What Did You Do Today???

murankar

Staff member
it happened I woke up and at some point today I ended up at work.

So I am looking at parts to fix the 180cfx. Looks like I may have some issues keeping this bird fixed over the next few years. Parts are starting to dry up in the market. I guess I need to look at other options.
 

murankar

Staff member
The idea is to keep small right now. I need a backyard beater. I have the X3 for my 450/360 class. I am looking to replace my 180cfx at this point. I just found the Oxy2 sport. That just might fit the bill. I can transplant all my 180cfx stuff over to the oxy2 sport. All I would need are new end caps for my servos. the mounting tabs broke off.
 

Tony

Staff member
So today was a great flashback in time for me. I had been wanting to put retropie on my raspberry pi 3 b+, but because of limitations of being able to capture what is coming out of it on my computer (a capture card is at least $160 for a single port for hdmi, forget those cheap ones that are only 480p/i at best), I decided to just put the emulator on my computer.

I knew last night that I was going to do this so I went ahead and ordered an SNES controller for the computer. This is mainly for Legend Of Zelda - A Link To The Past, one of my all time favorite games! I also play F-Zero, Mortal Kombat 1 (and 2 and 3 lol). I do need to order another comtroller though, and that is the N64 controller so that Goldeneye 007 is accurate, again, one of my favorite games! One of the first 3D world games. Oh, and I need an NES controller too, because, reasons lol. Tecmo Super Bowl, Excitebike and so on play so much better on the legit controller.

So I started researching different emulators out there and the first I wanted to try was EmulationStation. It was okay, but had some things that I didn't like. I tried another one which I can't even remember the name of (it was bad) but then finally decided on RetroArch. I like this one because you can use the controller quite easily to navigate the menu's, it has way more features than i would ever use and you can customize it until you are blue in the face. So this is the one that I decided to stick with and start loading ROM's on.

There was one issue though. On the SNES, when you would try to read the games it would not put the console in the menu. NES and N64 were both there, but SNES would not load. It turns out they use two different extensions for the SNES games and I had the one that retroarch doesn't like. I found a little program online that changes the extension and keeps all of the files working, I changed the extension and boom, it started working.

Once I had everything loaded (before finding out about the extension issue, the games still played lol) I fired up a live stream and after YEARS of not playing Zelda, I fired up a game, live on YouTube! The title says it all lol. But I'm telling you, I had a blast playing this game for over 3 straight hours. It was fun! If you want to check it out, enjoy the video below lol.

I did play a little F-Zero as well off camera as well as Tecmo, an rc game (old as dirt and horrible from todays standards lol) and some others. I have yet to play Goldeneye which I'm really looking forward to.

That was my day.... lol.

 

bigone5500

Well-Known Member
My eyes would be blood shot after 3 hours of gaming. Used to, I could do that. But not any more. I used to be able to play the 3D shoot 'em up games such as my fav, Painkiller, but now I get motion sickness from them. I haven't done gaming in a good while. The last thing I played was Guild Wars 2. I still have it installed on my laptop but just simply don't play it anymore.
 

Tony

Staff member
Well, I am used to staring at these screens for hours on end, and I have a desk lamp that provides some 'accent' lighting to help relieve the strain on the eyes from the monitor light. I have played FPS games (first person shooter, not frames per second lmao) and I'm just not a fan of them. COD is the one that I have played most and I just don't enjoy it much. The new ones online, oh hell no. Not even downloading them. Well, maybe I will, just to see what my computer will do with them being a 2011 model with a first gen i7 lol.
 

bigone5500

Well-Known Member
I have attempted to fly fpv once or twice so far. It's something that I will have to try to get used to. I flew my quad the other day for the first time in a while and crashed it breaking two props. I need to get out the goggles and get back to it.
 

D.O.G.

