Watching The Way of the Househusband on Netflix, and my initial thoughts: “Oh my fuck, this guy is awesome”. A few episodes in, and I’m already tempted to check if the manga has any English digital releases.

Apple Just Gave Millions Of iPad, iPhone Users A Reason To Leave

Arguably an article like this on Forbes bodes ill for Apple, but shouldn’t come as a surprise to many. Folks have long talked about Apple’s “Walled garden”, both positively and negatively over the years. But some may forget that Apple is in the same boat as the rest of us.
For the most part as a user, I’ve had as positive an experience with the App Store as I have with Google Play and Amazon’s own venture. I can but hope for developers, it has less the faceless sword of mysterious injustice that seems to pop up in more Googly lands as horror stories.
What people should expect from such a store front is a responsive attitude to dealing with malicious actors, and taking the responsibility to clean their own house.
Google and Apple have at least made efforts at that. Although in the big G’s case, sometimes I wonder how much of their interactions with humanity at this point is handled by automations and scantly reviewed by mortals. I suspect whatever Apple’s review processes these days, they’re likely overrated from a security perspective.

One of those things I just don’t do, is making macaroni salad. And really any kind of salad like that. As a food it’s the kind of thing that tends to be insanely delicious or really nasty, and many times it’s both if you eat enough in one sitting. Thus they tend to be something I’ll  eat where offered or pick up from the deli isle.

When I made a large batch of tricolor rotini, I figured that some pasta salad would be a plan. Boiled the potato leftover from making curry, diced a carrot, and boiled them until soft. Left those cooling while I walked the hounds. Finely chopped some sweet peppers to go with the macaroni and some leftover garbanzos.

Making the sauce as a mixture of ranch, black pepper, garlic powder, and Italian seasoning definitely worked out well. It was delicious 🤤.

Lately I’ve had a mind to try making curry rice with fish. Since Good Friday is basically the only day I intentionally don’t eat meat, I figured it would probably be a good plan for the holiday weekend.

Made a trip to Sprouts Farmer’s market this morning to pick up some vegetables, and I owe that decision for how delicious this turned out. The fresh potatoes, carrots, onion, and bell pepper made the best curry I’ve had in a long time. Made the fish similar to my usual method; kept the garlic powder, salt, and black pepper; used a light spritz of curry powder and some thyme rather than adding soy sauce to the braising water. Ended up making the tilapia a bit dry compared to normal, which in retrospect was perfect for going with the curry rice.

After packing some leftovers and a lunch box, I used some of the excess rice and a bit of tilapia filet to make a couple onigiri while I was at it.

 Kind of disappointed the camera didn’t catch Willow’s tongue sticking out, lol.

There’s a concept that I tend to think of as “Haha, only so serious” for lacking a better way to describe it.

I tend to view seriousness and humor as a balanced dualism that goes hand in hand rather than as diametrically opposed sides of the coin. The best humor tends to filter through by taking ourselves seriously, but not oh so seriously that we forget to laugh in the moment.

Perhaps I feel this way because life tends to be more like The Joker’s laugh after Batman wins and pawns him off on commissioner Gordan. Far more than our laughter in the real world tends to be as brazen as a chorus doing the can-can. Thus as someone who enjoys a good laugh, I tend to appreciate humor that stems from not taking oneself too seriously.

Finding myself searching Netflix for something simple to watch, I was pleasantly surprised by a little cheese flick called The Warrior’s Gate. It’s stoic sense of humor and comfortable territory makes it entertaining, if not spectacular. Many movies exist that fit that bill, but are sometimes hard to find. Often mixed into the same bin as films that try to be something more than a cheesy enjoyable romp.

And then there’s the ending. With the ice cream, I’d say the twist is exactly as it should be. But warrior Zhao teaching the knights in the end……oh man was that a priceless finish.

 “Holy fuck that’s fast” — me on launching Rimuru’s video test.

Input chosen for this case, is of course episode one of That Time I Got Reincarnated As A Slime aka Tensura. My normal preset in Handbrake that most notably for video does a x265 encode at quality 22, which is ample for 1080p anime.

