What Have You Done Today - (Computer Version)

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I cleaned my PC yesterday. It's in a Fractal Design Meshify C with dark tinted glass (I really like it!) but has been sat straight on the carpeted floor for a while and has been running 24/7 for the past month. The entire front panel is a detachable mesh with a sponge type filter inside, annoyingly you can't remove the sponge for cleaning so if you can't blow the dust back out from the inside (I couldn't) it does just get stuck there which leaves it looking a bit shabby, I wonder if they sell replacement front panels?

Apart from that though, the PC was far cleaner inside than I'd expected. Loads of dust had accumulated in the frame that the mesh panel clips into but very little of it actually made its way inside, the front fan had some dust on its blades but the CPU cooler was more or less clean, the graphics card was largely the same and the rear fan had a minor amount of fuzz. I didn't even bother to take it outside when I used the compressed air on it because there was so little.

That said, it's not even a year old so the fact that it's clean should be a given! I think I'll try and get it off the floor, just not sure where to put it.
 
Its always nice firing up a freshly cleaned computer. A year in my house without cleaning would destroy a computer though. I start seeing issues after 6 months. But, I have 2 kids, 6 cats and a dog and my computer only just recently moved out of our living room. I am building a new case though, and filtration will definitely be a thing.
 
Well I've been having some problems over the last few days and its all because i'm an idiot. Long story short I got drunk and spilled beer into my pc, yep i'm an idiot. It gets worse though since it didnt turn off and since i was drunk i never realised i just turn it off as normal. Well the GPU really hated the beer bath since it corroded the pcie slot, gpu power pins on pcie connector and it totally destroyed 2 pins on a chip on the gpu board under the back plate. It was an rx580 8gb that got killed everything should be ok since it wasn't fit by beer apart from the mobo since it powers on but won't post since it needs vga and cant get since pcie bus must have been damaged.

So far i have got the brand new rx590 to replace the gpu and a new mobo has just been ordered this has been the most expensive drinking mistake I have ever made lol.
 
Returned to my old gravity simulation project (using the Blender Game Engine) and worked on some improvements: Added lateral translation controls, added a halo to the stars and added a basic navigation interface (heading indicator and a horizontal grid).



Edit: Added a sun texture for the stars and a moon texture for the planets.

Skärmbild (976).png
 
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Just an update if anyone wanted to know I have got it fixed YAY. It reminded me how much i hate installing the stock ryzen cooler i need so much force made me wince lol. but its all good now just installing GPU driver and chipset driver since I got a mobo with a more up to date ryzen chipset.
 
@SecretAgentZero I'm sure the reliability is fine, it's the speed that's the issue. Still, it can't be slower than a mechanical hard drive. I don't need that much storage but if they really are that cheap I'd look into RAID 0ing a pair of 1TB ones to replace my 512GB 850 Evos.

Having read the anandtech review, maybe not! 150MB/s is slower than some hard drives. Much less noise and power and much faster seek time, but still.
 
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I'll admit I was mostly in when I saw $300 for a 2TB SSD. More likely than not using a ~500GB EVO when it comes time to demote my current laptop to Linux plaything.
 
I bought a Western Digital 250GB NVMe SSD from amazon at a bargain price of £59.99 and have been swapping it out from my standard sata ssd today.
81dlN-3opNL._SL1500_.jpg

I backed up my system drive with Minitool Shadowmaker (free edition) then recovered the image to the new M.2 NVMe ssd and rebooted and it's like nothing changed except the whole system is a lot more snappy and responsive (3000/1500 read/write) and is just WOW! boot time is halved. as is most other app launches. :D :lol:
 
As a result of ordering a Vive wireless adaptor, I've recently moved my PC back in to the living room but I'm still streaming it to the TV, not using HDMI, but I don't really know why. Today I also had a fit of DIY and put the lighthouses back up (in different places to before where the cables can be more easily hidden) after putting a new shelf in.

I'm conflicted about the Samsung TV Steam Link app. It's unbelievable how convenient and how good it is when it works, but:
- Non-Steam games are very hit and miss, FH4 streams at 30Hz max while other games have zero controller support when connected through the TV.
- I hate the fact that if I start games with Big Picture mode off, I get the BPM overlay instead of desktop - this sucks because the BPM controls are horrendous and I hate the UI and the feedback sounds.
- Some (poorly coded) Steam games just don't work, most notable for me right now is Yakuza 0.

