This blog is not dead, at least not quite yet.

I was streaming yesterday when a viewer observed that my blog hadn’t been updated in 4 years. So much has happened and I have been busy with so many things that I just haven’t gotten around to blogging. Time to get this blog restarted! My friends often chat with me about entertainment, technology and gaming-related topics and I think I’ll start posting about some of that. It might be a bit slow at first, but I have a few ideas of things that might be fun to share such as a series on the gaming PC I plan to build, or thoughts on computer hardware, some scripting ideas, educational resources and so on. Although my blog is a bit of an outlet for me I would like it to be a helping hand for you. Maybe I can share something here that you will find useful. I’ll also share a few opinions from time to time.

Thanks for stopping by.

The Little Computer That Could...

AMD is having a tough time, but that means it’s a great time to buy AMD. While it is generally true that Intel processors typically offer the best performance in any bracket it is always true that AMD is the cheapest in any bracket. I use both Intel and AMD processors and they both work just fine.

I’m about to build a new system based around the A6-5400k. The A6 series directly competes with Intel’s i3 processors. This should make a great little system for testing budget gaming options and demonstrating just how cheaply you can enter the PC Gaming scene if you’re a purely console player.

This is a comparison between the A6 I chose versus an i3 that is nearly triple the price (but not triple the performance)

Hi, been busy!

Hi guys. I've been a bit busy with a few things so I haven't had a chance to blog. I had a friend once that said my ambitions exceed my abilities...and that never sit well with me so I've always striven to do and be more. The problem usually ends up being though that there are only so many hours in the day and, whether I like it or not, even I need sleep occasionally. But I've been able to make a little more time to blog so it's time to try and catchup a bit.

I have a bunch of new videos that I'm uploading, it will just take a little time to tag and properly describe them, put them into play-lists...and hopefully get them in the right order. So look for them soon and enjoy.

2000 Subscribers

When I started my YouTube gaming channel I assumed only my friends would watch it. Apparently though I was wrong and today over two thousand fellow gamers subscribe to my channel. My channel is still pretty random, just me and my friends having fun. But the best part is that through the channel I've made new friends, and I'm always happy to have more friends to game with. I hope to hear from viewers about what they like, don't like and any suggestions they have for the channel. I hope people keep enjoying the channel.

Solid State Drives

Solid State Drives (SSDs) are great because they can store lots of data and have no moving parts. As a result you end up with a device that can retrieve information very quickly because it doesn't have to spin up and look for it the way hard disk drives do. The only limitation is that SSDs have a finite number of writes they can perform before their flash can't be written to any longer so the applications they are best for are ones that read loads of data but write very little. This is EXACTLY what most online games do being that they load data for various game areas, save their data to the cloud, and only write and save locally generally when there is a client software update (patches, oh the non-stop patches).

Watched my channel and noticed everything seems to load really fast? You've been watching SSDs in action! SSDs can make your old computer feel like new if you set the up the right way...

You can read more about it in PCWorld's article:

How to stretch the life of your SSD storage

Denigrating Gamers

Some people enjoy denigrating gamers as they consider us a safe group to disparage now that times have changed and there is swift and immediate punishment for maligning people for their race, religion or orientation. I just view it as ugly people looking for the current group they can be ugly to without consequence.

Jimmy thinks he's funny but in reality he's just a sad vestige of an old and dying media platform.

Jimmy may not like gaming videos but the gamers he heard from were correct (however colorfully they may have made their point), our media platform is the future and his is definitely the past.

Transcoding Computer 2

Recently I’ve been running into problems with video transcoding, specifically the amount of time it takes. We’re having so much fun that I routinely shoot about 3tb of video on a given play-day, but that takes the Transcoding Computer about 24hrs+ to chew through. There have even been a few days where the hard drives were filled to overflowing, so the 4tb capacity of the Transcoding Computer just isn’t enough. Mostly the fault lies with FRAPS which creates immense files than need to be transcoded to H.264 before they can be uploaded to YouTube. So I’ve been thinking of bringing another Transcoding Computer online!

It turns out I had another PC laying around that hasn’t been doing anything lately, a Gigabyte Brix A8-5545. All I needed to do was plug-in a USB harddrive that adds 3tb of storage and it’s ready to transcode!

This should alleviate the processing backlogs that have been building up as we have fun making videos so expect more craziness and a lot more of it!

This is a video of the Brix getting put together when I bought it a year ago: