MeghanIsMe

Me last night: I'd like to sleep now.

My brain: Sure, but remember how much it hurt when you had to give up the dogs you were fostering before you moved to Europe? Also, what if the used HEPA filter you just bought has bad wiring and starts a fire while you're asleep? Ok, sleep well now!

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Having determined that the budget to replace my computer just about covers all the parts I've bought and nothing else, I went back to trying to save the old graphics cards. I took one apart, cleaned it, removed and replaced the thermal transfer compound, put it back together, and tried it. It seemed like it mostly worked except that the HDMI port was dead so I could only use the Displayport Port. I need more than one monitor and couldn't get the integrated graphics to work at all with the card in, so that one's out. I tried the second card and that one wasn't even recognized as a video card by the computer.

I've started feeling like it will be good to take those things to an electronics recycler anyway. One more reminder of something awful that will be gone. They smell bad too, despite all my cleaning. The smell of the condo after the fire is seared into my brain. I can't quite recall it from nothing, but when I smell something that the odor lingers on, it's right there in my mind.

So I'm back to the integrated graphics on my Ryzen 5700 for now. They work well enough. I can't play Satisfactory very well, but that's really about the only thing it affects. I would possibly like to try Final Factory, a new factory-building game in early access, but that can wait.

I have a lot to journal about. But first I'm going to whine about my tweaks to my interface with the computer.

Maybe this is a technological get-off-my-lawn rant?

I've been spending more time helping Miriam or doing my own stuff at the computer lately, and the more I do that the more I want to tweak the computer to function the way I want it to.

The biggest problem I'm having right now is that AHK scripts I've set to execute with a key combination of a letter or number plus F13 are sometimes triggering without pushing F13. I thought maybe the F13 is getting 'stuck' on somehow, but no keyboard status monitor program I can find will show me the status of F13. I'll be typing along and suddenly a string just pops ittoex t ctohloer : blue it just did it again.

I'm going to leave it there as an example of how *ridiculously annoying* it's becoming. The recorded macro to change text color (using what happened above there for instance: that's supposed to trigger on F13+n) within Google Sheets just intertwines itself with what I'm trying to write and I have to delete it all and retype.

It could be a problem with my AHK code, or with the key remapper that I used to make volume up into F13, or with the way Windows deals with an F13 press, or with my actual keyboard hardware and I can't figure out how to troubleshoot.

Speaking of actual keyboard hardware, my nice pink mechanical keyboard is being flaky with its shift and space keys lately too. It was supposed to be a new open box item and it's been great up until now, but suddenly shift and space occasionally don't work and that's almost as annoying as the random macros in terms of having to go back and delete things.

I type quickly. I would guess around 60-70wpm when my brain and fingers are cooperating and depending on content. Having to fix all these random bits of mess just kills that, and it's so frustrating!

I'm pretty sure the shift and space problems are physical hardware problems because if I remove and reseat the keys on the switches, it gets better for a while. Maybe AUKey switches aren't as high-quality as my perusal of reviews led me to believe? I could order new ones and replace the ones that may be bad, I guess. The soldering shouldn't be too bad. I just don't have a good workspace because I'm *still* living in a temporary apartment 6 months after the fire.

I *really* miss my Enterpad and my Kinesis.

That Kinesis keyboard was a champion. I'd had it since a manager at a job I had when I was still with my ex bought it for me to combat RSI pain, probably 11 or 12 years ago now. It was showing its age, but it was still working just fine. A new one is up to almost $500 CAD now (thanks inflation!), so it needs to wait for insurance.

Speaking of RSI pain, my left wrist/hand/arm pain is has been significantly increased lately as I find myself at my computer for longer periods recently. I know that a lot of it comes from extension of my left pinky to press modifier keys (shift, ctrl) and tab frequently. The Kinesis moves a lot of those keys under your thumbs (though not tab) and it's a godsend. It makes a real difference in terms of pain.

I just...I really want my computer to do what I want, and look the way I want, and I've become more irritable about it as I get older I guess. I at least have it looking mostly the way I want, between dark mode in Windows, a dark mode browser plugin, and registry tweaks to change the color of inactive windows, for instance, because apparently stuff like that is too important and complicated to trust to average users? There's also Open Shell, making the Start Menu behave much more like windows 7 or 8 than Windows 10, which was driving me crazy. No, I don't *ever* want web search integrated with searches on my local machine. Ever.

