toys – Fooyah – Ian Parish

May 28 2025

Land Space Efficiency

I think we should consider vertical parking for more vehicles. Imagine the cars you could parking within a certain volume if you could store them vertically. There might be leakage problems I guess but those could be fixed. Oh, hang on – I’ve just remembered the standing seats for aircraft I’ve seen online recently – but, having googled, I think that while they exist people aren’t going to buy them.

As of writing this communication the first page of googled news results for these new “standing seats” are links to poor quality news outlets such as the Daily Mail, Time Out, Daily Express and The Sun. Ryan Air have denied they will be installing the seats. Industry news sites don’t have anything interesting to say. These seats haven’t been approved by the regulators. I doubt they will happen. We are easily in the last stages of the current capitalism model of running the planet and hopefully the world revolution will happen before we need these seats because infinite growth is a stupid thing.

I started this communication with the plan of posting my amazing parking within the game Fortnite. So here it is, very efficient:

May 26 2025

Video Upload Thing

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.

March 23 2025

Gran Turismo Stuff

So recently the Legend got me a Lego Gran Turismo Car. I wrote about it here. I then had to play Gran Turismo and buy that actual car. Which I did. Here are some scapes photographs I took of this car.

March 18 2025

Lego 68 – Model 76923

According to this website the last Lego model I made was in 2020, it has been a while! I’m not sure why it’s been this long, probably my kids no longer need my help with Lego and I haven’t bought any – where do I put it? This model was bought for my cake-day by the Legend and it super pleases me. It covers two things I really enjoy; cars and gaming. This model is the Lamborghini Lambo V12 Vision GT Super Car which exists within the game of Gran Turismo 7.

Lamborghini Lambo V12 Vision GT Super Car

I need to go and buy the car in the game and then take some scapes photos with it. I will post those here when I have completed that side-quest.

I’m hoping the car drives well. I’ve got a few races still to complete in the standard section of GT so I will be working on that.

January 5 2025January 4 2025

Views Of Flight

I’ve been trying to fly in X-Plane a bit recently. I need to do more I guess. There’s a plugin called Volanta by Orbx which I’m using to track my flights and it has some challenges it can add to the simulator so that gives me things I can aim for. I recently took a dawn flight from Biggin Hill to Le Touquet and I flew under the QE2 bridge and alongside my village. In the second picture here you can see the village where I live, if you know what you are looking for.

June 11 2024

What A Shocker

You know how it goes. You’re flying along over the Netherlands and then BOOM, there’s a lightning storm in front of you. Fortunately for me I was already planning on landing before the storm but I don’t recall seeing lightning before in X-Plane.

T7 Red Tail Over Netherlands with lightning

You might need to click on the picture to embiggen it and then be able to see the lightning forks.

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.

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.

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.