Goblin 380 Supporter
I hope you do get back into it and get used to it. You bought expensive goggles and that would stink to have them sit around and collect dust. As far broken props, there're a few brands out their say," Unbreakable", which they are. They don't break... just bend BUT It's how many times can they bend before breaking. I tried out a few unbreakable props and found out that Dals props bend and re-bend the most before breaking. The rest bend maybe once or twice before breaking. As many times I had a tree jumps out in front of me on my course, Lol, props break easily. Dals prop seem to last the longest. Just my opinion.
 

bigone5500

Well-Known Member
I found a pretty good deal at Walmart this morning in the clearance stuff. Box of 5 receptacles for 25¢ each.

15448966814505932414207172872066.jpg
 

Tony

Staff member
It's always nice to have some of those outlets laying around. I know I need a few right now and don't have any and don't want to go pick them up lmao. Work... you know lmao.

I have some of those props. They are okay just not a lot of pop to them. Very forgiving and soft.
 

Tony

Staff member
It's time for a little rant :rant:

:ranton:

Am I the only one that is tired of YouTube jacking with things just to make life harder for those that try to create quality content? I know I have been MIA for a while on youtube, but that doesn't mean that I have walked completely away from it. During my time on the road when I was not able to make videos they decided to 'soft' roll out what is called YouTube Studio which is a bloated, hard to navigate version of a very good dashboard that they had just rolled out less than a year prior. The old dashboard was just that, it was old. They did an update to it and the new dashboard was awesome. Very clean, fast and easy to use. But then mid 2018 they rolled out Studio....

Studio is absolutely horrible IMO. It used to be when you clicked on the title of the video on your dashboard, it would take you to the edit page so you could edit the information on the video. If you clicked on the thumbnail of the video, it would play the video. The same goes with right clicking each one respectively and getting the links. Yes, the title of the video has bit me a few times by posting the edit URL rather than the watch URL lol. But still, it was easy to use.

Now, Studio has both the thumbnail and the title text linked to the edit page. I did some searching today, adn there is a 64x38 pixel image of a black play button that is used to actually watch or link a video. Very small on a very cluttered page. And, I use TubeBuddy (not really use, but it is on there) and that may be where that little watch icon is coming from, I'm not sure. All of that to say, linking videos just got a lot harder with the new YT Studio.

Next up (I'm not done talking about Studio, but I will save you all the rest of the rant for 'this' post lol) is YouTube "cleaning house". On 12-12-18 they decided to clean house and remove subscriptions. Some of these were closed accounts and that's fine, they have done that for years. Someone closes their account or gets removed because of a TOS violation you lose them as a subscriber. But this time, in their words, they removed what they thought where spammers or sub4sub accounts from your subscriptions.

I want to get one thing straight real quick. On EVERY CHANNEL I OWN I have NEVER done a sub4sub, I have never paid for subs I have never even looked into it. ALL of my subscriptions on ALL of my channels are legit subs. But every friggin' one of my channels has taken a hit including RCH, BrokeAuto and Z28. You look at the analytic data and I have a nice little line of subs that is very fluid and then on the 12th, it just TANKS, and then on the 13th on, it goes back to normal. All because they decided to "clean house" on what they "thought" were spammer subscriptions.

If they were actually spammers, that's fine. I don't want them there. But I highly doubt a channel as small as Z28 would have the exact same number of subscriptions lost as the RCH channel, and they are EXACTLY the same number lost on that day.

This "Studio" crap though is going to drive me insane. As I was typing this, I loaded up the BA page from the Z28 page just to verify (and BA lost 19 subs on that same day btw) and the first page was the old style dashboard. I went from the Z28 old dashboard (after clicking the little link to go from Studio to the old style) and when I went to the BA page it was still the old style. I clicked on the analytics tab on the left and BOOM, Studio analytics which is all but unusable. So I had to yet again click that damn link to go back to the "classic" version (if they were into cars, they would know the "classic" is ALWAYS better than the "modern") which takes forever because you have to answer a popup as to why you want to go back to classic. I have worn out my keyboard typing into that box multiple times on multiple channels but now, I just click the crap out of the button and it will eventually change over without putting anything in there.

