AI Slop

Caught a short vid on YouTube talking about a battle in the Pacific in WW2.

The Garands were firing 3-round bursts as fast as an M16, and shooting, at least, 30 rounds with no reloading shown.

Looked good except for the that obvious flaw. 

Admission

It only took a year and a half, but I have finally moved my Thunderbird profile from Crispy IV to DerpyPuter.

I guess it was time to admit that Derpy is the main computer.

Procrastination was more at fault. 

Why Does Not Answer How

Ubuntu has three "Power Modes."

Performance, Balanced and Power Saver.

Performance notes, "High performance and power usage."

Balanced notes, "Standard performance and power usage."

Power Saver notes, "Reduced performance and power usage."

I have Balanced selected; or so I thought.

Derpyputer was not performing up to spec and it was right after a restart for an update, a browser update and installing a different music player.

Uh oh.  Which of those things broke the computer?

I just endured the slower performance while I waited for my brain to hit a space where I could endure looking for the answer.

Somewhere in here, while tabulating the stats for the Type 64 rifle, I noticed the built in screen would dim much sooner than expected.

So I went into the settings to change the time setting for that.

Turns out there's no discrete setting for that, but this is where I see that "Power Saver" has been selected.

I changed it back to "Balanced" and all is better! 

I have no idea how this setting got changed!  There's supposedly no keyboard shortcut for it, but I suspect feline involvement. 

Older Is Newer

There's no iTunes for Ubuntu.

There was iTunes on my Win7 and OSX 10.6.8 installs on the dead Mac Pro.

This has led to a discovery of just how much music was in the DRM locked m4p format.

Amazon is happy to sell me the music again in mp3 format without any DRM attached.

SIGH.  I sometimes miss Napster.

Going to be a bit of a slog finding and replacing the locked music.

But I get the bitter amusement that this is not the first time I've had to repurchase a large chunk of my music.

I've gone from vinyl to cassette to CD to mp3 to m4p and now back to mp3!

Yay! Fun! Yay! 

Power Only

I noticed that I didn't have a song I wanted to listen to on my phone.

Then I discovered that I did have the file on my phone, but it was DRM locked from iTunes.  You can't have iTunes on an Android phone.

No problem!

Buy the song, again, from Amazon, in a DRM-free mp3 format.

Plug in the phone to transfer the file.

No little notice asking if I wanna change from charge only to file transfer.

Mutter under breath...

This is the first time I've tried to do this since getting the Samsung, so maybe a default setting is wrong.

Search the search engines for answers.  Find them.  Change settings.

Plug in phone.

Nothing.

Get frustrated.

Realize that I might have a charger only cord plugged in.

Try different cord.

Get the expected notice asking if I wanna change from charge only to file transfer.

Move song from computer to phone.

In fact, I deleted the contents of the music folder on the phone and replaced it with the music folder on the computer, just to make sure I have all my tunes again. 

Speed Test

Now that Derpyputer has replaced The BeastMac on the desktop, I wondered if I'd see a speed difference if I plugged the CAT6 cable into it.

In a word, yes.

It also led to checking the speed with both logins on the router.

Insertrouternamehere got:

53.76 Mbps down and 40.01 Mbps up.

Insertrouternamehere-5G got:

300.27 Mbps down and 237.94 Mbps up.

The wired connection to Insertroutername got:

 503.36 Mbps down and 421.70 Mbps up.

I think I can live with that. 

I Need An Equalizer

Something I've noticed about Ubuntu and media is a lack of an equalizer to shift the preponderance of bass down a notch.

I know there's a nerd or two reading this.

What do I need to do? 

Illuminating

The deep dive into artillery for GURPS led me to discover something neat.

We have IR illumination rounds now.

That is really cool!  Hot?

Not sure if they would have had them for T2K or not, but it's still neat. 

Net Positive?

While I will miss AutoCAD and Photoshop, I had not actually used them for much of anything in years.

What I have gained, is desk real-estate!

That tower and the two monitors took up a lot of space.

I should be able to run a second monitor from any of my Ubuntu laptops.

I'd long since stopped using the drives on the Mac for primary data storage.  Technically, the data is still on the hard drives.  I have several ways to read those if I need to. 

PS: I am much less upset about the machine's death than I expected to be.

Maybe because it'd become progressively less useful as time went on and neither OS was safe to have online anymore. 

Sad Day

My 2008 Mac Pro A1186 has died.

With it goes my copy of AutoCAD and Photoshop. 

My God It's Full Of Math Errors

I have made a serious dent in the cannon list.

