is played a lot by younger children who love it. They love the creativity of it. They love challenging each other and it is a massive online arena with YouTubers careers made on explaining it to the world. But, when you break it down, what does it teach you? If there’s a better metaphor for historical and current European descent white supremacy then I’m not sure I know what it is. Where was this game created? Stockholm. Who owns it now? Microsoft. This world is biased and people claim they can’t see how! There, I managed to end this communication on a depressing note.

June 3 2020June 3 2020

Lego 67 – Model 75264

It’s been way too long for one of these communications so here’s a Star Wars miniature that was made recently in the May festival of Lego.

May 27 2020May 27 2020

CV-19 UK Tour

I’m missing seeing other parts of the world. I’m currently stuck in a small triangle within Kent and while I do appreciate the luck I have in being in this area I am also bored of it. I would like to visit RAF bases, I want to see other people and I would like to be atop mountains. Normally by now I would have been to the Lake District and also we had plans to go to RAF Halton, RAF Brize Norton and RAF Wittering. I miss those things and as much as I know I sometimes struggle socially I do miss the people.

So, I’ve started playing X-Plane about 30% seriously. I’ve been learning how to use navigation equipment within the aircraft and I’ve even started playing with the radio settings but my last attempt at that failed and I got told off by the game for not following the ATC instructions! I recently got some payware in the form of an aircraft model, the T-7A, and it’s a nice plane. It flies easy enough, can get up to speed quickly and has a glass cockpit. I’ve even figured out some small parts of the autopilot.

It’s slightly frustrating having to move my view around from the HUD to other parts of the cockpit to see the instruments and I’ll have to think about how to make that easier and quicker – maybe I need a second monitor? – but I’ll cope for now. One of the things I’ve always struggled with first person shoot em ups is that quick glances never seem to be that and moving the view can be time vital. Also, I’m not very good at them.

I’ve been flying around the country as part of this summer’s tour. The first few flights were down in the south over Kent and Cornwall but now I’m heading around airport hopping. A rough idea of places been so far are: RNAS Culdrose, Llanbedhr, RAF Valley, BAe Warton, RAF Leeming, Leuchars, RAF Lossiemouth, Kirkwall, Shetland, Stornoway, Prestwick, Glasgow, Isle Of Man, Belfast, Barrow.

This has been good fun so far. I think I’m going to head down the east coast next. Let’s see where I end up!

May 17 2020May 17 2020

UK Scenes

So, along with getting the new PC was the general concept that I would have a machine capable of running X-Plane which has ridiculous graphics simulation algorithms. I’m sure there could be flight simulators that run quicker and also look better but because of the physics engine employed by X-Plane it is the most accurate in terms of aircraft movement through the air. It used to be that to run X-Plane I had to turn off any clouds. These seem to really mess with the frame rate and the bottleneck occurs on the bus between the CPU RAM. I had spent a lot of time reading about finely tuning the software to give the best compromise between frame rate and looks. The new PC doesn’t really seem to have any problems and I just turn everything up to 11.

Browsing for a slightly better looking Great Britain I found, I don’t remember how, a website offering sexy GB scenery. I had to pay for it but it did look good. I was concerned about splashing out without being able to test the software but the company had a Demo area around Southampton. Orbx have a selection of payware airports along with GB scenery. I downloaded the Demo area and flew from Southampton Airport over Portsmouth and Gosport. The fact that I could see aircraft carriers in the harbour along with HMS Victory and the forts in the Solent meant I was smitten. The whole area looked great. So, I took the plunge and bought some scenery of GB. I had some cash stashed away from the sale of my old graphics card and those proceeds went to these views.

I have not been disappointed. There is now 367GB of GB scenery on the hard drive and while load times feel like forever, X-Plane is terrible at some things, the whole of the island of Great Britain looks spectacular. I’ve flown from Manston to Lydd to Southend to Heathrow. I’ve also covered Cornwall along with the Lake District. Next steps will be Wales and Scotland, specifically the Mach Loop and Lock Ness. Below is a gallery of some sights so far. After flying for a little while I turned some clouds on just to make it look more realistic. I know I’ve got the frame rate showing up in the top left corner and you might think that 30fps isn’t that great. Trust me, I would have had around 2fps using the old PC and these settings. I’m not really into bragging rights about fps and anything more that 50 seems iffy, not worth it? Happy to be proved wrong on that. Also, below, are a couple of pictures of the F-35B using the old scenery. Hopefully you can see the difference.

