I’ve been trying to get the last car in Gran Turismo to complete the café menu. I need twenty million credits. I also need the car to be in the store. Every now and then I get distracted by other cars that appear in the shop or that are new in the dealer area. Hence, I’m not that close to the required funds yet. So, the weekly time trials is a good way of making money and also completing the daily marathon driving distance.
Still Happy With It – GT Speed
Here’s my time from one of the latest challenges. I’m just under 4% away from the fastest in the world. I’m still happy with this. It seems not too bad for someone who plays a little each day and not all day every day.
I’ve been testing the new PC set up by flying around places I’ve recently visited. It’s nice to see how these places are recreated in X-Plane. I think it looks pretty good, it’s good fun also.
Hurst Castle via X-Plane
I’ll soon write about a visit to this castle and some other places in Hampshire and Dorset. I flew over Hurst castle to see how it was created within the flight simulator.
Portsmouth via X-Plane
I haven’t been to Portsmouth for quite a while but I am planning to head back there soon. It looks good in this early morning flight. Note the aircraft carrier.
The New Forest via X-Plane
Having stayed in the New Forest recently it was nice to fly over it. There’s quite a bit of air activity in the New Forest as it’s within the ILS of Bournemouth International. There are a few 737s, the odd Airbus A340 and some Draken Air Dassault Falcon 20s.
I have recently completed a couple of nice little games that I thoroughly enjoyed. It’s quite rare for me to play games other than the “big three” – Gran Turismo, Minecraft, and Fortnite. These are my standard games and I probably play a little of them everyday. I tend to want games that I can jump in and out of and the time needed for a session doesn’t matter. GT7 I can play for a few laps or a longer race depending on how much time I have in the real world. Minecraft is a world contained on a server and so I get to play that whenever I want and I can do as much or as little as I feel like. Fortnight I play to be with the Legend and spend time with them.
I did recently play some other games and really enjoyed them. They weren’t too stressy and I knew they could be played for a little while and saved easily. Also, I didn’t really have to learn new controls – this is important to me as if I only play a game a little bit spread out over time I don’t want to have to learn a new control system.
Atomfall
This is a game of wandering around the Lake District in the early 1960s [it could be the 1950s I didn’t pay that much attention] and you have to survive and escape. I love the Lake District and had wanted to play this for a while, then I think the price was reduced and I had a half term break so decided I would go for it.
The Lake District – looking gorgeous – Atomfall
I played the game on easy mode and even then I died quite a bit! I really enjoyed the story, the scenery, and the gameplay. I think my favourite thing though was the occasional crashed helicopter and the militaria of the age. The whole game really captured the time period. It was a really nice game to play.
Under The Waves
This game follows Stan, a North Sea diver, and explores their journey after the death of their daughter. For me, the cut scenes were a little too long. I don’t really care about those things, but I know the story was important to this game. I enjoyed the pace of this game and each day I could swim around and do the jobs I was meant to do. There weren’t any time restrictions within the game as those can make things really stressful. So I was able to explore with ease.
Under The Waves – from the press pack
I enjoyed the game. That’s the point isn’t it? To enjoy things.
I’ve been playing Atomfall and I’ve really been enjoying it. I am playing in almost-peaceful mode because I want to enjoy the game. I’ve still died plenty of times though! The developers set the game in the Lake District in the 1950s after the Windscale accident. I really like the look and feel of the game. It’s got proper sci-fi feels about it.
Gran Turismo has weekly time trails using various cars around various tracks. I try to take part each time because it’s a good way to get credits and also rates your driving against the rest of the world. I normally get a silver award for these which means I’m within 5% of the time of the fastest in the world. Recently I got gold for being within 3%.
Gran Turismo Within 3%
I’m also within the margin by over 1/10 second which I consider a good result. So, another 1.5 seconds knocked off my time and I’d be best in the world – highly unlikely. I only play for around thirty minutes a day so I’m never going to be the best. I’m also working on getting gold in all the master licences but that is taking quite a bit of time!
Gran Turismo Overall Progress
I go in phases with this game. Sometimes I play enough every day for the daily workout prize and then sometimes I leave it for a couple of weeks. I’m half and half at the moment because I’ve been playing AtomFall which I am enjoying a lot.
In testing for video output and uploads on the PC I decided I would try flying a floatplane in X-Plane. I chose to take off from Rochester, UK and land on the river Medway. This is not as silly as it seems because eighty years ago the Shorts Brothers made seaplanes in Rochester and they slid down a gangway to the river Medway for their first flight. The whole area is now residential but you can still see the gangway which is a historical object. It would have been nice to still have seaplanes and floatplanes taking off from there.
