Bank Holiday Pain. Also spaceships and cricket

I had a plan this weekend !

I had intended to go visit the Book Barn again as they were running another bank holiday sale. Nope. Leg had other plans.

(And I do hope that's one of those occasions where dog wasn't having to be super tolerant of small human).

What happened to the leg ? I don't actually know. I have a vague recollection of a very heavy leg cramp on Thursday night / Friday morning but I thought that was lower leg. Apparently I had a heavy strain or tear in one of the muscles on my upper leg, on the inside. Couldn't straighten the leg properly. Very tender, very sore. Couldn't touch it for Pain. Was struggling to get around the house on Saturday and Sunday after it tightened up on the Friday afternoon / evening. Definitely wasn't feeling like doing anything strenuous or stressful like gaming.

Oh and my back was joining in too, being its own wall of pain. Ouch.

I rarely resort to painkillers but it was very tempting over the weekend. Would have involved walking to the place where the painkillers are though and I wans't too sure if I'd get that far.

So Bookbarn on Sunday or Monday was a case of "maybe next time".

Cricket was awesome though this weekend. There hasn't been a finish like that to a Test Match since .... Sri Lanka pulled off something similarly (but much less spectacular) last ditch earlier this year to I believe South Africa.

Definitely enjoyed catching that on the telly over the weekend. England is blessed at the moment with 2 players in the team who are among the best I've seen, plus a couple more who should be there. When Jofra Archer started in the England team, I wasn't so sure. He was very stiff in his first game and through the World Cup and I didn't see what the fuss was about. But he's broken out of that into something that is a true challenge to face and if he stays fit, he will break all sorts of wicket records. Ben Stokes is the other one. People say he's the best all rounder we've had since Ian Botham. I think he's much better. (And then there's Joe Root and Jos Buttler who need to sort themselves out)

Also spaceships ...

The Black Sheep was on the prowl, running missions, blowing up pirates that she could take on and running very quickly away from the pirates that were a bit too big. She's a very fast ship for Elite, one of the quicker ones. Here she is picking up salvage from one pirate who tried to bite off more than they could chew.

There's the Black Sheep looking sleek against the stars while coming into land at Newholm Station. They tend to shoot at you if you try to enter the stations without asking permission ....

One of the stations I've been frequenting has a curious pair of co-orbiting moons outside. I called this shot "Moon and Moon" and there's a wonderful Bat For Lashes song of that name. (Youtube link and there's a little bit of intro before that)

It wasn't all space stations though, a few of the missions involved heading into a planetary moon base with some curious canyons again there.

It was an odd couple of sessions on Sunday and Monday. The aim for me in game at the moment is mainly to get Federation ranking up high enough to unlock another end game ship with a secondary objective of collecting more engineering materials to make that ship better. It's a bit of a grind to be honest, with lots of going from one place to another running cargo and data. It has made for some nice screenshots though.

Last one for today. This is a closer look at that planetary base and it sparked the engineer's curiosity. This is an airless moon, so you'd be suiting up to go outside. The ring of objects on the outside are landing pads. So ships land, pilots and crew come off for shore leave, cargo goes in and out. I can see where the cargo goes in, at the doors at the base with roadways outside.

What I can't see is how the people come and go. Does the base operate a taxi service ? I can't see walkways going from outer landing pads to the central area where I'm assuming the fun is. Perhaps there's a mass transit or tramway or train thing underground. Maybe. Underground would be a good way to do it.

I'm probably overthinking it. When Elite Dangerous was first released, this kind of base wasn't available. It's great to see things like this being added to the game, with more development occurring. The planetary bases and starbases may be made up of what I think is a toolkit of graphics modules to glue together but they look great and that toolkit gives lovely variation when you're meandering through the game to different places, different star systems, different planets, different bases.

Good night, fly safe.

Cricket and Ships

Not quite sure what I've been getting up to over the last week or so !

