Good Morning Friends. I am so screwed up right now in my schedule. The last few days we have not been getting up and around until 9 am, because my wife has been on spring break all week and then I took a few days off to join her. Always in the past our cat based alarm clock would kick in and Josie would get hyper active trying to wake us up. For whatever reason she has decided that it is a far better use of her time to just keep snuggling with us as we sleep peacefully… which results in us just not waking up at all. I foresee us needing to set an alarm clock for the next few days or Monday is going to be very awful.
In Guild Wars 2 the Quaggan are a effectively anthropomorphic dolphins. One thing that Guild Wars in general really nails is just how damned good it is at creating these anthro races. Quaggans however take the cake when it comes to adorableness. However now that I am up in the northern reaches I have encountered the even more adorable Arctic variants that are based on Orcas. I now want to live with these adorable frens. Cooo Quaggan just blew your mind!
I’ve continued to slowly push my way into the Living World 3 zones and I have to say… I love the way these are designed. Bloodstone Fen was pretty damned horrible, but I have greatly enjoyed Ember Bay, Bitterfrost Frontier, and now Lake Doric are phenomenal. There are so many activities popping off at any given moment, and they all feel extremely rewarding. It has been extremely challenging for me to sit down and say that I am going to focus fire the quests, because I want to spend every moment doing all the things and getting all the rewards. I have been waiting anxiously to get to Lake Doric because apparently this is the prime real estate for farming crafting materials. I’ve not spent much time in there, but the Centaur camp does seem pretty awesome.
My biggest complaint with Living World 3 has been that every fight appears to be a “find the stupid gimmick” encounter. Like this one from last night where I had to make the big invincible boss charge through all of the little invincible veteran mobs, so that he would destroy them in the process. Then finally after doing all of that… the fight took mere seconds to finish because I actually got to fight something rather than juggling gimmicks. I really hate gimmick fights. They always just seem like a way of dragging the fight out rather than letting you burn something down and be done with it. I get that they are trying to extend the length of the encounter and make it feel more epic… but it just doesn’t end up doing that when something goes from “unkillable” to dead when you have jumped through a sequence of artificial hoops. I hope this improves as we move into later content.
These encounters aside, I am still very much enjoying my time in Guild Wars 2. I sorta wish I could have arrived at a point of peace with this game a decade ago. I feel like I have lost so much time with something I am really enjoying. There is reasonably no way in hell I will ever really get caught up. Instead I am just sorta chewing away at whatever content fits my fancy for the moment. Guild Wars 2 really is sort of the ultimate choose your own adventure experience. It isn’t going to push you towards any one objective but when you know how to find them… there are so many long term grinds that feel worthwhile.
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Good Morning Friends! I hope you are recovering from sleep theft weekend. I found myself waking up this morning, setting a second alarm and then going back to sleep. This one seems to be hitting me personally harder than they usually do, but I am uncertain why. Whatever the case I mostly spent the weekend playing Guild Wars 2, which is probably of no surprise to anyone who has been reading this blog lately. Once the game clicked finally… I have been unpacking this huge box of things to do. So one of the things that I never quite understood before now is that while technically there are three expansions to Guild Wars 2, it is more like there are six.
What I mean by that is starting with Living World Season 3, each new season is almost like an expansion in itself with a large number of new zones being added to the game. While the scope of each zone is maybe not as grand as a proper expansion zone, they are most definitely cool. I am working my way through Living World Season 3 before starting Path of Fire properly. I’ve talked about this before with Elder Scrolls Online, but I have a strong desire to complete content in the order in which it was released. I screwed this up with Living World Season 2, given that I have now beaten Heart of Thorns before seeing it all the way through. However I did make it pretty far into Season 2 on my Warrior so I did not feel like I was missing a lot of information. At some point I will go back and finish that up. However going forward I want to try and follow the story track because it is actually getting interesting.
I spent a good chunk of last night running around the Ring of Fire zone and doing events as they popped up. It is shocking just how lucrative this new area appears to be at least compared to zones in the old school Tyria zones. I am guessing this is going to be a thing going forward as I spend more time in these new expansion zones. The story is also starting to ramp up so that I better understand what lead to Heart of Thorns and why our actions directly influenced the events. There are a lot of folks who really seem to hate Taimi but I find I really like that character. I mean she is infinitely less egotistical than Zojja was, but is still an Asuran so you have to sorta give her some slack. At some point I need to buckle down and find the rest of the drones that I am supposed to be reactivating.
Another big thing that happened this weekend is that I finished off the grind for my Warclaw, which should make World vs World significantly more enjoyable. It has sorta sucked being one of the only people on foot while everyone else rode around mounted. I talk about the steps required to get the mount in another post, but essentially I have been on the experience grind for awhile now having completed all of the other objectives. On Friday I got in with a really good group that was rolling through objectives left and right and ground out almost half of the progression track then. Last night I got back into the game and ground out the last pip of progress. Of course after ALL of the work… it still required that I spend 8 gold which I happily did to finish this out. If you can get in with a good commander, WvW is really an excellent source of resources especially high end leather and cloth.
