If you've ever seen my setup, well first I'd want to know how the hell you did. But if you've ever seen it, you'd know it started as a sort of TV/Entertainment stand with a strong platform bridging two endtable/cabinets my father built. The platform used to have room for my fairly large CRT TV and my big Jensen speakers. But as Screens have gotten flatter and bigger, the speakers have been pushed off to the sides. My Mac still resides, pretty much unused these days, in the bedroom I designated my Den. That room is dominated by disorganized piles of my comic collection. Cats are not allowed in there, which means they find it irresistible.

My PC used to reside underneath the span, until I realized that made it a stationary Roomba. That was three, maybe 4 PC's ago. Now it's next to one of the speakers.

I used to use my wireless keyboard and mouse from a lap-board while sitting in my recliner. But eventually the Fake PVC Leather declined to the point where I had to put it out of its misery. I would rest the lap board on a TV Tray table when it wasn't it use, and that became my "desk", and the recliner was replaced with a chair from my dining room set. (Another of those chairs lives in the Den in front of the Mac.)

This is, you can imagine, sub-optimal.

I also have a rolling stand with adjustable shelves I made for my large-format inkjet printer that is now in the parts bin. Two printers live on it now. The Epson is only used for its scanner, and the Brother Laser replaces the tiny HP DeskJet that also resides in the parts bin because it never ran right for more than a couple pages after a new set of ink cartridges. The Brother works well enough that it has totally derailed my plans to dissect my old LaserWriter 12/640 and find the inaccessible curl of paper that disabled it.

So this year I resolved to upgrade. I also wanted to move my setup so that it isn't blocking the gas fireplace so I can get that repaired. I've already bought a new office chair that is, honestly, meh, and a chairmat to protect the rug.

And just now, about 12:15, the truck pulled up, and I was unable to bribe the driver into helping get them upstairs into the Living Room, so they're stacked in the garage while I retrieve them piece by piece via the front door, while Max grows increasingly impatient shut in the bathroom. When I placed the order they projected delivery on the 26th, which would have been great and not cost me a vacation day. I would have had four days to clean and prepare.

Turns out cleaning up wasn't THAT bad once I cut up all the boxes for recycling. Max protested, but I saved his two favorite ones. I also moved a couple of dead monitors and my dead Toshiba flatscreen down to the garage for the eventual trip to an eRecycler. One was a 21" Dell with a true flat screen and the bug that chassis had that continually raised the lowest brightness level until it was nearly unusable. Fucker must have been 60 lbs with no good way to handle it. My back hurts just from that. Carrying the parts up didn't help.

As a bonus, I found three missing catnip mice and a ball.

Anyway, I trust my two readers are observant enough to notice my use of the Plural. I ordered not one, not two, but THREE Bush Components 60" x 30" desks. I honestly have no idea how many of these things I built when I was doing furniture assembly for the office stores, but they are simple and strong. There are only four major parts, the desk top, the sides, and the modesty panel. They basically make four sides of a box. Two are going to go against the short wall of the stairwell, and the third is going to fit into the Bay window. The only thing I couldn't find was a nice matching 90° corner piece, so I'm probably going to set up my printer stand there.

I'm really tempted to get going on them now, but my back is telling me that would be a bad idea.

Posted by: Mauser at December 22, 2023 11:12 PM (sZ6tC)

Posted by: Mauser at December 23, 2023 02:36 AM (sZ6tC)

Posted by: Mauser at January 02, 2024 03:59 PM (sZ6tC)

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Nah, not the show, that's just what I named the new 10 TB drive. I stuck it in the temporary drive slot in the top of my case and copied almost everything off of Biggest, the D drive. It took between 9 and 11 hours - overnight anyway. I didn't see it throw any error alerts. Then I swapped drive letters and uTorrent was none the wiser. It's funny that I went in the space of two months from having no back up of my anime to three copies in varying degrees of completeness.

Eventually I need to swap the drives physically. But the next task is consolidating F and H into one data drive, removing their obsolete Windows 7 installs (three of them between the two!) and reorganizing the stuff I used to split.

Windows 10 has one extremely annoying feature in the save dialog. When you go to save a file, it may go to the last used directory. But if you start drilling down to where you really want to save your file, after a few seconds it will jump back and reselect that previous directory, even as you're about to open another folder.

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Thought I'd De-Pan a few pics, for all your Dakimakura needs.

Yanno, I think they distort the proportions a bit on some of those pan shots. Also annoying was frame vignetting that I didn't clean up 100%.

Also, I can add more if anyone is interested. This show seems to love panning up her figure.

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The mismatch between English and Japanese titles can be really surprising.

For example, "Sousou no Frieren" has an English subtitle of "Frieren: After the Journey" Which makes it sound like the cozy remembrance we all know and love. But I was skeptical. Then in episode 8, one of the demons says "Sousou no Frieren" and the subtitle gave me a double-take. So I dug out my Japanese character dictionary, because my pocket dictionary was no help, and online translations weren't helping me match the characters either.

(I have to recommend DeepL for translation, far better than Google or DDG.)

葬送のフリーレン translates as "Funeral Frieren" at the nicest I was able to determine. The first character gives "To bury, to consign to oblivion, or to shelve". The second "To send". So "To send to your grave Frieren." So it makes sense when Lugner said:

Click to Embiggen

Posted by: Pixy Misa at November 04, 2023 07:18 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: J Greely at November 04, 2023 09:57 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Mauser at November 05, 2023 05:31 PM (sZ6tC)

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at November 07, 2023 10:17 PM (LZ7Bg)

Posted by: Mauser at November 08, 2023 04:35 AM (sZ6tC)

Posted by: J Greely at November 10, 2023 08:56 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Mauser at November 12, 2023 11:54 AM (sZ6tC)

Posted by: mikeski at November 15, 2023 08:08 PM (DgGvY)

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What am I trying to watch this season?

