Noise Generators & The Conservatory (Work)

That moment you tell someone you're going to go do some programming work in the conservatory during a rain storm and their mind melts as they can't figure how the sound of rain helps with your concentrating and keeping the alpha brain waves flowing....

I use noise generators whilst I'm working all the time, such as this one:

https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/campingRainNoiseGenerator.php

And I really like this one:

https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/thunderNoiseGenerator.php

But my favourite is this:

https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/primevalEuropeanForestSoundscapeGenerator.php

They're works of genius.

And as the new lock-down looms I'm relying on them more and more for that little taste of the outdoors whilst stick in doors.

Tech Rant - Twitch.tv Fix Your Filter

You already know I stream a lot to Twitch.tv, despite making zero income or anything and have pretty much no viewers, it lets me at least think I'm involved in something - seriously guys, I get like 100 views a day on here, go check out my twitch, and my YouTube!  They're linked on the right by the tips jar - which you could also use.. *cough* cheap bastards.

Anyway, what's my problem today?... Well, I've had ANOTHER copyright strike on Twitch, this is the second, the first time was a false positive, it detected god knows what from a truly free royalty free music source.  As a consequence I stopped steaming with music, despite nearly everyone else being able to do so, I didn't want to take the chance.

Today's strike though beggars belief.  It reckons I'm playing Shaggy's rendition of "Mr Bombastic"... I am not doing any such thing, this is a video of me talking... and Tinkering with a server...

Do I look like Mr Bombastic?  Am I totally Fantastic?

I am getting so annoyed with this, because when you submit your appeal, it does not go to twitch, or a forum, it goes off to some mindless entity and you get this horrible worrisome message about their submitting your details to some court in California.

News flash twitch, you'll have to drag me kicking and screaming to get me to go to California, and also the sound doesn't contain any music, and I certainly don't sing!

Idiots....

War Thunder Sound Issues Resolved

An interesting upshot of upgrading my graphics card has been the total solution of the sound issues I was having with WarThunder Ground Forces...

The sound uses to stutter and stammer, it was impossible to hear actions being taken against your own vehicle and the ambient long range artillery fire was constantly taking over the sound channels.

With the new graphic card no stutter, no booming...

The exact same processor and sound system is not playing the sounds normally, my thoughts are that the sounds were always playing properly, but that there were so many sounds and so complex a scene being rendered that the graphics card became a bottle neck, holding up the PCI-e Bus, and so interrupting the sound playing.

I'll be posting more about the new performance of my rig as I get to play more games, so far I've only played one half round of War Thunder Ground Forces and an hour of Sniper Elite 2; before the wife wanted me to go run around after her like a fawning lamb.

So to anyone having such sound issues, it maybe a performance bottle-neck.

STress

My first computer was a Commodore 16, but my second computer, and the first one I really programmed on (in Pascal) was my Atari ST, and I love the story of how the ST came together... I wish there were a book, or a documentary about it, as there are for the Amiga 1000.

But anyway, one source of the history of the ST is Dad Hacker...

On the first part of his ST History posts he makes this statement:

Stress: A number of us learned how to juggle. One of the DRI people had a nervous tick in the form of a "quacking" sound, and this spread through the group (a year later some of us were still doing it a little). The word "fine" became a pejorative: "Don’t worry, everything will work out just fine." How are you feeling? Fine, okay?

And it had me thinking, I worked in a particularly stressful place during my degree, and I developed a nervous Coooing...

Like a pigeon, I'm sure if Paul, Leon or Dave are reading this they'll remember me cooing.  They took the piss, but I really could not help it at times, sometimes I was totally oblivious that I was doing it.

I think I developed it out of a kind of mental juggling act I was carrying out thinking about the servers being looked after, stressing if the phone would ring to make me have to drop whatever I was doing and do an IT support run, or just the incessant clatter of the mechanical machines knitting on the factory floor, from which we were separated only by a 1.5 inch plaster board wall.

Whatever it was, I didn't quack, I cooed... And really well, I'm cured now, and can't impersonate a pigeon at all, so where my brain came up not only with that sound, but the ability to do that sound, is beyond me.