Other What Makes Your Life, Meh?

Getting drama in messages like, "Hey, do you think ____ is being really rude here?" — i.e. I’m looking for an argument and need to feel justified in it. Nope. You’ve both sent a few really woolly emails about a pointless topic, which has led you both to get completely the wrong end of the stick, and therefore caused utterly silly tension over something neither of you actually care about. Now bugger off.

Separately, I got all nostalgic over the weekend thinking about RuneScape and all the hours I lost playing it. I lost interest when the graphics and gameplay changed irreversibly, but I went back to it when OSRS came out. I made an account a few years ago and got it into a reasonably good position (99 Mage!), so I decided to see if I could get back on it.

After lots of faffing around with passwords, Jagex accounts, and general messing about, I finally managed to import my character from my newly created Jagex account annnnnnd… banned. Wut? It definitely wasn’t banned the last time I logged in, but going through the details, I don’t think I have any grounds for appeal. That nostalgia was short-lived.

 

Stick external NVME into Desktop to test out SW:Outlaws in a section that the Laptop didn't like. "This app can't run on your PC".... er what?

Check the actual install folder and the .exe for Steam shows as 0KB with the same error.

Plug the drive back into the laptop (where it was working perfectly last night) and the same error presents.

Well, that is new.

Don't want to automatically blame Windows.... but FFS Windows....

 

Well that just got a lot worse...

Re-installed all of the games (where it does the whole verification etc) and tried again. This time putting the drive into the PC just caused it to show with ~630GB used but nothing but a Bin and Public folder visible within the Steam sub folder.

Starting to get somewhat confused (I have never seen this occur before and I have moved the Steam drive between multiple machines without issue on multiple occasions) I moved it back to the laptop where it was just working and.... same problem.

The whole drive was acting like it was empty but Windows showed at being ~60% used.

Tried installing Steam again to see if it would pick up the games that I couldn't see and, nope, just tried installing them like nothing was there...

FFS, now I have to re-download ~630GB of games I had lined up to play / test for no other apparent reason.

 

Either caddy or the nvme itself is going wonky. Check the crystaldiskinfo?

 

Good shout, the drive in question (Crucial P3) has only ever been used for Game installs but perfectly possible for it to be going wonky.

Ended up installing the two games I wanted to test directly to the internal NVME and tested them there instead.

Initially I was even more confused (this time in a good way) as Outlaws was capping the monitors refresh at 144Hz. For context the desktop is using a 7945HX3D (7950X3D basically) and a RX 9060XT 16GB. Decent hardware but still mid range in GPU terms. The laptop in comparison with its mobile 5070 (5060Ti desktop basically) was only achieving ~50FPS in the same scene.

Turns out the game had defaulted to low settings with FSR set to Ultra Performance.... wha.....????

After the initial issues in the evening I had thought it was playing tricks on me and didn't immediately notice the complete blurry mess that was the visuals..

 

Some games are annoying like that, my Last of Us 2 install keeps auto defaulting to DLSS and framegen and the image quality is rubbish, the machine can do 100fps native @ 4k without any help I don’t need these things on but every launch of the game it is enabled, it infuriates me, it’s like cars that disable your setup each time you turn them off, why would I want to buy a car that does this, no wonder sales are down when things are installed to annoy you.

 

It was just all kinds of confusing (especially when it wasn't really my main point of focus). On the laptop the game defaulted to settings arguably too intense yet on the PC it was like, "Upscale from ~480p sir?, well of course, enjoy!"

Me =

 

The confusing conundrum of motorcyclists who tailgate.

No offence dude, but if I suddenly have to brake hard (more likely in today's pothole ridden world), it's going to end a lot worse for you than for me.

 

Honestly... all tailgaters can do one. Bike, car, van, lorry, whatever.

My car makes it very easy to stay exactly on the speed limit, so if people want to tailgate me then that's exactly what I'll do. Not to deliberately antagonise and piss people off, but because it's one of the best ways I can keep everyone else around me safe. I can't stop TinyDickAngyMan from being two inches up my chuff, but I can try make sure that I've got as much time as possible to react and as much space around me as possible; it might just help me avoid hitting, injuring, killing, etc, anyone else when I get rammed from behind after having to slam my brakes on.

 

They're just idiots, completely unthinking.

 

If the way is clear, I prefer to solve someone tailgating me with speed. Not always possible but definitely my preferred option than doing 20.

 

Oh, don't get me wrong, I hope all tailgaters end up in a special place in Hell reserved for paedophiles and people who talk at the theatre. But I just find the complete lack of awareness of a tailgating motorcyclist's vulnerability more perplexing than irritating.

If an animal jumps out in the road and I have to make the choice, that motorcyclist is the one who's suffering.

Unfortunately that doesn't work with (let's pick on a certain demographic...) BMW drivers.

