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.
With my annoyance at the latest changes in Tera, I’ve gone back to some other games that I’ve played before. So I went back to Blade and Soul after trying it a while ago. So I played my character for a couple of hours and put on a couple of levels, and then found I couldn’t repair my gear any longer. So after a few chats to ask about that, I stopped by an NPC and found that the Repair tool cost about 6 silver, while I only had 2 silver. Odd that at level 10 I should be so far out of step with my needs.
I hadn’t purchased anything of note, but I had transported one time – Windstriding. So I guess that used up a silver or two, maybe. Maybe I shouldn’t have repaired my weapon each time that I came back to a camp fire. I probably repaired about 50 times in the two hours of game play. Little did I know that the repair tool would run out of repairs or that buying a new one would cost so much.
Repair tool
My funds:
My Funds
Guess I’m outta luck.
With this update to guilds we see another case of Greed ruling the day. For years I’ve been using Guilds and Guild banks to share storage among my characters. But now you must have a level 30 Guild to have a bank. And of course to reach level 30 requires guild events which no single player or “Family” guild could satisfy. Well why does BlueHole or Enmasse care? Of course, they want you to purchase bank space. But that does not solve the problem of sharing space among characters / accounts.
Guild Bank and Elite Feature
Have a family where some of you play this game? Like to share among your family with a Guild? Forget it. It no longer works because you have to get your guild to level 30 to share things in a guild bank. And there is no way to buy a shared bank.
Hello.
Hi there.
What’s up?
We are going to understand loops.
Loops?
Yes, loops. Did you see the recent movie on Netflix called “ARQ”?
No. What was that about?
It was about loops. A couple was in bed and kept waking up over and over right before some bad guys broke into the room.
So what happened?
Well that’s not important. No spoilers here, actually.
Well that’s hardly fair.
Actually, this is not just about the story of ARQ, it’s about these stories in general.
Oh?
Story ARCs with a “C” if you will.
Oh, I see the pun there. ARQ with a “Q” is a pun for ARC with a “C”.
Right.
So in ARQ there is a device called “The ARQ” in the guy’s basement.
I thought you said “No Spoilers”.
Well, right. No more spoilers.
Ok. So what about this ARQ thing?
Well it’s a plot device to loop space / time.
Loop space / time?
Yes. Send it around again and again to serve the storyline. For example, if I play this short Youtube video of a fireplace, we can cause a loop in space / time. Let me start one. Click.
Continue Reading
So what if you want to listen to headphones in this modern HDMI connected world?
There were some old converters, but they only decoded 2.1 sound. Here’s one that decodes 2.1 or 5.1 sound. 2.1 sound is not going to be enough. Most broadcasts these days are 5.1 or 7.1 and most Set Top boxes and BluRay can be dumbed down to 5.1, but probably not 2.1.
HDMI Audio Extractor
Update: See below.
I’m sure you all know this, but I had to try it for myself.
Three Computers Running
294 watts for 3 computers idling. Not running any particular load. And now Sleeping
Three Computers Sleeping
Only 39 watts if they are all sleeping. You probably all know this, but I have avoided sleep for years since way back when I tried it and often couldn’t wake up the computers and had to reboot them. Back in the Windows 95 Days or some such.
Well now with Windows 10 I’m giving sleep a try again. We’ll see. But based on this kind of power saving I’m willing to try it again. I plan to set them all to sleep if no activity for an hour.
This is the configuration measured:
10 watts for a sleeping computer isn’t bad.
Update: Windows 10 sleeps all night, but does not go to sleep automatically.
I could not get these systems to go to sleep automatically. Despite lots of research and disabling LAN wake up of any kind, and looking for applications that might be keeping them running. I could not figure out why the systems would not sleep automatically. But when they were put to sleep manually with the power menu, they stayed asleep all night or longer.
If you want to do this, I suggest you enable Hybrid Sleep. My systems are on UPS [Uninterruptible Power Supplies], but if the power goes out its best if they can wake up from Hibernate as well as sleep. Hibernate writes the system state to the system disk [SSD in this case] so it is safe from a power outage. Sleep keeps a little power going to keep the memory alive and if the power dies, the system will lose any work that was active.
Most of my systems had Hybrid Sleep available, but one did not. After going through the settings in the 6 different ways to get to the power settings, there was no Hybrid Sleep or Hibernate options. Again, despite lots of research the only way to enable Hibernate, and therefore Hybrid Sleep, was to use the powercfg program directly. If you can’t find the Hybrid Sleep setting use Run As Administrator to run a command line window, then use the command
powercfg -h on
to enable hibernate.
While I’ll have my screens shut off after 15 or 20 minutes as I always have done. I guess I’ll have to manually sleep my machines. It is just too complicated to figure out what is keeping my systems from going to sleep by themselves.
:ww
Discord Audio / Text Chat
Discord is an audio / text chat app aimed at gamers. And it is way better than skype, teamspeak, ventrilo or mumble. Look at what it does when you share a link? It reads the page and provides a summary in the chat window. If you hit a wordpress post, then the featured image and first paragraph are fetched. Wiki fetches the first paragraph of the article. There is probably some standard web interface to ask a website for a summary. I don’t know. But this just works great.
Discord is very easy to set up, and works in a browser window or as desktop application on Windows or Mac and on your phone with apps for IOS and Android.
Why should we put up with lousy apps that haven’t changed in years, like Skype Teamspeak, and Ventrilo. Even Open Source programs like Mumble are hopelessly out of date and clunky. Continue Reading
Epson Artisan 1430 – Out of Ink I Didn’t Use
I’m tired of putting up with ink-jet printers. Shortly after moving to Oregon I was taking lots of pictures and printing some of them to put up around the house. I purchased an Epson Stylus Photo 1400, a very nice printer. Large format with DVD printing. I used it to print some very nice large format photos, as large as 13 x 19, and many DVDs. After about 5 years it developed a problem where the black ink was bleeding into the yellow so the output was smeared with black. But it would print black fine. I still have it, but I haven’t used it in years. I then purchased an Epson Artisan 1430, which is the replacement for the SP 1400, and again it produced very high quality photos, many large format and DVDs. Continue Reading
Cyberstorm in Slim case
In a previous post we talked about moving a server from a clunky old case to a new slimmer case. The only problem was the front panel only had USB-3 connectors, and the motherboard was created before the internal standard for motherboard USB-3 connectors appeared. This older motherboard only has external USB-3 connections on the backplate.
So here’s the fix.
ORICO USB-3 Card
This ORICO company makes many different USB-3 PCI-e cards.There are several manufacturers on Newegg, but these cards look like the highest quality. Their metal brackets are painted black, the PC boards are blue, rather than crap tan, and the connectors look like they are high quality. Continue Reading
Hardware and Windows 10 Complete
The refit of the Alienware Area 51 – 7500 from 2007 to a Skylake Processor and Windows 10 is complete. The system died trying to do the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, and while I spent two days frantically trying to bring it back to life with Linux Mint 18, I finally declared it End of Life and ordered the replacement parts. Here is the original configuration.
The new system has:
When I logged into after the last update, a new quest appeared for my 65 level characters: Memory Lost. What’s that. It says you get a Dreadnaught Weapon. That sounds good. Do they just give it to you, or do you have to do something impossible to get it?
And the rewards:
rewards
Well let’s give it a try. On a brawler so I don’t embarrass myself.
