Ultra Wide!

 My older computer monitor was having trouble synching, so time for a replacement.

https://www.lg.com/uk/monitors/lg-35wn73a-b

The hardware is fine. Like other LG products however it has no manual! Let's run through this using the product page linked above.

The video refers to speakers - this model has none. No problem for me as the computer has an external sound system.
The USB cable supplied has a mini connection both ends, so it won't plug in to USB HUBs or a PC.

The OnScreen Control app is not available via the LG website, I had to Search for a link to download it.
The assembly instructions are of the IKEA kind - a diagram with no text.

LG controls differ widely between models - they seem to be designed from scratch every time! In this case there was a hidden button on the bottom that accessed an onscreen menu.

 My color test screen is an Excel spreadsheet (!!) that has primary colors, on defaults they are a match for the smaller LG monitor next to it.

My Nvidia 1060 copes. It runs at 45C idle and at 70C for reasonable game settings.

Ultrawide is 21:9 as opposed to 16:9 widescreen. Most programs react intelligently to this, in Second Life for example peripheral vision increases.

Spacesheeting 63

The transition of EVE downloadable data from XML tables to SWAGGER has reached the point where the old system has been discontinued, which leaves me no choice but to convert.

SWAGGER is more complicated as it uses temporary tokens to get access to private data. This allows third-party apps to display your secret stuff without having access to your password, and that isn't easy to implement with a spreadsheet! However, a nice person wrote a guide:
SSO_Authentication_in_Microsoft_Power_Query

Right now I have the tables up and running, the next task is to get the many spreadsheet references to point to them. Which, with INDEX MATCH arrays, is a pain.

[added] Finished! Took six weeks!! Everything seems to be back to normal, updating generates a lot of error messages but these can be ignored.

I'm not that wealthy!

According to her EVE Character Sheet, Ori is worth 82 Billion ISK. Now while as a corporation CEO she is not short of funds that is plainly untrue, so what was going wrong?

There is a Character Assets XML table that can be downloaded via the EVE API. This doesn't include some things which are on the Character Sheet such as cash and escrow but still...

The XML had a column with mixed Tables and nulls which Excel wouldn't expand, so I had to create a second table to get this flattened out, it held the contents of containers and ship fittings.
Annotating the tables revealed an accounting glitch. The corporation transports goods from the factory to the market where they sit in a warehouse before going on sale. A corporation warehouse would be absurdly expensive to rent at a trade hub so the corp uses Ori's personal storage hanger which is free, and this comes up as her assets.
So that was around 40 billion located. Where was the rest? It turned out that sales orders were also being credited to Ori, only when items were sold did the cash arrive in the corporation bank account. And there on the order sheet was another 37 billion!

Another glitch was found whilst doing all this - the API ignores personal stuff in player owned space stations. This is unlikely to be corrected as XML is being phased out.

Oops

Oh dear - not been killed in EVE for a long while. I forgot that War Declarations only expire 24 hours after the clock runs out and got ambushed in my big fat freighter.
In EVE you wake up in a new clone minus your expensive implants and with a depleted bank balance, a totally unpleasant experience.

Nothing of Interest

The big change in EVE last year was a new range of player owned space stations, so my Corporation built one. It's a robot factory called "Nothing of Interest" orbiting the innermost moon of a gas giant, a pretty spot.
Editing the spreadsheet to take account of the various advantages not renting factory space provides has been tricky, but if I've got it right the green lights say we are in for a profitable year. Assuming no one decides to blow it up that is.

Administrator!

Yes, here we go again. Civilisation VI runs fine, thinks it has Saved, no error message - but doesn't. 'Run as Admin' fixed this, because presumably it was trying to save into a protected folder.

Spacesheeting

To make stuff in World of Warcraft you need a hammer. In EVE Online you need a spreadsheet.
This is just a corner of my currently 1.2Mb monster, which pulls down data from game databases and tells me what's worth manufacturing. It also does stock control.

I had old XML maps that weren't being used and Excel wouldn't tell me how to delete them. I was looking in the wrong place, the DATA menu and not DEVELOPER which has the XML management section. Bah.
The next step will be to compile a raw material shopping list.

Second Life

I have one. Can't think why I haven't blogged this before!
I had a brief look at SL several years back, but the interface was clunky and I wasn't enthused enough to continue. A few months ago I tried again, found it much improved, and as soon as I got beyond the 'new player experience' I was hooked.

I'll assume you've at least read the media accounts of Second Life, which indicate that it is populated by pedophiles, virtual conferencing business suits and land sharks. Well those people are there in small numbers, but the bulk of 'residents' do other things.

The difference between SL and other online games is that players have the in world editing program. Almost everything you see in SL is constructed by players - buildings, avatars, vehicles and so on. There is a scripting language that enables them to add animations, sound and video. So what do they do with this? Well actually they do what people do in Real Life...

Have sex. Sex in SL is (for me at least) mostly fun, but now and then a good animation with attractive avatars and a good partner can be surprisingly erotic. For others, I gather it works quite well as a masturbation aid, and good luck to them! It's also interesting as part of the overall kick I get out of roleplaying games, which is to be 'someone else'.

Learn new skills. In SL this means finding out how to Create things, something I've only scratched the surface of so far. I've extensively rebuilt my castle, modified clothes, can do textures but my scripting is still Read Only.

Make money. Well, not so far. as in RL that requires a good product, marketing and after sales service with the added twist that the relative values of things are entirely different. A castle is cheaper than a sex bed because of the time spent creating them, since raw material cost is zero.

Medieval II - Total War (2)

The default shortcut provided goes to Launcher.exe, a small program that accesses the Internet to provide details of updates and mods. Unfortunately Launcher on Vista takes 50% of CPU doing absolutely nothing and the main program fails to unload it, even when exited. It has to be turned off using Task Manager.
The solution is to create a shortcut to medieval2.exe.

Creative's sound driver for Vista remains buggy after 9 months, they seem to be unable to fix it. They did come up with an EAX patch, so that kind of works with Windows and more importantly with the range of games that don't have a 'plain vanilla' Soundblaster setting such as Medieval II. And then, knowing they had hordes of pissed off customers of Mongolian proportions, they charged $10 for it.

The game? It's fine, lots of epic battles.

Medieval II - Total War

I buy computer games rarely since I prefer open ended long lasting ones, just Civ IV and Zoo Tycoon 2 recently. However the local wargames group said it was best thing since Attila the Hun...

Vista note: it's fine. It guessed my optimum settings wrong and the sound was stuttering, but I knew what that was - as previously noted the Creative audio driver doesn't like pushy graphics. Dropping quality to medium cured the stutter and enabled me to push the resolution up to normal as well.

The graphics are impressive, whether the AI is as good remains to be seen. I seem to be winning but in the style of Pyrrus rather than Alexander.