I don’t appear to have written about it at the time of writing, but Sabriena took me to see Ben Howard at the Palais a while back, and now it was my turn to pick a show… and what a show it was: in around July, she noticed that the Dropkick Murphys were coming, and the opener was Alkaline Trio, two bands I really like (though I confess I’ve not listened to any of the last three Alkaline Trio CDs). At the Forum Theatre, we’ve never been there so that should be fun.
It was a work night (Sunday night), but no worries I can just take the next day off as I have plenty of PTO left this year!
So we organized to go down there, got there early to make sure we got parking ($27 for probably 6 hours right next door?), then walked up to Melbourne Central for some dinner. Back to the theater where the line got significantly longer, but they got every one in fairly fast just rapid-fire checking tickets. No one got carded, but I think that’s because it was pretty clear everyone was my age or older, and there’s no mistaking me for 17.
I dunno if Alkaline Trio shat in the sound guy’s cereal or if it was meant to sound like that, but I found their stuff really poor sounding - we were right in the middle of it (just in front of the sound booth, about a meter back from what would have been the pit if anyone was doing that), could barely hear the vocals (Sabriena had no idea what songs they were playing even though she knows a few and they actually played one of her favourites, “Radio” and she didn’t pick it up at all). The bass was simultaneously inaudible and obnoxiously ringing too. I’m no sound engineer (in fact I’m quite probably tone deaf) but I didn’t really enjoy it as much as I should have and the crowd didn’t really seem all that animated either (though I dunno what a bunch of 40 year old emos are supposed to look like?).
After that Sabriena wanted some air so we went outside for a bit, and when we came back we ended up further up the back, but the sound was significantly better and it was a brilliant show… probably evidenced by the fact I took seven photos total and three of them were when no one was playing. They played about two songs I couldn’t place, the rest were all great, they weren’t near as sloppy as they said they might have been, and the crowd was going bananas.
We got out fairly reasonably (traffic was a far cry from the Palais where we spent a good 30 minutes just sitting in the driveway of the parking lot) and made it home a bit after 3am, after a pit-stop at the Rockbank roadhouse for a coffee.
It’s funny that when we bought this house, there were multiple spur-of-the-moment decisions we made that we came to hate. “The rocks look nice, they’ll be low maintenance”. “The TV would work best against the brick wall”. The latest, it seems, was “oh that big room just off the kitchen with the two giant windows, that’ll be perfect for the family computer room”.
It was okay, but with a couple of minor complaints. Their desks were up against the windows, which is nice in theory, but in practice you almost always wind up closing them before sitting down to use a computer. If you didn’t, it’d do things like make Sabriena’s speakers overheat and buzz. The room was hot in summer, and because it’s an extension without a full roof cavity, and thus doesn’t have a heater register in a useful place, cold in winter. Those giant windows? Yeah they leak heat like nothing else.
This house also has a space, which when it was shown to us was used as a “formal dining” area. It’s got a nice hanging light thingo right above where the table was, and you can dim it! Except it’s on carpet, and we’ve got a kid, and a dog. So our table was on the tiles in the amply sized kitchen, since we’re a small family and only have a small table. So this “dining area” space really just collected clutter in it and didn’t do a lot else.
Sabriena came up with the idea, and Duncan agreed, of putting their desks in there instead. All the drawbacks of their current space would go away, with the only downside of Duncan losing some space for swinging his limbs around playing VR. Not too much, mind you, but some, admittedly. We resolved that we’d do it in January, because that seems like when all the big projects get done, and Duncan seemed almost disappointed by this.
We started talking about a week ago, and thought that actually it might be better to do it before December, because we’ll have family over then and that big space could be more useful for a Christmas dinner, instead of cramming the tables in wherever they’ll fit. So we talked to Duncan again and opted to do it this weekend, which started today.
The problem with building your own desk is that if you have to move it, it’s an entire operation to disassemble and re-assemble it. It took hours to do and we are haggard. But it’s mostly done - I still have to have an ethernet cable drop run there (there’s once again a cable running across the carpet), and since Duncan’s lost about 20cm of desk space to his right, we’re going to make up for that with some floating shelves he can put his knick-knacks on. I also need to get a holesaw and put one additional cable hole in for the lamp that’s in the corner, but it’s basically finished.
We’ve done nothing with the other room yet.