I also managed to wrap up the meta achievement for killing all three Wurms in the Triple Trouble event. I did not grab a screenshot so instead you get one of me fighting another big baddie called Drakkar. That fight in particular is maybe the hardest thing that I have encountered in GW2 and had serious flashbacks to FFXIV raiding. I did however manage to get through Drakkar without dying at all, and managed to pick up a number of the achievements for avoiding things. I think we ultimately just didn’t have enough players to really make the fight manageable. I am guessing because of its relative difficulty level that it does not get run as often as the others. I find myself having a blast in this game and have so many long term grinds that I am working on… but often times find myself easily distracted by whatever happens to be going on in a specific zone.
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Last night was one of those nights where I had the desire to play something, but lacked the energy to actually make it happen. As a result this morning I thought I would talk a bit about one of my “weird shit bel does” side projects. Now some backstory… I have been an avid user of Plex for well over a decade and have been a Plex Pass holder for almost as long as that program existed. For the uninitiated, Plex is a home media server that just keeps getting more useful and acts as a unifying force to glue all of your personal media together in a single app. Thanks to Plex Pass I have access to all of my home media securely and remotely no matter where I happen to be. I don’t even have a bluray or dvd player in my home entertainment set up, and instead rip the media directly to my network attached storage where the Plex server picks it up. There is a constant theme in my life that I hate fiddling with discs… and in truth that is a large reason why I have been digital only with purchases for the last few console generations and the last PC game I purchased in physical form was TERA in 2011.
In 2016 Plex added the ability to record over the air television with its own built in DVR functionality. I’ve always been curious about this but never jumped through the hoops in order to get it up and running. Our house has been wired for cable the entire time it has existed, and as such never had a proper high gain antenna. So essentially in order to make this work you need a television capture device and an antenna, two things I did not have readily available. I am not exactly sure what put this idea in my head, but over the last few months I have conspired to make this happen and play with it. I think in part it was when I set my parents television up with a new digital antenna and seeing just how many channels existed, and how shockingly clear the picture quality was. One of the things that I do not love about cable DVR systems is that I can’t save that file off to network storage. Plex effectively fills in that gap allowing me to record any shows I care about from broadcast television.
Now when it comes to acquiring a solution to record over the air television, you can quickly spend a lot of money. If you followed the recommended path, you would end up spending upwards of $300 to get the set up running. Instead I did a modicum of research and tried to do it on the cheap. Essentially I did not want to shell out much money without knowing if the process was going to work. This meant going to ebay and trying to find the best bang for my buck. In total I spent about $40 on the set up I have now, and the end result is shockingly good. The first piece of this equation was the capture card and for that I went with the Hauppage WinTV-HVR 950Q. It is capable of receiving a full 1080i signal and has fully supported Windows 10 drivers. The negative however is that it only has a single tuner, which means like early DVR boxes you can only be recording a single show at a time.
As far as the Antenna, after some research I decided to go with this design the Antennas Direct ClearStream Eclipse Amplified Multi-directional TV Antenna. There are three or four common designs for indoor antennas and based on reading and watching review videos I landed on this one because it seemed the most consistent. I currently have this mounted on my office wall using four small 3M Command Adhesive tabs rather than the permanent mounting medium that was provided. The truth is I hooked everything up, installed the Windows 10 drivers for the capture device, and Plex immediately recognized it.
In the Plex interface I provided the zip code that I live in, and it auto retrieved the channel guide information for all of the channels I was capable of picking up. You can go into the interface and determine which channels you care about, for example I am not listing the shocking number of random Christian broadcasting channels. I probably should make another culling pass because I believe I have some shopping channel as well that is still in the mix. From here you have the option of a grid like shown above, or a show by show based interface showing what is on within the next few hours.
For the moment I am using it to record the handful of network shows that I care about. For example this is a recording from the CBS show Ghosts, and demonstrates the quality of the broadcast. One word of warning however about this sort of set up is by default the file that is generated is massive. The stream is encoded as MPEG-2 compressed audio and video and stored in a TS file. This relatively low level of compression means that an hour of television ends up being around 3 gigabytes worth of diskspace. Currently I am taking these files and running them through Handbrake to convert them into MPEG-4 which shrinks that same example file size down to around 800 megabytes. At some point I will create a script that executes after a show has finished recording to do the compression for me automagically. For the time being however I am just pleased it works as cleanly as it does.
The setup works extremely well currently for what it is, and the very limited channels that I can receive over the air. If I wanted to upgrade the configuration it would involve moving to a completely different scenario involving getting a Cable card from my provider and setting up something like an HD HomeRun box which would give me access to all of the cable channels we subscribe to. For now I am happy with this little experiment and happy that I only spent $40 to make it happen. Why did I do it when I already had access to the shows I am recording? I just sometimes get dumb ideas stuck in my head and go forward with them.
