It's been seven days plus and since I disabled sleep mode, I've had zero errors until two days ago when I downloaded a house from the Sims gallery, which caused my game to crash and registered as an error. As I no longer had a clean reliable history folder, I decided to experiment.

I set my computer to allow sleep mode after twenty minutes, rebooted and began using my computer. A day later and it crashed - CPU fault led on the motherboard. It seems pretty obvious that my computer does not like sleep mode. I continued to leave it and the next day, after rebooting, another CPU error. I am now using the Ultimate Power option which does not permit sleep mode, I wonder why this option has this and why is it hidden? Probably to try and save the planet because there is no way to ban all the gas and diesel powered vehicles? 

(I am getting sick of the grammar correcting software in use here. These words work better with a hyphen? I don't think so.)

In any case, no more sleep mode and I will just shut off my PC when I retire for the evening. This still seems to be an issue with AMD computers as my older i5 has no issues except that Microsoft defender throws up a caution when it can't update in sleep mode. I turned my pc on this morning and there have been no errors all day. We'll see....

Windows 11 Reliability History - My Solution

No, don't install Linux, unless you want to open a whole new can of worms. This is about solving the apparent reliability issues that seems to happen on Windows 11 regardless of how diligent you are with maintenance, installing programs and web surfing practices.

First off, let's look at the issues I have had with my computer:

CPU error causing the computer to lock up and requiring the reset button to be pushed which registers only as Windows not properly shut down. When this happens, the video card turns off and registers as a CPU fault on the MB.
Svchost stopped working.
Failed Windows update for a video card driver which Windows isn't supposed to be addressing.
Windows Image Acquisition stopped working.
Security Intelligence update for Microsoft Defender Antivirus - Failed Windows update.
Numerous "Hardware" issues - not identified.

The three main parts that seemed to be the issue are: Ryzen 7 2700 running at stock speeds, B450 Carbon Pro MSI mb - overkill for CPU but couldn't resist the price, and an AMD (from HP) RX 580X 8GB running at stock, with standard fan curve and using Radeon "Chill". What might have been involved as well is One TB  NVMe Kingston SNVS1000G, and 32 GB of Corsair Ram but these show no errors on testing. This is not a high - end system but when running good keeps me happy.

All the above - mentioned faults happened within a 10 day period after performing a fresh install of Windows 11. On day 11, I said, "Enough is enough".

My Solution to all this nonsense:

Use DDU in safe mode to uninstall all AMD video card drivers and remnants after Windows decided to take over. Instead of using the AMD tool, which insisted that I download the developer's optional driver, I downloaded Adrenalin 22.5.1 Recommended (WHQL) and installed it, still running after ten days, as there is no update yet.

Once installed and running, I ran SFC and DISM, can't remember the exact commands so google for more info. Even though this was a fresh install ten days prior, these steps showed numerous issues, so either the install corrupted itself or the install was faulty to begin with. Prior to the fresh reinstall, SFC and DISM showed no errors on testing but Reliability History showed lots of errors, hence the reinstall.

Last, I went into power and set "put computer to sleep", to never. The monitor is set to five minutes. This is a desktop system so I wanted to try and see how reliable my computer was without sleep mode. I may try and allow my PC to sleep after ten minutes but I think there is an issue with the sleep mode for the monitor as sometimes it comes right back on without sleeping.

It's been 10 days and there are no issues recorded at all in Reliability History, no CPU faults on the MB and no sudden unexplained stops of WMI and svchost. I do perform a restart every day and sometimes after performing tasks requiring a lot of memory. 

The only conclusion I can make, is that there is a serious issue with Windows 11, perhaps the last version, 22H2. I'm running 22H2 Windows 10 on an older system but the CPU is an intel i5 and the video card is an old GTX 750 so that might play a part in this drama as well. In any case, my pc that I use most of the time is running now without issues and that's all I wanted in the first place.

Short and Sweet

 Not going to say a lot today, just one sentence. I really wish that when I buy something new it would work as expected without any issues. Sorry, I guess that's two, no, three sentences.

New RGB Software

After my last post on RGB, you would think I was cured of all this RGB nonsense and would move on. Not so fast, buttercup! I have a Corsair T220 blah blah case with a glass panel just built to show off your RGB nightmare. With no RGB going on, you would think I would be happy? Nope, I found the entire situation boring. It's because of that glass panel. It kind of makes a statement. Look at me! See what I got!

Anyways, as if I didn't have enough issues with RGB, I needed (I didn't really need, but it sounded like a good excuse) more ram and so I bought a 2-channel kit of Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro (2x16) DDR4 2933 (PC4 23400). Yeah, more RGB.

In any case, After the ram was in, I set the iCUE software on the ram and fans to the watercolor effect, but because Mystic Light doesn't offer any effects even close, other than one of the rainbow effects which I find too garish for my taste, I had that set to something close, using the CPU temperature effect. This was rather pointless as my CPU never gets up to the minimum temp of 50°C and as there is no way to lower this minimum, the colours never change.

After looking at this for a few days, I decided to blow away Mystic light and the entire MSI BS of crap they want installed in MSI Center, and I installed openRGB. I also ended up blowing away iCUE because openRGB does so much more with the effects plugin. This was easier to set up than what I thought it would be and I even made my own profile design using the iCUE water colour as an inspiration. The nice thing with openRGB is that I can get the MSI RGB and the Wraith Spire RGB to sync with the Corsair RGB. While it's not perfect, it looks far superior to what I could accomplish with what is supposed to be "professionally" made software.