I’ve needed a new mouse for some time now… years? This is my fourth Steelseries Rival in about ten years. I absolutely adore the Rival, which was later called the Rival 300 (of which I did not replace mine with), but is now abandoned… they don’t make them any more. None of their other mouse devices have a shape remotely similar (from a cursory look at pictures + specs), so I just kept chugging along with mine, putting up with it.
What’s wrong with it, is the same issue that basically affected all the others: the scroll wheel. I did have one mouse, one of the earlier ones, where the right mouse button developed noise/electrical bounce/whatever, but the other three mice since all developed the same issue. The scroll wheel gets phantom movement, or can’t decipher which direction I’m turning it, so it jumps all over the place. On games where “weapon swap” is bound to scroll wheel, I’ll swap weapons sporadically. Really frustrating on games like Once Human that don’t let you unbind this, and beyond frustrating for work.
I destroyed more than one mouse opening it up to clean it (because the feet that let the mouse glide so lovely over the pad are also what hide the screws, and you absolutely cannot get them back on in an acceptable manner after removing them, even if you warm the glue up with steam prior to removal) and it’s not dirty or anything… I have no idea what the hell is going on with them.
It’s ironic that the reason I bought the Steel Series in the first place was due to wheel problems with the previous mouse.
But anyway, enough whining. What to replace it with?
EB Games had a Logitech g502 Hero, on sale for half price, and I nearly bought it right then, but Sabriena said she didn’t wanna hear my mouth because I’m so precious about mouses, keyboards, etc, and I should research it first. Ugh, fine.
So home I went, and forgot about it. A few days later, I looked up reviews, and most of them sounded like nothing I couldn’t live without. The one complaint that multiple reviewers made was that when operating in ratchet mode (ie not free-spin), the mouse wheel is very “industrial” - big chunky clicks between steps. I don’t hate this, I think I can live with it. All the proportions looked about the same (I think there was a couple millimeters in either direction difference?), and other than looking “SUPER HIGH TECH” it more or less seems unoffensive to me.
I have no love for Logitech as a manufacturer, I think, but I reasoned that since I have the software installed for their devices on my work Mac for the webcam, I can use that if I need to configure something, so fuck it, let’s do it.
Except I forgot about it again, until today. When they weren’t on sale. Bugger. Oh well, today was shaping up to be expensive anyway and I’ve already told myself I’m not putting up with this fucking scroll wheel any more, so $150AUD down the toilet, and yeah so far I don’t hate it.
Sabriena’s had back problems for quite a while, but last year some time she ended up with one that stopped her from running. It remains to be seen whether it’s permanent or just for an extended time, but in the mean time she was going crazy from not being able to “get out there”, and she decided to dip her toes in cycling.
Because she’s as cheap as I am (we often joke that wire was invented by our ancestors fighting over a copper coin), she just bought a cheap mountain bike from K-mart. I did what I could with adjusting it out of the box (it came terribly poorly set-up), but in the end we opted to take it to the local bike shop and have them tune it up. It cost around $40AUD, and was well worth it, she’s super happy, it’s a completely different bike, and she’s gone on several long rides since.
I went with her on one short one, even though we’ve got very different goals, but one thing is clear: a 20" BMX with modern gearing (I think I have 16t9t?) is not suitable for keeping up with someone on a mountain or gravel bike. But it was going to take me some mental preparation for me to get on a K-mart bike, though I definitely wasn’t ready to spend the money on a decent one either, particularly as I didn’t know if I’d like it.
Fortunately, someone listed a Mongoose Fireball on Facebook for a price that was cheap. Suspiciously cheap, like might-be-stolen cheap. So I arranged to go look at it, checked out it wasn’t stolen (in retrospect, not well enough, I used what I thought was an official site, but Victoria has no official site, the one I used is commercial and thus non-conclusive). It was in pretty miserable shape, which downgraded the quality of the deal from “might be stolen” to “okay it’s cheap but this isn’t the final price, it’ll need some parts”.
After buying it and realizing my mistake with the anti-theft site, I held my nose and entered the local police station and had them run the serial number for me too. Confirmed it wasn’t stolen a couple days later, all good.
The damage? It 100% needed a new back tyre, and I had concerns about the chain too (not sure if it was left outside or just never oiled ever). It might want a new rear rim, or maybe the bike shop can true it and fix the noises the spokes are making. Anyway, I bought some cheap new tyres for it, some tubes, a new chain, and a chain breaker to do the swap. Some adjustment on the brakes (I am completely new to disc brakes but I did an okay job) and I’m away.
