I’ve recently had to deal with Razer and get a keyboard replaced. This started when one of the children complained about some of the keys not responding all the time. I quickly ignored this as I hadn’t noticed this and sometimes kids moan about things when really it’s a “them,” problem. However, later I noticed the same effect and one of the keys didn’t always respond. So I got in touch with Razer and went through their returns process. This was easy and annoying at the same time.
Initial contact was good but I did get an email saying that if I didn’t respond within 48 hours they would close my case. This was frustrating as I was away from my PC and I don’t really like using my phone to do work/typing stuff. But I did respond. Then they wanted a video of the problem, which was irritating as filming keypresses and the PC response to them was not the easiest, also trying to make the problem happen when it is intermittent meant a few tries recording.
Then, once the video was approved as showing a problem, I had to show that the keyboard did not work by cutting the USB cable. This would seem strange if I hadn’t experienced the same thing when returning a PlayStation steering wheel many years ago. Rather than spend money returning the product the company just want to make sure you can’t use your product so cutting the cable is the easiest and cheapest for them. I sent a photograph of the keyboard and cut cable. Did I think about how to do this to keep the keyboard operational? Of course. Did I think of a way to do that? No.
Next, the return was approved and I got an email telling me that a new keyboard will be sent to me. I do not know when that will be. Also, they said I might get a different type of keyboard depending on stock levels. All I can say is that if I get a different one it had better be more expensive than the one I am returning.
So, the delivery has occurred and it was quite painless. I had a DHL notification and I had that sent to a DHL centre as I’m never in my house when delivery people arrive. I would add that I didn’t get a “you can pick your parcel up” notification which was inconvenient as I had to keep checking their tracking website. Collecting the parcel was easy and quite local.
My keyboard was replaced with exact same type so I needn’t have worried about that. It also looked brand new in a sealed box so it’s not likely that it’s been refurbished. I want new stuff. It is plugged in and some keys replaced with different colours as specified by others in the household. I think it looks good. I’m back to being happy.
I recently upgraded a part of my gaming PC where a disk drive was running out of space. The Windows drive had pretty much become full with only a few tens of GB free. I was also worried as some apps keep NEEDING to be on the c: drive for some reason.
For these reasons I bought a 2TB SSD and installed it into my PC with a SATA link. This, I now know, was the wrong move but I migrated my c: data using the Samsung software and changed the boot order of the disks in the BIOS. This all seemed remarkably straight forward and didn’t actually take that long. I was happy.
Then, one day I happened to have a look at the physical set up of the drives in my PC and I realised there was a M.2 slot and the original c: drive was based on that. It showed up in the OS as a 250GB drive which was now empty. Given the improved speeds for read and write via a M.2 slot I decided I would upgrade the PC even more and move the OS to the direct motherboard contact.
I ordered and then installed a 2TB M.2 drive into the correct slot on the motherboard. Once I rebooted the PC I had a few screens of death and that was curious but checking the BIOS it all looked good. So eventually Windows started and I went about adding the Samsung 990 Pro to the drive list. Except, it wasn’t there! For some reason Windows couldn’t see the drive. I was frustrated.
I did some internet searching but a lot of the solutions pointed to AMD chipsets and I don’t have that. I tried re-booting and looking into the BIOS settings but I couldn’t see anything wrong. I used the Disk Management tool to see if it would see the drive but it refused. I genuinely didn’t know what to do until I found something that, I think, was called Storage Space. It was using the new drive! I have no idea what it does but I stopped the service and told it to stop using my new drive for this. Once that was done the M.2 SSD showed up in disk management.
It took around forty minutes for the data migration tool to transfer the contents of the c: drive to the new drive. Then I rebooted and told the Bios to boot from the 990 Pro. The computer seemed happy to do this and worked well! This was good news. I cleared the old SSD of the Windows files and now have a good deal of spare storage. I think I might move my gaming files to the older SSD as they are currently on a physical hard drive. I’ll think about it.
On Friday I was chatting to the Legend and I said I wouldn’t buy X-Plane 12 because XP 11 is pretty good and most of my payware might not transfer over. Well, it took all of about 12 hours to change my mind and buy X-Plane 12 even though it’s the development product. It took a while to download because I got the scenery for the whole world – why wouldn’t you!
I had to set up the joystick and configure the keys so they work as I like. This didn’t take a massive amount of time but it’s frustrating when all you want to do is fly around and see the world.
Citation X in the Andes
The scenery is amazing. I have turned most graphics settings up to maximum and this works well with my RTX graphics card. I’m getting >20fps which for a flight simulator, especially X-Plane, is pretty darn good. Also, using the taskmaster I can see that the GPU is being used at around 90% and this pleases me. It’s worth having something you’ve paid for working as it should.
