Nuke

still some months away until i get the cash for a new pc. needless to say my current one is getting kind of clunky. getting close to 3 years old. im looking into replacing it more because its starting to break down, and it doesn't offer many of the new connectivity options. things like usb3.1 and m.2 are completely absent. i built it for efficiency and wanted a reduction in noise over my previous rig. i like the mini itx form factor and have been using it for the past several builds. moore's law isn't quite what it used to be and the options out in similar price range arent that much of an improvement over what im currently running: i7 4790k 8gb ddr3 2400 gtx750ti just the important stuff. some preliminary research with an estimated budget of $700, and preferring to knock that down to $600 if i can (usually the price drops a hundred or so between the time i start planning and the time i actually buy stuff). im keeping all 3 of my ssd drives and my coolermaster elite 110 case and cooling peripherals (one big fan). absolutely want a new video card (thinking 1050ti) to drive the 4k monitor i got last year. and will need a new power supply, only power supply i have that works in my rig and is stable is about 10 years old. its pretty much a ticking time bomb primed to fail. preliminary research leads me to this for my core components: i5 7600 or i7 7700 (no bloody k, i run stock, no oc) 16gb ddr4 2400 (maybe higher if a mobo comes out that supports it and i can afford it, not thrilled about not moving up in memory speed) gtx1050ti with about $240 allocated to mobo and psu this just barely squeezes into my budget with the i5 option. except for the better video card and more ram, this machine doesn't do anything new, it might even be a step backwards if i go with the i5. enter ryzen, which i didnt even know about a few days ago. apparently amd has pulled themselves out of the gutter with a product that can actually do as well if not beat intel. this doesn't surprise me, as intel are trying to squeeze the final bits of processing power out of the silicon before atomic structures cease being a viable building block for a cpu. with amd chasing lower hanging fruit it was only a matter of time before they caught up. haven't really looked into seeing it as an option yet. this will depend on mini itx mobo availability and size of the stock cooler (going to look into seeing if its possible to adapt the case to an sfx psu to save some space). ive looked at alternatives that involve keeping more of the system. for example i thought about upgrading to a better mobo with compatibility with my 4790k and found nothing that was better than what i have or have any new features. in fact i only found four and i didnt like any of them. seems my socket was discontinued. doing just the video might be an option, i can really go nuts with a much higher end graphics card and the psu to back it up. but thats a little disappointing and i risk the machine giving up the ghost. could try the ryzen and see if it is as good as everyone makes it out to be. at the very least it sounds like i can go that way to shave some cost off of my build and not loose too much in the process. i want to do an upgrade path that results in an actual step up.

in before black metal from the 60s oh wait

in before this turns into one of those atrocious threads where everyone just posts videos. i like metal, mostly of the doom, sludge, black, and thrash varieties, outlaw country, classic rock, motorhead (its its own genre imho), with some classical and opera thrown in. i dont like anything that is over processed or autotuned, this is the cancer that is ruining music today.

was just theorycrafting a new build to be thrown together in october when the state of alaska gives residents free money for no good reason what so ever. its going to be a partial rebuild, but only the case and ssds are getting reused this time. i usually use this for a big purchase like the monitor im currently using, or a computer. its been 3 years since my last build. im not even sure the thing is going to be an improvement. since im probibly going to be dropping from a i7 4790k to an i5 7600 (no bloody k). bringing with it a drop in cache, drop in ghz and none of that threadly goodness the i7 comes with. also im going to move up to 16gb ram, been running at 8gb for no fewer than 4 builds. then again its going to be the first thing on the chopping block when i run into monetary concerns. found a mini itx mobo that has everything i need, an odd coincidence when the cheap model has all the things i want. no storage no drives. if i had any faith left in my current power supply, id avoid that "upgrade" as well. at first glance im looking at an overall decrease in tdp. 550w should cover it. the oldest stable power supply i own is a thermaltake toughpower 700w from my old core2quad rig. its been a solid backup every time need an emergency psu. im going to get the 550w model, because its enough (math will be done closer to order time). i did a rosewill last time, mostly because thats my second oldest functional power supply. the new one on the other hand didnt last 2 years. not that i trust any psu company to not let their quality slip, but what can i do. either blow a third of my budget on power or buck the problem a couple years down the road (i usually do this). also wondering if i cant mod the case to accept a smaller psu form factor, like sfx. throw in an adapter kit to the parts list. never did like the cpu cooler clerance on this thing. absolutely the thing i need to do is upgrade the gpu. still running that 750ti, i liked it but its time to move on up. i notice that some of the video cards out there are still quite absurdly long. my case can only handle one about 8 and a quarter inches, its very petite mini itx case. i like it and i usually keep cases i like for at least a couple builds. so im looking at a 1050ti. of course im going to do more research closer to build time. looking about $700, but last time i saw priced drop over a hundred bucks below my planned target. in retrospect i should have upgraded gpu and psu last year, saving more money for cpu this year, but the state decided to put a cap on the pfd and ruin my plans.