I know a little smuck like myself is not going to do anything to change the minds of a company as large as YouTube, but something has to give. I was able to go into my channels and do what I needed and knew exactly where to go and it loaded fast. Now, they are stacking these options that I use all the time behind other options where you can't find them and because it is so bloated now, it takes forever for a page to load. Time is money, and when it takes 5x as long to do something, the same thing, that I used to do, it is absolutely unacceptable. I may start looking into moving over to another platform, but lets face it, there is nothing else out there that can compete with the audience that YT provides... Too bad they are taking advantage of this fact though....

/rant
 

Tony

Staff member
I forgot about this so lets add on to what I posted above.... Are you ready?....

:ranton:

So there was a banner on one of my channels the other day (it is on all channels, but I saw it on RCH first) about Annotations. You remember, you could actually set about 20 seconds at the beginning of a video listing where everything was in a video and all they ahd to do was click on it and they could go to that section of the video. And on the entire video, there would be a link to take you back to the beginning, much like a DVD menu. Well, this is the banner that is on top of the channels now...

Capture.PNG

You may need to click on that to make it larger. It says "UPDATE: Video annotations haven't been getting much love from our viewers, so effective January 15th we'll no longer be showing them". Does anyone else see hands being forced here? Because I certainly do. Quite a while ago they removed the ability to add or even EDIT EXISTING Annotations which means even if you had them, you could not edit them. So now, they come out with that BS "UPDATE" saying that they "haven't been getting much love from viewers"!!! I WONDER WHY?!?!?!?! If you can't add them and you can edit them, how in the HELL are they going to get "love"?!?!?!

Here is what the Annotation page (where you used to be able to edit and create them) says now. You used to at least be able to see them...

Captufre.PNG

It's true, mobile users have taken over, but why completely destroy an awesome feature? Yes, some channels took it way too far and made videos unwatchable, but for those, just turn them off. On the ones that were done classy, this is a punishment. It takes hours to get things like that setup and now they are just going to kill them.

Sometimes I wonder how a company like this has grown as large as they have. Killing a key feature instead of making it usable for every device seems like the wrong step to me. Now, it's all about cards (which are horrible to create) and End Screens which no one watches the very end of a video, they click out of it before they get there after they get the information they want.

Does any of this make sense to any of you? I would really like to know.

/rant
 

bigone5500

Well-Known Member
I feel ya on this Tony. I wanted to add an annotation on my latest video but the editor is complete and utter crap. I guess I'll have to learn a video editor now if I want to do anything to my videos besides just upload and watch. I think it should now be called OurTube, or MyTube...(from youtube's perspective).
 

Admiral

Well-Known Member
Maybe it's catching, after reading you guys computer rebuilds this morning turned mine on and Black Screen of Death, it's been showing signs of something failing for a while, today it happened. Saved all the data lost all the programs which is really a good thing I will only be re-loading a small fraction of what was deleted, I didn't realized that I'd loaded so much crap over the last 4 years. All good back up and running good thing its raining, so I didn't miss out on going flying.
 

Tony

Staff member
What died on you computer? I'm not sure of the specs but a black screen is usually just a GPU unless you are running integrated graphics then it could be the CPU, north bridge (I think, Randy will correct me here if I'm wrong lol) or power delivery to the CPU. Sorry, I geek out over things dying on computers and have to know everything lol.

I had to look it up before Randy went to his happy place to correct me lmao. North bridge is for the AGP, ro Accelerated Graphics Processor which I believe is the same as internal graphics. Never used them on a computer that I really cared to look into so not sure lol.
 

murankar

Staff member
North bridge as I understand it handle the graphics data to and from the CPU. If you deal with things like blender 3D and you don't have a graphics card to handle the rendering then the CPU is used instead and it takes forever to render.
 
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