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.

Trikassi Enterprises 2020

The 2019 recession slowly lifted leading to more favourable market conditions. However in 2020 there was a significant raw material shortage that created continuing uncertainty.

As our headline figures below show, there was an overall improvement in growth.

Headline figures (2019 in brackets)

Year on Year Net Growth 17% (8%)
Before PLEX Profit: 28% (18%)
End year corporation book value 348 (304) Billion ISK

TV update

Sony doesn't rush with updates, this is Android 7 to 8.

They have also changed their custom GUI. The 'Discover' button on the wheel which used to do not a lot now tries to do everything. Sometimes it uses the Satellite Box channel guide, sometimes the TV guide. However, there is no need to use it that I can see.

It hadn't occurred to me to try before, but my Bluetooth keyboard pairs up fine with the TV. No more awkward onscreen text entry! The Back button on the TV is actually ESC, I guessed that, and on the keyboard that is fn+SQUARE, the bottom left and top left keys, which is weird.

Trikassi Enterprises 2019

The recession that began at the end of last year continued through most of 2019. Our Raitaru has been the only active capsuleer owned factory in Sobaseki until recently. There are some signs that economic conditions may be improving, but sustained recovery is not yet certain.
Whilst the corporation is still profitable, our growth has been at a much reduced level.
The price of PLEX was high in summer, reducing net profit.
We had one nuisance War Dec that did not affect us significantly due to robust contingency planning.

Headline figures (2018 in brackets):
Year on Year Net Growth 8% (47%)
Before PLEX Profit 20% (109%)
End year Corporation book value 304 (274) Billion ISK

Solar Panels - progress report

See Installation Report from six years ago.
I have had no generation problems apart from a couple of breaker cut outs.
The annual output has been constant.
The investment return has been about 9%, lower than was suggested but much as I expected as the facing is not due South.

One unfortunate snag was that after several years the roof below them started to sag. I called in the builders who installed joists in the loft that better distributed the weight and, ahem, plastered over the cracks. So far, all is now well.

The ongoing effect has been to wipe out my electricity bill with around £20 a month to spare.

Snail racing

Giant snail racing! Some good scenic shots of the Realm of Rosehaven. My castle is the one with the round tower in the opening shots.

Trikassi Enterprises 2018

Manufacturing conditions in Eve have been sub-optimal this past year. Technological innovations in moon mining caused a flood of minerals onto the market, depressing prices with a knock-on effect to manufactured goods.
Towards the end of the year this overproduction was augmented by falling demand resulting in an economic recession in Hisec. The result can plainly be seen locally, with factories being shut down and mothballed.
In the third Quarter we suffered an annoying war declaration which disrupted our activities for several weeks, though fortunately no assets were lost.
The price of PLEX fell significantly in the first half of the year, then rose to its previous level.

On the good side our station remains open, attracting an increasing number of users by having the cheapest rates in system. We acquired Blueprints for several new lines such as Battleships and various Modules. Our old products continue to be profitable though at reduced sales volumes.

Headline figures (2017 figures in brackets):
Year on Year Net Profit 47% (55%)
Before PLEX Profit 124% (99%)
End year Corporation book value 274 Billion ISK

Hi-Fi upgrade

Looking back I see it has been six years since I did this. Time marches on...

So, it's a Sony DN-1080. It doesn't look much different to the previous, just improved software really. It is set up for 4k and has Dolby Atmos and is thus a match for the TV and disk player. Let's test!

Atmos is good if the sound engineers take the trouble to set it up. If they just pick a few sound effects and put them behind the listener but otherwise use the old surround positions, not so good. There are Demos on YouTube that show what should be happening.

It comes with the two current surround systems, Dolby Surround and Neural:X. In different ways these do the same thing, spreading the sound out to all the available speakers. In my case that is 5.1.2, with the 2 being front height. The A/V uses a sound test to work out where these are.
As with Atmos, results are variable. A lot of prestigeTV programmes and movies are broadcast in 5.1 these days.

And one by one they faded away ...

The Rosehaven 12th Anniversary Ball. As befits Halloween the grid failed and one by one the guests vanished!
Clever GIF by Princess Selena

War! No one killed shock horror

Finally, I got the "nice space station you got there, shame if it should get blown up" message.

In EVE hi sec, within the territories of the big NPC empires, there are police. However a contribution to their benevolent fund will cause them to turn blind eyes to shenanigans. These are called WarDecs.

The rules for blowing up space stations are intended to prevent Corporations in different time zones from making surprise attacks when the other guys are fast asleep. First, attackers have to knock down the station's Shields. A week later, they can come back to destroy its Armour. Finally after another week, and that was today, they can destroy it.