T-7A Plymouth and Rame Peninsula — T-7A Plymouth and Kingsand

May 14 2020May 14 2020

The Rig

As I was falling asleep last night I’m pretty sure I was drafting a communication for this site. It was going to be short but worth it. A suitable piece of content that would mean I keep publishing things here. But I forgot what it was. I could have me-mailed a message but I don’t like looking at my phone once I’m upstairs and so I hoped I would remember it. I didn’t. My hope failed.

So, instead, here’s another picture of my PC. I hadn’t realised I’d put something here a short while ago but here it is in flight simulator mode.

I’ve already been criticised for the PC LED colours not matching the rest of the unit, I can change them, I just like the red, it makes it look angry. Also, the keyboard has lights which I’m not convinced are worth it but I smile whenever I look at them whirling around. I could match that too but I don’t care.

On the desk is a Pooley’s Flight Guide to every UK airport which makes taxiing around quite a lot easier. It’s open at Southend EGMC and I’ve been flying a T-7A Red Hawk around over Kent and shooting shit. I’m using the F-7 version because it’s got bang stuff added to it. The plane was made by AOA Simulations and is the third piece of hardware I’ve got from them. I have a F-35B, the CV-22 and this F-7 T-7A. I like their kit. I also like my Grumman Goose but that’s mostly because I’m still in love with Tales Of the Gold Monkey.

It looks like I need to take some pictures of the F-35B and so I will get on that soon. Look out here for more pictures of these lovely planes. I might try and find some extra special spots around the world to bomb also.

May 4 2020May 4 2020

Set Up

I spent part of yesterday setting up the final parts of the new PC. I’m very happy with the result. The new things are the PC itself and some peripherals like the keyboard, mouse and mat. Because the mousemat thing was too big for the old desk I bought a new desk for the PC. I was stuck with the sizes that the desk could be because of the tiny size of my dining room which is where it all lives. I guess I could have put the system somewhere else but I wanted this position for the easy access to a wired LAN.

I guess apart from tidying up cables I am done. It was very satisfying to wire in the whole system in its home for the next few years.

May 3 2020May 3 2020

Clouds

It’s a funny old thing that when flying in X-Plane you wish for clouds but they kill your frame rate because it’s X-Plane. Then when you finally put clouds in or real time weather you end up with not being able to see anything most of the time because – clouds. You have to take off in cloud or fly through cloud and then not see anything for a while. Once above clouds the world looks pretty much the same wherever you are.

Look at this picture. It’s gorgeous but the world looks faded because it’s not that often you get the wonderful clear days where you can see for miles.

May 1 2020May 1 2020

Red Hawk

This is my first communication on this restored site. I can’t see anything wrong with it at the moment although I may have deleted one of my old websites and I think that has gone forever. I’m sure one of the spare hard drives knocking around will have a copy but it’s whether I can be bothered to go and look for it. There’s a time/reward concept I’m trying to develop and the ratio is pretty low for that one.

Since 17th March 2020 I have spent just one day in work and that was voluntary. I helped supervise those children of keyworkers on Monday and it was nice to be somewhere else. While I feel OK 80% of the time I’m sure a change in scenery helped me for a few days. It’s been over a week since I was last feeling rather desperate. The big news, buried in this paragraph, is that the lockdown is costing me quite a bit in terms of technology that I keep buying. I think I’m done for now, but the most recent purchase was a new PC. I had a situation with the old one and although I think that was largely my fault – I was removing a headphone jack when it powered down – the headphone jack is close to the power button and I think it activated it -the PC was old and I decided that a new purchase would last a good five or six years and need to be quite good for gaming.

So, the PC has 16GB ram, an Intel Core i5 and a RTX 2070 graphics card. So far I have been very impressed although I’ve also upgraded some of the infrastructure surrounding the PC to suit the new machine. Setting up the PC was straight forward and installing all the relevant software that I wanted was easy and took about a day. A bonus of getting a new PC is the ability to break the old one down and use its components. So, the old SSD is now installed on the PS4 as extra storage space and that works well. I bought a cheap enclosure for the SSD and now have an extra 500GB storage on that. I had a back up hard drive running in the old PC also and that has found its way into the new machine and still runs as a back up to the NAS.

