Captain’s Log

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I wonder what’s technically worse: when you’re sitting at your desk and using your tablet/pen to finish something. Or when you’re still sitting at your desk and consider transitioning your keyboard over to aforementioned tablet rather than switching to a PC.

An odd artifact of my small desk space is how well it meshes with my tablet.

The mousepad dominates most of the working surface; the Razer Goliathus because I wanted a large pad and the SteelSeries Rival because I got tired of how fast Logic MX rats wore out^. Years ago, I had bought my K810 as a way of sharing a keyboard between my tablet, laptop, and desktop at work; these days it just serves as my desktop keyboard. Underneath the headphones and xbox controller off to the left is a USB keyboard of similar size and layout.

This lack of space is what lead me to such a small keyboard–full size but with the “Right” matter, the numpad and navigation clusters removed. Basically a few hairs larger than the smallest you can make a physical keyboard without me calling it useless.

Conveniently my tablet fits in much the same spot. Since swapping the wired keyboard for the Bluetooth one, I find it much less hassle to simple push my keyboard aside and put my tablet in the same spot; whichever I am using at the time usually takes center stage and the displaced ends up on the side-zone or next to the charging cable.

I think it is quite possible that if I had a dandy stand in here like I do on my living room end table, I’d probably would have dropped my tablet in it and toggled my keyboard over to my tablet; rather than writing this on my desktop. Yes, I’m kind of lazy 🙄.

^ Two left mouse buttons in 10-15 years is too much 😜. I loved both my Logitech MX-series laser mice but wanted something with claims of “Many damned clicks” before it dies.

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Some thoughts on long term planning,

At this point the kind of off machine that fits my “I’m done, that’s close enough” form adds up to about $1,500 if you shop off the rack. But that means 2 kilos of luggable with a GTX1650, a Thunderbolt expansion port and non soldered memory for its upgrade path. Something less awesome could be found quite a bit cheaper if combined with +$300 worth of eGPU dock but that usually means giving up something like the ability to reuse my ginormous SSD or having to suffer 8 GB of soldered on system memory, and aforementioned eGPU dock would be a prerequisite for handling games, as far as cheaper notebooks go.

Frugality makes me look at future upgrades for my desktop.Where good old Centauri principally hits her limits are games like Final Fantasy 15 and Resident Evil 7. Games that either hit harder than normal or that you wish had more fine tuning put into them, lol.

A trend that will only continue over the next 5 years of her extended life–I have already exceeded the retirement age I had designed Centauri for, and am tempted to see just how far she keeps on truckin’. Because while showing the signs of age: Centauri has been a superb machine.

Replacing the Core i5-3570K with a Core i7-3770K would cost about $200 and deliver a major CPU bump. On the downside this would mean a really nice processor goes to /dev/closet. But the crunch boost would probably last another lustrum quite easily.

A modern Core i5-9400F would deliver comparable enough crunch power for about the same costs when factoring in the motherboard replacement it would need. But then it’s + $75~$100 more for making the generational leap in memory. On a machine originally built for 8 GB and retrofitted to 12 GB when her older sister retired; needless to say forward motion is 16. And that would tally about $300 between processor, motherboard, and memory.

On the flipside one can find pretty decent deals on the GTX 1660 Ti and original RTX 2060 for between $300 and $400. Both solve one of the limits of my antique GTX 780 which is being limited to only 3 GB of graphics memory.

While my general suspicion for RE7’s performance issues vs RE2 running quite smooth has been expecting my processor to be the bottleneck, in FFXV I am running virtually full of VRAM all the time. So much so that I wonder if many of the performance dings align with the allocator trying to decide which textures to flush and which to keep. or if the game was designed to maximize usage. Performance drops often coincide with with the games FPS overlay showing graphics memory usage at holy crap full levels, relative to the near constantly full levels.

Hmm, think I’ll screw around with FFXV’s benchmarking program.

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Passing thought: Dad’s habit was reading a newspaper. Mine is called a tablet.

These do pretty much serve similar purposes. Except as a multi role thingamajig I’m going to say the other uses for a tablet tend to be more fun then what you can do with old newspapers.

Reflections on my road to becoming a computer nerd

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Generally I would say there were about four things that really got me into computers.

  1. Information access.
  2. Word processing.
  3. Video games.
  4. Community

Growing up in an environment where your choice was the family encyclopedias and dictionary: both about as old as me; or waiting a week or two for a trip to the library to actually happen. I was somewhat fortunate in the sense I could checkout books and learn about how nuclear power or jet engines function, and not be worried what people think. Today, I’m not quite sure I’d wanna see the alarmed glares kids might get today at the stuff I read back then but I guess there aren’t that many librarians left either.

