April 2020 – Fooyah

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 18 2020April 19 2020

Seems Right

It’s a weird time I guess. I’ve been getting through the days partly because I’m used to having quite a lot of time at home – I get six weeks off in the summer – in fact I think there are only three summers I’ve ever worked through! The main difference between normal summers and now is I’m normally quite busy travelling around and doing things. At the moment I’m at home, which is OK. I’ve got some things I can do as a routine:

Gran Turismo – a couple of races each day, trying to get better online.
Laughingly trying to write music.
Daily exercise.
Getting through some TV shows.
Watching movies.
Reading a book.
Actual work starts again in a couple of days.
Trying other games on the PC or PS4.
Food shopping once a week.
Thinking about what to do or making plans of things to do in the house but probably not getting the motivation to do that.

Along with these things I’ve also been doing the right thing by following my pay-for-it policy. So, while I can and while I am in a position to still pay for things, I’ve been trying to pay for things. I’m very lucky that I have a state provided job. I’m going to assume the state will continue because if that fails we are all fucked and it’s not worth thinking about. So, for the next while I should be getting paid. Because I am able I will buy some more albums and I am also paying for podcasts I listen to because they delight me so much and they keep me settled. The amount I pay for them is pretty small compared to the benefits I get. Some people might ask why pay for this stuff if it’s free? Because it’s the right thing to do.

So, here are some things that I am currently paying for [which are also available for nothing]:

God Awful Movies – podcast
Citation Needed – podcast
Faderhead – music producer
The Scathing Atheist – podcast
Cognitive Dissonance – podcast

Recent albums I’ve bought are:

Another Piece Of The Action – S.P.O.C.K
From Beer To Eternity – Ministry
Amerikkkant – Ministry
How Do You Feel Today – Rotersand
Dawn – HORSKH
Gate – HORSKH
Nachright vom Feind – Jadu

I’ve also been involved in helping to fund a few books that I’ve been interested in. I’m currently hoping that a Hush-Kit book will be published and that’s through a website called Unbound.

There may be a time when I can’t pay for these things. If that comes then society is going to be in a really bad place and these little things won’t be enough to keep me happy anyway.

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 17 2020April 17 2020

Screaming Symphony – Impellitteri

This is going to be a terrible review of this album. I’ll explain why in a moment. I wrote about Crunch much earlier on in this series of reviews and my gut instincts are still the same. At some point soon I will write about “Stand In Line” which is amazing – I love it. I was given a tape of this album in the late 80s and I have always enjoyed it.

I would describe this music as a cross between Yngwie J Malmsteen and Megadave. You have that speed melody and heavy crunching guitars at times. Sometimes the riffs sound almost Dio like, especially “Rat Race” and “You Are The Fire”.

This album is quite poor and derivative. It’s been done better elsewhere. I was listening to it while writing this but I am more looking forward to the next album review!!

April 15 2020April 15 2020

Globe Master

This morning I was watching my MagicMirror and up popped a RRR callsign on the aircraft near me section. Well, it wasn’t near me but it was close because there aren’t really any aircraft out there at the moment as the world has gone to shit. I checked with 360 Radar and it looked as though this RAF Cargo flight would pass quite close. So I got the camera and headed out to the garden to see what I could get.

Here’s a cropped view, which looks a little better.

Also, because the weather’s been nice here’s a photo of one of the plants in the garden. It was taken by son #1 and is a pretty good shot.

April 14 2020April 14 2020

Scream Aim Fire – Bullet For My Valentine

I got this album, I don’t know when. I have seen them live. But they are OK, just not really for me. I do like the heavy riff in the title track but other than that, I couldn’t tell you much about this album.

April 13 2020April 13 2020

Scourge – Xentrix

I bought this because Xentrix were a band who I had listened to in the early 90s. I think I had a music cassette by them and it might have been a live album. I don’t think it was brilliant but it was ok. I’m not sure I’ve listened to this album although I did see Xentrix live two summers ago.

April 12 2020April 12 2020

Secure

Yesterday I took the plunge and decided to do something that had taken me around two years to get to. I think the time was mostly because it was going to cost me money and the benefits weren’t that obvious to me. Back in January I migrated this site to a server somewhere and started paying a hosting company for the privilege. Yesterday I paid to get a secure certificate for this site.

I am now the registered owner of this domain and that is proven with this security certificate. So you can see up in the address bar one of those padlock symbols. This means that anything you enter to this website from your computer can’t be read by anyone else. Not that should really have a need to enter anything on this site, unless you search for something. Also, when I’m editing this site it now uses a secure connection which means my password is encrypted.

Down at the bottom there’s a little picture tag showing the authority that approves my owning a certificate allowing me to run the secure server. All sorted.

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.