The most important bonus of this new machine is that it runs X-Plane quite well. There is no stuttering under high graphics settings and while I’m not fussed about super realistic VFR graphics, the whole simulator runs really well. I have bought some aircraft in the past, most notably an F18, F35B and a V-22. I wanted something a little simpler to fly but also fast. There are quite a few prop planes included in X-Plane but they don’t fly that fast and what you want to do when playing is get up quick, do some aero, shoot some stuff down and then get somewhere else quick.

I had a look at AOA Simulations as they are people I have bought from before and they had an advanced trainer jet for sale. It’s the T-7A Red Hawk. It’s a nice looking plane and so I paid for it. Some of the freeware on X-Plane is pretty good but the level of detail on the payware is delightful. I’m aiming to upload some videos of this beauty to YouTube and will do so once i figure it out. But, screenshots are easy and here are some I’ve taken.

Someday soon I’ll give more details and links to lovely stuff as I explore this aircraft and X-Plane a little more. Just as a guide I used to get around 15-20 FPS on my old PC and the bottleneck was the processor. On this current/new machine I’m getting 50-60 FPS. Now, to you ultra-gamers out there 50-60 might not seem like much but I have to tell you that X-Plane is a stupid simulator and anything more than 30 is a decent job. Have a look at the forums and see people complain about clouds and almost everything getting in the way of frame rates above 20. Anyway, I’ve got places to fly.

April 19 2020April 19 2020

Minor Tribulations

Yesterday my PC powered down completely unexpected. Not in a shut down type of way but in a dead kinda way. Now, I am slightly concerned by this. I’m not too worried about my data, I back up everything regularly and use a NAS and cloud based storage. My bigger concern is that I might need a new PC. I guess I could survive without one? Nope. Just spent a moment thinking about that and it is definitely something I would be unable to do. My phone doesn’t offer all the useability I would need and I can’t use my work laptop for home based stuff.

The questions now are what specification should I be looking at and do flashy LED colours add to my experience? What do I do with the current PC, which is working fine at the moment but I wouldn’t be surprised if it died for good. What peripherals do I get? Do I need another monitor? That answer is easy, I don’t. I’ve got plenty of screens in the house. It’s just a matter of being able to utilise them correctly. How am I going to pay for this is another thought I suppose?

I know what I’m like when buying big stuff. I get super excited and need to force myself to calm down and think about things. I need to consider all the options and then build up to a final decision. Also, it being lockdown and everything I probably need another little project to keep me going and I need a PC on which I can write “music”. I call it music, but it’s noise really and me messing around trying to emulate my favourite artists.

I may or may not update here what happens over the next little while. I’m off to do more googling around and seeing what the best deal I can find is.

April 17 2020April 17 2020

45 and Birthday

My first day of self isolation was one month ago. On the 17th March. The night before the government had announced that people whose household had someone with CV-19 symptoms had to self-isolate for two weeks. So, given my contact with my family I had to self-isolate. I was actually kinda happy to do this for a couple of reasons. Firstly, my mental health was starting to suffer with the inaction of our government over the previous three weeks – it was starting to feel as though senior members of the government didn’t understand how much people moved around and things like six degrees of separation along with incubation periods. Secondly, I can’t remember my second reason for happily being at home, probably because it would get me out of the hotbed of transmission which is a school where 1400 people gather and mix every day. Oh well. Time at home was probably needed to be honest.

As any fule know Gran Turismo gives you a bonus car on your birthday. I’ve a communication from 2014 for you. This year I waited with anticipation as I opened the game [after I had done my proper job work thing you understand]. I was happy! The game gave me a McLaren F1!

Not only that but the game also gave me a fireworks show to impress me a little more!

Around the same time I also passed into Level 45 territory. This is quite an achievement I think. I remember tweeting something about getting to level 40 before and then my save-game got corrupted and I lost all my cars. I had to start again. I now regularly backup my save-game files to a USB stick after checking how many cars are in my garage. It doesn’t seem like much I guess but I’ve got quite a time investment in this game and I would be sad if I lost everything again. I’d just start again but some of the challenges are quite hard work.

I also have a screen shot of my current game progress to share with you. This gives a rundown of all my statistics. Let’s give you the rundown:

Some things I am proud of [I think]:

18,600 miles driven!
Campaign 100%
Level 45
Days logged on 353

This is not to do with President of the USA number 45 because he’s a lying bullying racist cunt.

