So, the operation of Credit Cards is apparently stuck in the last Century. The major suppliers of credit cards have not kept up with the requirements of the modern age of online transactions.
On-line Credit Card Fraud is a Major Headache
Case in point: My credit card was used Fraudulently. I have a couple of cards, one for physical transactions where I’m always present – well almost always present. And another that I only use On-Line. Of course, the fraud involved the credit card that was used online. I purchased some Game Currency from a game I play a lot for $10, and less than a week later someone tried to purchase $5599 at Best Buy. There was a lot of confusion about whether the transaction occurred On-Line, but the address was given as Minneapolis, Minnesota. Which is far from where I live. So the transaction was declined, and I was alerted. But that’s not the end of the problem. That card number is now stopped. It can no longer be used. And if this were last century, I could just use another of my few cards to eat take-out at restaurants, or buy groceries.
But this is 2020, and that credit card is in the hands of over a dozen on-line merchants whose computers will automatically try to use it on some random schedule to provide services that I use. These include Netflix, my internet service, my satellite tv service and so forth. I’m “waiting four to five business days” for the new card to arrive. And any of these days one of these many services’ computers might try to use that dead card. To say nothing of the fact that it will take an hour or so to go through all the services’ websites and give them a new card number. I need a better way.
The amount of work to get Skyscale to “Fly” in GW2 is punishing. For this amount of work, compared with the amount of work to get flying mounts in other games, this Skyscale mount should fly at the speed of sound and have a damage skill that could kill anything in the game in one shot.
But no. It doesn’t even really fly, as we mentioned before.
This is not a guide. There are better ones out there. I used a Youtube video to find all the Skyscales – Here’s the one I used. Most of them can be gotten if you have the Springer and you can borrow Skyscales from around the world once you unlock the Achievment. For two of the Scales, I had to get help to kill mobs that were nearby. Most of the scales were actually far from mobs, and I had no problem soloing them.
Finishing the last part of the story to unlock the achievement is very well written. Part of it is an arcade game where you’re riding Aurene to bring the Big “K” down. Quite a ride.
So, back on 6 October 2020, my main computer broke. This story is going to be complicated, so let’s call this one “Crystal”. I name my computers after the cases they are in, usually.
The verdict from the shop was the the CMOS battery was weak – replaced. And that the Ryzen 1800x CPU was bad. Good enough to run memory tests, but could not access storage. When the shop put in a Ryzen 5 CPU into the motherboard, the system ran just fine.
This post has been back-dated by one year to keep it off the front page of my blog.
For sale, cheap. Older system parts to build a modest or first learning system:
What’s included:
Intel Core i7-950 Processor
ASUS Sabertooth X58 Motherboard
12GB DDR3 Memory
Liquid Cooler with one fan.
Nvidia GTX 470 Graphics Card – Still Supported by Nvidia Drivers for Windows 10.
System is Licensed by Microsoft for Windows 10. Experience suggests that Activation will occur automatically when system is installed and connected to internet.
Motherboard supports USB-3.
What is NOT INCLUDED:
Case of your choice for ATX motherboard.
Power Supply suitable for the system. Suggest 500W or greater. Suggest Modular or Semi-modular power supply.
System Storage device. Suggest SSD 256GB or greater. Sata 2.5″ required. Prices for 500GB is about $45 on Newegg at present time.
Any additional SSD or HD storage devices.
DVD or BluRay Drive of your choice. Not required.
And of course, monitor, keyboard and mouse.
System can be installed and maintained using Thumbdrive storage.
I’m working my way through Path of Fire to get the Griffon mount. It’s the first mount that looks like it’s flying, but it’s not.
The second “Flying Mount” introduced into GW2, Living World Season 4 is the Skyscale. This has enhanced flight mechanics, but still can’t really fly.
There must be some “religious objection” to flight. Ever since Gliders were introduced in Heart of Thorns, we could only “Glide” while all other popular games in the genre have True Flight. Well, not really…
Couldn’t be bothered to back this up by a year to hide it.
Virtual Box on Windows Host, running a Linux Mint 20 Client.
When rebooting the Linux Mint client, this always happens. It only happens when you “RESTART”. Shutting down with “SHUTDOWN” works correctly, oddly enough.
Ok. I admit, I’m just a lurker. I don’t pay for Wow any more, I just play the starter or trial or whatever they call it. Yep. Recall that I played it for years and left when in Legion they did the “Universal Level Scaling”. That ruined it for me. Anyway, I check in periodically to see how things are doing, and of course yesterday was the big “Shadowlands Pre-Patch”. So I logged in, made a new toon and ran through the tutorial. I’m not going to spoil all of it. But you can do it too for only about a two hours investment. And you’ll wanna check out the new character customization options, although after FFXIV, I find those completely underwhelming.
Some shots from my Exile’s Reach experience
You are led by the hand, literally, through the experience on Exile’s Reach. It’s a common trope, nothing original here, Blizzard:
The ship to far off lands
The catastrophe that washes you up on the beach
The buddy that’s going to walk you through the whole experience, step by step.
But there are a few Wow specific tropes here too:
The obligatory “Bomb the masses from some sort of airship”, although this airship was just a little rotor and you dangle from a rope. Come on Blizz, the Goblins and Gnomes have better little one-man airships than this.
The “dress up an on Ogre” quest, or dress us as anything else, to sneak into the fortress, after which everybody ignores you anyway as you walk around with no costume.
and the minor dungeon tutorial where the NPC acts, or says she is acting, as your tank while you kill some trash and a boss.
Minor spoiler – watch out for those treasure chests lying around. They keep getting bigger and bigger as you go.
There is a marked difference between the GW2 Story Trials or Instances and the FFXIV Story Instances. I have many GW2 characters of all races and classes, but haven’t played it much recently. Back when Path of Fire came out I worked through the story and maps enough to get many of the mounts: Raptor, Springer, Skimmer, Jackal and Warclaw. I recently decided that I’d like to get the Griffon mount. To do this I need to complete the Path of Fire story on at least on character. So I started with my Necro, which was farthest along this journey. After about 4 hours I gave up in “The Departed” when I could not figure a way to kill “The Soul Eater”.
Today, I’d played FFXIV through the morning and just finished a 1/2 hour dungeon run – nothing special or stressful. And as I finished that and it suddenly stopped working. Just rebooted out of no where. No blue screen. Just a reboot. Boot loop. I tried to trigger a repair but looks like windows has removed “Safe Mode” boot. But after booting a couple of times, it displayed a message that it was attempting to “repair and restart”, but it just kept rebooting.
I assumed at this point that the SSD was bad, or so worn out that it was causing the error. So I tried SpinRite, a HD diagnostic that I have which boots into DOS from a DVD. No go. That booted, but then just looped forever with the message “Discovering Systems Mass Storage Devices…”.
Windy Weather 