Glasses - ThinOptics Versus Nooz

Chances are you've seen the ads on TV for ThinOptics.
I have.
After I had purchased a pair of Pince-nez glasses named Nooz.

A French firm made them. Great idea in a pair of magnifying reading glasses.
For $25 you get your choice of colors and a case which can be attached to your key-chain if you desire.
(More on that in a bit)

The connection between lenses is a gummy sort of plastic. Very flexible and meant to adhere to the bridge of your nose.
As a pair you can store in a pocket, it is a good idea.

Unfortunately the execution leaves much to be desired.
If you perspire at all, it will not stay in place. If your nose has any oil, it slips.
If you attach it to the key-chain as shown, the glasses will be pulled out of the case as you extract your keys from blue jean pockets.

And the biggest con in the list as far as I am concerned was the magnifications offered.
At the time I ordered them the lowest magnification was 1.50. That has since been lowered to a 1.00 - 1.25 range.

Lucky me that my eyes have remained at a steady 1.25 since I started wearing lenses at all.

Okay...ThinOptics.

Same basic concept with one important addition, the nose clips. Very thin metallic strips that keep the glasses affixed even when sweaty.
(Yay, I can read my phone at the gym?)

Same gummy nose material with the clips. You can bend them in many ways with no damage.

Same magnifications available with a selection of "clever" cases.

A bit of derision since I see the cases as half the selling point.
The glasses are touted as $19.95.
Oh? You want a case? $5 for the regular one with a strip of adhesive to stick your glasses to your phone case. $27 with shipping etc.
(Careful not to obscure the camera or speaker when doing so)

You want the phone case with the holder built in? $30.
The "made for the key-chain" model that requires you to perform yoga to bend the frame into the case.

Huge mehs all around for the cases.
But the strips for your nose make a huge difference in my ability to utilize the glasses.

And that makes 100% difference.

Thrustmaster Flight Stick X

Last Spring I renewed my interest in flying.
I went to the local airport (KPOC) Brackett and wandered into the flight school.
(There are two)

After spending enough time as a hanger on I was offered time aloft for labor.
Washing planes is not easy. I can see why they were willing to trade.
And the crap people leave behind in the cockpit after a lesson?

I've gotten 65 hours in the logbook when I was encouraged to use a flight sim to hone real flight skills.
I own FSX. Flight Simulator X

This was supposed to be Microsoft's crowning achievement in the twenty years since they had first bought the base code from Bruce Artwick of Sublogic.

This is what I saw on my Trash 80.
A six mile by six mile square grid with "mountains" on the northern side. If you "flew" past the boundary in any direction and continued to fly straight you would eventually end up on the opposite side of the map from which you departed. The "world" was a thirty six mile ball with only six miles graphically represented.
Upper left has engine "gauges." Lower left are flight management "gauges." Basic indicators of throttle, roll and elevator or pitch on the right. Airspeed and altitude on the bottom.
Yes, those are mountains ahead. There were two airports. One was the enemy base if you were flying combat and shooting the enemy down.

Today it looks more like this.

I had to dig out my ten year old joystick, a Logitech 3D Extreme Pro. A $30 stick with twelve programmable buttons, a throttle tab and  twist handle rudder control.
However, it had issues since the day I bought it. After searching the web I found I was not alone by any means.
The issue was when you plug the stick in, it very rarely was centered. Usually the '+' denoting the center position on the calibrate screen would show it pinned to a corner.
You would be forced to plug and then unplug the stick until it magically would center.

Enter the Thrustmaster Flight Stick X.
Same twelve buttons that can be programmed. You can save a couple of profiles and switch on the fly. It has an eeprom to store settings even if you unplug the stick for long periods.

Same $30 with free shipping. (That somehow showed up twenty three hours after I ordered it)

Same throttle, although a thumb slide and not a tab or lever.

It has a weighted base. A variable resistance knob to control the free play. And a very long USB cord.

The fundamental difference is this works out of the box. In fact, as the name implies, the stick is pre-programmed for FSX.

Ergonomics - it is larger both at the base and the height of the stick itself. It is also thicker about the handle.

There are things it does not do. You get no sense of the force needed to cause the plane to  rotate or bank. Twisting a joystick does not translate into pulling the yoke in a real aircraft.

Same thing with the twist handle for the rudder control. It feels nothing like pedals.
As you rotate you go, "Heels down," meaning feet are on the floor and not the tops of the rudder pedals. Obviously this doesn't happen when you're twisting a joystick instead.

The "switch view" button is right next to the hat switch so it is very easy to switch views when you meant to look around via the hat.

Overall I am pleased. I am one of those people who do not feel it necessary to spend thousands of dollars to buy a yoke and pedals and every possible add-on.
For what I do with FSX, practice real life procedures, try weather I'd never fly in et cetera this works well.