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There have been a few things that have changed in the way I approach games this year. The first is that instead of being the guy who never “finishes” games, I appear to be on this path of being laser focused on getting that win and moving on to the next game. I have no clue what clicked in my brain that has put me in this mode but I am riding it for as long as it lasts. Generally speaking I have been easily distracted by whatever happens to be going on in the MMO Zeitgeist. Maybe it was the abject failure of New World, a game I deeply cared about… or maybe it was my grind of all of my classes to level 80 in FFXIV… but whatever the case I seem to have been shaken out of my MMO focused mindset and spending a lot more time playing single player narrative games.
Just since Christmas I have finished the following:
Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade – PC
Witcher 3 (third playthrough) – PC
God of War – PC
Guardians of the Galaxy – PC
Control – PC
Alan Wake Remastered – PC
Quantum Break – PC
Wolfenstein II: New Colossus – PC
The other thing that has changed significantly is that I have altered my approach to console gaming. I have never had my consoles hooked up in the living room on our main television. This is just a thing that has never really happened and they have always been upstairs in my office on my main gaming display. I get that I am basically doing the opposite thing that the majority of players around the world do, but it fit my access patterns for years. However with the pandemic I switched to working from home, and my “office” upstairs has now become my workplace, and at the end of the day I need a change of scenery which means moving downstairs and either remoting back into my computer from the couch over parsec or playing one of my two next gen consoles. With this shift in gameplay has brought back the challenge it is of getting screenshots off my consoles in a reasonable manner. What I actually want… is the ability to type in a UNC path like \playstation5\screenshots and be able to download things directly. However that is very unlikely to happen so instead we have a number of hoops to jump through.
Microsoft honestly is the clear winner here because they give me a way to download screenshots directly to my PC. Granted it is not through the current Xbox app and is instead a feature that only seems to exist in the outdated “Xbox Console Companion” app, which might be sunset at any moment for all I know. However for the time being I have able to go to Captures and then choose “On Xbox Live” and click on a screenshot and hit download. A few hoops but it gives me quick access to full quality screenshots on this machine that I actually write my blog from. Then I can do the various things that I do every day to reduce the file size and prepare them for being posted. I still would prefer a network share, but this is probably the closest I am ever going to get to that.
For Nintendo Switch and Sony PlayStation I employ my screenshots twitter account that I set up way back when Rift was a new thing and had added twitter integration. You can tell this because I never changed the Avatar from the Defiant faction symbol. Anyways in both systems I am allowed to attach up to four screenshots to a single tweet, and while it takes a bit… I can offload a number of screenshots rather quickly. Thanks to the miracle of PlayStation remote play, I can even connect to my PS5 and do this in the morning and grab only the screenshots I am going to actually use. Then I have to click through the tweets and save the images off… process them… and I am up and running albeit again through a number of hoops to get there.
Yesterday my good friend Nimgimli tipped me off to a function finally arriving in the United States PlayStation App. For awhile now there has been a function that has been beta tested in Canada and Australia where you can directly upload screenshots from your console to the PlayStation mobile app. From there they will stay under the Captures tab for 14 days allowing you access to them from your phone. This morning when I connected into my PS5 to grab screenshots I noticed that over night I had received this update and now had the ability to enable auto-uploads.
Sure enough on my phone I also have an equivalent captures tab, and I am guessing when I take a screenshot it will now be piped over to my phone. Nothing I had taken prior to this happening has shown up yet, so I might need to spend some time fiddling with this to get everything working. I do know that I had to change my primary console in the app, because when I first set this up on my phone I did not have my PS5. The challenge here however is that this still does not do what I really want. This will in theory give me better access to screenshots from my phone. However it would still make me jump through a bunch of hoops to get them over to my PC. In theory I would either need to hook my phone up to USB and transfer them that way, or wait for them to synchronize over to google photos… and once again download them from another website.
I get that I am very likely an edge case here… but I will never understand why video game consoles make it so cumbersome to get screenshots from the console in bulk. I think what frustrates me the most about the entire experience is that a protocol exists for this purpose already. DLNA or Digital Living Network Alliance protocol exists to provide an interoperability layer between disparate media platforms. I can already consume content ON my PS5 via DLNA being served up by my Plex Server on network, but similarly I have no clue why I can’t access media hosted on the PS5 by the same protocol by other devices on the same network. This friends is why walled gardens suck, because you can get most of the way to things working like you want them to work… but not all t he way.
If I can get the mobile app working as expected I will give it a shot, but I am still uncertain if it actually does anything to improve my workflow. Huge kudos to Nimgimli for pointing it out and that will at least give me a shot to test it.
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