cucubits

For some reason I just can't get it to boot from a usb drive running mats. I set up a couple drives exactly as the dude says in the video above but it just won't boot from them. The drive shows up in the boot menu in the bios, I set it first priority but it still just loads windows...

Thank you. I'll do that. As soon as all the data is transferred, first I'll let it go to standby to see if the problem can indeed be replicated and then I'll try to diagnose.

Any specific tests I could try to narrow it down?

I think we're close! I've started to copy all my files to the storage as I type this but it's not looking good. It started doing something very worrisome all of a sudden. For about 2 days now, every time it comes out of standby, as soon as the display comes on, it shows the whole screen full of random lines (like old computer monitors used to do with bad cables for example). It does this every time and it lasts for a few seconds, seemingly until I move the mouse. I don't know if it would recover by itself every time but so far I instinctively started moving the mouse when I noticed this. For now I didn't want to experiment with it until I save everything but I'm worried. I have to say, I'm not surprised, but I am worried. Asus build quality seems to have gone downhill a lot over the past few years. This was the first ROG laptop I actually had to mess with out of the box just to get it to a usable state (changed thermal paste and lowered clocks just to keep things from throttling under regular gaming load). I'll try to get a video/picture of this happening after I save everything. Btw, nothing changed when it started doing this (no driver updates, it wasn't moved from my desk at all, nothing new installed). I did however get it pretty toasty over the past few weeks daily playing Star Citizen. It's very resource intensive and gets the CPU easily to over 90C all the time. Idle temps are ok... not great but ok:

Yes, it's very much completely across the country. From Dallas to Seattle area, it's about 3000km. But yes, we know it will be worth it for us to finally leave from texas.

ugh... this is what's expecting us as well, in about a month or so we need to start packing. I am not looking forward to all the chaos that's about to come.

Yeah, from at the released videos, it looks like a good mix of elements from Mass Effect + No Man's Sky + Star Citizen. I really hope they pull this off and it won't be a huge mix of empty planets with copy/paste structures, just for the sake of having a lot of destinations.

It does look great and I also have high hopes for it. We need a good space game badly. For now star citizen will do but I'd give it up in a heartbeat for an actually well made complete game.

This is going to sound crazy but over the past few weeks I've been only playing Star Citizen. I'm not giving a pass to the devs and I do still firmly believe what I kept saying, that their whole scheme is to purposely not finish the game and keep introducing bugs so hopeful players keep buying it. This and probably the fact they're not competent enough to actually get it to a point where they keep promising it will reach. Having said that, I keep playing it, for some reason I just have to. In all honesty it's now in a sort of more or less playable state. Performance is pretty bad but some missions actually work sometimes. It's still full of bugs but when it works, it's quite satisfying and there's a lot of things to do and places to explore. I'm doing a bit of everything, I worked my way up to buying a Prospector and I keep mining Quantanium. It's very exciting, from surveying the moons, finding good rocks, cracking them open without blowing myself up and getting back quickly to the station before the payload explodes. As of now, I would say this is the most efficient way to earn aUEC. With some variance, the yield can be about 300-400k aUEC per hour. There is a bit of luck involved in finding good rocks but this is a lot of money with not that much effort. There are other interesting missions too, bunker runs where you need to clear AI players from bunkers/caves. The AI is either dumb or 360 no-scopes you around the corner. Very exciting but there's a lot of loot to be found. The crime rating is actually an interesting feature. If you do something illegal (shoot other players or do illegal missions) you gets a crime rating. If/when caught (killed by guards or other players) you end up in an actual jail on one of the moons. Depending on the crime level, you actually need to stat there and serve time. This can be up to several real life hours. There are ways out like doing some special missions in the prison or even breaking out, but that's quite tricky to pull off. Bounty hunting is very cool. If a player has a crime stat, any other player on that server has the option to take up a mission to hunt down the criminal. With the mission accepted you get a tracker which shows the criminal at all times. To make matters a bit more complex, the player with the crime stat has the option to clear his name by hacking in some security bunkers and erasing the crimes. Anyway, I've been rambling too much... as hard as it is for me to say, getting the cheapest $45 game package when on sale, might actually be worth the experience, at least for a while.