Now my corporation specialises in arms dealing not combat, we are small, defenceless but wealthy so we hired mercenaries to defend us and the extortionists backed off without a fight. Hopefully they won't try that again, it cost them money and a complementary Bounty on their heads. It cost us a few million ISK as well, mostly in lost production, but we can make that up in a few days.

... and 4K disks!

It's Sony again, the X700
This is the budget player so it has some esoteric features removed, mostly stuff a smart TV has anyway.


4K disk buyers beware! There is a lot of 'Ultra HD' in the shops that isn't 4K at all, it uses HD masters and upscales them to 4K which is what a 4K TV does anyway.

The player has been updated to Dolby Vision but weirdly via a settings switch. Since most providers don't say if they are using Vision this is a chocolate teapot.


YouTube has 4K demos such as
Wildlife in 4K

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.

New TV

Santa gave me a new TV this year, a Sony Bravia KD55XE9005
It's pretty, but let's quibble!

The control system is labyrinthine. The most used bits are in an "Action Menu", the rest is buried at the bottom of the Android Home page that has the Netflix/Amazon pay us $$$ links I don't use.

The best advice for Video settings is to leave them alone unless there is an obvious problem - and I've not noticed any.

The computer's graphics card is willing to display 2160p but with my present three screen setup (!!) runs hotter if it does, more so with games. EVE would be unplayable anyway due to tiny text, a known problem.
Setting up the computer for HDR has to be done at both ends to work properly. Windows 10 will tell you if everything will work.

The previous TV couldn't cope with 1080p, no problem with this one. 4K is presently only broadcast by subscription. There is plenty of it on YouTube, including some wildlife and travel channels.

The Humax Satbox and Sony disk player link in OK. The TV comes with an "IR Blaster" that ingeniously attaches to devices and replaces their remote controls to some extent. I have it attached to the Satellite box so the TV's programme guide can operate it.


Mirroring from tablet to big screen is easy - one button.
Tablet remote control app? Fine!

Holiday Ball 2017

 Some photos of our Holiday Ball 2017  from Patty Poppy. It was held in a big icy structure up on the sky platform.

Windows Fall Update Annoyances

Yes it has several for me...

A new security section "Controlled Folder Access" stops "unfriendly apps" from changing files in certain data folders. By default, these are any non Microsoft program and everything in the User folder.
Oh dear! Some programs store data in User folders, so they need whitelisting. EVE Online was one such, and it was generating alerts as it tried to Save its chat logs. I suspect this might have been causing crashes as well.
Another was, mysteriously, a Microsoft program... msiexec.exe is the Windows installer program which I get repeated alerts about for trying to access the Desktop folder. There are only shortcuts there.

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.

Spacesheeting 51

'51' being the version of the EVE spreadsheet I've reached!

Following the conversion to Power Query all seemed well. There is a bug I created myself by deleting worksheets without disconnecting downloads on them, but that just requires pressing a button twice.

Meanwhile the devs have progressed from one API front end, CREST, to another, SWAGGER. Noticing that it had a useful price list I ventured into it armed only with my shaky knowledge of JSON and it was as tricky as I feared. Why is every entry called 'Record'? Much searching followed until I realised that the 'List to Table' button was the magic one.

Luncheon at Trikassi

An al fresco luncheon at Chateau Trikassi.with friends.

Some of our guests live in Aislinn castle, top left.

Dame Litta and Oriella with tomato soup:

Time to upgrade

After seven years, a new desktop PC! The previous one has served well with only one hardware failure, the power unit.
So as before something middle range for about the same price and rely on Moore's Law to make it better.
250GB SSD
GeForce GTX 1060
Intel i7
Aero Cool DS200 case+fans

It is, as advertised, silent.
I could have used a shift everything over utility, but that would have taken accumulated junk with it so I'm only moving specific files and where possible downloading and installing from scratch.
So far, no drama. If anything over enthusiasm, since Windows was grabbing settings from the old machine without asking!

And then I hit an Excel snag. Excel 2016 has integrated Power Query into the main program, it was an optional Addon for earlier versions. In doing so the old XML table downloader seems to have been broken, it fails to Save Maps correctly.
So I had to convert. Power Query is more generalised and is indeed powerful, but it's a complicated pain to learn. There is a button for everything, but where is it?
Today came the big test, running the converted sheet on Excel 2016. Success!

[added] Time to check really old programs: Webedit and WS/FTP are both Win95 vintage, mirrors of their folders have followed me faithfully and... they still work. A test edit of a website page uploaded with no complaints.

The sad demise of Daisy

My very old Email address daisy.freeserve.co.uk will be no more in a few weeks. My ISP has decided to no longer provide a mail server.
So, since I already have a Google address Google it is.