So, the RGB is back and looking great and much better than what I could accomplish with the software provided by Corsair and MSI.

The End of RGB

Oh yeah, another rant, well sort of. Last year in November, after numerous attempts at getting my HP computer to run quieter and cooler (Not possible at the same time) I decided to make a change. I'm old and grumpy and I decided a few years back that if something wasn't working the way I liked, it should be changed. So, I ordered a new computer case and as HP stuff doesn't work in something generic, a new motherboard and power supply.

Now I wasn't particular about RGB or it's use, nor that familiar, I ordered a Corsair case that uses iCUE to control the case RGB and an MSI motherboard that uses mystic light to control it's RGB. While I may have ordered the case thinking "Yeah, I bet the RGB fans will look pretty cool," the bottom line was I wanted a good airflow case at a good price. Same with the motherboard, not being aware that there are many different RGB setups "out there". The power supply was also a good price (More on that on another day) and didn't have RGB as it fits inside a shroud, rendering RGB pointless.

So, I assembled my computer with my new parts, as well as those salvaged from my poor HP computer (CPU, ram, video card and NVMe drive) and turned it on. The system posted (Yah!) and booted into Windows (Yah!) but no RGB. My computer stayed unresponsively dark. No matter, a bit of Googling later and I downloaded the software for both my case and motherboard. AS I had and still have nothing else with RGB, I was all set.

I installed iCUE (OMG, what hell is this? It's so bright! And purdy! I think?) So I discovered I could have different presets up as long as iCUE was running but different and not as nice a setup when "off". On with the Mystic Light setup. I was not impressed, this gives the user such a poor selection over iCUE and eventually I ended up with some sort of rainbow effect on both. This lasted for about an hour until it drove me crazy and I set it to static white (Which is really a sort of blue).

Over the past months, I've been playing with different settings, never quite satisfied until finally last night (Aug 30,22). I gave it one last go and found it was causing issues with performance and even though it had such a small footprint, I gave it the heave ho. My RGB is finally in sync and all it took was to turn it all off. Now iCUE and Mystic Light live in RGB heaven, in perfect harmony and I have completely purged all RGB software and will eventually remove the lighting Node core and perhaps replace the fans with quieter Arctic air 140 mm non RGB fans in the front and Arctic air 120 mm non RGB fan in the rear and possibly top. Ahhh, darkness.

More Issues

 One of the most unreliable pieces of crapware is the Bing Desktop Wallpaper Manager. While having a new desktop to look forward to sometime during the day, even with the ugly Bing watermark, this piece of crap crashed or failed to respond at least once on any given day. I was going to give it a week to straighten out gut yesterday, I'd had enough and it ended up in the trash. There are tons of programs out there that do the same thing, I mean manage desktop wallpaper without the incessant crashes and to be honest, all I need to do is do a search and come up with tons of images I can use and find a new one everyday without relying on a program to do so. Short rant today as I am hungry so bye for now.

Reliability History

 Joke of the day: If Reliability History is supposed to show how reliable my computer is, why is it that all the errors point to Windows 11 errors? 99 percent of the errors are related to something in Windows that f**ked up during the normal course of operations and the last percent is because of other software f**king up due to poor coding. That, to me, does not indicate a problem with my computer, that points to a problem with piss poor coding.

One of the biggest issues is with a piece of crapware called StiSvc which is used to connect to scanners and cameras. I rarely do either but there are days when this registers an error causing my computer's reliability index to drop ten percent. Why this should be gauged as a computer reliability issue and not a Windows reliability issue is beyond me. It can't even be considered user error as this user did nothing to cause it to f**k up.

Trying to solve this issue is another matter. According to the "experts" that troll the MS help pages, one should run SFC and a host of other nonsenseware that doesn't find any problems but you should run it because Windows tends to go for a shit after running for so many months. Maybe they meant minutes because this has happened shortly after a fresh install. Well, we all know that MS likes to point the finger outward indicating that there's a problem with the hardware or the user and never looking inward to see that they f**ked up.

Oh Well, more fodder for the bishing .

Too Hot or Just Toasty

 So, I have a personal issue (I probably have more than one but lets just talk about this one particular one today) where I am concerned about the heat being generated by my computer. Let's face it, 82 degrees Celsius is almost hot enough to boil water with and that's what my GPU runs at when I play "The Forest". I run it at medium, because that is what it was set at when I first installed it. I suppose I could run it at a lower resolution and at lower settings to get the temperature down but I am a visually obsessed with getting the best visual experience possible. I have other games that barely hit 50 C but this one and "Planet Crafter" both tend to turn my PC into a portable heater. I have a feeling it's something in the game engine but I get upset knowing that the computer runs this hot when playing those two games,

I was running MSI Afterburner to down volt my video card but that caused major issues. So I uninstalled it and I am back on Adrenalin. High temperatures really concern me but so does a fan screaming at 100%. I'm just gonna let Adrenalin control everything and if the card blows up, it will give me an excuse to get a new RTX nVidia card.