Citation X in the Andes
I’ve added in some of my custom scenery and it seems to be working well. So, I have my airport in Keswick, which doesn’t exist in reality but it does mean I’m in the Lake District immediately and can fly around and bomb shit.
F-14D in the Lake District
Now all I have to do is continue my flight around the world and get back to the UK so I can attempt to learn more. My payware aircraft from XP11 kinda work. I’ve tried the T-7 and as long as I keep the throttle high enough it seems to work ok. If I drop the throttle to idle the engine dies and that’s a touch embarrassing.
Citation X in the Andes
I’m somewhere in Chile at the moment and I’m heading to an airport on Antarctica. I have no idea what will exist when I get there and I’m only doing it so I can say I’ve “been” to every continent in my around the world flight. Here’s to many more hours of fun.
I think I’m going to stop. I’ve bought a beast of a machine with screens to match those abilities. I remember I first bought a PC for making music and I wasn’t really bothered about gaming performance, and that’s still mostly true. I’m not a hardcore PC gamer but I am very interested in flying. It just happens to turn out that the flight sim of choice – X-Plane is quite consuming of PC power. It’s also an odd program with the way it utilises the cores of the PC. Anyway. I’ve been trying to get the best flight simulation screen-age. I think I’m there although to use all the pixels to the maximum I will need another PC but that’s going to have to wait.
The Beautiful Front View
I’m not going to go through the specification of everything. Needless to say I’m very happy with it all. The curved monitor is very bright! It also chucks out a lot of heat so I think I’m not doing my bit for the environment. To keep everything in this position there’s a level of chaos to the reverse view:
Takes To Have Beauty
The curved screen has its own stand and the two top monitors are connected via 100mm VESA things to different arms on the metre high pole screwed to the desk. Look, it all works fine and is lined up to within tolerances.
This is communication 1953 and so here are some things that happened in that year of the common era in keeping with recent tradition:
Derek Bentley is executed [murdered by the state] in Wandsworth prison.
The North Sea flood kills over 2000 in coastal countries.
I recently spent some time at RAF Syerston and saw plenty of flight simulators there and generally the fashion was that you can’t have too many screens. So, because I’ve had a spare screen sitting on the dining room table for the last eighteen months I decided to fit it, again, to the PC. The only place it can go is at “the top” although I’d be tempted to place it into an aircraft instruments position at some point. I had all the gear because I had already tried the monitor there, but didn’t like the look of it. I’ve probably changed my mind for now.
The Flight Simulator System
So, this screen shows the flight simulator running with aircraft view on the right and various instrument views on the other screens. I’m not entirely sure I like this set up and I will try another way of doing this.
Have changed to have the cockpit view spread across the two centre screens, ancillary instruments at the top and a tablet with flight information on it under the main screens. This set up makes more sense as far as I’m concerned. I know the items on the upper screen wouldn’t be there in a real cockpit but I don’t have the kit to move the monitor. It would take too much hassle to make it look proper and I don’t use the PC as a flight sim all the time anyway.
Current Flight Sim Set Up
I’m not necessarily happy about the bezels in the middle of the cockpit view and I know I could adjust the offset to make it look slightly more realistic, but then I would also lose some of the centre instrumentation. I guess the only answer is a massive curved screen. Maybe I’ll get one sometime in the future but I am massively aware that my hot water boiler is fucked and I need to think sensibly about spending money for the next while!!
This is communication number 1942 and so here are a few [non WWII] things that happened that year:
The Sikorsky R-4 first flies
A coal dust explosion in china claims 1549 lives.
The first nuclear accident occurs in Leipzig.
Plutonium is isolated.
The first man-made self sustaining nuclear chain reaction at Stagg Field in Chicago.
My current flight sim plans are wandering around the Earth from airport to airport and just enjoying the views. I’m currently heading down the west coast of Africa and have recently started recording my journey on Twitter. I don’t use Twitter a huge amount at the moment because ultimately no-one cares what I think and I have friends whom I can moan to about things.
Having just clicked on the hashtag I can see that there are many people using the same hashtag but in reality. They are travelling around the world. Well, given the current pandemic, I am not. Also, I don’t have the money and I have other responsibilities at the moment so I don’t think I can. My next trip is to Scotland in February.
