Cleaning

After a little bit of struggle, finally broke one of my laptops open. It's actually quite similar in structure to the Aspire 4750G, which was nice. The lappy's just reached 2 years old now, going onto its third. It really shouldn't have that much dust in it, but what can you do. It happens. The only problem I have with it right now is that the Enter key feels... different. Must have accidentally hit something along the keyboard component that has loosened it. It'll only really be a problem when typing on it directly. Usually going to be using the mechanical on top of it.

Also. Fun thing about asking for some compressed air. I was expecting to get a can of air. What I got was a tank of it, although of very little air. It was pretty funny since when I first saw the tank, I couldn't figure out what was in it. It looked like your typical propane tank for a BBQ unit. Turns out it was just air. Go figure. Wanted to apply a new layer of thermal paste for my CPU. Couldn't get to it without further prying, and I wanted to get the unit back online within the day since the Dell's absolutely horrible with its wireless more than half the time, so I'm going to leave it for another time. Pretty annoying. It's running a little cooler now. Just need to figure out a few things with the GAM532 labs since something seems to have gone horribly wrong somewhere after I tried to include a .gitignore file. I may need to nuke it... something I really don't want to do. We'll see.

Tinkering a bit

As I had suspected, using one of my old normal 2.5" HDDs resulted in higher battery usage than the hybrid. Guess I should have just deployed one of my SSDs for the time being, although their life is a bit more limited, but not to the point of being detrimental in the long run. Still, the temp is holding up quite nicely without any noticeable performance loss, other than the battery life issue. It can't even go further than the 2-hour classes I have. Which is annoying.

Something rather amusing popped up less than a week ago. A little something known as Twitch Plays Pokémon. There's something about watching thousands of Twitch viewers attempting to play the game in a "coordinated" manner that's just so funny. Their efforts are seemingly always being compromised by someone else unknowingly due to the lag the servers create. Before the whole thing really blew up a couple of days ago, they were actually able to get some decent progress in due to the noticeably lower input frequency. Now? They're having trouble getting through a puzzle floor. Not that I can really blame them for it. Hopefully they'll be able to get past it soon. Even their Google Docs has "Get the Lift Key" in rather large font, right beside "stop using dig" crossed out.


Still waiting for my copy of Sengoku BASARA 4 to come in. Wait to see if moving to the full-fledged MT Framework did it any good. It was "crippled" by being built on the MT Framework Lite due to it being multi-platform for both the Wii and PS3. Not that I had much of a problem with it since you could see all the crazy flowery decals on their models for both versions.

And we're already off to a relatively bad start

It's not good if I already want to commit bloody, bloody murder less than a month into classes. But that seems to have resolved itself somehow. Still, somewhat annoyed. Now to work on that map so we can start building it in the editor... Since we billed it as a side-scroller, I think we need more horizontal traversal, as much as I would like to add more vertical to make use of the traps and mechanics.

A more pressing issue is my hardware being not up to snuff, min. temp being higher than usual, and being a pain to deal with when it comes to OpenGL implementations. There could be other issues as well, but those are the most immediate since I've had my main BSOD thrice within 3 days while not doing anything. Could be too much dust in there, could be a crap install that's getting screwy in the registry, etc. It's still mostly functional. Missed the "sign on at 12PM EST to break a record!" thing for TESO on Saturday though.

The temp seems to be a bit lower on the new install. However, there's also something really weird with the original hybrid install... Its temp also dropped. Weird. Not that I'm complaining too much, but it's somewhat odd. It's hovering around the usual mid-40s. Still going to look into getting a better laptop as an interim to upgrading the rig, because that thing still needs either a wireless card or cable to be networked. Along with general upgrades all-round, like an SSD, better RAM, etc. Something's going be to getting some attention soon.