I played around with fan curves and video card settings but I give up. Different case fan speeds made no difference so I set fan voltage to five volts and that makes my computer quiet at idle at least. As far as the high gaming temps well, I will just deal with it for now. If it wasn't good, I am sure that the card would show signs of throttling. Once winter comes, it won't be as much of an issue and I will probably appreciate the extra heat. Just saying....

Life In A Parking Lot

 So, if your social life revolves around the time and things you do in a parking lot, do you really have a social life? I mean you have to admit, if somebody asks what you did on the weekend and you reply with, "Yeah, I hung out in the local parking lot and me and my friends argued about stuff, we drank some really bad but cheap beer, and listened to bad but really loud music and then we had to leave cause somebody called the cops cause we made too much noise yelling and screaming at each other, to be heard over the really bad, loud music," I think you might have a problem, especially if this is your response every weekend.

It's sad really but this seems to be some peoples' idea of a fun weekend. Hanging around in a parking lot until security chases you out for anti-social behaviour.

"Hey grandpa, what did you do when you was a kid?"

"I hung around with my other loser friends in a parking lot."

"Is that all you ever did?"

"Pretty much."

I think it might be less embarrassing to say you didn't do anything on the weekend. A whole lot of time spent doing nothing. What fun! Okay, seeing as it's quiet out again and the morons have left the parking lot, maybe I can get some sleep now.

Karma?

 I just got a notice from Reddit that I had a message removed because I don't have enough Karma to post a message. Apparently you have to post messages to get karma and if you don't post you don't get karma. Huh? WTF? Ok, this makes absolutely no sense at all. You need to post to get karma but if you don't have enough karma your post gets removed and you don't get karma? Did Reddit hire an idiot to make up this rule? 

BTW, I am not upset that my post got removed, I hardly ever post on Reddit because quite frankly I think the site is full of too many whiners, no doubt all full of lots of karma because of their whining. I only posted to give somebody some information about an issue they were trying to solve. Well, good luck with that because if the whiners don't have the same info, nobody is gonna learn anything new.

Am I gonna ever post anything more on Reddit? Apparently not, not that I really care, I only post here when I am bored or encounter stupidity. I should have lots of karma here, and obviously the people at Reddit have no clue what karma really is and that karma is gonna eventually bite them in the ass. What happens when all the whiners stop whining and they wonder why they have no new members, and btw, I am not a new member but I feel treated like one.

Oh well, it gave me a reason to post here, not that anyone cares or reads this crap either but it made for something to write about. Oh yeah speaking of writing, one day I will start posting my story, if I can ever get past the first page. That's probably a good thing, if I find the story I am writing boring, I am sure that anyone reading the story will be bored too. I've read too many boring books in the past and no worries, I will never publish a boring book. I have enough boring crap on this site. I rest my case.

Fickle as F...

 If anyone is actually reading or following my blog, which I doubt, you know that I can change my mind on the drop of a hat. Go ahead, drop your hat and see what happens. Regardless, I decided after a really nightmare session screwing around with Lutris (google it) and trying to get The Sims 4 to work with Manjaro, I changed OS to Windows 10 again because at least I can get the games I want to work without spending all my time trying to get it to work.

Oh, I can get the Sims game to work but that's as far as I could get, a reboot resulted in Lutris going for a s**t and having to download all the game files again. I said it before and I'm saying it again, if you want to play games designed for Windows, then just use Windows, and the same goes for games designed for Linux, if you like to play games designed for Linux, then use Linux.

TO me, its pretty obvious what the F up is, with lutris, you have your Origin folder and then you have your users, and inside there is your c: drive. WTF, no wonder origin says you don't have the game installed. Anyways, its all good, if you want to waste some time screwing about, go for it but I don't really care, it was an exercise in futility and I am over it now, it's not like I don't have legal copies of Windows, so goodbye Manjaro and Linux in general and back to Windows. This is why I have an old F around with cause it don't matter computer in the first place. Ok, enough for now, lets go play!

Manjaro To The Rescue

I've been using Manjaro for a while now, Firstly on an almost dead chrome book which is most decidedly dead now and now it's on a Dell Optiplex 390 which is starting to show its age, but still a fairly fast machine considering the parts. Its certainly not state-of-the-art but I can surf the web, play some games on it, try to write my book, yeah, not at too fast a pace, but not the computer's fault.

Manjaro is not the OS I would recommend to anyone wanting to use a Linux OS but it was the only one that recognized my old chrome book's sound chip and as it is fairly light weight, running mostly the XFCE desktop manager with some Gnome thrown in for good measure. My setup is pretty sleek, using my MSI Monitor with built in USB ports, I can use one keyboard, mouse, printer and sound system for both computers, all I have to do is plug the main USB plug into which ever computer I want to use and this gives me access to all my peripherals. I do have the Dell on HDMI and my Win computer on DP but it works well and keeps the clutter on my desk to a minimum.

In any case, I want to use Manjaro on a more permanent basis as I find Linux more robust than Windows, in spite of what people believe, its just as prone to being hacked as Windows but I use it to try and be a bit more versatile. Besides there is nothing wrong with learning a new skill regardless of age. On that note, I have a fairly simple Canon printer that still defies my attempts at getting it to work with my spouse's Chrome book, but today, it took all of five minutes to get it working on my Manjaro computer.

I used to use Linux almost exclusively when I was still working online but now I need my Games on Windows fix to keep me sane, so I probably won't switch completely over to Linux but the idea is tempting. OK, kiddies, enough for now, later!

