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!