i think part of it was the superluminal and the subluminal actually share the same space but particles in one cant interact with the particles in the other except through gravity. its not my theory though, honestly i only posted because i was wondering if someone else knew what this was, my google fu produces nothing. nvm, i found it. thought it was something i read but it was a youtube video. derp. crock are not?

i remember reading about a theory awhile back, but i cant quite remember the source. essentially it states that we exist in the subluminal part of the universe. this is accompanied by a superluminal part where nothing can go slower than light. there is also a luminal part that is the divider between the two, everything in that "plane" goes exactly c. proximity to this plane, velocity wise, is what causes relativistic effects. dark matter is essentially the material in the superluminal part of the universe. gravity is shared between both parts. the ftl nature of the superluminal "material" pretty much means it can never form atomic structures or be anything more than a soup of really fast particles. it will however be attracted to and orbit mass in our part of the universe. it sounded interesting, but i dont even know what its called.

to be fair i like most of the big four, anthrax is the one i really couldnt get into. thats the political end of the thrash spectrum, where megadeth crosses into from time to time. but still thrash bands tend to have good musicianship. but in my opinion slayer is the only one that hasnt devolved into dadmetal in their old age (im pointing at you metallica).

you might be able to do a buoyancy glider for titan. every time the altitude gets too low inflate a couple balloons with hydrogen, rise to a high altitude and glide again. same idea as this but for use in atmospheres instead of the ocean (perhaps space oceans).

forbidden planet cast the mold for this type of sci-fi. star trek just brought it to the living room. or even metropolis, which set almost every scifi trope for the following 30 years and you still see some of them today.

megadeth, the wimpiest one of the big four. i recently got into slayer and dont know what i was missing. incidentally when i stopped being a trekkie i became a metalhead.

with bitcoin the fpga miner came in after gpu mining. and once you have the verilog code for a feasable hash processor design its only about $2million to have an asic made. bitcoin asics were pretty much crowdfunded overnight. its only a matter of time. another "gold" rush.

all members of my family are either insane, very self centered or both. im pretty much a crazy cat lady now, sans the lady part.

pro micro, those are fun. easiest way to get your usb project up and running, and you dont have to bust bank on a teensy ($7 on ebay). been wanting to do custom controllers, but my immortal ch gear refuses to die to make that neccisary.

i posted in the adam west thread about how i had watched batman reruns after school. st:tng reruns were also being shown in the previous time slot. many times my school bus did not get me home in time for the show, so i learned how to program the vcr to record it for me. incidentally i was the only one who knew how to do this. i think i rotated like 5 different tapes, which i watched at my leisure. it wasnt long before i found myself owning all the movies and going to star trek conventions and generally being a nerd. i kind of grew out of it in my 20s. i do keep up with the newer stuff but it seems like its a mere shadow of what came before. i recently binged the tos which was totally worth doing. i saw 5 or 6 episodes i hadn't seen before. debating whether i should binge tng and ds9 again, the former ive watched to death and the later havent watched since the original airings. no interest in re-watching voyager or enterprise, but looking forward to discovery.

well it was on every day and played in order, so it was as if you had the og experience. it was certainly worth watching. i find when channels play reruns of anything today they dont do it like that. they keep looping between 10 different episodes and cut out about a third of the show so they can cram in more commercials. you end up buying dvds or binging on hulu or whatever. but back in the 90s they did reruns right.

i grew up on reruns. we didnt have cable so of the 4 broadcast channels we had one of them had batman reruns, and i didnt like the cartoons on the others. and thats what i watched after school in the early 90s.

i think id use a polywell or dpf reactor (though i have doubts about the latter, same plasma contamination issue that fusors have) powering mach effect drives. woodward was claiming reactionless drives with the same capability as an f1 class engine. they would actually be phased arrays of smaller thrusters and would give you a great deal of fault tolerance and serviceability. polywell could be a few meters across where a tokamak (which runs on money and is only capable of fusing dreams into disapointment) would be utterly massive. also i dont think there is a means of direct conversion possible for a tokamak, meaning a big thermodynamic engine and a lot of radiator area. the polywell would only need enough radiator to dump what cant be directly converted, which could be as small as about 10% of the output. given a sufficient powerplant lifting a centrifuge to orbit would be trivial. ive done it in kerbal with an absurd number of boosters with the rocket equation biting me in the buttocks. i had an idea for a plasma/nuclear toroidal ship with the habitation being a small toroidal tube surrounded by a larger toroidal fuel tank. the ship would not spin, since most of its mass doesnt need to, the centrifuge would run on rails in the habitat tube with each car being on trunions so it could operate at high g loads and for surface operations. a nuclear reactor could be placed at the center of a hub with enough distance to greatly limit the shielding requirement (that and the propellant surrounding the crew). a small ring of shielding is used instead of a larger disk shaped shield you might expect. since the majority of possible vectors for radiation would point into empty space with only a thin band of stuff (from its perspective) that needs to be blocked from radiation.

