July 2020 – Windy Weather

FFXIV Getting Started

There are lots of help videos for Final Fantasy XIV on Youtube. But most of them assume you have already started to play the game. How do you get started playing the game in the first place? I suggest starting with the Benchmark to see how it will run on your system and then starting with the Free Trial. Here’s how you can do that.

Start with the Benchmark

First find the FFIXV Benchmark page here. This will show you how the game will perform on your machine. I suggest not using a laptop. While the game is somewhat forgiving and the graphics can be downgraded quite a lot, it’s still a modern game, so it’s going to cause a lot of strain and heat on your laptop unless you have a high end gaming laptop.

The benchmark is about 2 GB. Very much smaller than the full game, which is about 40GB. I suggest you load the benchmark, and the game, onto an SSD – Solid State Disk – if you have one. Also, you probably want to install the benchmark and the game into a folder such as “C:\FFXIVBench\”. Here’s a video with all the steps to install and run the benchmark.

Strange Java Issue

Update

See below for the solution. Spoiler – It’s a typo.

Back in April 2020, I wrote a little program to run a sequence of LibreOffice Impress Slide shows. For ease of deployment on Windows and Linux, I built the program in Java. And it worked just fine. Here’s what the program looks like:

Impress Show Runner with Resizable Dialog

You can follow the whole Saga of its development using this link. The program has been working very well on Linux Mint 19 and 20 and Windows 10 for a couple of months now. I’ve not changed anything since May 16. Here’s the github repository.

Windows 10 File Sharing Broken Again

File Sharing is InTransitive between Win 10 2004 and Win 10 1909

I have a bunch of computers. Not surprising since I’ve been a software engineer for decades. Windows file sharing has always been exasperating. It works, then it fails, then it works again.

So here’s an example.

Intrasitive Networking

I have had a little Gigabyte Brix computer for a couple of years now. I would like to set it up to play audio books so I moved it and hooked it to another monitor. I thought that a few weeks ago, file sharing was working fine, but now it’s not. I just need to copy the audio books to it so I can play them. So Crystal can see the GBBrix shares and read files from that system. But the GBBrix system cannot see any other systems on the network and so cannot copy files from them. All the shares are set “Everyone can read”.

Foolish me.

By “intransitive” I mean unable to communicate in both directions between two nodes of a network. Google cannot find this definition for me. All it finds for “Transitive” or “Intransitive” relates to Verbs in a language. Oh, here’s the definition. Number 2 – Logic. In either order a >> b and b >> a.

FFXIV vs WoW

There have been plenty of articles and Youtube videos comparing Final Fantasy XIV and World of Warcraft. I’m not trying to do a comprehensive guide to the two games, but compare them on two key areas that I find interesting. I played Wow for many years. I finally left in December 2017 when Universal Level scaling was introduced. But with all the hype surrounding the upcoming Wow “Shadowlands” expansion, I’ve had some thoughts about how FFXIV and Wow compare and how I think Blizzard is messing up again with their designs.

I’ll talk about two key areas and compare the two games:

Gear Upgrades and New Expansions
Class Specs and Talents

There are some important differences between the games that World of Warcraft could learn from as they move forward to Shadowlands and beyond.

Volunteer Dragonslayers

Here are maps to find the four volunteers. I do this on my alts so I’ll use this to find them each time.

Now you can find them easier too.

May you walk in the light of the crystal.
:ww

Dress Your Dancer

While I like the Dancer job in FFXIV, the initial outfit is not as nice as I’d like. Above on the left is the Original outfit – Softstepper gear. The top, gloves, and headgear [ if you choose to show it] are really fine. But the pants and shoes don’t really fit the style I like for my female characters. I prefer a thigh boots look with a little leg showing. Fortunately this look is easily obtained, as you can see on the Right above.

Witcher vs Elric

It would seem that there are too many similarities between “The Witcher” by Andrzej Sapkowski and the “Elric” by Michael Moorcock.

A quick youtube search will show you some references to this topic.

Rageaholic’s hour long rant is an extremely detailed coverage with examples from all the Witcher properties compared with the Moorcock books. Warning for Volume and Language.

Test Post

Paragraph: This post is to test all the blocks to make sure the theme is working. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Aenean at tellus orci. Vivamus lacus mi, rutrum ac enim ac, fringilla posuere massa. Vivamus egestas diam eget felis blandit, vitae volutpat mi ullamcorper. Nulla at enim sit amet nunc scelerisque egestas.

Theme Change

Yep. We changed the theme. Turns out that the other theme was “Deprecated” recently. It had problems anyway. The thing I noticed was that the background was not a solid color, but rather it was a pattern.

This theme is not perfect, but it’s better in some ways. I resurrected an old Youtube title image and resized it for the header. Odd that the theme decided to cut the image in half though, don’t you think? Here’s the whole picture that I made for Youtube a while ago:

Do you recognize the place where this was taken? The towers in the background?

Anyway. Times change.
:ww

Bad Audio Recording

A Few Headsets

I have a nice gaming headset. Logitech G430. Works fine with Discord. However, it fails when I use it with Corel Video Studio, or with Windows 10 Gaming Capture for captures in a game. It clips and drops parts of the audio, especially at the beginning of phrases. I’m in a very quiet space, so background noise is not the problem.

I decided to purchase another headset by another manufacturer to see if that fixes the problem. We’ll see. But in the mean time, I already have another device to record audio.

Headsets used to be very expensive. The G430 started out at $99 and is now $39, like the EKSA. Lots of choices on Amazon and elsewhere. Looks like they probably all use the same USB – Audio chip.

Older Headsets Have Their Own Problems

This older headset has it’s own problems. Turns out the hard plastic parts rub against each other, causing pops and snaps during recording. I guess the plastic got old and sticky over the years. The pops and snaps are so loud that the headset is unusable for recording.

Also notice that I had to replace the muff with some cloth. The foam had rotted away, as foam of that type does over time.

Enter the Webcam

I’ve had this Logitech C510 webcam for a long time. And it still works fine. But has long since been superseded by newer models. However, the problem with this device is that it hasn’t worked for sometime, for audio. Works fine for video, but Windows 10 has not seen the microphone for some time.

Let’s use google to find out why.

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