This game makes me mad. As I said... I despise the devs for their whole scheme of never finishing the game, just throwing crumbs of updates at players. I'm 100% sure this is their actual plan and they have zero intentions of ever getting the game to a full release version. Why? Because they are too incompetent to actually make it work properly and if they just release it, people will realize this and stop buying it. As it is now, with frequent updates (every single update fixes 2 things and breaks 3 others), people keep throwing money at them hoping they will actually release is someday. They will not. Having said that, I think I'll actually buy it this time. The cheapest ship possible as it really is not that difficult to make loads of money in-game. I keep wanting to play it more and more, even with the bugs and crappy performance... To me, Star Citizen is the best definition of a love/hate relationship, lol.

Queen of the South It's quite rare that I get this hooked on a seemingly random TV series. Can't explain why this one works so well, there are twists, plot turns, all sorts of ups and downs but none of the parts are overly dramatic, they don't overly extend sections to build suspense, things just happen, they get solved, they move on. I thoroughly enjoyed the whole series. Well apart from one single thing which made me really sad/angry. I also enjoyed learning the whole spectrum of Mexican swear words. I keep practicing in my head. Also Alice Braga is really pretty.

Very cool. Is it official? Standalone or do I need to dig up my old Fallout saves?

Free week for Star Citizen, started today. As much as I despise the devs and fully believe they are running an elaborate money milking scam with this "game", it's still in the back of my mind all the time. If you guys recall I had a thread about this on NBR, bought it a couple years ago but ended up refunding it. Since then, it appears they added some new areas and it's supposed to be more playable but believe me, it's not. Fired it up today and after only one crash, I managed to get in the game. Spawned in one of the new areas, some sort of base above the clouds on a planet (no terrain visible at all, just the base). From the moment it started, I was looking at a slideshow. It couldn't have been more than 10-20 FPS. Sometimes it would get better but nothing above 30. I even lowered some settings but it was the same. It's just not optimized. Mind you this is on a pretty beefy machine with a 2080 which can run perfectly all current gen games. This is why I call it straight up a scam. There are a handful of youtubers who can't stop praising it and keep showing gameplay as if it's working all the time. I'm very much inclined to believe they're paid actors, lol. Anyway, I'll mess with it for a few more days but I don't have any high hopes. PS: Speaking of bugs... after walking around for a while on that base above the clouds, I managed to find a spot where I glitched over a railing and fell off. I could look around while free falling, the base above kept getting smaller and smaller yet the planet surface was nowhere to be seen. I left it alone for about 15 mins, free falling all along... I then quit the game, no other way out. At least on solid ground there's a button to kill yourself.

I realize this is a long shot but who knows 🙂 This is a great trunk mounted bike rack, can hold easily 2 full size mountain bikes and fits almost all cars. It's much sturdier and more adjustable than their current lineup. Local sale only as it's quite heavy and shipping would probably not make sense. I'd happily drive to meet on a 2 hour radius around DFW area. It has all 4 rubber straps, nothing is broken on it. $150 Thanks!

Sorry about the long post, I do hope it makes some sense. Here's another example, Nico has a good way of explaining how this works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVZXmxUmXyM

That article is partly accurate but they do make some assumptions and missed some key details. All camera sensors are monochrome. This is true for every single type of digital camera whether for astro purposes or in your phones. Now, all these cameras do take color pictures by using tiny red, green and blue filters in front of the pixels of the camera sensor. This is called the Bayer Matrix or Bayer Filter. A usual standard is RGGB pattern which most cameras use, which works great for real life regular pictures. The problem comes when shooting space with these sensors, a lot of signal to noise is wasted because there's virtually no green color emitted from most of the deep sky objects we can image. Almost all nebulae are made up a deep red and blue colors. These are real colors, not made up to look nice. The red comes from ionized Hydrogen alpha particles making up most nebulae and the light blue comes from Oxygen-3 molecules making up huge clouds in these nebulae. This is the reason why specialized astro cameras are monochrome (they're essentially regular sensors without the Bayer Filter). This means the photons reaching every single pixel are recorded as signal. Hubble's sensor is the same way. From here the article above doesn't seem to explain very well how we get to the end results with those nice color pictures. The colors do not get added "later" via photoshop. These mono cameras always shoot with some sort of filter in front of them (just calling them short/medium/long wavelengths is very far from accurate). These are very specific filters which allow only very narrow band to pass which then gets recorded by the whole sensor (which we now know it doesn't have the RGB bayer filters). This is why mono cameras are much much better for deep sky imaging. The 3 main filters used for nebulae are generally called SHO (Sulphur-2, Hydrogen-alpha, Oxygen-3). The transmission lines and actual colors from the spectrum for these filters are: 656nm for H-Alpha filter (red), 672nm for S-II filter (a bit deeper red) and 500nm for OIII filter (light blue). So once the camera gets a bunch of picture sets with each of these filters, then colors are assigned in post processing. When this combination is done, if they want accurate representation they do the RGB combination by assigning S and H to the Red channel and O to the blue channel. All the nebulae pictures you see which are mostly red and have some blue - these are accurate representations of what's actually there and what we could see if our eyes would be thousands of times more sensitive. Now, most of those amazing Hubble pictures are nothing like I described above. Those are what they call "false color images" where they assign the S H O data to the RGB channels in a different ways (swap the order) when they combine the images. Some prefer these and they do show more color separation and details but in fact all those green/orange nebulae are not representing reality in any way. My personal preference is to stick to reality. My astro camera is a color camera, it does have the RGB Bayer Matrix and for nebulae I use additional Hydrogen Alfa and Oxygen 3 filters. This allows me to get details in the dust/gas clouds but also keep accurate RGB star colors. Speaking of star colors, yes, there are different color visible, even to the naked eye in a dark location. Some are very white, almost blue-ish (Sirius is an example) and some are visible yellow/orange-ish (Betelgeuse). The stars temperatures make these differences visible, some are way hotter than the others.