Helck, Frieren, Spy Family, Shield Hero, Uma Musume Pretty Derby, Kanojo mo Kanojo

What am I actually watching?

Frieren, and Kanojo mo Kanojo, and I'm still trying to finish Love After World Domination.

Most of those shows in the first list are continuations of previous seasons that I haven't finished, so I've got a backlog on the order of Boeing's. I'm actually kinda hoping for a strike next year....

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One problem I had with the build was the stiffness of the wires for the USB 3.0 ports on the front panel. The two wires from the port melded into a single, fat, plastic-encapsulated plug, and the header for the port on the motherboard, instead of being vertical like most pins, was parallel to the board, and that caused the cables to press against the drive frame. The fix was a simple right-angle adapter meant for exactly this purpose. And it was only $6 and change.

My case also came with a 200 mm fan that sucks air through a screen in the front panel and blows it across the drive bay. It ran virtually silently at 18 db. But the original fan developed a nasty squeak, so I sought out a replacement. Unfortunately this is a unique 20 mm thick fan, and nearly all replacements were 30 mm. There was only one, and the one with the blue LEDs that matched the original was out of stock, so I had to get the red one. Fortunately with the front door shut, you don't really have to see it.

I had a little USB Bluetooth dongle that for some reason I was unable to make work. Broadcomm only makes Windows 7 and earlier drivers, and doesn't support it any more. Then I realized that my motherboard has bluetooth built in. I just hadn't thought of it. It apparently uses the antennas on the back that I hadn't attached because I didn't intend to use the built in wi-fi. So I put on the antennas and enabled the bluetooth and the signal is a lot stronger than the little dongle. I can now use my headphones anywhere in the house without dropouts. However, the phone utilities will be kind of missed.

My case is designed to be a noise suppressor. The left panel even has eggshell foam on it, but I haven't had that panel on for ages because of all the monkeying I had to do with Himawari, and because the numeric display that showed the boot process and temperature was on the motherboard. Even now, I have the LED on Purah's CPU heatsink set to display colors to indicate temperature and the cover off so I can monitor it. But I won't be able to see it if I put the cover back on to control the noise (My homebrew water cooling system was virtually silent). This is from before clear cases became a thing. But I have seen the light. As much as I normally hate all the ludicrous RGB crap that is in fashion, which makes your PC look like a Pride Parade exploded inside it, I finally saw a use for the 12v, 4 pin RGB connector. I spotted some cheap RGB strips (not the more expensive 5 volt ARGB stuff that does chasing lights etc.). I can easily run one on the exterior of the case and set the software to have IT display the CPU temperature where I can see it.

The strip's waiting in my shopping cart while I decide on one more thing, I wanna get a Much bigger drive to replace D (Where all the anime lives.). I could either double it with a 6 TB Western Digital Red for under $100, or go completely mad and get the 14 TB model - which would have more than enough space for running automated backups of the rest of the computer too, confounding my previous plan to take advantage of the drive slot in the top of the case.

I should also consider finding a good way to merge F and H, removing the Windows installs, and consolidating the data and the saved preferences (for programs I haven't reinstalled yet). Although, if I consolidate H to F (The SATA SSD) that frees up another drive. And there's still the stack of drives I was going to run backups to (various 2 and 3 TB drives, but older ones). Decisions, decisions.

And I'm left again pondering the wisdom of water cooling again in my pursuit of silence.

Posted by: Mauser at October 12, 2023 05:14 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Mauser at October 13, 2023 08:04 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Mauser at October 21, 2023 04:00 PM (sZ6tC)

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So after a water leak messed up my GTX 980 card on Himawari, a friend sold me his GTX 1070 card for a c-note. I was never able to really put it to the test because of the problems Himawari was having doing anything at the time (I could play DVDs fine, but watching YouTube would case dropouts, pink video ports, and bluescreens), Instead I kept using the really old 650 card I didn't realize I still had that I'd put in before I bought the 1070.

Well before this Himawari had been so unstable I couldn't even run World of Warships - which is why I was running it on Etna at minimal video settings for a while, and getting about 30FPS.

Enter Purah, and I decided to go for a little while running the built-in graphics, which could handle YouTube just fine, even at 1440P, and never crashed on anything (Well, Chitubox may have bombed out once, but it merely exited and didn't take anything down with it). At the minimum graphics settings it ran WoWS at around 70 FPS, which is still faster than the TV's refresh rate.

I was considering leaving it like that, or maybe buying the latest hotness in Video cards, but my demands aren't really that high. But then I decided I'd want to see the difference between the built-in graphics and that 1070 card. Just to see if it was faster and to take some load off the CPU. After all, I had it, why not use it?

At those minimum graphics settings, WoWS ran at an absurd 500 FPS, more or less. After clicking the auto settings in the preferences, it turned the graphics all the way up on every setting, and still ran at 80-100 FPS.

I think that's quite good enough for now. True it supports more than the 1440P I'm running it at, but it's comfortable for how I'm set up at the moment.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at October 05, 2023 08:14 PM (LZ7Bg)

Posted by: Mauser at October 06, 2023 05:57 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at October 07, 2023 08:02 PM (LZ7Bg)

Posted by: Mauser at October 07, 2023 11:14 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Mauser at October 07, 2023 11:22 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Mauser at October 09, 2023 07:30 PM (BzEjn)

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