Month: September 2019

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Start Trek: The Excelsior Is The Greatest Ship, Not The Enterprise

Personally, I’ve felt that the Excelsior class was a bit overrated, and the Miranda class much overworked. But I think this makes a good point.

The work horses of the fleet prior to Wolf 359 decimated Star Fleet, were mostly late 23rd century designs like the above and stop gaps on the way to later Enterprises. There’s actually a lot of good reasons for that, both in world and in terms of producing a television show back then.

Actually, when I think about it: the notion of giving Kirk an Excelsior class makes perfect sense. The NCC-2000 already had a Captain and crew by the time Scotty stuffed up the pipes, but presumably the design wouldn’t be going to waste and it takes time to build a star ship. Renaming another Constitution refit the Enterprise-A is more expeditious and political IMHO.

That said of all the starships to bear the name Enterprise, the A is my favorite.

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Micro Center’s flash drives might not be the most sexy performing drives ever to grace USB, and personally, I think their memory cards are better. But in terms of the cheapest there is, I’ve owned worse.

Plus when there’s a coupon for a free one, you’ve got my attention, lol.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 6.0.2 x64 (UWP) (C) 2007-2018 hiyohiyo
                          Crystal Dew World : https://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

   Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) :    32.740 MB/s
  Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) :     9.412 MB/s
  Random Read 4KiB (Q=  8,T= 8) :     4.671 MB/s [   1140.4 IOPS]
 Random Write 4KiB (Q=  8,T= 8) :     0.003 MB/s [      0.7 IOPS]
  Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) :     4.665 MB/s [   1138.9 IOPS]
 Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) :     0.001 MB/s [      0.2 IOPS]
  Random Read 4KiB (Q=  1,T= 1) :     4.438 MB/s [   1083.5 IOPS]
 Random Write 4KiB (Q=  1,T= 1) :     0.004 MB/s [      1.0 IOPS]

  Test : 1024 MiB [F: 0.0% (0.0/28.9 GiB)] (x5)  [Interval=5 sec]
  Date : 2019/09/30 18:53:36
    OS : Windows 10 Professional [10.0 Build 18362] (x64)
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Family time: also known as the canine couch sprawl.

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When the local definition of the weather is “Hot as hell”, and the feeling of baking in the sun’s rays both feel good and off home, I can’t help but blame it on growing up in Florida.

Coming from a place like southern Florida kinda leaves you with a permanently damaged sense of temperature, lol

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Crunchyroll Announces Fall 2019 Anime Lineup!

Hmm, sounds like this fall will be more than a few fantasy series to watch.
Given how much they’ve been pushing content in various languages, usually dubs, it’s kind of nice to see the announcement is being made available in multiple languages. As opposed to native English and that’s all.
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Ya know, I’ve never really cared about multimedia shortcuts on my keyboards.

As I sit here with my music player to one side and an Evernote window to the other, I’m kinda glad that my keyboard has a play/pause button. It makes transcribing the lyrics to a song much easier, lol.

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About a year ago, I came across an interesting hybrid game called Omni Link; combining space combat, exploration, and far more importantly a good story. Much to my surprise it also had a couple of great songs to go with the journey across space.

My review on Steam was quite positive:

At first I thought, “Huh, this feels just like asteroids!” when I got to the helm. But it’s so much more than that.

Omni Link is more of an RPG / VN hybrid with action in a vein similar to Asteroids for the space combat. You can explore and travel the star systems, but interactions are mostly combative or story driven. It’s fun but the story is where it is really at.

I greatly enjoyed the story. Good times between Keb, Arcadia, and Dawn. Malthus livens things up quite a bit. Suzumi’s rescue was especially good for the soul. All in all, I probably enjoyed the story more than I would have going to see a movie for the same price tag.

Music is freaking great. Honestly my favourite part is the sound track–I wish there was an add-on with the vocal tracks and some concept art.

Art is very well done. I love the intermixing of comicbook/manga style panels here and there, and the CGs that are scattered across the game are wonderful. Some of the moments are especially great such as the hug and the cowlick scene.

Action as previously said reminds me of Asteroids. Augmenting that however is your fleet. As you pilot the main ship, Dawn takes care of your support ships and they are quite effective. Meanwhile you can morph into whichever one you like for direct control agains the enemy: allowing you to be the quick scout, the gunboat, etc and delegate the other roles to the A.I. backing you up.

Towards the more typical VN parts things are a bit more sparse. Saving only can happen outside of the VN portions. No gallary, screenshots don’t seem to work, etc. But it gets the job done. More focused on the space combat parts of the UI than providing an interface like renpy. No real complaints because the story is excellent.

/* Also Steam client needs to add a spell checker :'( */

I use vndb to track and remember the visual novels that I play, and there are not very many that I rate towards the top of the voting scale—Omni Link is one of the few I voted 9/10. Which pretty much means great victory on the story front.

One of the perks of using Steam is the ability to follow a game, and hope that someday a news post is made if updates or new projects occur. When I heard the developer was working on a new project called Crypterion: it didn’t take long to add it to my wishlist.

Later on, when the Kickstarter project was announced, I was very tempted. Never been a fan of backing crowd funded projects, but given how much I enjoyed Omni Link: the odds are in my favour that fun shall be had. Hearing that there were still some CDs in existence from Omni Link’s own crowdfunding, I rather went from “Remember to do that” to “Where’s the sign up button”, lol.

Suffice it to say, I really enjoyed the game’s main themes, particularly the song “Love is Pretend”. Pretty sure that a transcription of the lyrics is going to end up in one of my notebooks somewhere.

Today, happily this arrived in the post box:

This CD shall be going in a nice safe space :).

Actually, this kinda makes me glad that I still have plenty of hardware that can play CDs, and don’t have to power on an old PlayStation, lol.

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Rule of Acquisition 286, when Morn leaves, it’s all over.

If I ran a bar, and Morn left without being forced to, I’d probably announce doomsday as well.

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https://youtu.be/jFACcujmdE4

In all the years prior to getting a laptop, or hell before adapting fancier than vim methods of typing notes—I wonder how the – to + thing never occurred to me.
Generally speaking, if I tended to take more free form transient notes, I’d probably adapt the rest of that method to my notes. Typically my work notes revolve around pen driven swipe typing, and my home notes on handwriting to text conversion. Getting just quick unconverted handwriting usually means that I’m stuck in a meeting or footing it between server racks.
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Bug: noun: when you slide a notification to the side with a Pencil, and tapping clear launches Apple Notes instead of clearing the notification.

On the flip side, 13.1 -> 13.1.1 has made iPad OS feel less like a buggy mess in the name of selling stuff. Also, I am likely more of a stylus using whore than most at the fruit company.