X-Plane Control Panel – iOS
This is a screen capture of the X-Plane Control Panel on my iPhone. It looks at the information in X-Plane on the PC and gives me information about my flight. The bottom display is my glideslope approach to an airport, the middle display is a kind of map with weather display and the top is my PFD. I’m quite impressed with the extra information I get and I’ve been using the glideslope when my approach is through clouds. None of those landings have been successful though and I generally fly those routes again or it seems like I’m cheating. One thing that does happen though is once the iPhone is connected it changes the weather from real-world to whatever the settings are on the phone and that’s a frustration, I will look into this to see if I can correct it.
This is the system I use to play on the flight simulator. I really enjoy my time flying around the world virtually and trying to split the journey up into twenty minute flights.
X-Plane Set Up
The stuff I have here is a HOTAS system from Logitech, two PC screens, keyboard and mouse from Razer along with two external displays. The Samsung tablet runs some software giving me a PFD and the information involved there. My phone runs some software which is similar to the tablet PFD but also includes glideslope information and forward terrain. In the picture below you can see my chair, which I absolutely love. It’s a lovely chair.
My Favourite Chair
It was quite hard to get the camera to take a reasonable photograph of the system because I have a polarising filter on the lens and as the displays are also polarised, but in different directions, it means that I couldn’t really get the best direction of the polarisation. But I did ok. Here is what it looks like at its worst.
Early on in this pandemic that is fucking the world I started playing Minecraft pretty much so I could engage in conversations with my kids and understand a little about the world they were obsessed with. I still don’t know everything but I know what I like and enjoy and so I’ve been building. It gave me purpose. I hated it at times, having to head off to the farm to get wool or go and get supplies so I can make concrete. I considered making a squid farm at one point, but just changed my design to have less black concrete. I quite liked the process of building a thing and then changing my mind about what I wanted to to look like or how to complete a particular section. I would often think about what to do while I was running or working.
I haven’t done everything I want. There are things I kept thinking about that I could make to increase the complexity of the build and make it look even better. I wanted exhaust tubes to be built heading from the base of the launchpad up to the ground level around 100 blocks away and these would have smoke constantly pouring out of them to look as though the rocket was taking off. I wanted to build a launch control centre like the one at Kennedy for the Apollo launches but I only have so much time and there are other things I like doing. I’m not a complete obsessive!
Once I had done enough – I don’t think I should say finished – I tried to figure out the best way to save this build for posterity. I have the world save files backed up and stored on a NAS and in the cloud. But I wanted to be able to show this off I guess so I looked into making a YouTube walkthrough. Now, I have some rules about this website and I decided I should have rules about the videos. I wasn’t going to feature my ugly face, but I decided I would in the end. I have an opening title card – ha ha, created in MS Paint – yes it looks cheap but these are my first videos. Not sure what I’ll do next. I’ve been really impressed with the video recording software and I found it very intuitive. So, here is the first in the series, Episode 1 of Megaship 3000.
It turns out I can talk much better if I have wine and it amuses me how stilted and staccato my opening words are. I think I relax a little once I get going and know what to talk about. Many, many thanks to Penguin for giving me feedback on the first few attempts at a video and I would also like to thank the penguin chicks for their advice which, as seasoned YouTube watchers, was really good. I guess it’s now time to publicise my efforts and think about a release schedule! There are eight episodes in all and I guess, one day, I might do this again.
So, Bedrock edition just got updated to include Ray Tracing in the standard edition. This meant I had to update the server as well and the results are bloody gorgeous. I’m using the most basic texture pack but it still looks absolutely amazing.
Minecraft With Ray Tracing
It’s a shame this won’t be on the PS4 but it works on the PC and that is where I am going to record the tour videos of this build. One thing is that glowstones don’t shine as bright and all the lighting I had sorted out to look lovely has been adjusted. But it looks bloody lovely.
Turns out that today is Friday 13th. Not that I’m bothered by that. I’ve had some bad luck recently but if I linked that to a random date then that would really be pushing the causation correlation fallacy. My recent bad luck is mostly my PC blowing up but also my left leg refusing to work yesterday morning. So far today things have been OK.
Chillblast have sent me a new PSU for the PC and last night I fitted it. The PC powered up and all seemed good, so I powered it down and then cable tied everything in place within the PC cabinet. When I fitted an extra HDD to the PC shortly after it arrived I only had a blue SATA cable and that didn’t match all the other cables so I replaced that for a black one and now the insides of the PC look all lovely. More importantly I have a functioning PC and there doesn’t seem to be any damage from the explosion last week. It all seems to be working well.
Two albums were released today and I purchased them. I expect there were many more albums released that just these two but these were the only ones I cared about. I have, of course, bought the new AC/DC album, Power Up, because. I will listed to that later but I expect it to be full of solid AC/DC songs and definitely not a disappointment. GrooVenoM also released their latest album and I got that too. I like all their music, I do prefer the mix and sound of the first album but the band deserve my support. It’s a nice mix of everything I like and so sounds different and familiar at the same time.