here we get these rust buckets, if you leave it out in the rain it dissolves practically overnight. you ride it in the rain and pretty soon your chain and derailers rust. its not really something you can rely on to get to work on time on a daily basis. people would buy bikes, ride them very hard for a couple days, and they would come back to the store and call it defective, it was all beat up and busted. they would get a full refund of course, the store would bring the bike back, have me fix it up, and then put it back on the shelf as new. the practice was so shifty that i stopped doing it for them. i say again do not ever buy a bike from a us retail store.

shimano works out great if your frame isnt bent. unfortunately this is more the rule than the exception. and thats assuming the underpaid overworked laborer who welded on the derailer brackets did a good job. derailer mounted at a slight angle can severely alter the throw so that some gears end up completely unusable. thats why a large pair of pliers and a hammer were in my toolbox at all times. trim that out and the gear shifter works like a charm. of course at 10 minutes a bike, i only bothered with the worst cases (why i said go to a bike shop, they are paid enough to care). the $200 is about the threshold of where the bikes start getting good. anything in the $100-$200 range is ok if you plan to at a later date throw on a bunch of upgrades. sub $100 good luck, you are looking at a bike that might last a couple summers and will fall apart. of course these are in usd, and these are prices in southeast alaska where shipping is problematic at best and as a result things are more expensive. knock about $50 off if you live down south. incidentally if you find yourself up in anchorage you will have access to one of the best bike trail systems i have ever seen, at least during the parts of they year when you can ride bikes (of course you do see cross country skiers and dog sleds on them during the winter months).

i did see some shimano, but also a lot of no name chinese made garbage as well. the shimano was iffy on anything other than the schwinns though, if it was found on a mongoose or a vertical, there were problems caused by horrible tolerances in the frame manufacture (though they did look like the same systems). and while shimano does make some really nice systems, their low end lines can be pretty terrible. if you arent spending at least $200 bucks you wont see descent hardware. better yet spend at least $300 and get it from a bike shop that has a mechanic that knows his stuff. if you get it from a retail store, they will have a contracted mechanic that doesn't get paid enough to spend more than 10 minutes on each bike. i was one of these guys and i got paid by the bike not the hour, and i needed to do 6 an hour (and i was told to aim for 10 an hour) just to make it worth it. in that 10 minutes i had to get the front wheel on, the handlebars on, the seat installed, the tires filled, and calibrate all the break and derailer systems. the schwinns were a dream out of the box, toolless assembly for the seat and front wheel the handlebar was just a hex nut and the systems were calibrated at the factory, everything just worked out of the box. i actually hated the kids bikes the most, they had the most problems, more accessories to install (bells and ribbons and the like) and they paid the least.

i used to put bikes together for a living, but to be fair the stock hardware is often lackluster. the ones on schwinns were pretty good, but everything else dont trust it. il agree though that every lever shifter is garbage. the best ones were the old skool style found on early 10 speed bikes. trigger shifters are different though as they shift one gear for each click. this allows a much more gradual shift up reducing lash between chain and sprocket. its slower yes but its easier on the derailer and definitely the sprocket. the best shifting mechanism i ever seen was on a 3 speed shaft driven bike. it was fast, fluid and smooth. the only reason bikes have so many gears is the derailer can only throw the chain so far and you need to step up. you end up finding yourself using the same 3 or 4 gears even if you have 24 or more speeds to choose from. so having wider ratios on fewer gears is much better, and the fact that shifting was near instantaneous. ive even read about cvt hub shifters which dont have integer gears at all, but ive never actually seen one, just pick any ratio between the lowest and the highest and shifting is a smooth fluid motion with no skips.

those twist shifters are horribly unreliable. ive seen some so cheap that they break after a few rides. trigger shifters are neat if properly calibrated.

something about cnt heat pipes.

i look forward to 3d memory. when they figure out how to build up a cpu die to about 1 cm thick with massive vertical sram and dram memories built right into the die. then throw in a gpu and an fpga while you are at it. then your motherboard just becomes a big socket for the chip, psu on board, and a rack of ssd slots. that would be interesting indeed.

kind of why i got turned off to opengles. seems it was generally regarded as being free of legacy cruft. but its that cruft that made opengl approachable in the first place. didnt know vulkan was replacing es as well. ive considered learning how to use it but then i just end up working on my software renderer instead.