Microsoft, Please Stop!

 For the third time in a row this month, Microsoft has tried forcing 365 down my throat. Its software I don't need or want so please stop trying to trick me into trying it out with your "optimize windows for your device" crap. I was using a spread sheet a month ago but the need is gone and now the only software I am using for writing is Jarte. I was using Libre Office but it has the same issue that Office has. Constantly reminding me as soon as I make a spelling mistake to correct it. Stop The F**k Right Now!

I hate it when I get on a roll and the creative juices are flowing and I just want to get crap down before I lose it. Oh no, you made a spelling mistake oops there's another one, wait you need to correct that. O.M.G. Just stop already, I'll check it later, those mistakes aren't going any where and when I do finally run a check, I am sure I'll find them.

Well, Microsoft, you've pushed me to where I removed Windows 10 Pro off my "Too old for Windows 11" computer and installed Manjaro. The benefits were immediate. Firstly, my computer now boots in seconds instead of minutes. And all the Microsoft nags for Edge and 365 are gone. Same with linking my phone to my PC. My cell phone isn't for day to day use and I have no desire to link it. It's for EMERGENCIES, not for hiding crap from other people or playing games or whatever. It's for if my landline goes down due to a power failure or a network failure and that's it. Why the hell would I want to link it to a device that will probably be down when I use my cell phone?

Anyways, anything I used to do in Windows 10, I can now do in Manjaro, and much faster so thank you MS for pointing me in the right direction.

Hurray For YouTube!

 For the third day in a row, cable TV on Rogers sucks. Tonight I have my mom and my wife freaking out because none of the channels are working on TV. Great. I still have internet so I thought, hey what about YouTube? My mom doesn't care much about movies, "Too much drama!" she claims, but she likes documentaries about animals and weird places, so I figured, YouTube. I found a documentary about Australia and she is happy, hurray! Later, I will go to Netflix and find a movie there but for now I have my games to keep me happy, and my wife has a bunch of online games she enjoys playing. Yeah, this is probably going to open a can of worms, no doubt I will get requests for more and more documentaries but hey, whatever floats her boat.

Rogers Ignite in Canada

 No doubt you have heard about the Canadian Internet going down on Friday, June 8th, 2022. If you live in Canada, you were undoubtedly affected by this either by the fact you had no internet, land line or cable TV, or all your shopping had to be done by paying cash. God forbid if someone in your family suffered a medical emergency and discovered that 911 services were down. No doubt you heard the CEO bragging to the media that almost 100 percent of services have been restored. Well let me tell you this. If that A.H. thinks the internet has been fixed, he's on better drugs than what I could afford.

Cable TV is absolute crap, with drop outs, channels not being available, sound and video issues and other problems. The internet is no better, many sites are unreachable Those that are available take forever to load, reminding me of a time when dial up was state-of-the-art. About the only service that seems to be working is the phone but I haven't been on it long enough to say for sure.

MR. Rogers CEO, if you think all is good in Lala land, you better give your head a shake. I am sure that come Monday and maybe sooner if possible, many people will be dropping Rogers Ignite and switching to Bell, even if satellite is the only internet and TV option available. If this is your idea of being fixed 100% then you are the only one with that view. I tried logging onto the community website tonight and it's not working, no doubt due to the overload of people complaining.

Just posting here to say I am not pleased or impressed with the service, yeah you had some poor unfortunates slaving away into the wee wee hours as my services were unavailable at 3:00 am but up at 7:00 am. Whatever the cause of this outage, my spouse's chrome book no longer could get online even though she could connect to WiFi. Turns out that due to this outage, the machine reset the DNS server in an attempt to get online and I finally located the issue four and a half hours later. Well, you go on believing and telling everyone that the problem is one hundred percent fixed.

Necroposting

OMG,I cannot believe that this is actually something that some people freak out about. WTF! Get over it! If you post something on a site after ten or so years of no activity, I get it. The poster probably should have read when the post was first made and figured out that maybe the subject is no longer valid but freaking out after six months of inactivity?

Maybe it's because I began posting when I used to use Linux more than Windows and issues were common. Answers usually were not readily forthcoming because in a lot of cases there were no answers. It wasn't unusual for somebody to finally find a solution six months, a year and sometime even two years down the road. Posts that finally solved issues were welcome, no matter what the time frame.

I get it, people post something and then a week later, they move on and no longer care if they get an answer or not. But when it comes to solving issues that are still relevant then it makes sense to have one thread and not a hundred different ones regarding the same issue. I have a feeling that there may be more behind this necro posting than people will tell you.

Some sites thrive on the number of posts and if you only have one or a few posts regarding an issue, then the site appears to be mostly inactive. Sites like that are driven by social desires more than anything else and are usually useless for actual problem solving and finding solutions. What these misinformed individuals don't realize is that even though a post is too old for them to consider posting to, those posts all still come up during a search. There's nothing more frustrating than trying to solve an issue and a search reveals over a thousand results. If this is your policy for your site, well it's your sandbox but you can keep it.

There are sites like this I belong to but once I get wind of their overuse of the necropost accusations, I usually leave and if possible, terminate my membership. If you find something I posted ten or more years ago, you are welcome to reply and you may even receive acknowledgement but a necropost warning? Nah, not from me.