Cardboard Models

They are not new. Far from it.
People have been making cardboard model buildings since the 17th century. Now the models encompass everything from aircraft to sneakers or motorcycles.

I first discovered them in the late 1980s during a trip to the Queen Mary in Long Beach, CA.

For $9.99 I bought a postcard sized package that had fifteen 3x5  sheets of cardboard with Buckingham Castle (including Big Ben + Parliament) printed on one side in color/colour.

An Exacto knife, a ruler and some Elmer's and a piece of wood with which to mount the model.
That is all that is needed in most cases.

If you are really meticulous you will also need toothpicks for cleaning joints and also to act as gussets in strategic corners.

And then it is nothing more than cutting and folding and gluing. The folding being the most exacting part of the process. Sharp corners are not always easy to achieve with cardboard, thus the need for the straight edge.

Modeling is an exercise in patience for the most part. You are alone with your thoughts. They do tend to be about the model under construction.
I like to play some mood music or have a theme movie playing.
I always found modeling to be very therapeutic.

These types of models are very popular in Europe. Poland, the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom seem to produce the most in terms of numbers as well as complexity.

Found on eBay for $15 with shipping.

The German Battleship Scharnhorst along with an accompanying tanker, the Olschiff.
Do not expect a perfect package. Many times the pages have been printed in a haphazard way leading you to think half of the instructions are missing et cetera.

Give yourself a good few minutes to 'catalog' exactly what you have in your hands.
(Ah, the first half of the illustrations are in the back of the book while the second half are at the front)

What led me to looking for these models again, I am not sure. Maybe I need some therapy.

You Can Optimize Your Rig, Can't You?

Back in the day, (I really dislike the expression) everyone who played games on a PC knew how to optimize it to within a nanosecond of it's life.
Today you are lucky if players know what is under their hood.

nVidia and AMD/ATI have all but neutered tweaking gamers.
nVidia wants to load a streaming service - and players wanna know why the game they are playing is lagging?

Or they use WiFi as a connection and wonder - "What is packet loss?"

Okay, here are some basics.

First rule is to minimize what is running in the background.
One of the best ways to learn about programs running on your computer is to go to Black Viper's site.

He teaches you to run services.msc.
Open the run window - windows key + R
Type services.msc

What you'll see is a list of ALL the programs that launch on your computer.
Some are .indispensable. He'll let you know.
Some are superfluous garbage, he'll let you know that too.

Some Anti-virus suite have a "game mode" to limit the interference while you're online gaming. Cheaper AV flags any change to an executable as a virus so every update to your favorite game causes your AV to quarantine or delete you game.

Then there is your router.
Have you enabled UPnP?
Many times a game wants to use specific ports UDP or TCP.

Each aspect of you PC is worth examination.

When was the last time you opened the case and cleaned the dust from your CPU heatsink fins? Your GPR heatsink?

Does your power supply allow for a good deal more wattage than you normally consume? Or are you running at the limit?

There are some great programs to monitor your hardware.
HWiNFO64 will show you everything you need to know about your hardware and it's performance after running a game.

If you have any general questions about tweaking your rig, ask away.

Cogmind - Roguelike My Ass, This Is Rogue Only Better

This is one amazing piece of code.

Rogue was a game that used ASCII characters as avatars for you (@) and your environment.

This is what Rogue looked like in 1980 on a Trash 80.

What defined the game was "permadeath." Die and the game was over, there was no save to restore and continue from.
You had to begin all over again.
Explore, find loot, kill monsters and then find the stairs to the next level. That was the entire game.

Later, Avalon Hill made another version dubbed, "Telengard."
It expanded the initial game in a few ways, many of them graphic. That is, if you had a Commodore or Apple II.
On a Trash-80, this is what you got.

More character information. Now you could roll dice to your hearts content to get that perfect character. And you could play as a Rogue, Fighter, Mage etc.

The trouble was you got invested in your character, much like D&D but the game...not so much. You could roll for a half an hour to get what you wanted in stats and then die on level two. How many times you'd do this, a measure of your masochism?

Well in Cogmind you are a bot that grows (levels, evolves) by finding and attaching various parts and subsystems.
Yes, there is permadeath. Yes, you can play using ASCII characters or tiles, your choice.
So they can call it Roguelike but I'd call it Rogue's successor.

On  the Cogmind screen you will find windows with all the information you need. What you have installed and it's condition. Your major systems (and their health), your logs, scans and inventory.
A Unix like environment.

There are many other types of bots to be found; scavengers, serfs, pests, mercenaries et cetera.
Some are innocuous, although destroying them can leave you with some loot. Some are enlarging the map - watch they don't wall you off.

