So, Lot Going On. Bought A $2100 Desktop Computer, Because ...

Lots going on. Wx is fairly cooperative about it. Dump run for SWMBO's pack-rat friend. (18 garbage bags this week.) Next day dump run for our 3 cans. Did pizza-Tuesday on the way home from the dump run. Everything connected to a UPS has crashed twice this past week. No idea why unless they are just too picky about the incoming voltage.

Bought a really nice gaming computer with 64 gig of ram and a Geforce RTX 5070 Ti with 16 gig vram on it specifically to do MS Flight Sim, X-Plane, and ComfyUI. Enjoy the flight sims, will have fun hooking up the Quest 3 and getting that to interface faster. ComfyUI is going to allow me to play with all my old photo's and make people do strange shit: like dishes and laundry and fixing roofs and poking each other in the eyes and stuff. You know: fucking around.

And, yes, within 10 minutes of starting the thing up for the first time (Windows 11 of course) I ran all the diagnostics I could find to verify that I actually got what I ordered this time. Wonders of wonders: I did. Finding this system with that video card for the price I got it at was a real bargain. $500 off on sale. How could I resist?

That picture to the right is my ex- and our '68 Mustang way back when. ComfyUI did pretty good except it didn't have a good look at her face from the start so had to 'guess' her features. (That's not her.) Understandable but still fair results. No idea why it added someone driving from the passenger seat and the car does all that movement. But I'll find out.

My spendy ass gaming laptop will wind up both my ham radio rig (until I get tired of Windows) and my travel rig. So, while I won't be using it as much I at least will still be using it. I still set up an old laptop with Linux for the same reasons though. (I'm a Linux guy.)

Speaking of which: Gemini and I spent a LOT of time and experimenting into setting up Thunar (Linux file manager) with a butt-ton of "custom actions." You should check them out. Look at the menu bar. You might find something useful.

First call for snow this year for tomorrow afternoon. So, around here, the Dog and I will see some on our walk in the morning. Not much though. Too early.

But, SWMBO is going to visit her Dad in Ohio (and get him off his ass to begin the moving process if he's going to be moved out here by next June) and I'm almost betting that we'll have the white Christmas she never gets around here. I'll send pictures. And suggestions. Don't get me started.

Having trouble typing tonight. Way too many mistakes I have to backspace and fix before moving on. It's almost kinda sorta like my mind is forgetting how to send the correct sequence to my fingers. Which is wrong as I've been typing so long ... SWMBO used to complain because I could talk with her, looking at her, and continue to type error free. Now I'm lucky to get 5 words out at a time. Getting Old. I used to have to set the keyboard cache higher because I typed faster than the input accepted keystrokes. Don't have to worry about that anymore.

Still have the headache. I didn't drink my usual Dr. Pepper last Sunday and Monday afternoon the headache completely disappeared. ???. So I didn't have a Dr. Pepper Monday or Tuesday. No headache! Hmmm. Wednesday I drank a Dr. Pepper and the headache was back by evening. Shit. I've been drinking the Pepper 20 years. So, almost a week later I still haven't drank a Dr. Pepper but I still have the headache off and on. Damn. Not the Pepper. Probably.

On the other hand; I found some Honey and lemon and Ginseng Green Tea that I've been drinking hot every evening because I've been sleeping longer between pee's and longer hours after the last pee of the night and that shit didn't start until I drank some as an experiment. Sometimes 5 hours straight! Cool! Of course, that means I don't get up until 0700 and my day gets started REALLY late (step off for our walk at 1000 and breakfast closer to 1100) but I do not mind. I cannot positively prove it's the tea; but if something is working just keep doing it; I always say.

Anywho, it's getting late so I'm going to shut down the radio (playing with FT8) and hit the rack.

Well, That'll Teach Me To Fully Inspect Expensive Shit I Buy!

So, July 2024 I bought a spendy laptop to 'play' Microsoft Flight Sim & X-Plane Flight Sim and to do both on the Quest 3. Supposedly I bought a Dell G16 7630 Laptop, 16" QHD Display, Intel Core i9-13900HX, 65 GB DDR5 RAM, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 with 12 Gig vram all for the low, low, price of $2000 (rounded up).

And, yeah, it's been working great (mostly) when I start it up and all the updating (Windows 11) gets done and the auto-start shit gets done loading. X-Plane was kind of glitchy in VR; but mostly the laptop works as advertised.

Wait, did I say Supposedly? Aye, I did!

Over the past weekend I installed and have been playing with "ComfyUI" to better learn text-to-image/video and image-to-video. Checked with Grok and Gemini and both stated that my laptop was in the top 5% of home machines able to run ComfyUI without problems with the specs I presented. (They were very enthusiastic.) Except it kept running out of vram. ???

So, started up 'dxdiag' and had a look.

Excuse me? 8 Gig Vram? But. But.