Some "Experts" Need To Stop Giving False Advice

 I watch a fair amount of youtubers, some I subscribe to and some I just happen to watch the odd recorded stream if their content happens to catch my eye. There was one person I used to watch on a regular basis because I found his advice helpful and I enjoyed his computer building videos. I had a regular subscription and waited eagerly for each new stream. Lately, however, his streams were becoming tedious as whenever somebody expressed an opinion that differed from his, he would go on an endless tirade stating how his opinion was the only one that mattered as he was the expert.

Fair enough, you are the expert, you have made your point many times in the past and going on for a half an hour or more about it, gets tedious after a while. Just ban the person and let's move on. Yeah, he will be back but you have a ton of moderators who will jump on his butt so ignore it. No, it seemed he relished the opportunity to complain about it some more and kept threatening to make his live videos only accessible to paying viewers. When I noticed he was handing out special membership to paying supporters I decided that unlike him, I would not carry on for over a half an hour about how I felt it was unfair that only paid subscribers could watch live feeds, so I cut him loose, I wanted to watch somebody build computers, not whine about the criticism.

As I said before, this isn't about his YouTube and streaming practices and his treatment of mostly unpaid subscribers, this is about something far more serious. Giving out advice that sometimes is not in the viewers' best interest.

Whenever this guy built a pc, regardless of the CPU, whether it be Alder Lake, Rocket Lake, Comet Lake or whatever, and maybe it doesn't make a difference but his opinion was that regardless of the processor, one should always get the latest Bios and install it.

Apparently, this is not always a good idea with AMD CPUs. Now, to be fair, this guy uses mostly intel CPUs but he has built some AMD computers in the past and his practice regarding the Bios is the same. A few months back, I replaced the motherboard on my computer because I was having heating issues with my computer due to the proprietary case and components and I saved what I could and replaced what I couldn't reuse.

I followed what I believed was standard practice and updated the Bios to the latest version. Every now and then, my computer crashes and according to the LEDs on the MB, it's due to a CPU issue. It's possible the CPU is bad but I was careful when handling it and as this wasn't my first build, I knew what I was doing. I've been searching for a solution and in my search I read that if I used a Bios built for a newer CPU, I could have problems. I checked the manufacturers page for CPU compatibility and read that for my CPU, I should be using their two year old BIOS and nothing newer. Hmmm.

So here is my point, it's great to be an "expert" but user beware. What is good advice for the streamer, may not always be good advice for the viewer. I downloaded and installed the older Bios and during a subsequent boot, I still had a CPU crash so I may be looking for a new CPU tomorrow. I will hold off for a bit as this might have been a crash due to something else but it's not looking too good for this CPU right now. At least I solved the BIOS mismatch and perhaps today was the last time my computer will crash but time will tell.

Humans Love Labels

We all love to use labels because we love to make sense of our world and labels mean that everything is neat and organized. We have labels for sexual orientation, genetic sexuality, skin tones and various human races and it's all just a big pile of labels. The problem is, labels cause discrimination. If you are in one box and you see somebody in a different box, oh boy, obviously anyone in your box is vastly superior to anyone in the other boxes. People who try to fix the problems with humanity are always going to run into the issue with boxes. In order to get rid of discrimination, you have to lose the boxes. Period.

In order to demonstrate how things should work, I will use sexuality and the whole X versus Y genetics to try and make my point. In nature, most creatures, including humans, are set up with two sexes for the purpose of regenerating the species. The thing is, nature is always messing with genetics in order to try and make the perfect example of each species. while some changes improve the species, others are just experiments and don't provide any benefit, or are actually detrimental to survival. So lets focus on one species (yeap, put em in a box!), to try and explain in more detail.

I am struggling at this point because there are words (labels) I am trying hard not to use.

We have human males and human females and this was set up by nature to allow for the mixing of genetics, one sex provides one half of the genetic material and one sex provides the other half in order to create a complete set of genes. I'm not going to get into how one thing creates blue eyes or dark skin or whatever, you can find all sorts of information about that on the internet. The idea is that as time progresses, you have humans popping up, some male and some female. Unfortunately, even with two sexes, we are already creating labels.

So let's throw out the labels and put in a slider, on one end we have extreme males and on the other side we have extreme females. The extreme males have all male parts with no female attributes of any type, including sexual preference and on the other end we have extreme females with no male attributes, and here is a bit of a variable; even though the males are drawn to having female sexual partners and females having male sexual partners, during times of growing up or even due to availability, males and females sometimes have sex with same sex partners just because. I'm not going to finish that statement because there are too many variables.

At one end of the slider are males and along that slider are males with varying amounts of female attributes, including sexual preferences and at the other end are females with varying amounts of male attributes. So, this would wipe out the transgender labels and almost make everyone equal again, at least theoretically. Instead of using male and female labels lets just drop sexual orientation all together and call males and females and all those in between, human. Yeah, I know, it gets complicated and makes the language ambiguous, but perhaps it's a way to try and solve the mess that's been created.

Yeah, probably won't ever happen but it's fun to speculate.

This Burns My A$$

 So, nobody commented which is fine, apparently me "winning" something and having to send a message using the program listed was nothing but a scam. Yeah, another one of many on the internet. Well, it's okay, I was able to install the legit program required on my computer which means I bypassed installing risky software from where-ever, and which also meant I was able to completely remove same software which didn't work as intended.

