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.
In the level 30 area town, the “Event” quest giver with the pink arrow gives you a quest for a 1 Day Surfrider mount reward. Woopee. Well not so much. It’s not very fast and it can’t fly. So it’s just a come on to spend real money in the store where you can buy one of these for each character. Sigh. No option to buy Account Wide mounts.
The blow hole is right under where you are standing, so it occasionally blows up your skirt and knocks you down. But you don’t fall off.
Not that fast, so while it’s an intro to mounts, it’s not that much faster than Running Potions. By this time you probably have a hundred running potions and you’ll keep getting more, so mounts aren’t that interesting – until they can fly. But they probably give you a lame flying mount when you need it.
:ww
I’ve been wanting a Thermal Camera for a while and finally got around to doing some research and the Flir C2 seemed to be a good one to start with. It has the option to take a normal light picture with the thermal image. Once charged up and with the settings changed for F rather than C, here are some pics to start with.
Should be an interesting tool.
A long time ago I got some Cabela’s Moccasin Duck Boots. These are great for here in Coastal Oregon, where the grass never dries. And they should be easy to slip on and off at the door. But the problem is that they never were easy to put on and take off. The Tongue of the shoes was turned in rather than out.
As you can see from these pictures, I’ve figured out how to re-string the laces to correct this issue. On the left is the original shoe and the right picture shows one repaired shoe.
When I originally tried Aion on a private server, the Asmodian characters didn’t look that good. At some point I created characters on the NCSoft servers, but I don’t have a record of when I did that. I might have used a trial. At the time I was not impressed enough with the game to continue playing it. Recently I’ve come back to the NCSoft servers and am enjoying it.
After learning a lot more about how to create a nice looking character, I needed to send three of my original characters back through “Plastic Surgery”. Here’s an album of the process of in-game purchases and Plastic Surgery.
A popular class in MMOs is the “Engineer” or Mechanical class. Usually employing gunfire of some kind. GW2, Wow, and Tera all have Engineer or Gunner classes. One of the fetishes for these classes is a big gun. Well, for the Aion Aethertech class, the gun is bigger than all the rest.
This Mech is not a mount, but actually the weapon for this class.
It flies, and glides and when you “Disembark” you are carrying a CypherKey, which only allows you to “Embark” to ride your Mech. The Mech skills include punches, rockets and rocket powered fists. And this is all out of the box at level 10.
Tera Gunner, eat your heart out. My “Gun” is bigger than yours.
So far I’ve seen four pets of the Spiritmaster: Fire, Earth, Water and Wind. The Wind Spirit looks like a small griffin with a white / blue mane. The Tempest and Magma spirits appear, depending on your Faction, at level 50.
At about level 25 I’ve seen these pets. I prefer the Wind pet, although they all probably do the same damage and I’m not clear on any reasons for choosing among them.
Update: Will continue to add quest helpers here.
Both Elyos and Asmodae quests are here:
Just switched to Spectrum 400mbps service. It’s great. 400 mbps down, 20 mbps up. And I hear a rumor that they are going to provide 1 Gbps service soon. My YouTube posts now complete in a reasonable time. Fibre comes to my street and the last 100 yards or so is coax. My service is about $70 / month for internet alone.
Check out your options here if Spectrum is in your area.
Not a paid endorsement, just a happy customer. The installation procedure is much more modern and up to date with Spectrum than with the local phone company, that is still operating with hand typed username / passwords to configure DSL modem. The Spectrum modem configure operation was a photo shot of the bar codes on the router into the installer’s mobile phone with their special app, and away we go in seconds. The local phone company has no plans for faster service, in spite of the fact that my house is only a little farther away from their fibre head end box.
I was just checking on some account services for some of my characters. These are ones that I’ve created a long time ago and need a coif and makeup.
Plastic Surgery is very like Wow’s Appearance Change and costs a little less. Rule of thumb: Game currency is a little more than a penny a coin. So about $10 on Aion and $15 on Wow. About the same.
But here’s where it gets weird. Say you want to play end-game and you don’t want to slog through all that leveling on the way and you have some coin to spend for that? On Wow a Character Boost will cost you $60. Since Battle for Azeroth is coming out and will raise the level cap to 110, I’m not sure what will happen. This price is for the level 100 boost that was active for Legion, the currently active expansion. So, $60 to start playing end-game content.
I’ve recently had problems with my internet service. My DSL router is apparently re-syncing causing my public IP address to change. Apparently my ISP uses PPOE rather than DHCP, and apparently PPOE does not allow “Reservations”, which allows a client computer to use the same IP address if it reconnects within a given amount of time. Your home router uses DHCP, which does do reservations, so your computers LAN IP address does not change if the computer connects every 24 hours, which I understand is the default “Reservation” time.
Re-synching is not only a problem because the internet is out for a short amount of time, but also because the IP address change causes some games to require that you “Verify” your IP address by reporting a code that is sent to your email account. This is obviously an issue if the Re-Sync happens several times per day.
After quite a bit of research I found a windows service that logs the Public IP address to the Windows Event log every 15 minutes. I run one of my windows systems all the time, since it’s running Carbonite, so this system will run the PublicIpLogger program.
If you want to use the program, it’s on GitHub here. This is the forum post that mentions this program.
From Github, download the setup.exe file and run it. Then you can enter “view event log” into Cortana and you should see a choice to run the windows event viewer. The program logs your public IP address to the event log every 15 minutes.
As shown, under Application and Service Logs, find the PublicIpLogger events and there are a number of events that show the Public IP address, whether they have changed or not.
Enjoy,
:ww