And sometimes I think about all the things that I love my desktop *so much* for, when it's behaving, and I think about people who use a phone as their primary "computer," and it just boggles my mind. How do you *live* like that? I don't even feel like I can work as effectively as I'd like at a laptop, let alone a phone.

One of the things Miriam is working on is an interface for doing complex searches on a mobile platform, and I'm like, why is that even a thing? Why would you willingly torture yourself that way?

Miriam and I were talking about my annoyance and frustration with new versions of various software interfaces yesterday, and that might be a post in itself. But the conversation reminded me of my experiences trying other media players since Winamp 2.x and how annoying or unhelpful I found them. Winamp 2.71 did exactly what I wanted and very little else, so I just stuck with it.

Since Winamp 2.x does not play FLAC files, and I'm tired of opening up VLC player every time I want to play the files from my ripped CD collection, and a search online for a working FLAC plugin for Winamp was unsuccessful, I finally looked for and found a media player with a customizable interface that I like. I'm switching over to using Foobar.

Good bye Winamp 2.71: you were released in December of 2000 and you worked pretty well for me for most of 23 years. I'll miss the way your individual windows snapped to each other so readily.

Pictures ( behind the cut. )

I really don't know why, but I've started playing a bunch of the Commodore 64 games I grew up with. Brief reviews?

The current version of VICE (the emulator) is nifty. You can even emulate the sound of the 5¼" floppy drives. They sound basically like I remember. I wonder if someone sampled the actual sounds? The sound seems to be the same between the 1541 and 1571 though, so maybe not.

Christ on a cracker, did these things *really* take this long to load? Why aren't we veterans of '80s computers more patient? Gah! Which key maps to Run/Stop? Why do some games use a different joystick port? But on to the games!

Telengard is still awesome. My dad had a character with so much experience the game expressed it in scientific notation. I died five or six times before making it to level two, but it's awesome regardless. "The dragon likes your body!" Ummm, uh-oh...

Lords of Conquest: pretty cool little Risk-like game (but based on another board game called Borderlands). I used to be good at this. I lost my stockpile in the first two turns twice in a row today.
Expedition Amazon: I remember this being *so* awesome as a kid. After monkeys stole my map *twice* though, I gave up this time.

Impossible Mission: DESTROY HIM MY ROBOTS! *zzzzap-craaackle* Good stuff.

Ultima IV: My first real RPG. The Ultima games truly make my heart ache for a simpler time. The Ultima series will always be very close to my heart.

Way of the Exploding Fist. Fun fighting game at the time. Kind of goofy now. The noises they make are hilarious!

Spyhunter: The best thing about this game may be the Peter Gunn theme. Hearing that on a SID kicks ass. The game itself is decent too though.

Spy's Demise; not bad. The music is forever burned into my brain.

Sammy Lightfoot: this game is kind of crap.

Jumpman. Jumpman is 8-bit love! Yes! Thank you Randy Glover. Still one of the best platform action games because of the unique elements to the different levels.

Master of the Lamps: This was a *weird* game. I think acid was involved.

Seven Cities of Gold: Such colonize. Much slaughter. Wow. Also, "creation will take about 20 minutes." It's easy to forget how long things took on a machine with a ~1mhz processor and 64k of memory. But it's amazing how *much* it could do too.

Sword of Kadash: Ooh, interesting dungeon crawler. The gameplay isn't quite like anything I can think of. Not as mysterious-feeling as when I was a kid though! I used to get so anxious when I could hear ghost noises but couldn't see them. Where are you?! Careful with that ax, Eugene: it's cursed. I might come back to this one.

Also, I had the following experience trying to start it up. "Why isn't the character creation working? It just makes me keep swapping disks forever. *reset* Nope, same thing. *keeps swapping disks approximately forever* Ok, it works. You just have to swap disks a stupid number of times... "Your adventure begins..." *waits 5 minutes for the disk to be read* Good thing you can turn off speed limiters on emulators!"

Boulder Dash: Wow, that music! I remember that! This is a fun little game; I may come back to this one too.

