Happy New ... Picture ?

No epic wall of text today.

Hmmm ... Whenever I've said that before, you know how it tends to end up ... (oops!)

Random stuff !

Tomorrow could be busy - I could severely do with sleeping in* but there's a few things happening ...

*(travel on a weekend takes its toll on me, mostly because I use my weekends as lazy time to recover from putting all I have into the week, plus I have bugs apparently still).

(click for bigger)

Wotcha think ? I hope it makes people who celebrate Chinese New Year happy. The picture is made up of a few different elements :
Big Chinese Dwagon - courtesy of Google.
Fireworks - are from way back and by way back ? I mean 2004. Bit ropey in quality but not too shabby. They came from a digital compact on no-flash, so there's camera motion blur in there as well as long exposure time.
Font is Zenzai Itacha (a freebie via Google again but they ask for a little credit in the personal use free licence so there it is !)
And there's the message dwagon in there again.

I know one person who I think will be celebrating Chinese New Year tomorrow, hope she has a great day. And then there's Yogscast Kim, who is the big one for spreading the message that it is Chinese New Year. Our Western media isn't too interested in this particular festival.

And I just realised something I meant to add in but have forgotten ! Chinese Lantern ! Hmm - where would it go I wonder ... I do like this one better than what I came out with last year :

That's from earlier days of using the image manipulation program I currently use (GIMP). The text is a bit small. You have to make these things readable from an instant glance. I've also done a bit more on the template to cut out all of the background and make the dwagon copy/pastable into other images. That mostly works, although you have to match up the texturing of source and destination to make it really work.

But that's geeky non-fun work type stuff.

Happy Chinese New Year for tomorrow !

It won't be the Year of the Dwagon (2012, won't come round again until 2024). Here's a bit more from wiki about the festival.

I'm not planning to head out for celebrations tomorrow but I know what I will be doing. Can you call this busy ? Definitely occupied but I'm not sure if I can call it busy !

I switched out the graphics card yesterday over my Working At Home lunch (only took 20 minutes, I reminded myself of the how and what to avoid when switching out the power supply a few weeks ago). The old one is doing pretty well, although I'm not intending to try and games on it. The old one is 4 years old now and for actiony games, that's a bit below par now. Ok, possibly still better than Xbox One and PS4 but not something a PC Master Race person will be happy with.

Status report - the dots are gone ! Hurrah. Actually quite a relief because I've had graphical corruption on a machine before and it was something going horribly wrong in Windows that needed a complete wipe to fix. At least this time it's just a hardware swap.

New one is an AMD R9 380 with 4GB on board. It has 1700ish coprocessors on board aiding 6 main graphics units*. How's that for progress ? My first PC had 4MB of memory, this has 1000 times that just for the graphics. It'll run at around 1GHz, which is ... 15 times the speed of that first PC's processor. I think it's actually faster than that. Oh and it can throw data around much quicker too.

*(parallelism helps a lot with graphics, each unit draws a little bit of the whole picture and by having many units, it can draw many frames of that picture per second)

It should be good for another couple of years I hope. The new one arrives tomorrow so no sleeping in for me. It's curious though - Saturday delivery is £10, compare that to ... actually it's cheaper than driving to the store and back (£20-£25) and saves me 2 hours each way.

How about that being occupied though ? I'm going to be antsy ... Because the machine it's going into will be busy !

Cricket (time delayed cos it starts at 8.30) on the telly.
Rugby on the pooter.

Should be a good day's sport watching, although I'll be itching to get that graphics card put in. I should really get back into gaming to check it out ... I haven't been doing gaming much lately, been too tired and suffering from the bugs. But that energy is steadily returning.

The hype machine is firmly behind a new one called XCom 2 at the moment and I have to admit, it's caught me too (I am balking at the £35 price, I'm not in a rush to play new games and can wait for sales). What is it ?

UFO Enemy Unknown and it's modern remake XCom are tactical games where you have a small squad of soldiers to send in to combat the aliens who plan to take over the world. XCom 2 starts up 20 years after you lost ... badly. Time to take the Earth back !

Yep. Am hyped. Very tempted actually. But I also have a few other games which I haven't given enough play time yet.

Urg - I said at the top I wouldn't go all Wall of Text on you today.

SORRY !

Actually, not sorry. Cos I like doing the writing and I hope you enjoy reading what comes out when I bash the keyboard.

PS In case that Working At Home lunch thing caught an eyebrow - yep. Instead of going off to read the news on that break from ... reviewing/reading work things, I did something technical labourish instead ! Probably more effective at break stuff than reading news things, the mind refreshes better when you turn it to different tasks. And I didn't count the tinkering as work time.