Yes, my bad, I know. I shoulda check it all out 15 months ago when I accepted the thing. But everything was (mostly) working far better than any computer I've ever personally owned so I didn't think to check.

Dipshit. That'll learn ya.

So, I'm drafting (with Gemini's help) a letter to let Amazon, Dell, and even Cardinal Pro Electronics know how unhappy I am. No, I do not expect they'll replace the laptop with what I ordered; or even have me send it in and 'upgrade' it to what I ordered, but I can voice my displeasure and ask that they (one of them) refund the price difference between what I ordered and what I got.

Yeah, we already know how far that's going to go.

So I will adapt and overcome and continue on because that is what I do. When I have to. ComfyUI works reasonably well, considering. Memory management is the thing AND I'm really limited on what size I can make  a image-to-video. But it works well. Did this:

Picture of SWMBO's ??? from the 1950's.

But, my desktop computer (Ol' Faithful) is now going on 13 years old. Still runs great (probably thanks to Linux Mint) but, with only 12 Gig RAM and 8 Gig Vram it won't run some of the programs I want to run. Especially anything AI local.  It's getting like when your phone just refuses to update. (Or am I the only one that holds on to a phone for that long?) So, time to upgrade.

Looking at: MSI Codex Z2 Gaming Desktop: AMD R7-8700F, GeForce RTX 5070, 32GB DDR5, 2TB m.2 NVMe SSD, USB Type-C, VR-Ready, Windows 11 Home : A8NVP-436US (with a supposed 12 Gig Vram) that, if I get it ($1700 delivered), you can be damned sure I'll check out on first run. And if everything checks out immediately convert to Linux. (I hate Windows. Or, more probably, I hate Microsoft and what they've done to Windows.)

Otherwise, around here: SSDD. Raining way more. Still have the headache and the CT scan was basically negative. Still old and fat and still getting older. (Which is a good thing.)

What A Boring Week! Oh, Caught A Trash Panda ...

Yep, had the trap set but not baited just sitting there in the garden and it caught a racoon. Trash Panda.

I was sitting on the 'throne' while my lovely-young-bride was out walking her cat, when the Dog, Wiz, started barking his head off using a bark we haven't heard before. And he kept barking. Then barked some more.

SWMBO actually called me to tell me Wiz was really barking at something with a bark she hadn't heard before.

Yes. I can hear it. So I got off the pot, went to find out what he (Wiz) was barking at, and found a racoon in the trap.

Now what?

Loaded it into the back of the truck, drove about 10 miles to a wooded spot next to a big pond, and let it out. Easy peasy. I think it appreciated the "I don't want to hurt you and I'm sure you don't really want to hurt me so let's make this whole release thing as easy and safe as we can." speech before opening the cage. He sped off like there was a fat white guy on his ass.

Date Day was good again because of the date I took. (SWMBO, of course.) We went kinda overboard at WinCo on Banana's ($.33/lb), Beets, and Chicken breasts ($1.49/lb) to freeze dry. Ya gotta take advantage of the sales! Kind of a DNA imperative thing.

So I spent a lot of time in the kitchen yesterday. Two hours to make 4 double-stacked trays of banana's. About 1.5 hours processing beets. About a half hour making sausage patties to just freeze. (I don't know why they don't sell sausage patties at the store. I mean hamburger patty sized sausage patties. Something you can fry up, throw on a toasted bagel with a over-hard egg added on top and call it breakfast. I do it a couple of times a week.)

Still looking at 6 lbs of chicken to process today.

Made a run to "Faith In Action" downtown Belfair for a pot big enough to water-bath can 4 pints at a time. Needed to do 4 pints the other day of the grape and blue berry juices I processed with my new steam juicer and wound up using a #10 can and doing 1 jar at a time because I didn't have a pot big enough that I could use on my induction stove without getting out the BIG water-bath caner and using it. Over kill! Unless one is doing quarts. But I wasn't.

Anywho, found a pot that will do 6 pint jars at once and uses only about a gallon of H2O so it heats up fairly quickly. Water-bath caning is too simple. And, yeah, I still 'can' because it's damned hard to freeze-dry fruit juices. I've done it, but, found it's just not worth the effort. Hence, pint jars.

Although, that can of orange juice concentrate I freeze dried still takes up a pint jar but it is shelf stable and still tastes good when added to cold water. You could carry it on a camping trip fairly easy.

Otherwise, rained like a bitch off and on for a couple of days. Got the trash burned during a downpour. Only head thunder once during all those sudden downpours. Bummer. But at least I got the burnables, well, burned.

But, the Wx is turning a lot cooler and I'm thinking my maters just ain't gonna make it this year.

'Nother Sunday Going Down! Phew!

Google Banana: "The only limit is your imagination." Is a lie. They really censor your input and output. I've had pictures of my renter wearing a short blue dress that Banana has just flat out turned down processing 'because.'

