Tag: PC

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Razer Issues

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.

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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.

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I Said I Wouldn’t But I Did

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
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
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
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
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.

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Gosh, It Looks Beautiful

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
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:

What It Takes To Have Beauty
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.
  • The Polio vaccine is announced.
  • The first RO-RO crossing of the English Channel.
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Is Three Enough?

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
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
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.
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Glideslope, PFD

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
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.

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Just The Way I Like 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
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
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.

Polarised Displays
Polarised Displays
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So, I Did A Thing And Learnt Some Stuff

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.

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Ray Tracing

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
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.

Megabuild With Ray Tracing
Megabuild With Ray Tracing

Keep an eye open for the tour, coming soon.

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Bad Luck Musings

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
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
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
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.

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