Toys – Page 2 – Fooyah

May 9 2024

The Portal

I have and have not wanted a PlayStation Portal since I saw they were released. There was a period of time that I had a notification from a stock checking site to try and buy one but I was always too late to the party. I nearly managed to order one from Currys but then the order got cancelled as they had run out of stock. So, I gave up on stock checking sites and just thought I’d be ok without one.

So, I had settled myself to not owning a Portal, I can always use remote play on my iPhone if I wanted to even though I really hate using screens as controllers. Then, one day, EE sent me a text message saying they were selling Portals in their shop. Even though I had mentally settled on not owning one, I somehow went through the entire order process and ended up having a Portal delivered to my home.

The above image is a poor photograph because you can’t see the main features of the Portal which would be the controller part of it. But you can see that I am logged into Fortnite. I have found that the Portal works really well on my home network. I haven’t tested it fully on another Wi-Fi network yet, but I am going to do so this weekend. So far it seems a great little device, as long as you have connectivity. If you don’t then it’s just a lump of plastic and electronics.

One of my main methods of connecting to my PS5 will be via my phone’s hotspot. I figured that I pay for quite a bit of data so I might as well start to use the allocation. However, when I first tried to connect to my iPhone the Portal said it couldn’t connect. I tried again and I still got an error message. I spent a little while using Google and I found a number of pages where they said it was not possible as iPhone doesn’t support the particular NATs or whatever. I was somewhat upset at this.

Then, through a random Reddit post I saw that someone had connected to an iPhone using manual settings in the Portal and so I tried that. It worked!!! I now have the best of all worlds. I am a happy chappy.

May 9 2024

Portal Gateway

This communication should come after the next one as I have some writing to do about my new toy. I bought a PlayStation Portal and have been using it to play from somewhere that isn’t my lounge. I was quite worried when I tried to connect to a hotspot from my phone because the Portal refused to connect. What would be the point of having a Portal if I can’t connect wherever I get mobile service?

I spent some time googling and there were many pages saying that “nope, it’s an iPhone thing” and also that the wrong type of NAT is supported or something like that. So, I started looking into a wifi device just for the Portal to use when I am not in wifi range.

Then . . . . . today I stumbled onto a Reddit post that listed the manual wifi settings to connect to an iPhone hotspot. I tested it and I am very happy to announce that it worked, so I am now able to connect and play via my iPhone hotspot. I have decided to write the settings here, mainly as a reminder for me in case the Portal resets itself or something. Also, maybe other people will find these settings if they need them.

SSID – whatever your iPhone is called
Password – WPA2, and the password is whatever your iPhone says in the “allow other devices” section.
IP – 172.20.10.10 [the last number you can change from 02 to 15.
Subnet Mask – 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway – 172.20.10.1
DNS – 8.8.8.8

April 13 2024

I’d Been Aiming For This

Over the time of playing the recent chapter/season or whatever it’s called of Fortnite I had hoped that the opportunity to jump the train in a vehicle would arise. I had tried before and it didn’t really work. But recently I did manage it and I managed to capture the video of it. I have removed the sound as other people were talking while I did this.

March 28 2024

It Takes Skill

A favourite thing to do in the game Fortnite is to drive around and surprise people. Even better is to be in a convoy of a few vehicles just driving around the map because it’s fun. I recently drove through some of the Underworld and then somehow managed to park my Jeep exactly sideways in a corridor – it takes skill.

Just Park - Fortnite — Just Park – Fortnite

March 21 2024March 21 2024

Consoles I Have Owned

The Commodore 64 – I know it’s not a console but it was used for “educational purposes” [gaming].

Public Domain, Link

The Sega Megadrive – bought in second year of university.

Public Domain, Link

The Sony PlayStation – Used to play Gran Turismo on my Landlord’s PS. Got my own eventually.

Public Domain, Link

The Sony PlayStation 2 – installed a network card, played Navy Seals online and hated it.

Public Domain, Link

The Sony PlayStation 3 – bought from an airport. The original had multi memory card readers and Super Audio CD capabilities. It died and I got a newer one which had none of those capabilities. It now lives at work.

Public Domain, Link

The Sony PlayStation 4 – This lives on the wall in the dining room. LAN connected rather than WiFi, obviously.

