Apparently there is going to be a portable X-Box released soon. I guess this will excite those fans of Xboxes. I’m less fussed but I was curious to read about it. I have a PlayStation Portal and it works by effectively cloud-gaming using your own PS5 as the server. It’s pretty good and I enjoy it. I have played Fortnite using the Portal away from my house and the performance was fine.
I Don’t Trust Anyone Who Say This
I started reading a Guardian review of the portable XBox and I got to the bottom sentence in the image. No. The person is wrong. No-one can appreciate the asymmetry of an X-Box controller and if you do then I will stop reading. I did just that. I didn’t read any further. I do not care what this person wants to say. My last few words on this matter will be that human hands are, mostly, symmetrical.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Lamborghini Lambo V12 Vision GT Super Car
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.
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.
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.
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.
PlayStation Portal
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.
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.