On to the big gripe of the week:

WTF Microsoft? It's not enough that you charge people a ridiculous amount for your Professional Operating System (Yes, I am using Windows 11 Pro) but you feel the need to advertise your crap in settings? By the way (BTW), that advert you see for 365 is clickable as if you feel that everyone should have this software? I don't need it! I don't want it!! If I did, I am sure that I could do a google search and find it without any difficulty.

Oh and BTW, after the last update, you felt it necessary to try and trick me into resetting Edge to YOUR settings, not MINE? Why the F... do you think I changed those settings in the first place? As I have said so many times in the past, I use Windows because the games I play require it. Mark my words, as soon as I find enough games that I like that will run under Linux, Windows will be scrubbed permanently from all the computers I own.

So, keep pissing me off, the more you do, the more determined I am to switch back to Linux, I used it before exclusively for two years and it was only because I wanted to play a particular game that I installed Windows, but as for everything else that I use my computer for, I m more than comfortable doing so in a Linux environment. That includes sharing files on my computers without having to resort to cloud access. OMG, file sharing on a Windows network is the biggest PITA I have ever seen, and it's still a huge PITA! You want to really have some fun, set your computer up for dual boot and try and access Linux files from Windows. It's much easier accessing Windows files in Linux.

Okie Dokie, that's all for today folks, I've made my point and nothing will change so stay frosty!

Blues Be Gone

Didn't take long to bounce back, I'm not one for sitting around and moping about what I could have been or done or had, I picked up my guitar today, turned on my amp, used my distortion pedal and played along with some blues backing tracks that made me feel a whole lot better.

I've come to realize over the years, it's not about what guitar you have and what it sounds like on its own, although that's pretty much what you get with an acoustic. I do have an acoustic that I like to just grab and play from time to time but when I'm in the mood, I like to rock out with an electric.

With an electric, I'm sure that different woods, electronics in the guitar, the amp and speaker quality all play various roles. I've seen lots of videos where sound comparisons were done with various instruments, amps and accessories, to show how much difference each component makes but the bottom line is, an electric guitar is just a piece of wood, with some sort of inductor to pick up the sounds and or vibrations of the strings and fed into an amp, with or without various effects pedals altering the signal being amplified.

Component prices that should make the biggest differences don't always perform as expected, a poorly made expensive guitar, amplifier or effects pedal can sound worse than an inexpensive but well made guitar, amp or effects setup. If you eliminate the overly pricy or cheap trash, you'll discover that you can pretty well get whatever sound you are looking for with whatever's available. Of course, there is another factor that needs to be taken into account and that is the skill of the musician. The best equipment available isn't going to make a beginner sound anything else than a beginner.

For somebody to get the most enjoyment out of playing, and that should be the ultimate goal, not trying to impress people or make a career out of it, but just to play for self enjoyment, one needs to have gear that makes the experience enjoyable. I used to play a Gibson Les Paul deluxe but I have to say that I enjoy playing my Squire Telecaster, which costs less than one quarter the price, much more. It's a lighter guitar, with slimmer neck and no nonsense controls and a joy to play.

So, for anyone looking to start playing, I would say, try a few different ones in you budget range, avoid the hype of more expensive is better and find something you feel is the most comfortable to play. Don't worry about the sound or components, those can always be changed, just find something comfortable and that looks well made. Taking along someone more knowledgeable about guitars is helpful but don't let their prejudice about different brands influence your final decision. After all, once you get home, you'll be the one playing your guitar and not them.

Feeling a bit down right now, apparently I won a random pick on a YouTube channel, but I need to text the person using a format I am not familiar with and apparently it only works on a phone. I have a cell phone but it's a really basic model that lets me receive and accept calls, which, surprise, is the only reason I have a phone. I don't have a data plan, as I have enough trouble seeing stuff on my 22 inch monitor. So, even if I won a really special prize, I cannot contact the person using the format they requested and as such I have to give it a hard pass. The sun will still rise tomorrow and as I wouldn't have had this item anyways, I will survive. Kinda wonder what I would have won though. Oh well, time for bed, nite all.

The nice thing about blogging is that I can pretty well post whatever I want and nobody gives a crap.

This was going to be another rant about Windows 11 but life's too short to rant long and I have a big mess to clean up so stay frosty!

Life Goes On

 I told you the sun would rise today.

Speed of Light Limit

Yeah, a bit of a ramble coming up as I am not, nor do I pretend to be a theoretical physicist. On the other hand, theoretical means that any thing goes as long as it can be proven or disproven. I remember as a youth, watching a video where the narrator mentioned that common belief was that if someone where to travel faster than 10 miles an hour, they would suffer serious trauma and perhaps even die. This was a stupid belief, and not really a theory, as people had been riding horses and other animals for years and horses can run at speeds of thirty miles an hour. So, if this was a theory, then it was busted a long time ago.

Fast forward to current times. The current thinking is that the speed of light is an unbreakable speed limit. While I don't question this, I do believe that there are circumstances where this might be (I almost wrote circumcised) circumvented. I believe the speed of light is directly tied to gravity. "So what?" you may say.