 

I get it - motorcycles have the agility and freedom move around traffic knots and it's absolutely what I would do if I rode one. However the increasing number of them who see this as an automatic entitlement and leave everything to the last fraction of a second, then dangerously push in front of you and react like a ****ing arsehole when you make your feelings about their abject idiocy known to them, just leaves me with a single thought: "just ****ing die before you polute the gene pool".
There are many sensible and respectful cyclists (motor and otherwise) on the road, but there seem to be fewer every day.

 

Unfortunately, that only increases the level of risk for everyone around you.

It increases risk for you too, but a fair chunk of the problem with declining standards on the road is that so many people are just selfish. They don’t care about anything other than themselves or their journey.

It doesn’t work anyway. You’ll get tailgated even when you’re well past the speed limit on a motorway or NSL dual carriageway. I’ve been tailgated on the bike while doing “not far off” speeds that would see my licence revoked immediately if caught.

At least on fast NSL roads you’re only likely to get yourself killed - there’s not much chance you’ll hit and kill the kid who runs out into the road when you were going too fast to be able to anticipate or react. Unlike, say, a 20mph area where that speed limit has been set precisely because you’re likely to have situations like kids running out into the road unexpectedly.

You’re operating a piece of machinery that creates more than enough kinetic energy to turn people into paste.

You can’t stop people being a ****, but you can control how you respond to people being a ****.

A lot of the time they do it because they think they’re better than you are. A bike is smaller, it weighs less, the brakes stop you quicker than a car ever could.

Most of the arseholes I see on bikes around here are either: kids on petrol or electric scramblers that aren’t road legal; or, delivery riders on L-plates. The former is a tale as old as time; but the latter could be solved easily by requiring a full licence for commercial-use insurance. It wouldn’t even need new legislation, just an industry-wide change in insurance policy. Of course it won’t stop people sharing licences (there are many reasons this happens - let’s not get into that here), but it sure as hell would make police enforcement easier. Scooter, L-plates, and a delivery box/bag - “excuse me sir, are you using this vehicle for commercial purposes, and is your insurance valid for that purpose?”

BMW, Audi, Range Rover “Evoque”, Land Rover Disco - all vehicle types I tend to keep a close eye on. I know what BMW & Audi headlights typically look like, so even when it’s dark I don’t have to be able to see the car properly to know what it is. Discos are easy to spot in the dark because of their size, but I haven’t quite got the hang of recognising those fugly Evoque Range Rovers.

It’s always a nice surprise when you see Those Round ****ing Headlights behind you and they aren’t being a total bellend. Though that sometimes makes me even more suspicious in case it’s an unmarked police car!


I can now also spot a Volvo a mile off, dark or not, from the pattern of the daytime running lights. But only because I now also own a Volvo, and what Volvo calls that T-shaped light pattern stuck in my head: “Thor’s Hammer”. FFS guys, I know you’re owned by Geely and they make most of your cars in China, but you don’t have to overcompensate that much! .

 

Tailgating of any kind by any vehicle I will never understand, especially if the road is clear and they can overtake (be that breaking the speed limit or not) but just sit 2 inches off your rear bumper for.... reasons.

Kind of fits with the twonks who come haring up behind you on a dual carriage way when you are passing slower moving vehicles at ~70mph (extra bonus points if you are in a queue of vehicles doing the same thing).


Completely seperate to this I found the issue I was experiencing with performance on the laptop. Turns out the stupid Lenovo Vantage software needed to update but didn't bother notifying me. This mean despite the on screen stats showing a change in clock speeds etc, it wasn't actually doing anything. Updated it and back to where I would expect a ~5060Ti (5070M) to be.

 

Woke up with a proper thick head and a good dose of the sniffles this morning. Seems to have eased off a little over the day, but been fighting a general sluggish feeling and the desire to doze between calls and emails.

 

Might be worth a cotton bud up the nose?

 

I think I have had an IT curse this week.

In the process of moving our room around to fit in a Sit / Stand desk for myself (matching my wife's) and have my PC setup on the Kitchen table testing out a new monitor. It was all working absolutely fine before moving it to the table. Went to use it this evening and it decided I could either have a mouse or a keyboard and not both. Both peripherals worked in each others ports (and together on another system) yet would not work together on my PC. Even tested completely different (known working) peripherals with the same result.

Two restarts later and it worked like nothing had happened AND the WiFi started working. What was confusing here is that I had reset Windows (from within Windows itself) and only had it connected via Ethernet.

Ended up nuking the install and now it's working like nothing had ever happened.

Also according to all the tests I can easily try the drive having all the issues before is working absolutely fine. I am now wondering if something was a bit iffy with the original Windows installed (pre nuke this evening).

Honestly one of those "**** knows" moments..

 

Ah @xaser04 it's that occasional instance of a pc just deciding it's going to mess you about randomly for some random reason because it's become briefly sentient enough to want to be annoying.

They're always 'fun' experiences.