Same with that new 'image to video' thingie in Google Photo's on my phone. IF the picture will generate a bit too much skin it pops out with a "can't process this image. Choose a new image" error message. Which is BS because the AI is in charge of what it generates; thereby what it 'shows.' I've had it fail several times on the image to the right. However, it has still made a rather nice short video of my lovely young bride wearing that see-through white dress she had way back when. (It is nice!) So, make it make sense.

AND the fact that I'm 73 years old and if I want to animate a photo of a young SWMBO barely wearing a bathing suit; then I should be able to use the tools at hand. Not worried about offending anyone but SWMBO; if you catch my drift. To me, their 'programmed for the greater good' means it'll never be useful for real creativity because you have no real control of what the results are.

So, "The only limit is your imagination" is a load of crap because they impose their (morality?) standards on you whether you like it or not. "For your own good" has never been a good excuse for anything.

Honestly, it's got me wondering how difficult/involved it would be to host a private AI image to video or text to video computer at home. Hardware's not the real problem unless it requires a roomful of computers. Seems an AI that's already been 'trained' should be easy to download then set up for home use.

But what do I know. I grew up in the '640 k of ram is enough for anybody' era. And a 35 mb hard drive was $450.

Don't get me started!

Not a lot going on around here. Picked the last of the (delicious!) grapes and am rendering/processing them as we speak. Straining is the worst! A lot of the juice turns out to be chunks and strained out anyway. Seriously thinking that "preserves" will be good enough. I don't mind chunky.

Finally cleaned out and wiped down the inside of my truck. Don't go there.

Still waiting on the maters to ripen. Weather is turning cooler though so we'll be watching that carefully. First real time I've grown tomato's in a few years since that last batch is still sitting in jars in the pantry. We had an over-abundance. But, fresh tomato is good. Too good.

Relocated some sycamore trees; then the deer came along and ate them. Bastards.

Still haven't finished painting the deck. Unless SWMBO gets off her duff (since it was her idea) I'm not getting out there and painting so it probably won't get finished this summer. Good thing we got the primer done.

We still have Date Day every Friday; but limit it to the practical since everything (everything!) is so expensive now. $40+ to eat out, WinCo (Walmart) then home. So, I guess we really have "Old Folks Date Day," don't we?

It Has Been Another Extremely SSDD Week.

Except for me going to the doctor today. Early. My BP was only 112/76; which for me is out-fucking-standing! And the Doc finally got hands on and actually tested my head, eyes, grip. He says that, for an OLD guy with the life I've had and smoking for 40 years (quit about 15 years ago now) that I'm in pretty good shape. But he's still going to order a CT scan of my head because we still can't figure out what's causing this headache. And I've got to make an appointment with my optometrist 'just in case' that's the problem.

They drew blood to test my Potassium. It's low. Again. I'm sure the Doc will up my dosage. Again. But, it is getting easier swallowing those horse pills.

Gemini generated this picture of my lovely-young-bride from a picture I took, oh, 40 years ago. I really want to get it 3d printed, but, looking around online, I can't afford it. Got me to thinking of buying my own 3d printer and learning to do it myself. SWMBO would absolutely hate it. (The original picture is a bit more revealing since the dress was mostly transparent.) And she doesn't like being reminded of the past. (Even though I think she's still the most beautiful woman I've ever lived with!) So I don't know if I'll ever get it done or not. Would love to have that sitting on my computer desk though.

And I'd bet it'd sell well in those specialty shops where they sell the Anime figurines. Wouldn't that be a hoot!

Today was the most productive day around the house in a long time. Picked the rest of the grapes. About 15 lbs. The Trash Panda's are welcome to what's left.

Packaged the banana's that just finished freeze-drying. Three half-gallon jars of goodness!

Did a sous vide chunk of steak for SWMBO that was way too bloody for me; but she liked it. Says that maybe I could do that once a month or so for her. The portion I had was mostly tender enough for me to eat but I had to grill it a minute more. I'd have to be way starving to eat bloody meat. (I say bloody, but he juices were mostly clear-ish.)

Moved my HF antenna from the fence (started yesterday) to the peak of the roof. That was a job! Disassembled the whole thing and got it up there a piece at a time then re=assembled it. Only had to come down and get the correct tool once! And then once more for the feed cable. Took a couple of hours in the blazing sun and I had to rest only half a dozen times so it turned out well.

Was able to join the Mason County 10-meter net tonight on that antenna. Cool. Thought I heard Australia also but wasn't near enough to the radio to try to answer.

So, more maintenance and tweaking and maybe I can get back on HF. Cool! My friend in Pa really wants me to try FT8 for some reason. I'm not sure I'd like FT8 since you don't really talk/rag chew. It's just for the contacts; and I'm not a just for the contacts kind of guy. Look at my Field Day record! Hardly any contacts in 15 years of doing them. I'm there for the companionship and food. Mostly the food. Sorta.

Anyhow, we alive. We not doing too bad.