So lets look at the primordial "big bang". Actually, let's look before the big bang. All the known matter and energy, anti-matter, anti energy(? maybe, maybe not), dark matter, dark energy and whatever else may have been out there, was all drawn together into one tiny point of existence, for one tiny infinitesimal period of time. Interestingly, for that tiny period of time, it was possible to reach any part of the universe instantaneously.

This was the ultimate black hole, a gigantic gravitational force that for an instant, defied all attempts at escape. Of course, this resulted in the big bang but I believe that whatever started the the entire universal contraction is still at point zero, generating an enormous amount of gravity affecting most of the universe, I say most because this is where my uneducated theory comes in. You may laugh and scoff at my lack of understanding even a tiny amount of physics but I too can see what I see and base theories on those observations.

According to what I have read and heard, galaxies on the edge of what is currently the universe have been observed to accelerate beyond the speed of light. All kinds of theories exist, none that I understand but what I propose is this. The speed of light is determined by the most significant gravitational force affecting that light. What am I talking about?

OK, say you have a universe with only two objects in it, a five kilo mass and a one kilo mass that is orbiting the five kilo mass. As long as that occurs, the five kilo mass affects the speed of light. The one kilo mass may have some influence but it's not the most significant source of gravity.

Now, for some strange reason, the one kilo mass begins to accelerate and slowly begins to pull away from the five kilo mass. As it moves away, it begins to speed up and move away at a faster rate until it reaches escape velocity. Now it's free from the five kilo mass but if the one kilo mass stopped moving in relation to the five kilo mass, it would slowly return.

Now we place a light source on the one kilo mass. Even though it may be travelling faster than the five kilo mass, the five kilo mass is still affecting the speed of light as it's the most significant source of gravity. But then, one day it happens, the one kilo object travels to a point of where its gravitational significance is equal to the five kilo mass. Still, the light source is influence by the five kilo mass.

But then, the one kilo mass becomes significant as it moves further away, and becomes the reference for the light source. Observers on the five kilo mass will observe the light violet shifting as it begins to accelerate beyond the speed of light on the five kilo mass, but even though the observed light is moving faster than light on the five kilo mass, it is not accelerating according to the influencing gravity.

Eventually, the one kilo mass may even reach the speed of light but to any observer on the one kilo mass, the speed of light has not changed. To the observers on the five kilo mass, there is no light. This is similar to the Doppler affect but is not the same as the light beam is not being compressed or expanded. There is no change to the wavelengths of the various spectrums.

So, take it as you will, a way of looking outside the box or the ramblings of a tired, senile, old man. As most theories go, it makes no difference at all, as most likely, the sun will still rise and set tomorrow even if we don't see it.

I've noticed a few times on YouTube, people post videos about their "collections" or something else about their "possessions". I wonder how many people actually care, okay, maybe a few but in reality, as a person who hates clutter and maybe has one or two of certain items because they're expensive. I feel these types of posts are nothing but self indulgent drivel.

As a guitar player, I subscribe to various youtubers and it seems like every year they have to post and boast about their guitar collections. Who cares? Do you enjoy playing? Good for you. That's what is important, not what you have. I have four guitars in my "collection", one is a not working Gibson Les Paul Custom that I played to death as a working musician, a very nice Squire Fender Telecaster with humbucking pickups that I really enjoy playing, an Epiphone DR-100 which is actually very playable in spite of having 13 - 56 gauge strings, and a 12 string Vester Acoustic that I don't play any more because twelve strings are now too hard to push and I'd rather play my six string Epiphone.

So when I see a posting that starts off with "My best 10 guitars" or even more laughable "I have over 100 guitars...", I think to myself, so, open an bloody store or maybe, these people have a store and are just advertising. I would like to replace my poor dead Les Paul custom with perhaps a Sire Larry Carlton L7 2022 or whatever the going model year as I think these are way nicer than my Gibson and if I did and liked it, I would be getting rid of my telecaster as I don't need anything hanging around gathering dust. And that reminds me, if I get a good offer on my twelve string, with hard case, it's gone.

I'm loving this blog cause it seems like nobody ever reads it and if they do, nobody comments. That makes me think i can post whatever I want. So today's topic is about the way youtubers announce their new streams. I mean look at their faces. It's like somebody hit them in the face with a pie except that there is no splatter, just an expression of utter amazement. Whaaa?? I said what???? Yeah, like your content is a big surprise. Okay, stop trying so hard. If your content is really that amazing, people will watch. Oh well, I get a bigger kick out of their expressions than some of their content.

So after a week of messing around with settings and upgrading Win 10 home to Win 10 pro, everything seems to be running good again, without having to shut down or disable services. I decided to do a fresh install of Win 11 Pro, which seems a lot more stable than Win 11 Home. I doubt if I need the extra features of Pro but it does run very well so I am not sad I spent the extra money to upgrade. I did save a bit by getting a Win 10 Pro license and then this license automatically attached to Win 11 Pro due to the license being attached to my motherboard.

Love It or Quit

 A while back, while watching a youtube video being streamed by somebody I kinda looked up to, a few morons jumped in and began to troll the channel. Instead of just banning them and moving on, this person started a tirad about how he was going to change his channel to paid only subscribers, to get rid of the trolls. At that time, he was considering maybe charging two dollars a month which I felt was sort of fair. I mean if I have to pay two bucks for every channel I subscribe to, that's gonna start costing me some serious change but OK, I get it, you're pissed off at the trolls and you're going to make your subscribers pay for it.