Space Shuttle - a Journal Into Space: I never had clue 1 what I was doing, but I still thought flying a space shuttle was awesome! The title screen has a trademark symbol after the text, and for some reason I always kind of sang it to myself "Space Shuttle, a journey into space tee-emm." Through my whole life, that weird little musical phrase still comes randomly to mind for no reason at all. Brains are weird.
Just tried to play it. Still have no clue.

Satan's Hollow: Doood! I remember this! I knew the title, but couldn't remember the game. It's kind of like Galaga, but with Satan. C'mere Satan, I'll fuck you up!

Save Me Brave Knight: Why is this lock spitting hummingbirds at me? This is weird. Level two may have the most annoying sound track of any game ever.

Ok, maybe more later. I might go back to Jumpman right now.

We are building a new computer for Danae and parts are slowly arriving. We have the monitor so I unboxed it and tried it out to make sure it works. I've never used a curved monitor before. It's weeeeird.

I've been a little too crazy to do much with my leisure time lately other than build things in Minecraft. (The mod set we're using lets you build diesel generators and oil pumpjacks and distillation towers! So of course I have.) I've really just gone home, dealt with animals, made some perfunctory attempt at dinner, and logged on to the server we're sharing.

But I had Monday off because I'm working this Saturday, so I asked Erik if he'd like a visitor after work. After spending a little time at home, he saw me looking at graphics cards on my phone and said that if I was still looking at PC parts, we could take a trip to Fry's.

So we drove over there and walked inside to find a store devoid of nearly everything computer-related. Seriously, there were rows and rows of 95% empty shelves. They had a total of 2, *2*, video cards in stock in the entire aisle, which, at approximately $400 and $500, were not what I was looking for. At the nearby service desk, I commented on the dearth of video cards. The employee said that there was a reorganization happening of the way things were getting delivered and they were waiting on a shipment. On the way out of the store, Erik said it would take a lot more than one shipment to fill all of those empty shelves! There was basically nothing there!

We drove to the nearby Microcenter and found a much less disappointing selection, though that's hardly a high bar. I swiftly realized that video cards had become more complex than the last time I bought one new, which was just before starting grad school. They're like mini-computers in thmselves at this point, with differing processers, memory size, clock speeds, and so on. The card I was looking for because it was specced as the recommended one for Satisfactory, was in the 10xx series. That series is old news now, so I went with a 1660 which, at 6GB, has 3/4 of the amount of memory onboard as my whole computer does on the motherboard. Tech really changes.

That's the largest purchase I've made just for my own personal happiness in...I don't know how long. But Minecraft has been my best destresser lately, and I also want to be able to play things like Astroneers or Satisfactory, which my old 760 was not up to.

I had managed to leave my wallet on Erik's table while ordering food, so he was kind enough to briefly spot me the money until I could Paypal him back that evening, and I left with a fancy new graphics board.

I know video cards are big. I've had ones that take up the space of two expansion slots before. This one takes up three!

It was a pretty great day, though it could have used more cuddling. I ended up leaving not too long after that because I was tired (still getting used to the time change I think) and had work the next day. Next visit I want to plan snuggle time with a movie.

I'm going through some Code Academy stuff on HTML and CSS, in part for work. The last time I wrote HTML, CSS didn't even exist. (I don't think I've done any HTML other than in-line tags in social media since high school.) It is not what I expected at all (not that I'm sure what I expected other than *not* a simple text-editable format); it's both simple and useful.

Also, I was on my way to bed last night when I thought to check Woot.com for the day. I've been pining for a table to use to read my annotated PDFs at school, as well as for numerous other productivity type things, so when I saw this deal, I went for it. http://computers.woot.com/offers/famous-maker-10-1-16gb-android-tablet-5

It looks like it's almost certain to be an HP 10 tablet; a Woot commenter pointed out that the model number matches, and the text on the Woot page was basically a direct copy of HP's product page. This seems to be a pretty good price for one of these, and may even replace taking my laptop with me when I travel somewhere.

This is my oldest IBM Model M keyboard, made in 1986. It is about two years older than my twenty-six year old brother, who is holding it in this picture. It still works just fine, though one has to swap the AT-style cable with an ATX one to connect it to anything these days. Fortunately, that's easy on these because things were actually designed to have replaceable parts back then.

The one I'm using on my desktop off and on is a comparative youngling, made in 1992.





(I'm taking some pictures of my stuff as I start on the process of packing up to move.)