So I'm considering binning it off and using Parsec instead, but then I have the issue of what to install it on, and can I start the stream on that device automatically? As it is I can go from TV to PC with a couple of button presses on the remote control. Speaking of, Steam Link also disables your remote control so the volume buttons no longer work, which is just terrible.
 
So I got my Vive hooked up again and immediately discovered an annoying issue - if I have SteamVR running I can connect to the PC with Splashtop but can't connect with Parsec. Worse, if I connect with Parsec at all ever I have to unplug the DisplayPort cable from the link box, connect it with HDMI, start SteamVR, exit, reboot and reconnect with DisplayPort so I can plug my EDID spoofer back in - that's required so I can get an image when connecting with Splashtop since I don't have a monitor.

Since Parsec is by far the best streaming solution right now this is pretty annoying, but I'm confident I can fix it since Parsec is compatible with VR and people use it to play games where one player wears the HMD and others don't. It could be because I have Revive, I use direct mode, I don't have a monitor or I use DisplayPort, to make things worse I'm getting a wireless adaptor (I probably mentioned this before) soon which is going to throw another variable in the mix.

Luckily, Abusemark now does HDMI and miniDP iPad LCD adaptors so the LCD I have might be useful again - I have the DP/mini USB version so having the super thick cables made it somewhat useless to me. So, anyway, I might rig it up as a small screen. I might even see if Fractal Design will sell me a new glass panel for my case and put it inside!
 
Bought a mini display port to HDMI adapter for my laptop today, tried it out with a few games on my big screen TV and it works great! Nerf Arena Blast was acting weird though and not displaying the HUD at all when projected to my TV, but it worked fine on my laptop. Changed the "Video Driver" (at least that's what the game calls it) to "Software Rendering" and not only did it fix my problem and a few others, but I also learned I can play the game in much higher resolutions now! :D

However, Xpadder for whatever reason got to where it wouldn't even touch some games much like Black Ops did when ran on game_mod. Luckily after setting it so the program always runs as administrator, it works flawlessly now!
 
Improved my gravity code for the Blender Game Engine and made it approximately twice as fast.

In the old version each planet would independently calculate its gravitational force against every other planet in the scene, making the number of iterations a function of the number of planets f(x) = x^2-x, where x is the number of planets in the scene. With 30 planets the script ran 870 iterations per physics frame.

In the new version, I’m using the fact that the gravitational forces between two bodies are equal and opposing, meaning that I can reduce the number of iterations per planet pair by half (from two to one).

Now the number of iterations are g(x) = (x^2-x)/2, so with 30 planets I just have 435 iterations per physics frame.

I also made everything much cleaner and more efficient.
 
After using it for between 10-15 years (or for as long as I can remember), I have officially retired Firefox tonight. I have kept on Firefox as I was also using Waterfox. While I don't use Waterfox as much, I still have it as my third browser. I guess I was disappointed mostly with how the newer and faster Firefox builds just didn't really add up as a quality browsing experience. And so... I retired Firefox and will mostly work with Waterfox instead.

So my new lineup is Vivaldi, Chrome, and Waterfox.
 
Today I spent some time in Blender putting this together:
Ballfield.png
Ballfield1.png

It is the baseball field from Wii Sports. I had tried to extract it from the game years ago, but didn't have any luck with it sadly. However, as of recently I found a different program that was able to extract it and it seems to work very well. Some minor issues with the UV's on the pitcher plate, but nothing dramatic. Had to delete two redundant polygons because they served no apparent purpose and they only seemed to interfere with the model. I would post more pictures of it from different angles, but I can't figure out Blenders controls for the life of me. :banghead:

One thing I have really wanted to do that motivated me to get this in the first place is port it to Star Wars Battlefront II and turn it into a hero map. It's something I have fantasized about for a long time and maybe if i'm lucky, I can make it happen. I have no experience with the mod tools yet, but we'll see how it goes then.

Tomorrow I may do the same thing for Wuhu Island from Wii Sports Resort, but it'll take some time though.
 
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I’ve dedicated the past two days to meticulously tagging my pornographic image collection with descriptive keywords using digiKam (great software for this purpose).

