Welcome to the Windy Weather Website.
These are musings from my vantage point on the Oregon South Coast.
A long-time software engineer and general geek, I continue my exploration with Photography, 3D Graphics, Linux and other nonsense. Come along for the ride.
EGO has just released a 42″ Zero Turn Electric Mower. It uses 4 x 10Ah 56V batteries, the same one EGO uses for their other tools. And of course it charges the Batteries in-place, so you don’t have to move them. Just plug it in like your Tesla.
Yep. It will cut 2 acres on a charge and it has a cup holder and USB charger.
Continue reading “Electric Zero Turn Mower?”For a while now I’ve been working on the Amaro Mount in FFXIV. As a reminder, to get this mount, you need to get all of your Fighting jobs, except BLUe Mage, up to level 80. So it takes a while.
Here is my current progress:
I’m currently spamming Heaven on High after getting all the jobs to at least 61 in Palace of the Dead. It takes about 4 to 5 runs of HoH to get a level. Once I reach 70, and equip Scaevan Armor, I move on to another job. Also once per day, I do an MSQ Roulette. At lower levels, doing dungeons was a win for experience, but at this level, dungeon queues are too long and XP too low to make doing dungeons, except the MSQ Roulette, to be worth the trouble. To avoid over running the Armory storage, I’m keeping all the jobs at about the same level. Otherwise the Armory space would be gone pretty quickly.
I’m not sure how to level 70-80 most efficiently. I’ll probably try Trusts and may look into Eureka. I have figured out where to buy level 76 and 78 armor from merchants, so gear won’t be a problem I hope.
Guild Wars 2 or World of Warcraft share mounts and mastery progress on mounts across the entire account. However, Alts in FFXIV are completely separate silos. So to get this mount on all my characters would be a horrific grind. But I have nice mounts for all my characters, esp the Falcons in various colors, from holiday events over the past couple of years.
May you walk in the light of the Crystal.
:ww
Ziply Fiber is installed and is working fine. The modem required no change in the Router. The router connected with DHCP to get an IP address from the modem and away we go.
When the Spectrum Service is shut off in a month or so, I’ll move the Ziply Modem to replace the Arris cable modem on the frame.
The frame is wide enough so if I move the White Netgear switch to the left slightly, the Fiber Modem will fit where the Arris Cable modem is now. Velcro is a great way to hold these items down to keep them in place when the cables move.
Hurray.
:ww
For a few years, I was using Carbonite and I was quite happy. But like all services, from Electricity to Internet to Cable TV, folks got greedy and the price crept up. While the price of storage and price of internet goes down, the prices of Carbonite creeps up. So two years ago I did some research and switched to another service.
Wasabi [Hot Cloud Storage] provides a naked cloud storage service with an AWS interface. So you need a backup application and after some research, I found Cloudberry. It seemed the best at the time. They have since been purchased by another company. Cloudberry is a simple but functional backup application that can use Wasabi, among others, for cloud storage.
My backup requirements are about 750GB total. Across all my computers I have many TB of storage, but what I need to backup is much smaller. I move the data I need to backup to one computer using a Synch application and then the backup function runs in the middle of the night to back the files up to the cloud.
As it turns out however, The Cloudberry / Wasabi solution is the same cost as the Carbonite service. Ignoring the cost of the Coudberry one time cost, the Wasabi charges are $6/mo for 1TB or less. And the Carbonite plan is the same cost. And Carbonite is simpler to deal with and understand. So I’m going back to Carbonite. I’ve started the free trial. But how is the back up going?
Continue reading “Carbonite Backup Service”I have a Ziply Fiber install date less than a week from now! I mentioned Ziply was coming to my area in a previous post.
I’m psyched. The price is what I expected from research on the web. Free Install. Symmetrical upload and download speeds. So 1Gbps UP and DOWN!
I can’t wait!
:ww
As you level your role, my experience indicates that you need to get your “Greater” pets as soon as possible. The reason for having “Greater” pets is so these pets can survive when you do “Instant Adventures”. Lesser pets only level up to level 30, and often your Instant Adventures will be at level 50 or 60, and your lesser pets will die quite quickly in these adventures.
In order to get “Greater” pets, you might need to manually adjust your Soul Points at about level 20-25 to in ways that are not the normal progression for your Role. Here are two examples: Click on the pictures to expand them to see them more clearly.