GrooVenoM AC/DC
Since my Minecraft server runs from my PC I’ve been doing other things on the PS4, which pretty much means I’ve been playing Gran Turismo Sport which I probably would have done anyway. I was racing with my Mazda and noticed that I had driven quite a distance in it!
Mazda Atenza Gr.3
If you look at the right hand side lower panel you can see I have driven 3,266 miles in this machine. I think it’s the car I have used most but I could be wrong. Perhaps I should look up the statistics for my Porsche also! I wondered then what my total distance within this one game was and went to my career summary:
GT Sport Progress
21,669 miles in total when I took this screenshot. That’s not too shabby! I’m a little embarrassed of my Sportsmanship Rating because it has been up to a grade B but I’m not sure what happened there. I think I did quit an online race a couple of weeks ago after being forced off the track and ending up in last place but other than that I think my driving is generally OK. I’ll see if I can work to bring that rating back up a little.
Well, since the PC died I’d been feeling a little disconnected from everything. There’s only so much browsing you can do from a phone and using a work computer. I don’t always bring my work laptop home as I have access to all my files using the cloud. But now, I have a full screen browser: I’m using my spare Raspberry Pi.
I have two Pis. One is in the loft supplying Radar 360 with data of aircraft flying around one hundred miles from my house. The other was in the dining room and ran as a Magic Mirror. The Magic Mirror was my first lockdown project and I really enjoyed it. A problem occurred when I updated the software and it removed all my careful programming. Considering I didn’t use it a lot I decided I would re-purpose the DR Pi and now it is running on the main PC monitor and I have a device I can browse and see web information. I’m almost happy again. I just want my PC working again.
Kaboom went something in the house and all the wall sockets died, the sound of silence only returned once all cooling fans slowed to a stop. No noise from the boiler, the fridge, the TV. No music. No Google home. There was light but no rock and roll.
Investigations led to the house circuit breaker and the wall sockets having tripped. I went around and turned off many plugs. The sound came from somewhere in either the kitchen or the dining room so first suspect was the boiler. It is old and makes strange noises at times. Second suspect was the PC. It is young and lovely but loves those electrons. I flipped the circuit break back and some sounds returned – the fridge woke up and started making circulation noises. First plug to try turning on was the boiler. Click. All seemed normal. The boiler clock made its clicking noise and after a short while the gas started burning to warm the house. I was actually slightly upset it wasn’t the boiler, it meant the it was more likely to be suspect two and I do like my PC.
So, I crouched to power up the PC. CRACK and a flash. Everything turned off again. I had found my perpetrator. The PC was fucked. The flash seemed to come from the PSU and so I am hoping that once I can get the unit sent off it will be replaced and no other damage has occurred. Best case scenario is that the PSU alone went NFG and all the data is secure and everything else inside the PC is fine. A medium case scenario is that the power fried some of the processor or GPU and that’s under warranty and so that doesn’t really bother me. Worst case scenario is that some of the data drives are buggered. I won’t lose anything as it’s either all backed up or easy enough to redownload but it would take a couple of weeks to get everything back to normal.
So, I have some mild inconvenience at the moment. I’d just bought a new screen for the PC and I was looking forward to spending time flying around the UK in X-Plane. The PC also acts as my Minecraft server and so my current mega-build has been put on hold. Thinking about it now, I don’t think I have a backup of that world. If it’s gone then I suppose I’ll have a big shrug of my shoulders and start another. I’ll be sad for a while as I had plans and projects to complete but it would be fun starting again.
Annoyingly this all happened just as the UK enters another lockdown and so I’m not sure how long it will take the PC company to get back to me. It might be that they have to shut down for a while and so now it’s all up in the air and I’ll just be sitting here twiddling my thumbs doing my best to avoid ordering a PS5.
It turns out I’m a sucker for some kinds of advertising. Normally it’s the advertising that solves a particular problem I have had or something that’s been playing on my mind. I bought the NVIDA Shield TV after seeing an advert on a graphics card driver update loading screen. I bought a SONOS Move after it was announced and they sent me an email letting me know about their new products. I guess I’m a sucker mostly. I bought a new television after “popping” into Richer Sounds and picking up their catalogue, there was a Philips Ambilight TV on the front. I didn’t buy one straight away but I would think it was within two weeks. I think the adverts have to be technology based for me to want to get whatever the product is. I haven’t been disappointed by my purchases but that might be just the sunk-cost fallacy kicking in.