April 11 2020April 11 2020

EoP

In 1671 apparently not a lot happened in England. Parliament moaned about the rise of Roman Catholicism and someone called Blood tried to steal the Crown Jewels. Around the world I’m sure there was plenty going on but there’s not a lot on Wikipedia. The pope made someone a saint – whatever that really means – and the Ottoman Empire declared war on Poland.

A while back I wrote about connecting my lounge room to the router/modem using an ethernet cable. This was relatively easy as I already had a hole in the wall and the distance wasn’t too bad.

I have a Raspberry Pi in the loft acting as an ADS-B decoder for an aircraft position aggregator site called 360 Radar. For some reason whenever the router reset or rebooted the Pi wouldn’t connect straight away to the wireless network and I had to reboot the Pi as well. This wasn’t bad but mildly irritating. So, after mentioning it at work it was suggested that I hard wire the network in using Ethernet Over Power, which I was, then, already using to keep the entertainment centre wired rather than wireless.

Now, EoP makes a lot of sense. You already have a network of wires in the house and so just adding a high frequency signal into them is easy and won’t affect anything else. How far these signals travel down my street I don’t know. I’d be tempted to plug one in next door and see if I can get a signal there. I have encrypted my signal because I’m not stupid. TP have a utility so you can manage the EoP modules from the PC and I have used it to see what bandwidth I am getting.

As you can see I should be capable of getting 600Mbps over this connection but some things are working against me. The instructions say that these shouldn’t be plugged into extension leads and definitely not multi-gang extensions. Both of them are sorted like that. Who else has that many plug sockets near the IT centre of their house? These aren’t even pass-through modules so that can’t work. To be honest I’m happy with 200Mbps. My internet connection is only 70Mbps and so the EoP can easily handle that. Not that it needs to!

My router/modem has currently an uptime of just over 18 days. In that time the Pi has downloaded 194MB but uploaded 8GB. That’s not a lot really for that length of time.

18 Day Totals are:

Pi ADS-B – down 194MB, up 8GB
PC – down 900GB, up 66GB
PS4 – down 225GB, up 11GB
Shield Pro – down 1TB, up 25GB
My phone – down 344GB, up 80GB

The other devices aren’t interesting and don’t do as much. The bandwidth of the Ethernet over Power is perfectly suitable for its usage.

April 5 2020April 5 2020

Done For Now – A Better Image

I forgot that I can output the Magic Mirror to a browser as long as I open that IP within the config file. So I can have on my TV using that built in browser, but it looks terrible. I can also run it on my PC in full screen mode and it looks pretty awesome. I wonder if someone has written a screensaver for it??

To see what the different modules are visit the previous communication.

April 3 2020April 3 2020

Done – For Now

I think this is it for the next while. I have done some final messing around and think I’ve got a format I like. It’s a 47″ display, so quite large and looks lovely. I’ve added a remote plug control for the Magic Mirror Pi so I can turn off an on easier than just unplugging it.

Magic Mirror - Resting Set Up — Magic Mirror – Resting Set Up

So, finally [for now], the modules are:

top_left – current date and time.

top_left – current weather followed by weather forecast.

bottom_left – state of lights in the house.

top_right – what music is playing in the house.

top_right aircraft near to the house listed in order of ascending distance with direction [assumes ADS-B transmitter and sending lat/long details].

top_center – Conway’s Game Of Life cellular automata.

center – picture of view of Earth from the sun-side. Animates over a period of a few minutes.

bottom_center – new headlines from chosen sources.

Overall, I’m pleased. The next thing would be to add a rotating module that switches between different views or maybe even a gesture controller so that you could swipe through different screens to see what you want. Whether I will get to these is another matter.

March 31 2020April 29 2020

Black Magic Mirror – Day Fourteen

I’ve spent some time in the last week getting a Raspberry Pi running on my new “spare” TV. I put a new Philips TV into the lounge last week and wrote about that in this communication. I’m coming up to personal isolation day 13. This means I’ve kinda had time to program another Raspberry Pi and get it displaying information on the spare TV. I wanted to have a map of the aircraft in the sky near me and I might eventually look into writing a script that will automatically reload a webpage with password every ten minutes and put it in full screen.

I already have a Raspberry Pi in the loft. It is receiving aircraft ADS-B signals and decoding them. It then feeds the results to 360 Radar, an aggregator website that then publishes all the positions. I wrote about that quite a bit. Just use the search function and find ADS-B.

This time I was working with a program called Magic Mirror. It should be used with silvered glass to create a display mirror but I just want it for the display. The initial program was easy to load and get working. The trickier thing was getting custom modules loaded and then get their parameters working correctly. I had to edit js files all the time and so I found that irritating but rewarding. It’s all about the syntax, which I got eventually.