SO, let's fast forward to the present. After listening to over a year of bishing and whining about the trolls and threatening to make everyone pay, it finally happened, he began his paid subscription only channel to watch his live feeds. For $15 cad per month.  Are you frikken kidding me??? Hasta la vista, baby. I got upset when Netflix and Amazon raised their rates and I watch stuff there more than all the youtubers I normally watch.

If you really love streaming these live videos, and you aren't the only one doing so, then a few trolls aren't going to matter. In fact, I feel now that the whole point of this was not to educate people but to make money. Well, good luck, sorry to have to unsubscribe but, it's time to move on.

Experts(?)

Let me just say this... There are far too many people who think and some who have convinced other people to think, that they are experts. Most of these are the most clueless morons on the planet. I'm not going to go into details but you can find most of these "special" individuals writing articles in various newspapers. Enough said? Enough said.

Windows 11

 I've used Windows 11 for over half a year, and have had numerous issues, some user related but some because of the OS itself. So my final thoughts so far, and these are opinions and yours will probably be different, what I like or don't like will most likely be different from your likes or dislikes.:

Pros: The initial look is clean, and finding most stuff in settings is fairly straight forward. Upgrading from 10 to 11 is easy, as is downgrading in case you change your mind. The program list and the start menu is separate.

Cons: Yeah, not many pros. This feels like another ME, VISTA, 8.0, in other words a transitional version. We'd like to have features X,Y,Z but we'll give you A,B,C because we have some kinks to work out.

Having the start button in the centre of the task bar doesn't bother me as much as the start menu itself. I hate that they have that huge "recommends and new apps" section under the actual menu. I get why it's there but I feel it should have been on its own page.

I hate not being able to group my start menu items, although I hear that they will allow icons to be grouped within icons at some later date. Yeah, not the same thing, it's just trying to make up for a menu that cannot be resized or has lost half the real estate to recommends ....

There are so many settings that cannot be accessed through settings, oh but wait! You can get to them through Control panel! Okay, and this is an improvement how? Oh wait! We renamed Administrative tools to Windows tools. You notice this is all under Cons, right?

One note and cloud storage, Okay so cloud is now One Drive™. This is an issue with 10 and 11 now, I don't need it shoved down my throat so quit trying to force me to use it. (See previous article for how I backup my data) I told you this blog would have many rants on it right?

I've been told by Windows 11 fan boys and girls that if I don't like it, don't use it and that's exactly what I've done. I did a full reinstall of Windows 10 pro, bought a key for it (the 10 key is about half the price of an 11 key) updated (This is not an upgrade) my version to 11, still had issues with it and now I am back on Windows 10 pro.

Thank God, my other computer is "too old" for Windows 11, which I will continue to use until end of support, at which time I may upgrade it, recycle it, or install Linux on which will be perfectly fine for what I use it for.

Some of you will love using Windows 11 but for me it's a hard pass for now.

Backup or lose it!

Have you ever had a Hard drive or even worse, a computer completely die with no hope of restoring your data? Hopefully, in the later case, you were able to remove the HDD and restore whatever was on it but if your drive no longer worked, whatever was on it, without resorting to a data recovery company, was probably lost forever.

So, what should you do? You could subscribe to a cloud server, pay their fee and hope they never lose your data or have a breach, exposing you to whoever compromised their systems, or you can perform your own backups on a regular basis. In addition, if your system ever requires a full wipe of whatever is on it, you will already have the tools in place to back up your data before cleaning your storage drive.

Requirements:

Knowledge of where your data exists. 

Somewhere to store your data, other than a drive on your computer.

A little time and patience.

How to proceed:

If you've never created a separate folder for your data, then everything you have will be stored under "/user/(your user name)". Documents, pictures, videos, favorites( if you use Edge) will all be there. Programs won't be but if you have to restore your operating system, you might want to reconsider just reinstalling those programs after the purge. You may not want to save all those folders but at least you can access the folders you want.

You want to save those folders and their contents to an external drive, be it HDD, SATA SSD, NVMe SSD or even something as simple as a USB stick, depending on the amount of data you have. If you have two drives, even better and if one can be stored in a different building, then you are good to go. Remember - Fire, floods or any other disaster can be your enemy too.

If you do have more than one external drive, you might want to copy everything into a temp folder on your main drive, which saves you from having to copy each folder as you come to it, for each drive.

As I don't use HDDs for anything in my computer any more, which may or may not be an option for you, I use older, NVMe drives that I have replaced due to size and speed, placed in an external holder which allows file transfers much faster than transferring to a USB drive. While my USB drives are large enough, they are also very slow, taking up to a half an hour or more to transfer data. The repurposed SSDs take less than a minute for each backup (Yeah, I don't have much data, just pictures and stuff, but it's all stuff I don't want to lose).

This information is for you to use as you see fit, maybe you use the backup provided by windows, or employ a third party, the important thing to remember, is that to keep from losing it, you should have some backup system in place that you can access when needed to rebuild the data on your machine.

 Wow, A new post? It's been a while but it's time to get posting again. It keeps me from ranting... okay, maybe not. I'm going to try and post in the font I am using now as eyes get older, they don't see so good so I'll keep things large. I just wanted to start a post, to show that this isn't dead. Keep smiling!