For an Elementalist, you need to have 21 points in Elementalist, and to have selected “Greater Affinity”, so you may need to manually add the points to get that trait as soon as possible.
For Druid, to get Greater Healing Faerie and Greater Saytre, you’ll need to have 24 points in the Druid Soul.
These Greater pets do much better in higher level instant adventures. There are ways to get pets in almost all the Roles, so you may want to adjust the Soul points in Warrior or Necromancer and other Roles to get Greater Pets sooner.
Enjoy, and Close those Rifts!
:ww
I’m sure you won’t believe this, but AT&T is lobbying against faster Internet for folks. Just kidding. Not kidding about what they are lobbying for, but kidding that you won’t believe it. Anyway, here’s an article I just saw.
Here’s what AT&T has said they want:
Reading the whole article – included here in case it disappears from the ARS site.
Continue reading “Surprise: AT&T Wants Slower Internet”The following two pictures are from encounters: The left one is a rift in a low level area and the right one is in the middle of an Instant Adventure taking down a boss with a nasty attack mechanic that disadvantages Melee attacks.
When I started playing Rift, I was looking for a way to play with a Pet and a Bow, or at least a Ranged Weapon. It looked like a Ranger Beastmaster build would be the way to do this. Here’s the Soul Tree for that build, with the key skills that the build provides:
I wasn’t able to find a way to use a Bow with this build. You could shoot the bow to draw a mob toward you, but there were no real Ranged skills available for the bow.
If you examine the tool-tips for the skills in this build, you’ll see that most of them are “Melee Range” and only a few are short range – 10-16 m. I’ve played this for a while now and it’s not ideal. There are too many times when you need long range skills. So here is how I built a Ranged Warrior.
Continue reading “Ranged Warrior and Ranger Rogue”I’ve just started crafting and gathering. Again. This is not a guide. I’m just reporting something I found surprising.
Insects can be Butchered. Yes. And low level insects yield Soft Leather.
I found this surprising. Note that the butchering is going on with the progress bar at the Center Bottom above the action bars, and the type of creature being butchered is displayed at the bottom right of the screen. Sure, a Wolf yields soft leather. Expected. But a Vespid Darter? Who Knew. And all the low level Humanoid mobs in the game seem to drop Burlap at a nice rate, which is expected I guess. Also note that the Flame Minion drops burlap. That seems odd.
Also, you seem to get a higher drop rate if you don’t use a pet. I put my Greater Razorback away and the drop rate increased significantly. Seems like the pet is getting half the loot. Very odd.
And you don’t have to learn Tailoring and Leatherworking. Just learn Outfitting. Nice touch. Also, I quickly leveled my Rogue to 25 and my gear was way behind. So I checked out outfitting, and it seems the best way to get nice [stats not necessarily looks] gear at this level. The recipes at the beginning of outfitting are better than my Quest gear. So I’m all in on Butchering, Foraging and Outfitting. The maximum of three professions you can learn at a time. And you can Mail stuff to your Alts, so they can send this Alt mats and I can send them Gear. And the game has both Trading and Mailing with Friends, so you can easily pass gear to the person you are playing with too. And my other Alts can learn other professions if I need them.
:ww
I tried Rift the MMO a while ago. But didn’t stay long. Not sure why. But recently I was looking for something new and went back. And found that it’s actually quite a lot of fun. This is not an in depth review. There are some of those out there that you can find on Youtube and elsewhere. Here’s a Recent One by Josh Strife Hayes. And another one by The Lazy Peon. But here are some of my thoughts. First of all you should know that the game is published by Gamigo who got it when they bought Trion apparently. Gamigo is notorious for milking the last dying breath from a game and shutting it down. They recently shut down the Defiant brothers and laid off a bunch of Rift developers.
No matter what they say, it’s not clear to me that this would not put a chill on folks spending money on the game. How would you dump a ton of money in a game if it might be shut down in the next year. Why shut down? Because Gamigo is greedy. Due to global conditions right now, online Games and MMOs are a big deal. Lots of folks are home with time to play. So why not invest in games rather than shutting them down? Everything going Mobile? Humm… Is mobile a better Cash Grab? I’m not sure. But I digress. Let’s look at Rift in more detail from a F2P perspective. You may decide to buy a few credits, but so far I have not.
Continue reading “Rift Try It Soon”
