efaardvark

Welcome!

We don't serve that kind around here! jk Welcome!

Having a hard time getting excited for any of the new anime. Isekai everything and remakes. Meh. I did like Overlord and DanMachi so I'll probably at least start those. Fourth season for both however so I do not expect much. Certainly nothing at the level of the previous seasons. Hoping I'll be pleasantly surprised.

The real behind-the-scenes hero there was broadly-deployed megabit broadband. I too remember 300-baud modems and tape storage. A small part of my mind still boggles when I see a multi-GB Steam download finish in a minute or two.

Worked on a couple water projects on my main farm/base in Minecraft. One is my aquarium in the underground "bunker" area. It used to be just one level but I expanded it to be viewable from the level below as well.. I also added a little area for a frog pond. I think it turned out pretty well. Can't you just see some polliwogs swimming around in the mangrove roots there? Sorry, you'll have to use your imagination for now since I haven't actually had time to go find a swamp with frogs in it yet.

We barely have smart glasses yet. Now someone has a working prototype for smart contact lenses.

Good choice!

Played an hour or so of Farmville, er, I mean Minecraft. Really just grinding a bit for crops to sell for emeralds to trade with Librarians. Also sticks. Fletchers are extremely useful and easy to trade with, especially in the early game. Farming trees for wood -> planks -> sticks and then trading the sticks to a fletcher for emeralds is probably one of the best early trades in the game right now. If you can find the right Fletcher to trade with, a stack of sticks will get you at least a couple emeralds. And 4 emeralds can get you a full stack of arrows. Better than all that messing around with chickens and gravel to make them yourself. A couple dozen emeralds can also get you high-level enchanted books like mending from the right librarian.. without having to deal with the randomness of the enchanting table. Since the "Village and Pillage" update a nearby town well-populated with high level merchants is a very handy thing to have access to.

Nvidia's latest 1630. OMG.. what are they thinking? This "new" GFX card doesn't even beat Nvidia's own ancient 1050Ti from 2016 in price, gfx performance, or power consumption! The only thing the new card has going for it is hardware decode support for some of the more recent video codecs like VP8 and H.265 . But even that is really stretching it. (I mean, even that old 1050 had support for H.265 HEVC 4:2:0. The 1630 just adds HEVC up to 4:4:4 12bit.) The chip is also using the ancient "Turing" architecture so it doesn't have other modern features like DLSS or ray-tracing support. Maybe Nvidia is just trying to make Intel's ARC look good.

Definitely. Enjoy it.. YOLO after all. (says the 57yo.)

Looks like there's now a preview of Optifine for 1.19 Minecraft. However I only just recently installed Iris/Sodium and updated Sildur's and my favorite texture pack to most-recent versions of everything so I'm going to stay where I'm at for the moment. I don't typically mod much beyond the shaders anyway so the only thing I'm missing is Optifine's zoom key. Gives me an incentive to find a geode in-game for the amethyst shards to make a spyglass. I haven't messed with Iris much yet and I'm already getting 60fps using only half of my GPU so I'm also kind of curious what it can do with some in-depth tweaking, if I can find some time for it. Depending on how that goes I may or may not update to the final version of Optifine for 1.19. I need to spend more time playing than updating/tweaking!

Are we -sure- there are no sandworms in Minecraft?

Did a little more minecraft. Mostly messed around with mangrove trees a bit more. These can produce a surprising amount of wood, as you can see if you take away the leaves.. It's a bit random though, which makes it a bit of a pain to farm efficiently. Nice for landscaping but my preferred method for wood farming is still going to be the 4-sapling spruce. (Note the scaffold tower next to the large spruce in the background to the right of the mangrove tree.) The other interesting bit is the mangrove roots. I think these are the only solid blocks in the game that can be waterlogged. For any technical players this might mean things like new options for redstone contraptions. I was also able to make a 5-block cobblestone generator with just 4 dirt, 1 mangrove root, and one bucket each of water and lava. (Probably only of interest to skyblock players.) I also want to play a bit more with mud blocks. Even if you don't have a newly-generated swamp near at hand you can still make them by using a water bottle on a dirt block. I found that a bit of a pain to deal with in trying to generate a large number of them. However, once you have the mud blocks then you can make mud bricks, which gives us another material and visual texture for constructing structures.

World of Wonders...

Flipping the power switch on a new build is always a bit nerve wracking. Did you check the CPU socket and chip for bent/broken pins or debris? It doesn’t take much. I had a tiny bit of dog hair cause me quite a bit of trouble on one build when it got trapped between the CPU chip and the socket. If you’re building on an A4 socket you might also want to verify if your motherboard/bios supports the CPU you’re (trying to) use. Props to AMD for prolonging the life of their products by avoiding unnecessary obsolescence but one of the downsides with certain motherboard manufacturers is they ran out of space on the BIOS memory that holds the settings for all the possible A4 CPUs. To free up space they sometimes leave out entries for older or less popular CPUs, which sometimes results in a reported CPU error. You might check the MB manufacturer’s support site for a BIOS update, especially if the MB is an older one. Hope it turns out to be a simple/cheap fix.

Thanks. Ayreon has some good stuff. I think their "Universal Migrator" album is awesome for instance. (I've always been a bit of a fan of themed albums, whether it be Pink Floyd's Another Brick in the Wall or Blind Guardian's Nightfall in Middle Earth or what have you.)

I love to build new systems and upgrade old systems. (Though with prices as they’ve been for the past couple years I’ve had to exercise restraint and only go for the upgrades that are actually necessary. It’s been tough. ) I’m still using an older AMD 2700X-based system with an ancient - in computer years - RX 480 GPU but I’ve been keeping up with prices and tech with an eye towards building a brand new system, once the prices for GPUs and DDR5 bits come down a skoshi.

Human Equation, day Eleven: Love

Welcome! I’m often a bit of a lurker myself but don’t be afraid to join in. People here are pretty chill… more of the laugh with than at type(s).

Here in the S. California desert I’m good for anything up to the high 80s as long as I have at least a fan and plenty of something cold to drink but I definitely prefer cooler temps as well, especially if there’s anything resembling humidity in the air. That’s going a bit too far in the other direction. Cold and wet is pretty much my definition of hell.

\me "was obliterated by a sonically-charged shriek".

Lucassen strike again. Pink Beetles in a Purple Zeppelin