Author Archives: essiep

Still ill

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9°C, clear.

Dog experience: imagine playing with your mates in the park, running about and having a generally exciting time. Made more so by no having not seen a particular friend for nearly six months. Eventually you get out of breath and you take a moment to have a little sit down. Moments later your long lost friend decides to pee on you. That’s what happened to my dog this morning, in fact he did it again to the other dog too. You just wouldn’t accept that in social circles would you?
No?- well i suppose you just aren’t as cool as my two poodles are you.
 
They did get a wash-down when we got home.

McNaught: nought

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9°C, clear & sunny

No ride today: walking in Derbyshire instead. The rivers are deep- near to overflowing, and the mud thick black stuff. Deceptively – it’s not as deep as it looks, there are limestone rocks near the surface. Those new walking boots are superb.
 
McNaught: With the first day of clear sunset, I really hoped to see the new wonder-comet, just as the sun went down. It’s too late by a few days- and when it was higher- we had cloudy skies here in England.

They are not all bigots

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9°C, rain and more rain.

News story; as I write, the house of Lords (an unelected body of very old men who hold tremendous power here in England) are debating the law that could protect the human rights of homosexuals. Read here:
Fortunately, I did find a readers’ opinions page which held quotes from christians who aren’t as bigoted as their religious leaders can be. You have to scroll down a fair way before the malicious side of christianity appears. Following on from there there are very few christians moved to criticise the proposed law, and many who want to be distanced from the intolerant members of their religion. Conclusion? for now, we must be wary of headline grabbers, the moderates are in the majority, just watch out for those Christians in positions of power.

less fever, more gummed

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12°C, cloudy, still no ice in Moscow!

Saturday was a bad day for this cold, I was all a shiverin’ in the late evening after sleeping most of the day. There followed a rotten night.
That bout has given me a chance to take big bites out of "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins. The book meandered a during some of the middle passages, but then regained its pace near the end. There are many instances where I have read arguments and felt thoroughly supported in my own views. My own distaste for faith schools is a good example. RD went further and suggests we resist the practice of referring to children as a Catholic child, or Moslem boy or Jewish girl, we could though, say child of a Christian family (and so on). There is a little more to read, but then I can start lending the book out.

If there weren’t so many wanting to borrow it, I could consider the practise of "Bookcrossing". That is some organised way of planting a finished-with book so someone can pick it up to read.

Weather and worrying about it: hold back a little,
Here is a graph of recent trends


Nothing in there to start excessive panic. Curiously- 1940 peaks as a warm year, a year famous for it’s harsh winter her in the UK and western Europe.

Silly money

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9°C, rain

Back to work. Too soon, too soon.

Hardware: choosing computer hardware is an absurd process. All I am doing is comparing two CPUs, and then adding up the cost of motherboards, RAM and a graphics card to rebuild this machine.


I really want faster rendering in 3ds max as well as the rest. So if anyone has any suggestions for similar money, let me know
According to Tom’s Hardware reviews, the Intel wins

I’m getting more enthusiastic- the more I read up on this. The Cinebench tests are the closest to 3ds max rendering times (and other 3D software). Anyway, I an downloading test software to see how much faster rendering can be. It looks like 10 times faster is a reasonable figure; just imagine, all those hour & half that could be done in 9 minutes! That really would encourage me to do more 3D animation.

’07, day one

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7°C, sun then rain, wind all the way.

Monday:It’s been a holiday full of late nights, and for me, too many social occasions. Today was an escape- by bicycle- which was in no way marred by a puncture near Hamstel Ridware. A Buzzard flew over while I fixed it. the situation was quite atmospheric – what with gathering dark clouds over the Chase, strong winds blowing towards here and the sky full of crows. the only colour anywhere was grass, black earth and lead-grey roads.
"Orphans" by Tom Waits is fantastic, a triple CD that should keep me going for quite a while. That Christmas CD ( exCathedra) is getting more plays than I expected- choral music is very good, it’s more than just decorative wallpaper (apart from a few tracks).

Was that it then?

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11°C, wind & showers

It’s dark, it’s 7am and it’s the last day of the year even though last night wasn’t exactly early, I woke at 6am and at dawn, I can take the dogs out.
No new- year’s resolutions this time ’round- the last few have worked out and there it no real need to wait ’til new year to change something in life. 2007 will see some mountain walking, the same amount of cycling and probably more futile computer game-play.
Currently I have been whiling away time playing "Company of Heroes". A corney name I know but this is rather a good game, see more on this Wiki. It is a little beyond the power of this computer but an upgrade is due in the next quater anyway.
2006 has seen my paintings continue, less rapidly but more concentrated on each one. There has been a price for the time spent on those, that is- fewer animations.
 
There is the most beautiful birdsong coming from outside, dawn is almost here, and the dogs are wide awake.

Marquis drive

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10°C, sunny

Cannock Chase: brisk walking on the Chase which was supposed to be with the 3-peaks team. I was late; mainly due to the meeting point  being off familiar turf. At least I met them at the end & they had walked about the same distance as I did. They also walked over round pebbles of the Bunta-pebble bed, surrounded by treacle black mud from years of forest managment. There were relatively few wild animals, offset by vast numbers of mountain bikers. Some tracks are impassable due to hoardes of those cyclists. Oh well, it looks like fun and unlikely to break bikes like some terrain would. Swinnertons cycles looks like a useful place, I make a mental note of it.

Geforce tweeks

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8°C, changing- rain arriving.

Watch out- this section is for a geekiness fix. Skip it if you don’t need to get out more often.

Geforce tweeks for specific games, I didn’t know these were available on my card but here’s the explanation pasted from a Ubi forum:

Right click on desktop and select Properties menu.
Click the Settings tab & click the Advanced button down the bottom.
Click the tab that lists your vid card (6800 in my case).

This is your Nvidia controls. Go to the section called Performance & Quality Settings. In the Application Profiles box, select il2fb.exe and Il2 Sturmovik Forgotten Battles from the Application and Active Profiles boxes respectively.

Now click the Modify Profile… button and select "Modify" from the two choices.

In the next box, select browse, and navigate to the Il-2 Sturmovik 1946 game folder and click on the il2fb exe icon and press Open.
(Back now in the Modify Profile window) Click OK.

Now you can tweak the Nvidia settings…

Make sure the View: Advanced Settings is selected. From the available selections, tick the boxes and set them up as per below:

X Antialiasing settings 2xQ/4x (whichever is best for you)
X Anisotropic filtering – OFF
X Image settings – Quality
Color profile (leave blank)
X Vertical sync – ON
X Force mipmaps – Trilinear
X Conformant texture clamp – ON
0 Extension limit – OFF
X Hardware Acceleration – Single display mode
X Trilinear optimisation – ON
X Anisotropic mip filter optimisation – ON
X Anisotropic sample optimisation – ON
0 Transparency antialiasing – OFF (don’t tick the box)
X Triple buffering – ON
X Negative LOD bias – CLAMP

Now click OK and the new settings should be saved and activate when you start ’46.

Finally, go to the setup tab in your ’46 folder.

Click on the Settings tab and select Custom.

Set Texture mipmap filter to Anisotropic.
Set Texture compression to None.
Unselect Dither
Select Use Vertex Arrays
Unselect Polygon Stipple

Under Extensions:

Tick: Mutitexture, Combine, Secondary color, Vertex Array Extension and Texture Compress ARB.
Leve the others un-ticked.
Select OK to close and save.

This is what I did and found my performance greatly improved over identical settings in 4.05m. If anyone has any improvments to this, it’d be great if they can share them Thumbs Up.