All the Kwk guns from 3.7cm to 8.8cm for Mr Mustache Man.

The 17 pdr, 20 pdr and L11 guns for the Brits. 

All of the US 75mm and 3" guns.

Just about all the T2K guns for the US and Soviets.

A couple of the WW2 USSR guns for good measure.

One sheet per gun.  29 guns.

And because I was looking at tables in the Gun Stats pdf and doing a lot of copy-pasting...

I introduced a lot of errors.

Errors which were corrected when I figured out the IFS function!

Now it accounts for the three variables from bore diameter, two from velocity, one from the TL and if it's a smoothbore or not.

Save early.  Safe often! 

The Wehraboos Have Failed Me

There are no consistent sources for the weight of complete tank rounds for Nazi Germany.

Worthless AI guesses are the projectile weights. 

Scan Issues

Yesterday, The Beast decided that the left front speed sensor was absent and turned on the ABS and Stabilitrak lights.

The $410 Topdon Artidiag Pro scanner we got just for such occasions did not tell me this.  It told me the engine and transmission modules reported no codes. 

The old BlueDriver bluetooth code reader told me it was the LF speed sensor, but wouldn't clear the code.

The old Innova scanner cleared the code.

Tonight I decided to see WHY the Topdon wouldn't read the car.

Ran the updates, tried to scan, no joy except for the engine and transmission.

It turns out that I need to tell the scanner to scan for Holden (Australia), 2012, VE/WM Series and it can suddenly see the other modules!

Good to know.

It's possible that this is my fault by enabling BCM features not normally on a US spec car with OBDSynch, so now the BCM thinks it's from the land of Oz. 

Slogging

Moving files from the NAS to the expanded storage on DerpyPuter is a matter of wait.

I am finding a couple of files that don't exist on the NAS, but do exist on Crispy.

I must have moved rather than copied at least one time.

Ooops! 

More Space

DerpyPuter has shed the 500gb drive that came with her and now has a 1tb drive that used to house Win7 on Crispy I.

Special thanks to JT for figuring out a configuration issue.

Happy dance to go from 321 to 821 free gigs of space. 

Even If

I was reading about how Senator Kelly spewed the contents of a classified briefing in public (are charges coming?) about how shallow our stockpile of precision munitions is getting.

Need I remind everyone that the dumb munitions still work fine if you're willing to have a larger circle of destruction surrounding the target?

One of the main drivers of precision munitions is to get stand off distance to keep our own people safe from the enemy's defenses.

If the enemy has no defenses to speak of a WW2 bomber could do the mission. 

Control The Words Control The Dialog

There's a list of words that you cannot say on YouTube if you want to keep your channel monetized.

There's also a list of words that let you wink wink, nudge nudge, understand what word they'd meant to use.

Like unalived instead of kill.

Yahtzee for Nazi.

Etc.

By going along with the ban, you are going along with whatever messaging the people in charge of the purse strings wish you to portray.

I don't know a way around it except to be funded outside of YouTube and using their platform despite it.

But that leads to your channel being buried and not seen by new eyes... 

They Keep Breaking This Feature

Blogger keeps breaking the post picture by URL feature and I have now idea what could be the cause.

It's not because the URL is broken, because if you manually enter the html for the hot linked pic, it appears correctly.

It's their interface that's busted and keeps getting busted after they fix it.

Feedback has been sent to whomever keeps track of such things and it will prolly start working again tomorrow for a few weeks. 

Signal Strength

We've been watching hockey via one of the secondary broadcast channels on the back porch.

Which is fine as long as the weather cooperates.

Lately, though, reception has been a bit choppy and we have neighbors who turn up their music too loud.

So I ordered a bigger antenna!

I clamped it to the mount that used to hold our abandoned in place Dish Network dish.

There was some bother with aiming because my phone's compass wasn't calibrated properly.  I was off like 13° south of where the transmitters were!

Bonus: since we were using abandoned Dish Network stuff anyways, we now have broadcast TV in the living room too!

It just took me a bit to find which of the coax cables in the attic led to the wall-jack nearest to the TV.

I owe Marv dinner for his help.
 

Good Timing

Remember a couple days back when I talked about replacing the Amazon Basics UPS with a unit I'd put a new battery in?

Yesterday the clock on the microwave said 0:00 for the time and the garage clock was short a few hours.

The power had gone out while I was sleeping and there was nothing else to make us notice.

It cannot have been out for very long because the coffee pot's clock was still right.  It'll recover after a short outage because unplugging it briefly is how you reset the "clean the pot" notice.