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.
A while back I bought and hooked up a Dust Deputy to the shop vac that I have been using to clean my pellet stove. The Dust Deputy is an after market DIY cyclone separator. And for what you get it’s pretty pricey.
The kit I got comes with two 5 gallon buckets and a hose along with the separator. But it required some ABS pipe, glue and some work to get it hooked up to the shop vac that I’d been using. Turns out that hose diameters are no where near standard on these vacuums of course. But I’ve got it going and have not had to clean the vacuum filter in over a year. I have emptied the 5 gallon bucket once in that time. But Wait There’s More. A Better Solution has arrived.
The Dustopper from Home Depot is a much better solution. And Cheaper.
The left picture shows the Home Depot picture for this use of this device. Clearly a mess since you are dragging two separate canisters around your shop or other area as you clean it. That’s gotta be a pain. On the right we see a fellow who has designed a simple modification for a Ridgid vacuum to hold the Dustopper together with the vacuum. Takes less floor space and moves as one unit.
Clearly this is what I should have done. And I may yet do this.
I still cannot understand why Ridgid or some other shop vacuum company, Dyson even, has not just made a vacuum with a cyclone separator built into it. Why these nonsense add-ons? Is Dyson holding a patent that keeps others from doing it, but is not doing it themselves? Dyson does not make a vacuum suitable for cleaning shop areas after all this time.
Cheers.
:ww
So, apparently, Dice Towers are a thing.
There are many Dice Tower design / construction videos on Youtube. Here are a couple of pictures from some I found. The problem with these designs is that they are made from foam. The one on the left is made with a foam core / glue gun construction with EPS foam blocks then cut and glued on. While the paint job is very cool, the light foam board construction is going to sound silly when you toss in the dice. The one on the right uses EPS foam blocks glued around a vase and a spiral ramp of foam core inside to bounce the dice around. Again, this one will just sound silly as it’s used.
I’ve had a Gigabyte Brix GB-BKi5HA-7200 for a while now.
This is about the 3rd Mini system that I’ve had. Maybe fourth if you include one that I built from parts. This one has:
It was running Linux Mint 18 and recently Linux Mint 19. And this was working fine, except recently I upgraded the monitor to a Samsung 40″ 4K TV – UN40MU6300FXZA. I found the Refurbished TV for about $290 for sale by Walmart a couple of months ago. This is quite a good price for this Samsung 6300 level TV.
Since I use this mini system to display photos and game screen shots a large high-rez display is just the thing. However, Linux Mint has never supported the display correctly.
As you can see, when in 4K [3840×2160], the display is sliced up and repeated across the screen. It works fine in 1920×1080 mode on Linux. From all the reading of the processor and TV specs, it looked like it should work fine and when I use a long HDMI cable to plug the TV into a Windows 10 system with a GTX 1060 card, it works fine too in 4K.
I am using a pair of 2K monitors through a IOGear Displayport switch and Linux Mint works just fine with that using a GTX 1050 card, which has DisplayPort output.
After spending a couple of days on various forums trying to understand and fix the problem on the BRIX with no luck, I had the bright idea of just trying Windows 10 directly on the system. So I made a Windows 10 install Thumb drive, removed the M.2 Sata, to avoid messing up the Linux Install with Windows 10, and installed Windows 10 on the 60GB SATA SSD. Worked like a charm and brought the monitor right up in 4K without problems.
Above are various low level weapons in Palace of the Dead. Pink is a lower level, and green is approaching powerful for the floors you are on. Bright White is appropriate for the levels where you are playing.
When you start playing in the Palace of the Dead, your weapon is pink or green and eventually, as you trigger more Silver Chests, it turns White. I could not find any place that this was carefully described.
Here’s a play guide for the Deep Dungeon aka Palace of the Dead.
I’ve been spending a lot of time in Palace of the Dead. Here are some recent adventures:
Leveling my Warrior / Arcanist is working pretty well.
The first couple of levels of the PoD don’t give much XP, but the 3rd and 4th levels give more than one level of XP. Level 41-50 has longer wait times and the boss is quite difficult so I usually just back up and start over when I reach that. I’ve cleared level 50 a few times, but I’ve been with groups that have wiped too.