No no, still here, just that many planets need to align for good sessions 🙂 We didn't have the best weather lately and it's been pretty chaotic at work too. When it's this crazy, I usually don't feel like sitting outside at night... On the other hand, it is getting slightly better, I did get a chance last week to get out of DFW area. Found a local dark site thanks to a friendly local astro club member and I spent a night there. I'm still working on the main image but in the mean time I did get a nice Milky Way shot. This is my first experiment with very basic gear. By basic I mean this is actually untracked, it's just a Sony a6000, with a 30mm prime lenses sitting on a simple tripod. To get so much detail we do need long exposures but since it's untracked, the individual shots must be very short. The formulas tell us with this combination, we can get max 3 second shots to avoid star trailing. The end result is a stack of about 800 shots of 3 seconds each. After about every 200 shots I would stop it, recenter roughly (got some reference stars in the live view so I could put it back almost where it was). It's still quite early in the season for Milky Way shots, this section came up just above the tree line at about 3AM. In hindsight, I should've got a foreground shot as well, with the field included... would've made a nice combination.

Ran across another oldie but very much goldie for me. Not sure how well known in the US he was but I'm curious if you guys know of Falco. Back in the 80s/90s he had a few very well known songs playing in Europe. Jeanny and Out of The Dark are two main examples

no no, do it. I'm sure it'll be fine 😁

Seth Everman ruined this song for me. I can't listen to it without thinking about his take. It's genuinely hilarious.

Indeed, it was a very roller-coaster like experience and the waiting, especially when we didn't know if it was fine or not, was painful. We were ok, even with the Tesla sold, for now both my wife and I are working from home so we're ok with only her Beetle, but we did plan some longer trips for which we were counting on this car. If you google SFL Composer, you should run into quite a few ongoing threads with discussions about what happened.

No, it was by pure luck that I missed the ship that caught fire and sunk. My Macan got on the next just a few weeks later... which in turn had its own problems. They've hit a bad storm and a lot of cars got loose and crashed into each other. Some ended up upside down, it really was bad. Again by pure luck the section in which my car was, ended up being fine. The dealer said he had another car on the ship which was totaled. They had to re-order and push the customer back a few more months.

It here, it's here, It's finally here! It took about 5 months since placing the order, a bunch of delays caused by the war, factory closure, shipment delays, rough seas... but it still made it in one piece! I'd be willing to bet it's the only Porsche out there with the Far Cry 5 soundtrack in its repertoire 😆

Decided to fire up Far Cry 6 after a long time off from it. Started as expected with a huge update, I think it was 15Gb or so. For some context, it's been so long since I played it, I actually had to look up some of the controls, lol. I kept thinking I was in Dying Light and was watching for zombies and hitting my imaginary survivor sense button 🙂 Anyway, I had a very pleasant surprise of a new and unexpected side story. I got it as soon as I loaded my game and without anything better to do, I decided to just check this one out. Turns out it's a whole another level side quest. It's called the "The Vanishing" and it's completely awesome. Nothing like any other quest so far. I don't want to spoil anything so I won't give any details, just please go check it out. Also don't ready any news/reviews on it - they pretty much spoil it all.