Wait. I know ... Lots of cricket watching mixed with lots of internet spaceships. England narrowly drew today against the Aussies with a very scary fast bowler emerging on the scene.

There we go. Perfect pic for the thumbnail.

It's been a while since I actually played the cricket but I still have a few of the memories. Perhaps mental scars even. I definitely didn't enjoy seeing Steve Smith hit yesterday by what was nearly literally a death ball. Because he turned his head away*, the ball missed the area that the helmet protects and got him on the side of the neck probably close to the vital weak spot that caused the death of Phil Hughes a couple of years ago.

*This is most certainly NOT a criticism of Steve Smith, more a recognition of human behaviour. I suspect that we'll all break from training and conditioning after being hit in the head by a cricket ball once and unconsciously attempt to avoid the blow by turning the head away when it's actually better to look right at the ball and let the helmet or grill take the blow. But that rational thought definitely doesn't come into play the second time you're hit in the head by a cricket ball.

I've actually been hit in the noggin three times by a cricket ball. The first was the Nose Job, which was nasty (and scary in after thought) enough considering I wasn't wearing a helmet. The second was a similar incident, where the ball hit the grill at the side of the helmet where it attaches. I can remember batting out the innings in dangerous conditions (with a dangerous fast bowler in the opposition who mangled the keeper's fingers too), anchoring our side to a comfy win, watching the guys at the other end bash runs. And then I was nearly sick in the changing room after the game.

I rarely actually get that kind of sick, unless there's alcohol involved ... in which case watch out.

(My third hit on the head saw it hit me in the gob, doesn't count though as an avoidance or not incident though because the circumstances meant that I barely saw it until OUCH).

But yeah, having that kind of injury and the aftermath of it does something to your mindset and I was relieved that after having Nose Job 2 to straighten my nose, I got the chance to bat again before the end of the season and put the potential psychological demons to bed.

One thing I'll say though to conclude this part of the post though, if someone you know has had a head injury, keep an eye on them. They probably don't know whether it's affecting them more than they realise, I certainly didn't realise how badly Nose Job 1 affected my memory until years later. And my memory is still affected 16 years later.

Spaceships time !

Last time saw my ship blasting off from an icy planet with blue canyons ...

I've since been to some rather rugged locations;

Had some close encounters with spaceborne organisms. (As always, click for bigger with these).

Generally racing around the galaxy partly powered by the boosts off Neutron Stars like this one. There is a cost here though, the last 40,000 light years were blighted by having to periodically wait for "FSD Malfunction" to sort itself out.

There was an occasional stop to look back at the full glory of the galaxy. This was while nearing Magellan's Star at the Eastern edge of our galaxy.

Another rugged planetary location. The screenshot is titled "Next stop Edge of Galaxy" (.jpg). Spoiler ... I didn't actually get there because there wasn't a suitable route though. In Elite, the ships get around by making hyperspace hops from star to star but there is a limit to how far the hops can be. In Chrissa's New Potato, I could go 62 light years in a hop. In my current ship, it's more like 22 with cargo, or 28 without. More on the new ship later.

Ship was getting as tatty on the outside as the hyperdrive was getting on the inside, so it was well past time to head home. While peeking at the local nebulae of course.

Also nebula. And a little bit of far off civilisation. A quick stop off for repairs (and fresh paint) and we're off again.

Finding spooky locations in space ....

And a crashed ship in the same system. But ...

It became time for the Potato to be retired to a very special hangar. That's Jameson Memorial in the background, which is only accessible in game to pilots who have gained an Elite ranking and I'm there for Exploration now.

That's the Black Sheep, which is an Imperial Clipper ship which will be put to work in the service of the Federation. I have a weird sense of humour sometimes.

Last one for today. That's the Black Sheep closing in on an engineer base to get some shield modifications in.

Other thing before I close ... I mentioned a zombie hard disc in the last post ! It's still going. Had to reboot Meltdown due to a Windows Update and the ancient zombie drive came back for more. Tough little beastie.

