Resting, Internet Spaceships, Fancy Pooters, Annoyances

Hello everyone.

Week off for me this week. I'll go on so long and then need to get away from Stuff for a little while. That'll be people, work, having to get up in the morning, various stuff like that.

Oh and it's also a chance to listen to a lot of music, get stuff in that I wanted to have delivered, lots of general chill out. Maybe a few trips out and about, may that be in the virtual world or in the real world.

I haven't actually listened to all of the music on the laptop yet and that's approaching a year. I haven't bought much music over the last year, only about 500 tracks. There are 1850 tracks to go to listen to everything and I'm at tracks in the S albums. After listening to tracks individually, I'll queue up the albums and I'm in the O albums there. It's a reasonably systematic way of jumbling up what gets listened to. The next album up in the queue is Once I Was An Eagle by Laura Marling.

One reason for these occasional weeks off is to rest, recover and let some of the painful bits fix themselves up a bit. I'm having to be careful with certain games at the moment, because my wrist is threatening to go very painful ... First person games where you have to do fine aiming with the mouse seem to be the worst and I haven't played many of those for quite some time. WoW was bad for it too because that fine aiming would see me looking to press certain buttons on screen.

Oh - tracks from one album have been coming through at the moment, that's Scarlet and Other Stories by All About Eve and there are some great tracks in it, like Only One Reason.

Internet Spaceships may dominate, if that's Elite, Stellaris or something different when the PC upgrade arrives .....

That's the latest from EDSM star map and I'm now through the centre of the galaxy and heading way off to the left towards the farthest points you can navigate to from Earth. That got named as Beagle Point in game and is the next destination. I can now plot a route to it as well, with the route plotter being limited to just 20,000 light years. That was a great upgrade from the somewhat unreliable 1,000 light year limit it had when I first started playing.

I got me a new paint job ... A few Dragon Green stripes in there.

And that's Sagittarius A* at the centre of our galaxy from at least a light minute out. (Earth is just over 8 light minutes away from our Sun and Mercury is 3.5 light minutes out). The ring inside the black hole is actually light deflected from the Milky Way ribbon to the top right.

Astronomy is fascinating. And scary when it comes to super massive black holes that just happen to be the engine that makes our galaxy happen.

I'll hopefully get back to collecting some great screenshots soon (although there are more that haven't been posted yet). But I would like to go back to some of the games that I set on one side for a bit. Like Deus Ex Mankind Divided and Prey which were going beyond the capabilities of my computer as it was at the time.

New bits are on their way ... What'll be in the box ?
AMD Ryzen 5 3600. Latest modest processor from these guys and it's apparently better than Intel if you feed it with good memory.
X570 motherboard. Gotta have something to link it all together.
500GB M2 drive from Crucial. This'll be my 4th SSD from Crucial and they've done well so far. This upgrade was a bit too tempting.
32GB of DDR4-3200. This will be another 4x upgrade from the 8GB I have here. More memory always helps because the unused memory gets used to help the disc caching out.
New box ... and power supply. Because it's awkward to take a motherboard out when it's in.

I'll be transferring over a 1060 graphics card and my various hard discs. Oh and a bluray drive that may need to be replaced because I think it finally failed. I had to abandon watching Rogue One tonight because it was breaking up too much and I think it's actually been failing for a long time now because it was corrupting the imports of audio cds.

Oh and I'm happy with monitor, keyboard, mouse and speakers so those will transfer over too.

One thing that's annoyed me though is the attitude of my credit card company ... I ended up using my debit card to buy the bits too because they (Barclaycard - beware of them) flagged the transaction as potential fraud despite the order being placed at the same IP address as I use to do all the paying off of that card.

They did the same thing last year with the laptop.

Highly annoying. Oh and they did an automatic phone call thing at 10.00 this morning to clear the issue. 10.00 on a Sunday ? WHAT IS THIS HERESY.

Back to reality and better things.

I don't think the bits will arrive tomorrow because I ordered after they all went home on Saturday. May well find myself over in Cardiff again for munchies. And a wander. A wander that may well take me past :

Lego Shop
Music Shop
Sweet Shop
Market Book Stall
Cardiff Castle
(And I need to do a general shopping too)

Hopefully my back feels better this morning to allow me to do that. It was very stiff this morning. Perhaps because I left the window open last night on a cooler night than it has been. Oh and that 10.00am crawl and flop down the stairs for that call from the credit card people.

We shall see !