Basically the elements are:

Top_Left – Current date and time.

Top_Center – Two calendars of upcoming things.

Bottom_Center – Three RSS news feeds. One from each of the BBC, Defence Blog and The Guardian. These change at different rates depending on how much there is to read.

Top_Right – Current weather. The temperature is measured in Kelvin – because why would you measure it in anything else? Also, this updates every ten minutes or so.

Top_Right – A weather forecast of the next six days of weather. Again, temperatures in Kelvin.

Center_Right – A feed displaying what is playing on the home SONOS system and in which rooms.

Bottom_Right – which lights are on in the house. I mean I could just look around my house because it’s that small but why would you when you can have the information displayed on a screen.

Bottom_Left – My proudest part of this display. A section devoted to which aircraft are closest to my house and [now] where they are. It takes a feed from the Raspberry Pi in the loft which is decoding ADS-B signals. So, not all aircraft will be shown here but most interesting ones will be. Given that there’s so little flying at the moment the top ten closest aircraft are going out to 180km. Once the world returns to normal it will interesting to see how far out this goes. About 50km I reckon.

The picture above has the added details of how far the aircraft are from my house and in which direction.

This project has taken about ten hours of putting together and playing with the software. I think it is mostly finished. There are a couple of small things and I’m investigating them over time. At the moment the Pi starts in the wrong resolution if the TV isn’t turned on before the Pi. I have looked at this and it seems to be all levels of wrong so I don’t know how to fix it. I have googled like an expert and pretty much figured out what it isn’t. I’d really like the Pi to turn on at a particular time and turn the TV on at the same time. I think this is possible but will take much work.

I currently have the Pi plugged into a Philips Hue smart plug that means I can turn it on and off from anywhere. This is a helpful feature. The TV is then set to turn off after a short while without receiving a signal.

I do feel quite smug at the moment. Also as the TV showed up two RAF aircraft earlier. They must have had their ADS-B signals on and so were cargo/passenger planes. All in all I’m a happy chap.

March 20 2020March 20 2020

Lights

Before all this madness I decided I would buy a new TV. I kinda figured that most screens are similar and so it was other features I wanted. I went for a 4K HDR screen [I’m not fussed about the sound, I have a separate system for that] and also Ambilight. Philips make TVs with the Ambilight system. There are LEDs around the back of the screen and they project colours onto the wall matching areas of the picture on the TV. This is what it looks like:

I do have some sound issues at the moment because my current amplifier won’t pass through 4K signals. I’m in the process of fixing that. But the screen and picture are great. The colours on the wall are pretty amazing. I did have the signal linked up to an LED strip but it was too overpowering! I had to turn that one off.

March 18 2020March 18 2020

Frustration

I love Gran Turismo. I have done since I lived in Chicago Avenue in Gillingham. My landlord borrowed a PlayStation from his brother and it had Gran Turismo. He and I would play this game and slowly over time I have gotten more and more into this particular game. I’ve owned every version.

The last few versions have had online gaming and I have a love hate relationship with the online version. Gran Turismo Sport has a vibrant online gaming community and I suspect there are people who race online all the time. I don’t get to see them often because my qualifying times aren’t that great.

Online racing is frustrating at times because I could get knocked off at a corner (or straight) and then I am pretty much in last place. The person who did the knocking will probably get a time penalty but my race is pretty much over. Also, there are times when I get knocked or hit into but then I receive the time penalty. This is what happened in the following clip. I was on the outside of the last corner of the Blue Moon Speedway when a black car rammed the car on the outside of him, then that second car rammed into me and I got a 1 second penalty. On a fast track like this 1s is a disaster and I can only pray for the whole front pack to take each other out to get any decent level of points.

In this clip my car is the dirty orange looking colour. I was racing closely with 9th place “YOUR-INFERIOR”, spelling please, I gave him room in the penultimate corner and then feathered the throttle going into the last corner. You will see 11th place “Golf_RalleyG60” come up the inside too fast and “lean” on “YOUR-INFERIOR” causing them to drift outwards and smack into me. In the second view you can see things from ” Golf_RalleyG60″‘s point of view with a reverse look to see me get my penalty.

Sometimes the racing is really good and there’s an unspoken gentlemen’s agreement as people race. Sometimes the race is full of assholes.