Online however made a very different set of information available than the bookstores and library could offer me. Two websites especially: the Gundam Project and the Mecha & Anime HQ. While MAHQ is still around the former went defunct before my family switched from dial up to broadbanned. As my interests exploded I found that increasingly the Internet was the way to gather information. You could go to the used bookstore and get books on Star Trek and Star Wars. You couldn’t find so much related to Mobile Suit Gundam and Macross. Hell the nearest source of anime was probably drive two hours to a Suncoast, and that usually made it both very rare and expensive for our income level.

Likewise as my interests exploded: I generally faced two problems. One is the inefficiency of handwriting all your nerdy documents. Second was how painful corrections were with a typewriter when your spelling is less than 110% of perfection. I don’t think I have even touched one since the 6th grade but correction tape integrated into a typewriter is still among my definitions of wasted time and misery. When I gave the computer a shot at these matters, what those older than I dubbed word processing; my fate was rather sealed. Because between the rapid access to information and the ease of editing text I came to spend inordinate amounts of time in front of a computers.

Once we made the transition into the Pentium 4 era: we finally had a computer worth while for gaming. Well, at least for games that didn’t come on and run from floppy diskette. Early in my childhood we had both a Tandy 1000 and a NES, so I’ve been exposed to video games in one form or another longer than I have been able to read my native language. But most of our computers in between weren’t worth much for games, which generally got dumped on consoles.

The rise of multiplayer gaming pretty much created and defined my social connections outside the meatspace, and that largely remained the only link until I began getting into unix systems and learning programming as a teenager.

Strangely today: video games are still a major point for my computer use. It was around 2007 or so where I hit the point that FreeBSD could replace my XP machines, except for the damned Direct3D gaming pickle. At this point I don’t think I would even have built my desktop if it wasn’t for Steam. My next PC will probably be a laptop and an eGPU rather than a tower.

But that’s really where things intersected with other people.

I was quite active in a few gaming circles, and as my knowledge of computers grew so did my participation in circles built around those topics. Many years later: I still have friends that I met through those circles. Well into my early twenties, I was still very active in various forums and news groups related to my interests. As time has gone on most people have generally moved in the direction of services like Facebook and the late G+, and thus so had I. Today that largely takes the form of Diaspora and the Pluspora pod.

As I reflect upon the road that lead me here: I do wonder whether that is a good or a bad trend. But I think it really owes to two facts. A lot of the social things we do with the Internet are like scraps of paper: detritus and transient. Things like G+ made the ease of integrating people a lot higher than when you had to manage many memberships and connect to dozens of systems but it never changed the fact that most of our output is pretty much digital scraps. These aren’t communities that will last longer than national governments and treasures in a museum: rather the things we post are closer to asking what some Tom, Dick, or Harry had for lunch in the 19th century. It’s all transient at the backbone but we enjoy it while we can.

On the flipside the warehouse of old data on my cold storage drive is rather easier to deal with than stacks of old handwritten and typeset papers. And more than a few of the places I’ve gone have allowed me quite a bit of ease in backing things up, hehe.

Colt ACR

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It has taken my about 17 years but I have finally found out what this freaking weapon is called:

It’s the prototype Colt entered in the Army’s old Advanced Combat Rifle (ACR) program in the late 80s.

The first time I ever encountered this weapons silhouette, was during the waning days of the G.I. Joe Hall of Fame toy line, because the Combat Camo Duke action figure and Green Beret weapons set came respectively with an olive green and silver. I think that was like 1993, so I must have been 5 or 6 years old at the time. As a child, it was actually a geeks curiosity about my toy’s weapons, that drove me to study how weapons work, etcetera. This particular rifles model number always eluded me, it was an enigma that I never saw anywhere else. A stock reminiscent of an M4 tube, an ELCAN/C79 style scope, M16’esque magazine, but the rest became alien. Almost like an alternate evolution of the Colt M16A1 or an early version of the M16A2. Now I know why! It was made by Colt for the ACR program, and obviously based on the M16A2’s it would have been replacing, if the program didn’t flunk lol. Sadly it’s successors also flunked.

Ironically not even knowing about the ammunition being tested with the Colt ACR, as a child I would often use it in toy battles as a substitute for an urban sniper rifle, in a role in between what you might see the old KAC SR-25s and modern Army SDM-R/USMC SAM-R rifles used for—but firing a special “Hyper (velocity) penetrator” sabot round. Still I would rather of had an MSG-90/PSG-1, even as a kid, I had a taste for Heckler & Koch.

Sometimes I wonder if I am part psychic, hehe.

Servants Creed

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Some how I can’t help but remember what I told a friend and [SAS] member on my way out of [SAS].

“Lived in shadow, died in shadow”

Such is the nature of someone who follows orders and serves without seeking their own political benefit.