Public Domain, Link

The Sony PlayStation 5 – this takes pride of place in the lounge. Wired connections obviously and HDMI through 7.2 amp into 4K HDR television.

Public Domain Link

Honourable mention goes to the Sega Saturn which I hired for a weekend in around 1994/5, possibly hired from Blockbuster.

Public Domain, Link

March 21 2024

Phew

I’ve spent some time trying to work through the new Gran Turismo Licences that came in a recent update. Sometimes these are frustrating because I’m sure the demonstration video car has more front end grip than I do. I had a similar feeling when I looked at the Lewis Hamilton replays in a previous challenge. Anyway, assuming my times are distributed with a mean close to the Gold time I will eventually get Gold because of natural variation. Curiously if I’m a second behind I know there’s lots of room for improvement and I don’t feel despondent but if I’m close to the Gold time I get most frustrated because I’m continually close but not great. I can’t remember which particular trial I’m taking in the picture but I was very glad to get Gold.

March 7 2024

NVMe

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.

February 29 2024

Random Events In Pairs

I’m really not a fan of “loot boxes” in computer games. The latest version of Gran Turismo has a kinda-loot box but at least it’s not one you can use real money to get. The task is to complete just over 26 miles of driving within the game within a day. If you manage that you then get a “random” prize. The prizes go from around 5000 in-game credits to cars and even a million in-game credits [I think]. Anyway, plenty of people moan about the consistency of “winning” the 5000 credits. As a counter argument this is what happened to me on consecutive days:

Gran Turismo Not A Loot Box - 1 — Gran Turismo Not A Loot Box – 1

Gran Turismo Not A Loot Box - 2 — Gran Turismo Not A Loot Box – 2

I guess it’s not all bad.

January 28 2024

Taking In The Views

I’ve spent a little time recently flying in X-Plane. Now that my journey around the world is complete I’ve decided to spend some time learning start up and shut down checklists to get a real feel for the aircraft. I’m currently playing with the T-6A Texan that the RAF uses as a basic jet trainer. It’s a good little aircraft. Here are some views that I’ve photographed recently:

RAF Wittering - Through The Ages — RAF Wittering – Through The Ages

I’m really enjoying the whole – potter about a bit – approach to exploring the UK. I’m trying to improve my take-off and landings at the moment, a little crucial you might think, but making them smooth and “butter” is taking some time.

January 23 2024January 23 2024

Platinum Trophy

Well, I’ve finally done it. I’ve got all the Trophies in Gran Turismo 7, or any PlayStation game, and I am happy. For the last couple of months I have been either working through challenges, racing online, or grinding to get money. I had three trophies to get when I thought a Platinum was within reach. I had to complete 50 races online, this was easy, just time and frustration at people trying to knock me off the track, but I completed the 50. I had to take 100 pictures using Scapes mode, this was time again especially as I didn’t just want to keep pressing the shutter button – I wanted most of the pictures to be a decent quality. The final trophy was to buy three absolute classic cars.

Prius in a car park. — A Detailed Version Of My Actual Car In a Car Park – Taken within GT7

A Jaguar valued at 20,000,000 credits
A ford valued at around 5,000,000 credits
A Ferrari valued around 9,500,000 credits

These cars appear occasionally in some in-game dealership and so not only did I need the money to get them I also needed to keep checking the dealership to buy the car when they appeared. I think this has taken around a month. I managed to get the Jag and Ford easy enough but have spent the last two weeks waiting for the Ferrari. I also as orking hard to secure the 9,500,000 credits I needed. Part of me considered using actual real cash to buy some in-game credits but they are about GBP15 for 2,000,000 credits and so I asn’t going to spaff GBP60 or so real money on an in-game car. The grinding continued.

Yesterday morning I checked the game store and the Ferrari was in there. However for whatever reason was decided it now cost 20,000,000. I was a little gutted as I had already saved 9,500,000 for the original price. I decided that I could wait and then it struck me. I have loads of cars I don’t care about and so I sold some of the racing cars I own. This I did and very quickly made the required purchase price.

I now own a Platinum trophy in the cybers and I’m very happy. There’s still plenty of the game I have left to complete. I’ve got to get gold in all the new licences, win every standard race and then maybe compete a little online. Oh, there are also the challenges or mission things to do so I have plenty more things to be getting on with.

PlayStation screen capture of GT7 trophies. — GT7 Trophy List