Centauri normally takes about 35 – 40 minutes to complete encoding an episode in this context. Seeing Rimuru reporting average FPS in the 50s, I had a split take and double check that Handbrake didn’t screw up my imported preset settings, and of course it didn’t. Rimuru is just that powerful a demon lord.

Looking like the new estimated conversion time is about 10 minutes per episode rather than 35 minutes. I can almost see Shion’s smiling face in my mind’s eye….lol

When I originally designed Centauri: it was with the spec that it should last at least five years before it would be cost effective to replace it. By that, I mean it has to take so long to do shit that it’s worth money not to have to wait on it. Dear Centauri made it to eight years with most of its bottle necks only showing up in the last couple. I’d say that’s pretty good.

Enter the new generation: Rimuru is reincarnated born.

Since my 5 year design ended up pulling 8 years of duty, I opted for the biggest influencer of that spec. Centauri rocked a Core i5-3570K based on the assumption that it would retire by the time it became the problem, and lo and behold it really was the main bottle neck. As such, Rimuru rocks a Core i7-10700K because I’ve specified parts based on a 10 year service life.

One of the primary goals aside from that was the modernization of technology. Two pieces of tech have been on my mind as possible final retro fits for a few years now.

I’ve reached a point where USB-A only exists for old technology and existing peripherals that have nigh indefinite life span relative to their host computer. Things like my web cam and mouse.

Rimuru sports a snazzy front panel USB-C port perfect for the fact that most of what I want to connect now functions through USB-C. Likewise the motherboard rather resolves one of my gripes with its predecessor. My old Z77 chipset was a superb motherboard but it sadly was a bridge chipset, literally. Coming from the era in which USB 3.0 became standard only two rear ports and the two front ports were 3.0 with the otherwise ample ports in back being 2.0s. On the H570M the only 2.0 ports are header; all rear ports are USB-A, and two of them are rated for 10 Gbit/s. A perfect solution to having to be careful which USB goes where in the back.

 Second temptation was the insane speed of NVMe drives. It’s been on my mind the last few years that there is no point in buying SATA drives anymore, except as external SSDs and use cases where big, cheap HDDs are the win. While I could retrofit an M.2 slot to my old Z77 it wouldn’t be capable of booting from the drive.

While I was at it: I decided on a fairly future proof power supply. My GTX 780 was the root cause of my last power supply upgrade, but is so powerful that it’s not typically the bottleneck Centauri experienced. 

Opting to take advantage of the situation: I picked up an affordable power supply off a list of PSUs capable of driving an RTX 3080. In terms of PCI-E power connectors I could run two 780s. It’s also a semi modular—meaning everything but the ATX power cables “Plug” into the power supply rather than having to be tied off and routed. Since Rimuru is operating M.2 NVMe only, and has 2.5″ SSD mounts on the side panel: there is nothing in the drive cages below. As such I tossed the power supply’s remaining cables in there, so I don’t scratch my head in the years to come wondering which box in the closet they landed in.

Somehow it does seem ironic that the first live fire test of Rimuru’s capabilities was playing a DOOM (1993) 😁.

Raw performance testing in more interesting vectors has also been promising. Tested one of my projects that takes Stark about 15 minutes to compile from scratch, and Centauri pulled it off in about 7½ minutes to compile. Rimuru did it in 3 minutes. Bare in mind, Stark is the development system in the family and a laptop of similar vintage to Centauri.

Like her predecessor, Rimuru gets a nice “Assembling” album that tracks and marks things as part of the build. Centauri was the first PC that I built in the era of phones and cameras everywhere, and that really worked out. In a similar lesson from Stark, she also gets her own entry in y note system to serve as a log book of major changes and configuration. I’ve actually got pretty good at coping with that puzzle over the years.

Wait, no wonder my beard is turning grey…lol

Avocado, cheese, grilled chicken, and ranch on French; also the glare of a hungry Misty.

My real problem with avocados is the same as my problem with hard boiled eggs: a tendency to find myself standing over the kitchen sink with a salt shaker, eating them as a snack.

On the positive side avocado farts are less deadly than egg farts…