So far I’m okay with it. I haven’t ridden it enough due to my chronic unfitness, but I’ll get there.
Meta update: I need to change the “BMX” tag to “cycling” or something.
Waaay back in the day, a kickstarter was announced for Elite Dangerous, a spiritual/actual successor to the “Elite” series of computer games, the first of which was a substantial rabbit hole I fell down as a kid (I distinctly remember dying a lot, and I think I was saved frequently by cheese-saves via our Action Replay cartridge). We were much too poor at the time for me to back it, and I promptly forgot about it.
I bought it on sale some time ago, and never played it, and I eventually rolled around into trying it a couple months back. Playing it is probably not the right term, it became my personality for a couple of months. It’s not entirely unlikely that I am thinking about the game while you’re reading this.
I’ve progressed reasonably quickly in terms of content (though definitely not skill), and I decided that using an Xbox One controller was probably holding me back. Yeah, I’m sure that’s it. I remembered seeing people advertising HOTASes (“hands-on throttle and stick”) around, and I originally wanted a flight yoke for MS Flight Sim. I could unfortunately find neither on Facebook or Gumtree local to me for a reasonable price, so I started researching what a new one would look like.
After a lot of research, coinciding with a swelling of my fun-budget, I decided upon the “Gladiator” from VKBsim. They’re pretty nice, eminently hackable (they literally provide YouTube videos showing various customizations you can do, they come with several parts to change things out, and people 3D print or otherwise fabricate addons for them all the time), though they are a bit steep. To the point where I did the numbers and I couldn’t afford a set of rudder pedals at the time, though now I wish I could as I really dislike Z-axis on joysticks still. Seriously, it’s been 25 years or thereabouts since I tried the original Microsoft Sidewinder and I still fucking hate the idea! Oh well, Christmas is coming, and I’ve been pretty good.
Anyway, they arrived last week I think, or maybe the week before, it’s been a bit of a blur between this and work. I’m still experimenting with a control scheme, and the ali-express-tier mounts I bought to go with them need some more fabrication work to improve things, but they’re pretty dang great. I bought the “enhanced” stick for the right one, and an “omni throttle” for the left one, which is really just the enhanced stick with an angled grip as far as I can tell.
I love ’em, for zooming around an asteroid field blowing up pirates, the feeling is excellent.
Complaints?
- The knob on the upper POV hat sucks arse, it’s really rough on the thumb, and I use it for navigating the menus. People 3D print replacements, including ones that are supposed to look like those on an F-15/F-18, so I’ll probably buy some of those.
- The throttle knob (I don’t use it as a throttle, I tried to use it for sensor distance but threw that away for the encoder wheel instead) seems really bad. This might just need calibration, but 50% of the knob is not 50%. I have to hook it up to my Windows laptop and run their software (it won’t run through WINE/Proton, or it’ll run but will never find the device) and see if calibration fixes it.
- The 8-way POV analog stick’s sensitivity is also kinda bad, but again calibration may fix that.
- There’s a couple small sharp bits, and my autistic fingers instinctively go looking for them. A nail file to round them off fixes it. This is probably more an issue with me than the sticks.
That’s it, definitely way more good than bad, if you can afford a set, I would 100% recommend them at this stage.
Update: 2024-10-13: I mentioned earlier that I wished I could afford the rudder pedals at the same time. In retrospect, this turned out to be a blessing in disguise! Yakking with some folks on the Anti-Xeno Initiative discord, they mentioned how rudder pedals are basically the last thing you want for E:D, because basically for a regular flight sim the yaw is not super important, you make small adjustments to it at certain times but that’s it… but for E:D in combat, you use yaw a lot, and using rudder pedals is tantamount to playing Xbox with your feet.
I wasn’t necessarily convinced, but then I realized that I basically tried “twist for Z axis” on the original Microsoft Sidewinder in like 1999, or 2000, or somewhere thereabouts, decided I hated it, and have hated it ever since. So I resolved to give it another go - I took the screws locking the Z-axis out, calibrated it, and set it up. This let me put the lateral thrust on the X axis of the throttle instead, and now that I’m used it it it’s actually substantially better, and hasn’t caused my any RSI.
So I might still look at getting rudder pedals in case I want to play something else, but for E:D it doesn’t seem like they’re required. Now what to do with the Z axis on the throttle? 🤔
fwaggle