2ºC, snow thawing.

Started the day Painting: continued with fine tuning, moved the vein on the horse’s muzzle, adde a layer to the man’s face and so on. I have an idea for the background, so that could change tomorrow. this picture will easilty be done in the next few days.
Computer fixes: I just put the RAM card back in this computer to see if it runs ok. After a few false starts, it seems that the problem lies with the slots on the motherboard. The cards don’t seem to be making good electrical contacts, so after some fiddling- they are back in. Now running at 1572 MB I am on the lookout for any signs of a crash. Usually programs start reporting errors. Barring IE6 crashing and loosing my first entry this morning- it’s ok for now.

Flickr: has a more lively community than here. Comments are more forthcoming and the response to my phtogrphs has been very good. There seem to be fewer juvenile spangly-glitter posters than here. In fact, it’s encouraging me to take more interest in my camera. Now I am taking all shots using manual exposure settings and it’s like old times. When I used ot use the Olympus OM2sp I always set exposure and focus manually, it makes you think more about what you are trying to get ina picture. the same works on the digital camera. I bet the quality of my photos will improve as a result.

It’s snowing again.

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.

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 .

Added up – this could be the shortest day. the earliest sun-set was last week- on the 13th December and the mornings will continue to get darker for a few days yet. We have 7 hours and 39 minutes of daylight today. By Saturday, we will see an improvement of 6 seconds on that. wow!

Audigy: finally got round to putting in the new soundcard in this computer. Though it still needs some setting up, it definitely makes clearer sounds as well as doing some special effects like echo and reverb on mouse-click sounds too. The biggest change should be in games- we’ll see about that.

CDs: Tom Waits, this is a triple set which leaves me wondering why he can’t release more often so they are spread out & we don’t have to wait so long?

Game: latest incarnation of the Sturmovic flight sim series. 

Which is very nice to have just before the holiday, but I have a painting to finish….

True to my word- ithe painting now finished   ….pitcha tomorrow.
The Tom Waits triple is promising- never one to make a judgement on first hearing, all the right ingredients are there.
Finally– the title comes from the sound a bird made while I was out with the Ladies (both proudly wearing their flashing LED collars).

That: seems to be it, one little setting and it works now. Next step is : get the wireless connection to work

Below is the Stalking-horse picture almost finished, the paint is still wet- hence the uneven background.

Also: read this. It’s on Agnosticism, compare with : Wiki