Photos Latest Purchases Thread: v2.0

...but the solar panel is ok outdoors, right? Right?

BTW, I have the C300 and I'm very happy with it, indoors. The marketing was laughable for another reason - It showed the C300 clipped to someone's belt as a go anywhere device. The fugging thing weighs a LOT.

 

More physical media:-
I used to have the first one on DVD years ago, but it was the early release with a defective disc 3. WH Smiths would only give me a refund instead of a fixed copy
The 2nd one (CGI Scarlet) is launched for pre-order today

 

I can only presume that the device is not IP65 (or similar) rated so fine in lovely dry camping situations but risk of spontatneous combustion if short circuited in the rain!

 

So it doubles as a fire lighter on wet days.

 

So, my Razer black widow ultimate keyboard had been randomly losing keys in that it had been responding fine with a key press and then it didn't, then it would randomly come back and then another 2 or 3 would go, so I bought myself a little replacement, an Aula Win60 hall effect jobbie:



So far, I really like it, feels so much more solid than anything that I have used before and for £40 from the Amazon, I am well pleased. Just need to get used to it now what with it being a bit smaller and a very different feel to the Cherry blue keys that the Razer has.

 

16/512 Oneplus 15

 

A year's car insurance, starting Thursday (see awesome thread)

 

Crimson Desert got it for less than £50 for the £65 version. I know there are mixed reviews but I'm not a story person it seams my kinda game so thought sod it treat thy self

 

House Insurance for the house we exchanged on yesterday.

Now my eye is twitching for the amount to be paid on Friday (completion)..

Also got a rebate from our current water provider (relating to a switch to a meter and the DD being too high vs actual use) which mostly paid for the Insurance... result!

 

Dell 3280 Compact for an absolute bargain price - literally £300 cheaper than the same spec anywhere else; and he looked after it too - there's barely a mark on it. Honestly it was almost too good to be true, and I was half expecting a brick to arrive in the post instead.

It has an i5 14600 and only came with 8GB and a small SSD but I have plenty of both. It does sacrifice the SATA drive support but the PCIE 5.0 makes a surprising difference to the performance on the RTX Pro 2000, in synthetic tests at least. Not had a chance to really stretch it's legs because I forgot about bitlocker when I transferred my drives over and lost a fair bit of time to faff. I should have just decrypted them before tearing down the T3260, but I'm a muppet. I hate bitlocker. It's a sensible feature, but a royal PITA for an inveterate tinkerer like me.

I was going to drop my 13500T in there, but the larger cooler handles the 14600 without getting noisy, it's actually really impressive and it's significantly faster than the i7 12700T in my 3260. It's a little bit bigger than the T3260 - maybe 16mm wider and 6mm taller, which means I have to print a new bracket to fit it neatly in the 10" rack; still under 3 litres though. You could beat someone to death with the 280W power brick, mind, it's flippin mahoosive.

The only real downside is the 1GbE NIC, but I have NBASE-T adapters.

 

Another Waveshare dev board… that’s almost identical to the one I bought not long ago…

Except, as you may note, this one already has a case… a case that looks exactly like the kind of case that I was getting frustrated trying to design from scratch…



Got annoyed with myself after I accidentally snapped one of the buttons yesterday, got further annoyed with my lifelong lack of graphic design/3D design talent, threw the idea of designing my own case out of the window, hunted down and bought this version instead.

There are a few limitations on this variant. No GPS capability, no MicroSD card slot, no external WiFi/Bluetooth antenna socket, and there are reviews on AliExpress reporting that the case blocks radio signals. I’m happy to try and design a rear cover myself, but designing the entire case from scratch was pissing me off.

 

Some uber-black material to apply to the window reveal in the cinema. Bit of an experiment but has to be an improvement from the glare off the paint when the sun is at the right(wrong) angle.



Yep, it’s definitely black.

 

You could also try, vanta black paint https://www.vantablack.co.uk/vb-200-series

Unfortunately, neither easy to buy or use...

 

Nah, **** Vantablack, don’t give Anish Kapoor your money. Anish Kapoor obtained the exclusive rights to Vantablack, pissing off almost the entire art world in the process, so British artist Stuart Semple made an alternative that anyone can use - anyone except Anish Kapoor… https://news.artnet.com/art-world/stuart-semple-blackest-black-anish-kapoor-1452259.

Buy Black 4.0 instead

 

Having (obviously) gone full geek mode with research, I learned a lot. I started with Vantablack with it being the one everyone has heard of... aside from the licensing and cost issues, it's more of a coating than a paint. It has application requirements wholly unsuited to practical use in home cinema (ultra high temperature in a vacuum? easy!), and actually kind pointless in "imperfect" environments where it may come into contact with... well, anything. As much as sniffing in its general direction ruins it.

Paints as a whole suck compared to fabrics too - nowhere near the light absorption and easily damaged by being touched. Just think of how easy it is to get oily fingerprints and matte paint and then 10x it.

This in particular is Musou Black fabric - not the very blackest one due to it being quite delicate itself - but the one just behind it which is quite robust and handily half the price.

How boring, why chose the most obvious solution to a problem when getting creative is so much more fun?

 

A Garmin X310 4k Dashcam



Halfords were £100 cheaper than direct from Garmin!

 

Decided to treat my X99 motherboard to an M.2 SSD, having owned it since 2017. The mobo is too old for NVMe, so it's a plain ol' SATA drive, but still I feel like I've completed an important side quest.