New Router

 I had an elderly Chinese router, gets hot but worked fine. My ISP is under orders from the government to switch to digital phones, so a new Hub arrived.
It was BT branded with no instructions. Hm. Message found on back lid of box - use the App to set up. Yes, the App had some diagrams.
Plug in, wait for blue light. Connected! Plug in computer, TV, other networked stuff - OK! Wi-Fi required a password, found on a label in tiny print on the bottom of the Hub. Magic happened - the tablet having connected told the phone how to do so as well. By reading a QR code they paired up with the Hub.
The satellite box needed time to reconnect.
I had to search for the Hub Manager address for the PC to display it.
The Hub replaced my fiber connect box as well.
The phone socket on the router activated a couple of days later. 
My Tuya Wi-Fi was less cooperative, it took a while playing with settings to get the radiators paired up. The old thermostat refused to connect so I bought a desktop one that did.

 I forgot about the printer. Hewlett-Packard require a wi-fi connection for ink supplies and emailed to say it was no longer working.

The printer itself gave the wrong instructions for fixing this. Adding a new printer using the HP App worked.

 Footnote: whilst doing this I changed my payment plan - doubled my speed and reduced by bill by £13 per month. Er, what? It seems that the regulator forced ISPs to unbundle a lot of things such as naff streaming services but didn't insist they tell their customers. Now I'm down to basic plus keeping my old telephone number.

At the pub

 

Zaida Gearbox, Oriella, Duchess Liz, Wildstar Beaumont.

Wooburn views

 It's been two years since we ventured to buy our own Region in Second Life. 'Wooburn' was intended to be an English village circa 1910, but this is the steamlands so it has ... peculiarities.

 Regions are quite small, 256m squares. They can be joined together, ours has a water Region to the South.

The Canal

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chateau Trikassi

 

 

Clocktower and Trolley

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

An adapted San Francisco trolley with Full Self Driving! 

The Falcon Pub

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

House on the Hill

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Parson's Park

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

St Barnabas Chapel

 

 

 

 

The Village Railroad

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cassie Eldemar makes miniature dollhouses, a train is her latest venture.

Home Battery revisited

 After a full year of operation, time for a checkup.

The App that displays data has been updating and improving.

My spreadsheet says the battery is saving me about £840/year. That means the return on my investment is around 20%. This was much better than I expected! Since batteries last around 10 years, this investment was successful.

The system is ~80% efficient.

Purple line - battery charge. Green - battery. Blue - Grid input. Orange - electricity used.

More gadgets

 My Sony tablet has been running continuously for 11 years. It's still going strong. Batteries wearing out? Oh no they don't!
However, it's OS is old and won't run new Apps well or not at all. So now I have a Samsung Tab A8, not the expensive one in the adverts but mid-range. I don't play Android games, so no problem.
It has some Samsung bloatware, but that can be suppressed. It needed tweaking, mostly to stop the beeping notifications about everything. The battery isn't as long-lasting, otherwise fine.

Having sat on my Sony phone, I also went Samsung for a replacement, the A23. Same comments really.

I do recommend getting cases for these devices.

The gasman cometh

A year ago British Gas sent a subcontractor to our road to replace the elderly pipes with plastic ones. They dug holes. The holes filled with water.

I live at the bottom of a valley and the water table is about a foot down in winter.

 

They filled up the holes, apologised, and came back in the autumn. Success, though it took a week.

Path reconcreted, lawns resown with grass seeds, meters relocated outside the houses, £50 compensation for the disruption.

Would I like a smart meter? I already have an electric one. Sure! It's fitted, but after several months isn't online. I contacted them, they claimed to be working on it but I suspect this was a lie.

Smart Home

 It's been a couple of years since I posted about Tech stuff, so let's catch up.

Phillips Hue smart lights use a wireless USB connected Hub. They can be programmed to switch off at night and can be dimmed.

Tuya is a Chinese in the cloud wifi app that can control all kinds of appliances. I use mine for electric radiators and an air cooler. The app takes some effort to understand but is improving.

Oh, yes, I turned off the gas central heating. Another blow against global warming!

So far so good, but then came the home battery saga. My local authority had a scheme that recommended installers for solar panels/ batteries, so I ordered a small 3Kw battery. Delays and more delays followed, and it took almost a year to complete the installation. The company was too busy fitting more profitable solar panels and kept lying to me about completing the job.
The actual system works fine now, it stores excess output from the panels during the day and then puts it back in the evening. It is modular so more batteries can be added later. The app has one remaining bug, it's not calibrated to zero against the solar panels.

Solis inverter and Pylon battery. Yes, Chinese again ..

 The first Happy Hour at the Rose & Thorn in its new location, across the canal in Rosehaven Laudanum. 3PM SLT, which for First Lifers is Pacific Time.

Graphics Card

Graphics cards have finally fallen to reasonable prices as the chip shortage eases, so I went for a GeForce RTX 3060 which Nvidia recommended as an upgrade for my five year old 1060.

Will the power supply be sufficient? My CPU+GPU combination is here:

https://www.whatpsu.com/psu/cpu/Intel-Core-i7-7700/gpu/NVIDIA-GeForce-RTX-3060

so my 500W PSU is good. 

Next concern: six socket power input, four pin plug. It seemed to only engage to the left? Correct!

Windows came up in an emergency low rez state. Whilst I pondered this the Nvidia driver was presumably reconfiguring since after a couple of minutes it returned with everything done.

My card has a configuration App for overclocking and so on.

So far, no problems. I've been tweaking games up to better graphics

 

Ostara at the Stone Circle

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.