And here are some sale prices for loot on the Market Board.
These are not frequent drop from Bronze Wrapped Sacks, but I’ve seen the hair style a couple of times in the last few days. Almost 1 million Gil!. And the Housing items aren’t too bad either if they sell.
Enjoy,
:ww
I’ve been having more fun in the Palace of the Dead. While you can find lots of detailed guides online for the PoD, here’s a few hints that may organize your experience.
Palace of the Dead is way more fun than the normal dungeons. Killing goes much faster. You’re not just standing there wailing on trash mobs over and over. A few hits and they are down and you are moving on. Stuff is always popping up and changing. Floor to floor and within a floor. Normal dungeons don’t have re-spawns. Once the mobs appear and you kill them that’s it for those mobs. That area is cleared. You kill the mobs and move on. But in Palace of the Dead, stuff re-spawns all the time. Way more interesting.
The XP rewards are the primary reason you are here. You have lots of classes / jobs to level and this is the way to do it. Forget leves. Do your roulette’s once per day, but you can grind PoD all day long and there are no limits. Your mileage will vary based on your “Rested” status and whether you have “Road to 60” but typically each run of 10 floors will get you 20% – 30% of a level, and maybe a lot more. So you can put on a level in less than an hour typically. While the Main Scenario Roulette gives more, along with a lot of Tomestones but that’s only available once per day above level 50. But PoD is all day all the time and it starts at level 1 once you enable it with a battle class at level 17.
The Palace of the Dead, or Deep Dungeon, is a multilevel auto-generated dungeon that is designed for leveling your jobs. One of the odd things about FFXIV is that quests and Levequests don’t really give very much XP. Up to now I’ve avoided the Palace of the Dead since it can seem a little intimidating from the descriptions. But don’t let that worry you. I found a series of videos that cover the whole thing in seven short videos that describe what is up. Here is the play list for these guides.
The PoD is not that intimidating. I’m not going to dive deep into the description here, since the guides do a great job of doing that. I’m going to give you a sales pitch so that you don’t wait a long time, like I did, before you start using it.
I received a DMCA Copyright Violation Notice from my ISP and when I called my ISP, they reported a date and time and the program “World of Warcraft -name of private server”. I have removed the name of the private server that I was trying to use.
It turns out that the Client that I was trying to use was an old copy of the Legion 7.3.5 client that had not yet been modified to not reach out to Blizzard resources. So this client was trying to update it self to the latest client. But Blizzard had changed the resources to update the latest client, but is watching these old resources for accesses and then reporting those accesses back to ISPs with DMCA Copyright Violation notices. This of course has a chilling effect in my use of World of Warcraft private server since I could lose my internet access.
Ok. So apparently Blizzard cannot take down the private servers themselves – maybe because they are off-shore, or for some other reason Legally Out of Bounds to Blizzard.
So now Blizzard has gone after the users of WoW Private Servers.
Well since I am not playing WoW as provided by Blizzard, not because I refuse to pay, but because I don’t like the new features. I restarted my subscription back in the early days of Legion – middle 2017 – but left when the PTR [Private Test Realm] showed the direction that Blizzard was going with Level Scaling. I refuse to play because of Level Scaling, as I’ve pointed out several times before. Private servers have choices of other releases, such as Warlords of Draenor, Mists of Pandaria or Wrath of the Lich King.
Vanilla or Classic is not interesting for me. It’s too primitive. I wish Blizzard and the users well with Vanilla, but Warlords or Mists are the patches that I would choose, or I’ll play something else.
So I’m back to FFXIV.
Happy Gaming. Take Care.
:ww
I’ve found a private server that provides the Warlords of Draenor patch of Wow. That’s where I am now. These Private Server folks provide choices of patch levels – Wrath of the Lich King, Mists of Pandaria, Warlords and Legion. I chose WoD for two reasons.
In December 2017, Blizzard released details of their Game Wide Level Scaling and I was able to play it in the Public Test Realm [PTR]. I didn’t like it. I couldn’t articulate just why, but it seemed to be a betrayal of the nature of the game for me.
Now I understand better why I felt that way after watching a talk from the recent Game Developer Conference on Youtube. Here is that talk:
Published on Oct 3, 2018