Happy travels, fly safe.

Speed ! For Science ....

I had a daft idea today to do a little bit of FOR SCIENCE !

It's not going to be that bad. Honest.

The daft thought came up when we were talking about hard discs on one of the Discords. NOOO ! DON'T GO ! Please stay. I shall add photos of cute animals at inappropriate places.

An old one but a good one. Nah, this question got me wondering how fast the various beasties are now. I have 4x hard discs in Meltdown now ...

It boots off a Crucial M2 500GB SSD with 90 running hours on the clock now.
(Addon - that's not right. This system has been up for a continuous 13 days or 312 hours and it's had more time on than that since the build)
The last machine ran off a Crucial 250GB SSD which racked up 6258 hours.
Most of my data lives on a Western Digital 1.5TB conventional drive which has clocked up 61,626 hours.
The golden oldie is a Samsung 250GB conventional drive with ... 91,482 running hours.
That's a lot of hours. (3,811 days or 544 weeks or 10.5 years of running time).

Yep. I leave my machines on a lot but they're usually doing more Science ! in that time with the BOINC grid computing applications that help out alien signal research, medical research, astronomy and climate research.

The video I was watching has finished, so I can check out how those drives do ...
Samsung 250GB drive first - this one is ancient so it shouldn't do so good.
Read and Write speeds are both about 70MB/sec. (B for bytes, b for bits, there are 8 bits in a byte)
Input Output Per Second (IOPS) tests gave around 0.7 to 0.4 MB/s on its meter.
(I neglected to take a screenshot at the appropriate time - oops!)

Poor thing probably shouldn't be getting benchmarked these days.

Not quite dead yet though.

(Update - erm. It might be. Oops. Drive is no longer responding ! It's done this before though and came back and I have all of the data that I want off it.)

The Western Digital drive is actually about the same !

A little bit quicker on Read and Write and whereas the Samsung didn't register on the Write side, there we are. That's not actually IOPS with that 0.886, apparently it did 216.3 IOPS on that last write test and 81.8 IOPS on the read test.

Why are the two conventional drives similar ? Firstly, the Samsung drive was a performance drive in its day and the Western Digital was more of an eco friendly green variant of their drives. So it's understandable from that direction why they're so close. They're also similar technology and quite possibly, limited by the interface.

How do the SSDs do ? That's a Solid State Device drive which instead of storing the 1s and 0s as different magnetic poles on glass platters laced with chemicals, they store the data in memory.

Erm. Quite. This is the 250GB SSD that's wired up through a better type SATA cable (think it's shielded better) but still goes through the same interface protocols as the conventional drives.

But it's a whopping 6.5 times faster on raw read speed, 4.7 times faster on raw writes and 314 times faster on the Q8T8 and Q32T1 read test.

The IOPS for the last two tests were 7556.9 IOPS for the read test and 23,425.5 IOPS for the write test. The fastest was 54,041.6 IOPS for the 4KiB Q8T8 test. These are so much faster because instead of an arm physically traversing across the platter to find the data, the system just asks for the data to be read from the memory.

Can we go quicker ? Let's see. I'm doing these tests blind by the way but I kinda knew what to expect.

Here's the last one :

I thought there might be a bit more between the two SSDs to be honest there ? On the whole, a little bit quicker on top of SUPERSPEED. I'm not that bothered about it being quicker than that.

The detail numbers are 10,390.6 IOPS on the 42.56 Read and 23,504 IPS on the 96.26 Write. The fastest was 57,770.3 IOPS on the 236.6 test. It's not going as quick as the spec says it should by quite a long way (1900MB/s read, 950MB/s write, 90,000 IOPS read, 220,000 IOPS write) so I might need to do a little investigating as to why there. (It's probably set to use the wrong interface type). The drive was getting a little toasty though (63 degrees C according to one app) so I might not actually want it to go much quicker.