This is a terrible film. There. That pretty much sums it up. I rated it 2/10 on IMDB and although I didn’t leave the cinema before the film had ended I certainly fell asleep and did not care about anything in this film. It’s terrible. Such a shame. They could have made an amazing story, but no. They did not.
A couple of months ago a van was blocking my car which was parked by the side of the road. It turned out to be people installing fibre optic cables (invented in Harlow) to the telegraph poles in the village so that people can get fibre to property. Until then the village had FTC, which is fibre to cabinet and then metal wire to houses. This meant I was getting a bandwidth of about 74Mb/s, Upload was limited to around 10Mb/s. This is not a bad bandwidth, but at times it does need to be better, especially when there are around five devices that need updating with new software.
About three weeks after I saw these fibre installers I had an email offer to upgrade my broadband to FTP – fibre to property. I jumped on the chance. I ordered the new system and then just had to wait for my install date. Fortunately for me the install date was scheduled for a day when I am not in work. There was more of a problem as far as I was concerned which was where will the new modem/router go in the house? The house has been set up with the router in a specific place that allows wi-fi throughout the whole building and is the hub of all the wired devices. There are around ten devices wired into the LAN and there are also four switches that run the traffic near those devices. There was a video to watch which seemed to imply that I can request that the modem/router goes where ever I want. I knew that wasn’t going to be the case.
I spent a while thinking about how to arrange the home network if the router could not be placed where I wanted it. Given there are switches and it’s all kinda connected so doesn’t matter which way the traffic flows I decided I could live with the router in the front room of the house, the only real problem could be wi-fi range, the back of my house is quite a distance from the front of the house. I ordered a new switch and ethernet cable to allow for network connection.
On the day of the installation I had everything ready, I knew where things were going to go and I had options if they couldn’t be placed there. I also had a new extension lead placed in the front room because there could be two extra sockets needed, also the sofa is powered but that’s for another day. I chatted with the installer. I could have the router where I wanted it but each corner put in the fibre cable would drop the bandwidth slightly. This then gave me the thoughts that perhaps the ethernet from the fibre-decoder went via the switches to the router in the middle room. This is a possible solution. The installer chap said this was possible but I’m not sure he understood the finer elements of networking. I googled while he was working and I could have done this but only if my switches are managed and allow VLAN. They might allow VLAN but they are not managed and that is a level of stuff slightly beyond my confidence level. Then, I had the genius idea of placing the router above the AV centre and this would give a slightly higher range through the house.
So, the installation went well. The system was tested and it all worked. Then the person left and I took on the task of setting all the stuff up. There’s DDNS servers to configure, ports to forward and static IPs to set up. I have a spreadsheet for most of these details along with screen shots of the settings from the old router. Obviously I also ran some bandwidth tests, just to see what sort of rates I could get.
Internet Speed Test
These bandwidths seem good. I don’t think there’s anything I can complain about. It took a few hours to get the router working how I wanted it. The modem router is wired into the fibre box via an ethernet cable and the router is around four metres away from that box. Then, there is an ethernet cable connecting the router to one of the switches which means I have a good stable connection for all wired devices. The switches are gigabit so the wired network has a little spare capacity and shouldn’t become blocked.
I tried to update Fortnite on the main gaming PC and it went swimmingly. The download went quicker than the computer could cope with! The download is no longer a pinch point on the network. The install time is now limited by the read/write time on the computer. This is exciting and should stop problems when multiple devices are trying to download large files. I have recently been downloading some TV Shows from Apple and I the issue there is more that the Apple server is limited rather than my download speed being a problem.
I’ve got a project happening in Minecraft at the moment and I’ve built a railway station. I wanted to put a “town hall” elsewhere in the build and I had laid out a ground plan but I wasn’t sure how to design it or complete it. After a recent trip to the Lake District I found the perfect design – Moot Hall in Keswick. It’s iconic and gorgeous and it is just waiting to be made in Minecraft. I’ve recently spent a little time, a few hours, collecting materials and then building this hall in the space I had in the recent build. What follows are the results of the exterior. I haven’t started the interior at the moment. I’m not sure what to do for that. The actual interior is a shop and information centre, which I might try and remake.
Moot Hall, Keswick, but in Minecraft
Moot Hall, Keswick, but in Minecraft
Moot Hall, Keswick, but in Minecraft
Moot Hall, Keswick, but in Minecraft
I guess you’ll want to rate this compared to the actual building. Google it, I’m not going to link anything here.