I’m only about 5% complete... it’s hard work.
 
Lain
I’ve dedicated the past two days to meticulously tagging my pornographic image collection with descriptive keywords using digiKam (great software for this purpose).

I’m only about 5% complete... it’s hard work.
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Wouldn't have thought renaming a folder "latex cockroach prawn porn" would take that long.
 
neema_t
It could be because I have Revive, I use direct mode, I don't have a monitor or I use DisplayPort, to make things worse I'm getting a wireless adaptor (I probably mentioned this before) soon which is going to throw another variable in the mix.
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As it turns out it was because I was using DisplayPort, it may have even been a bad DP cable. I got a DVI > HDMI adaptor to connect the EDID spoofer that way and use HDMI for the link box and it has been fine since.

Today I installed the Vive wireless adaptor, after setting it all up at my parents' house as I'm here until Wednesday - and yes, it's in their (ludicrously spacious and otherwise empty) basement. I only got to play 5 minutes of H3VR before the battery died but wireless VR in a huge space (4x4m play area!) where you can be confident you won't hit anything is really something. If I had a second VR-capable PC I think I would actually just leave it set up here and visit more often.

... I'm just gonna go visit PC Part Picker...
 
Saw Lego Star Wars The Complete Saga for $6.99 last week, so I bought it. A Youtuber I follow uploaded a video once about having the extra toggle characters in any level and I have been relentlessly toying around with the game ever since. As of today, I have finally finished testing out different ideas I had, but sadly none of them worked. So I guess I am done with it for now. :indiff: It's probably a good thing because lately I have been wanting to finish so badly, that I get irrationally annoyed whenever I have to get off of my computer to do something. I guess i'll just have to converse with the dude a bit and find out how he did it.

It's quite fun plundering through the files and learning I can change the sound effects around. Humorously, I didn't even know this, but their is actually a text file containing a massive list of swear words to keep the user from using them in game. The things you find while researching. :lol:
 
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finished my yearly backup of my main PC which lead me to thinking about purchase of new backup laptop, my old netbook from 2010 have busted battery and small 128GB HDD. I'm thinking something low power with Win10 and 1TB HDD ...
 
Sonygamer455
their is a actually a text file containing massive list of swear words to keep the user from using them in game.
Click to expand...

Knowing what I was like as a kid, poking around game files to see what I could find, having a list like that in the files as plain text would be irresponsible and, in my opinion, probably grounds to have the game's rating changed! Maybe they aren't though. There have been examples of easter eggs or hidden content causing re-rating of games after their discovery, this isn't all that different.
 
neema_t
having a list like that in the files as plain text would be irresponsible
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Maybe, but to be fair the game as it comes has most of its files in .DAT files and the only way to get access to that text file is to extract it from one of the .DAT files. Personally I wouldn't expect a typical person to know how to extract it. However if someone else did it previously, then they could try to plunder through the files.

It's worth noting you can still run the game with it's files extracted, even if you delete the .DAT files they originally came from.
neema_t
There have been examples of easter eggs or hidden content causing re-rating of games after their discovery, this isn't all that different.
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Interesting. Any examples to name?
 
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Sonygamer455
Interesting. Any examples to name
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I can't find the video I watched on the topic, but I remember it started off summarising the Hot Coffee controversy then went into a list of other games that caused similar problems, at least one if which was reclassified as a result as the game technically contained nudity (or at least I think that's what it was.)

Edit: I found it but won't embed it here, its YouTube ID is UfVW2xrt34c
 
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Sonygamer455
So I guess I am done with it for now. :indiff:
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So I said this earlier, but as of today, it turns out I finally figured out what I needed to do. Though I had sank at least 18 hours into the game trying to figure it out, it's actually pretty easy thankfully now that I know.

Now that I've figured it out, I think I may play through the whole game and make sure their isn't any unwanted glitches from altering the game data. Going to try to add as many characters to the list as possible just to see how far I can go with this game.
 
So I got myself a
GTX 1050 Ti coming.
Along with a new monitor that isn't a TN film. (In budget)

Now I am thinking of
FX-8320
650W PSU
Wraith cooler.

(I am currently running a 500w psu with a FX4130 and a 550Ti, on a GA-78LMT-USB 3.0 rev 6.0)

Will a 650w PSU work fine?
 

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