One thing I did notice through these tests is that the SSD read tests were pushing the processor. The Ryzen 5 3600 that I have has 6 cores capable of running 12 threads simultaneously. The read tests were maxing out one of those threads, so that might be affecting what the drive can do. It might be going beyond what the rest of the system can provide.

It's nice having hard figures though to back up that "SSDs are so much better than older style hard discs" thing !

Why does it matter though ? What's the significance of the numbers ? When it comes to raw MB/sec, not much in my opinion. We're rarely copying massive amounts of data around the system.

What we do most often is pull in lots of little bits of data. Accessing a font. Accessing configuration files. Accessing all the little pictures that make up icons and buttons. Pulling up all of the other little bits and pieces that Windows seems to need. SSDs excel at doing that ... older hard discs, not so much.

And I better leave it there !

Ok. One last cute animal pic :

Wait. Not cute animal. Still worth posting.

I have popcorn. Cya !

Randomish Thoughts

I feel the need for a random thoughts post ...

Quite.

One random thought lately was about Advent and what I'll do this year. This one was triggered by waking up and seeing the collection of little Lego things from last year :

There is a lot of it and I'm not sure if I have the space for it all any more ! I do enjoy the Advent format though so I think I'll still do something adventy in December. Probably something like those calendars that have a suitable picture behind all of the doors. I did something similar a few years ago :

I definitely enjoyed that sequence (here's a link to the posts from that December). Something similar may happen this year.

And yes. I have no shame for talking about Xmassy stuff before it's even Autumn.

And I have been told off already for talking about Xmassy stuff this early in the year.

Currently watching a Rebel Galaxy Outlaw stream by the one and only FuzzyFreaks (who is lovely and I'd recommend her streams - adult levels of swearing though !). An interesting game. It's another space shooty combat game, pretty much all about the combat. Which is why I won't get it ... Fuzzy's having fun with it though. There's an absolute tonne of great music in it too. What I do want to go is go back into the original game, Rebel Galaxy which I drifted away from when I played it before.

Rebel Galaxy - you had battlewagons to fly around in;
Rebel Galaxy Outlaw - you're flying a combat fighter;
Different scale. Outlaw is more around the Elite scale, which is another reason I won't switch over to it. I'm too invested in the Elites. I'm attempting to be more careful with the games I acquire because I just don't play probably half of them. I could spend that on Lego ! That I have little space for. May need to spend money on storage and chucking out of boxes.

The latest leg of the long journey home (don't buy that game, it had a nice concept but shockingly bad execution) saw me find a planet mostly ice but with blue canyons.

Nice. I've had a couple of evenings off Elite though because that long exploration run is feeling grindy. Only about 180,000 light years to go which works out to a minimum of 3,000 jumps. I'm good with sessions of about 120 jumps on weekdays and push it longer on weekends. I'll be cheating though by taking shortcuts via the neutron star highway.

I enjoy watching the streams too and I only have so many screens to watch things on. (Telly, laptop, 1x desktop screen).

Fuzzy is currently drawing something crazy on screen - in Elite, you buy the paint jobs through the Frontier store. In Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, you can paint your own ships. And apparently, there may be an option to have them 3d printed for you.

Random shift - cricket didn't happen last week but it looks like Jofra Archer is going to be a more than ample stand in for Jimmy Anderson who turned out lame last week. Apparently he got runs too ... which is a complete surprise after seeing what he was like batting in the World Cup !

Hopefully that'll let England bounce back in the next game. I have Kia Super League women's T20 on at the moment and it's half time. No idea who's going to win yet, which just adds to why you'd want to watch it.

Oh dear Lord, Fuzzy just drew a half naked man to adorn her spaceship. Oh dear.

Any more random thoughts ? It's happily a little cooler now, not quite as oppressively hot as it did get over the last few weeks.

I think the rest of tonight's going to be more chill out. I'll see you on the other side ....

NOOOOO ! Need the cookies !