If you’re going to play around with nuclear fission, it’s probably best to do so on a distant planet where (almost) zero humans are endangered by your efforts.
Category: Geekery
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Re-ripping The Classics
On my way to the grocery store yesterday morning I discovered that one of the songs playing on my phone was misbehaving a bit. It skipped forward randomly for most of the first minute or so before settling into something resembling normal playback. In a moment of brilliant forethought I made note of the glitch (thank you, Obsidian) to check on once I got home.
Sure enough, that song (and indeed every song on its particular album) had been ripped with a barely-out-of-beta version of the Ogg Vorbis codec, which means it hadn’t yet been optimized for decoding in mobile device environments. Then I checked a number of other albums by the same artist and… all but a few were ripped at basically the same time with the same (new then, but obsolete now) codec. Clearly at some point in 2002 I was super busy ripping CDs.
Guess what I spent yesterday afternoon doing! Ripping CDs again!
On the upside, I have dbPoweramp‘s CD Ripper software on hand and a solid & reliable LG optical drive to work with. On the downside, some of these CDs are quite old and are showing their age. (Plus, in some cases, there’s actual physical damage. The kids got into my CD collection once when they were very very young…)
Overall the operation went well, and the only three tracks which indicated failures in the ripping software were tracks I don’t particularly need. (The first is a duplicate bonus track available in remastered form on a different album, and the remaining two are live versions of songs I can probably source elsewhere.)
Why even bother, then? Because this time I have more advanced codecs available, at higher bitrate (thus slightly better overall quality), and if anything went horribly wrong with my source CDs (further bitrot or an actual physical catastrophe of some sort) I want the (reasonably) best available archival copies I can get. (No, I didn’t FLAC these albums. They’re not important enough to me to justify the vastly increased storage requirement.)
And now when those songs come up on my phone in the random playlist, they shouldn’t go all glitch-y on me. Priorities, y’all.
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Satisfactory – Rail Tour Video
I put this together last weekend and eventually remembered that I should post it here:
Please enjoy 18 minutes of a train moving along train tracks through video game scenery. Note that the rail network shown in this video is far from complete. There’s the planned nuclear power site along the north coast of the Rocky Desert region yet to build, never mind the expansion into the Dune Desert and south from the Oilands. But if I waited until I was “done” building new rail segments in this game, I’d never get a video made at all. So, here we are.
As a learning experience, making this video also taught me a simpler way to “slide” text on the screen in Davinci Resolve than I’d used previously, cutting the production time on this one down considerably from what I originally expected. I’m not 100% happy with the look of the text itself, however. I think it needed more contrast on the edges to avoid readability issues on complex backgrounds.
Anyway! Until next time!
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The State of the Gamer in Mid 2023
I’ve had zero creative energy this year so most of my spare time is spent watching documentaries (CuriosityStream and Nebula and PBS for the win), listening to music, and playing games. Quite a bit of playing games.
But not a whole lot of games. Just a few.
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Satisfactory – Right Turn, Clyde
I wonder if anyone is going to clock that reference. Hmm.
At any rate, I said a few days ago that I intended to come back once I had the process worked out for right-turn bypasses at railway roundabouts in Satisfactory. The idea being that there’s no point in sending the train through 270 degrees of cornering and eating up all pathway vectors if all it needs to do is “hang a right at the junction.” Minimizing the time spent in the roundabout block is good for any train which needs to utilize it.
Let’s show off the finished product right at the start. Including the slightly janky bit just back from the center caused by (once again) siting the roundabout too close to my paired support pillars. So here’s how I make that happen, more or less. (Circumstances sometimes require some creative fudging. That’s the game in a nutshell though, isn’t it?)
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Satisfactory – Late Game Bits And Bobs
It’s been a while since my last check-in on my ongoing train-centric Satisfactory save game, so here’s a bullet-point catch-up:
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