I get emails from X-Plane about new aircraft, scenery, plugins and ideas and recently they sent one with a lovely F-16 model but that’s coming in a around GBP40 and I don’t really think that is a sensible purchase. Below the F-16 was an advert for a web-based glass cockpit simulator. I didn’t need much persuading, I looked at the shop page and decided I would get it. The current instrument panel I have on my [old] tablet takes ages to load and the refresh rate is quite slow. This would at least mean I could use any browser on any device and see flight instruments.
Suck You In Email
Just look at that F-16, it’s gorgeous. Except for the conformal fuel tanks over the wing root, I really think they spoil the lines of the craft. So, I bought SkyScout. It works well, it’s a small webserver which reads the data from X-Plane and then serves that to a browser on the LAN. I initially used the old Samsung tablet but it’s so old that the browser isn’t supported anymore. I then used a laptop and it worked really well but I didn’t want to have to keep getting the laptop set up when I wanted to fly around the world. So, I thought about a second monitor for the PC. It’s specification is high enough that it should be able to cope. The choices were about whether to get a small monitor or large. How much was I prepared to spend. Should it have touch capability? I really like the touchscreen I currently have as I can operate cockpit switches just by touching the screen – assuming the cockpit deign has hotspots.
I decided the screen had to be the same size as the current monitor so 27″. This, is quite frankly, ridiculous. I remember when I moved into my current home I had a 28″ widescreen flat TV that was pretty good for its day and that would now seem tiny. That TV ended up being given to Mr Pom, I think I remember carrying it up the stairs to their flat. So, screen size was sorted. The existing monitor has a large bevel and that would mean everything looks uneven but there wasn’t a lot I could do about that. Touchscreen costs are a lot more than a standard monitor so that was an easy decision. It was also quite fortunate as the touchscreen can only operate one of the desktops. So, only one monitor can run a touchscreen and it can only operate one of the desktop areas. I lucked in there.
I opted for a reasonable Philips monitor and ordered another screen arm and also I had to order a DP cable. All of these items arrived on the same day but late and so I decided to complete the build the next day. I couldn’t sleep well and I don’t know if it was tech-excitement or just the fact that I couldn’t sleep well. I also woke up quite well at 0500 and I think this is due to a neighbour leaving for work around that time, I think it’s just enough noise to nudge me awake as I sleep with the window slightly open. This morning there was a full blown conversation happening at 0450 as two people stood outside their RUNNING vehicles and chatted about stuff. I did at least get back to sleep. I love the sound of the rain and I wish it rained more.
The first set up I tried was to have both screens in landscape and next to each other. I think this made the whole unit too large and too much headsweep was needed to look from one edge to the other. The new Philips monitor is the main screen and will be used as the gaming monitor while the old ACER monitor is now the secondary, information giving screen. In this view you can see the system as it was set up for a couple of days.
Another X-Plane Set Up
The aim is to turn the keyboard and ancillary equipment to face the right a little more. As a system it worked well but I did think that having the ACER monitor as portrait would be more interesting and serve a more natural feature as the extra screen for information. I mentioned this to Penguin and he agreed, it seemed that it would work quite well along with fitting within the floor area of the desk and also making the bevel less obvious. So, yesterday morning I spent some time adjusting the left monitor to the portrait position. I needed to perform a little extra cable management and also move both monitor support stands so it would fit in the available space.
Current X-Plane Set Up
This is the current set up and will likely remain the monitor positions for a while. I like it. I think the left monitor looks good and fits better than landscape. Windows seems happy enough with the monitors being like this and the touchscreen still works and maps correctly to the portrait screen. I’ve had to find some wallpaper and set that up as Windows doesn’t want to have slideshows from different folders for different screens and that is something I can live with. There exist plenty of programs that can sort that out but I don’t really want to install more stuff on to the computer. As I write this X-Plane is downloading scenery for the rest of the world because when I installed it onto this computer I only covered Europe and northern America. It’s taken around an hour of download running at around six megabytes per second. My X-Plane installation currently consumes 442GB of my hard drive.
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.
Minecraft World
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 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
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.
My Suspension Railway Bridge
My Standard Railway Bridge
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.
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.
The Rig
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.
F-7A parked at Lydd
T-7A Taxi
Grumman Goose in the Lake District
MV-22B on a misty day in the Lakes
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.
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.
Terrible Picture Of New PC
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.
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.
Here’s a look at my flight simulation set up. There’s a decent screen for the PC, the 10.1″ tablet which displays a moving map image and the HOTAS system for controlling the machine. I am going through the process of setting up the programmable functions of the stick so that flying is efficient.
What do I do? Hard to explain. Last night I went from Sint Maartin to Anguilla and landed successfully. My current favourite plane is the Dassault Rafale.