The game play is familiar. Sneak or shoot but you are trying to find the stairs to the next level.
Sometimes you will "evolve" upon completing a floor; you gain extra slots to distribute.
"Do I place the slot in 'Power?' Or do I put it into 'Weapons?'"
That is about the extent of the RPG elements.

But again, I am more invested in the game - I want out, rather than being invested in a particular build I crafted.
It's $20 on Steam. And well worth your time.

Flight Simulations

In 1981 I bought a cassette from a firm named Sublogic, it was called Flight Simulator.

It was crude but it began me down a road that has lasted 36 years. Through one iteration to the next I followed.

Recently I restarted my pursuit of a private pilot's license. While talking with my instructor the topic of sims came up.

"If you don't already have one I suggest you start using P3D or FSX to hone your skills. Specifically using  the A2A Cessna 171 or 182. I prefer the 182."

Flight Simulator X (ten) was the last iteration of Sublogic's code before the whole kit & caboodle was sold to DoveTail Games.

A2A Simulations has been on my radar since their very excellent stab at the Battle of Britain,  Then known as Shockwave they produced in 2005 a sim with both depth in strategic gameplay and they also began acute modeling of aircraft. Down to minutiae such as the affect of recoil from eight machine guns on an aircraft flying at 350 mph.

Over the years they abandoned full fledged games to produce addon aircraft for the popular simulations.
It naturally began as modeling WWII aircraft.
What brought them to the General Aviation community is anybody's guess.

Once they had decided to pursue the GA market they went for it with the same sense of fidelity that had been an obsession in their WWII aircraft.

The culmination of this experience became the Cessna 182. An "upgraded" version of the ubiquitous Cessna 172, this thing is modeled down to the rivets.

If you run the mixture rich you will foul the plugs. There are consequences to operation of the aircraft. Parts wears and fail if not maintained.

Where many aftermarket aircraft tend to ride on rails, Carenado & A2A being notable exceptions feel like real aircraft reacting to the winds  and environments you encounter.

Furthering that bent is Accu-Sim (AccuFeel V2.0 is the solo addon) technology. A2A has modeled wind tunnel and ground data so the aircraft reacts to the simulation as it would in the real world.

You feel the bumps in the taxiways and runways. If you land at an angle you will hear the individual tires land and perhaps bounce. Each flight is different, no two takeoffs or landings are the same. THAT is what a sim is supposed to do.

And it is done with meticulous care and attention. At any time you can inquire as to the condition of your aircraft - whatever maintenance needed is outlined and available for you to initiate.

And then A2A gives you choices - turn the whole shebang off and fly blissfully unaware. Do you want wheel covers? Different spark plugs? How about a two blade prop? All there for you to choose.

This has added to my education in many ways.
I picked up pointers from the sims walk around inspection that directly translated in real life.
I look forward to much more of this.

G'day

Alfrex 1/6 Scale (12") Action Figures

G.I. Joe sized dolls.

In 1959(?) I needed a doll, mom bought me that very first Barbie. I recall being fascinated with the miniature aspect but a zebra striped bathing suit glasses and high heels were only going to keep me occupied for so long.

When G.I. Joe was released. I HAD TO HAVE ONE.
Didn't every red blooded ten year old who played "army" every night until mom called out it was "time?"

And I wanted the pilot or the scuba diver or even the dress Marine in his blues, but not the generic Army or Navy version.
(I got the generic Naval one - grrr)

When the Far East bug bit I soon found a manufacturer called Alfrex that made of all things, one sixth scale samurai action figures.
Yojimbo - the worst Mifune head sculpt - bar none.
Zatoichi - one of the best head sculpts ever.

The list goes one for quite a ways. Many lines were envisioned but the company failed and all we were left with were the completed runs. Most had been limited to 2,500 pieces.

Incredibly detailed. Zatoichi comes with the traditional straw sandals and if you wish to use them you will have to learn how to wrap and then tie them. They are made from straw. These are not slip on, plastic Barbie shoes. Same thing with the loincloth, kimono shirt, gloves, leg warmers, and cloak.

Okay, the included rice balls are plastic, but okay no issue with that. Or the plastic tobacco pouch, although the holder for the pouch requires affixing and tying.
The sword blade, hidden in his cane is metal. And on the experience goes on & on. They spared little time and expense to make these dolls.
In the early 1990s when the were released they were sold for $150 each.
Now on eBay they go from $140 for Yojimbo to over $1,100 for the Seven Samurai boxed set.

The horrific Yojimbo (above)

The actor for comparison

The sublime Zatoichi (below)

The actor for comparison.

Overly articulated, beside the twenty to so movement points a regular 12 inch action figure would have, these have several for each limb. There is no pose you cannot achieve, literally.

eBay and vendors overseas are the last place they still live.