Other What's ruining your life right now?

These two are rescues and they both have some behavioural issues, so I definitely set myself up with the previous comment. I am still more happy to have them than I was PO'd to have to clean up after them.

 

I doubt it is much consolation, but you need to get through to an operator. Then spend 30 minutes winding them up, then telling them you are winding them up.

After that? they put you on their "worked it out, do not call" list and won't sell your details to another scammer. They are only wasting money by calling you.

I did that for about two weeks. I would delay them as much as possible, before finally telling them I did not have a computer. When they asked why I said I did, I reply "Because I just wanted to see how much of your time I could waste".

I rarely get them now if ever. My number is unlisted, but wasn't with the previous owner. Hence they found it on BT's site, and usually address me by the wrong name trying to be clever.

 

The Saga of the Shitty Capture Card continues...

So first of all, this:

Yeah that ain't happening, I'm not gonna be playing Warzone on this PC at all, let alone playing Warzone and trying to stream at the same time.

I reinstalled my PC to give it one last try at working with my computer and in the process made a startling discovery. I'd been plugging the damn thing into a USB2 port, not a USB3 port... Of course, plug it into an ACTUAL BLOODY USB3 PORT and the little light goes blue, indicating that it's working fine!

In sotto voce: ..... **** sake, mun... all that bloody time wasted because I didn't bloody check which bloody port I was using.....

Commence testing my stream setup!

Many hours of testing a driver re-installs later and I make a discovery: the latest drivers murder the framerate, whereals older drivers have good video performance but garbled HDMI audio. I can live with that since I'm capturing audio separately to HDMI. Fine.

In the meantime, I order a condenser microphone and start getting the mixing desk set up. Only to discover that there's an imbalance between the left and right channels... Much vigourous prodding of buttons and twiddling of pots later and this imbalance is mostly gone, so I'm hoping it's just dirty jack sockets, pot tracks, etc. I have some contact cleaner on the way this week to liberally douse everything with. It's still not *perfect* but it's barely perceptible; the only reason I know there's still an imbalance is because playing a 1kHz sine wave should make the level meters for each channel hit the same peak and fact that they're still SLIGHTLY off bothers the absolute **** out of me.



See? SEE?! They should be identical but they're NOT!

Anyway... Fast forward to this evening where I do some 'proper' test streaming to Twitch. Aaaaaaaaand hello blue screen of death caused by an AVerMedia DLL. In the intervening time I'd switched to Streamlabs OBS instead of OBS Studio, since there are many more features out of the box (plus access to themes, widgets, plugins, etc) - never got a BSOD with OBS Studio, but OBS Studio is going to be more of a pig to use, I'd really prefer to use Streamlabs OBS.

So update the drivers: BSOD gone, but hello again to murdered framerate.

I've finally discovered that an earlier-but-not-quite-as-early-as-the-ones-I-was-previously-using set of drivers seems to be doing the trick and was stable for a 30 minute session. Me and some friends do Warzone on Fridays for most of the evening, so I'll give it a proper workout then. I go to play back the VOD and... yeah, the encoding isn't great, I might switch to 720p, but I don't think it'll really make that much difference.But it looks.... fine. Few stutters here and there but at this point I can't be sure whether that's the PS4 or the capture card, so... I'll go with it.

I think - think! - I'm getting close to being satisfied (not "happy", just "satisfied") with it! One thing is for sure though: when I'm done, this mixing desk and this capture card can GET IN THE ****ING SEA.

 

Stub your toe.

 

Cracking idea. Or bang the soft bit of your knee into the edge of the coffee table.

 

I just try to sleep/nap when its that bad, normally sorts me out!

 

Sold a 1960s radio on eBay a week ago, didn’t make much but a nice profit considering. It was in nice condition for its age as well... we’re talking 55 years old ish..

I buy my bubble wrap 300m a go, void fill 600m a go and keep stock of heavy duty double wall boxes for items such as this. heavier goods I try double box, leave no edge uncovered and no void unfilled. I probably cut heavily into my profit margin by excessively over wrapping on occasion... but I ship Hermes for my own convenience and I know their reputation....

55 years of service undone within 3 days in the Hermes network. It arrived as if it had been hit by a car...

The money bothers me little.. it’s annoying, I don’t want to have to give back someone’s money but it’s not my biggest pain point. It’s more such a nice item can be so heavily damaged in such a short space of time, with such considerable amount of packing yet survived the previous 55 years relatively unscathed?

 

Not the Gloucester region by any chance? https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/hermes-delivery-driver-filmed-launching-22958206

 

From their latest radio ads, it seems ParcelFarce will now collect for an extra £0.70-ish per parcel.

 

...and the 70p per parcel will be directly invested into Parcelfarce being not **** at executing their core function, yes? No, I thought not.

I think they are marginally better than Hermes, but it's very much a case of tallest dwarf, or prettiest hippo.

 

Narcissist.

 

Missed all 3 alarms and overslept 4 hours.

 

Impressive.

 

Work.

 

Indeed, impressive on both counts.

 

that level of tired isn't necessarily serious, but it isn't trivial either. treat your body better!

 

12 hours of sleep is not to be sniffed at, I usually do OK with 8 hours in the sack (between 6 - 7 hours sleep)

Besides, who wants to leave a good looking corpse, use it up whilst you can.