The World Reacts to the Mightly Jingles - #8 France

We've all wondered, haven't we, what happens when Jingles releases a new Video?... In this new series I aim to help solve that mystery.... This week, France, and it seems Mr Sarkozy is not that interested, like most French Tank drivers.

Check back each Friday at 18:30 UK time for the next thrilling instalment, where might we find Jingles being Enjoyed?

HMS Dreadnaught

Happy Birthday, HMS Dreadnought....

99 years ago, today, a new generation of Warship was launched, concentrating all the main fire-power into rotating turrets, rather than both turrets and barbed emplacements along the length of the ship.

She was HMS Dreadnought and her name went onto represent a new era and new form of Naval planform, from which the great naval arms races of the early twentieth century would hang.

It is with great reverie many of us look back at the great navies with awe and even a tear, some of us had family or perhaps ourselves served in the Navies of the world.

For my part, I grew up hearing about life aboard His Majesties Cruiser Belfast, stories from my Grandfather, which I will be bringing to you over the course of the coming months.

But today marks the day on which Naval warfare changed, and the great stories and names of other ships came to prominence, Hood, Bismark, Repulse, Warspite, Houston, Enterprise, Ark Royal and all the rest would not have occurred without the direction given to advances by Dreadnought.

Elite Dangerous - Trading Tools - User Privacy - Progress Pt10

Update: You can now support this project at Patreon!

The boring bits of the Elite Dangerous Trade data tool... Yes, this weekend I've been checking as to what information I can extract without wanting to draw the ire of Frontier... Using OCR you can pretty much read anything, at least here in the UK, so long as I don't represent this as my data and I don't charge anything to access the information.  Which I never will.  Then we're free to collect information.

I believe tools like this go one step further, because you can argue we'll be showing off the internal complexity of the markets in the game and so perhaps selling the trade side of the game.

Anyway, as part of the boring bits, I also have to check with you, the users, what you want to let the program do.

Now clearly, by downloading the program you accept it's going to run on your computer... You do get that yes?... I had one guy, well lets say, he's a bit slow, he didn't realise I was writing a program, he asked to be a tester and when I handed him the exe I got this very puzzling reply... "Where's the script"... it's a program mate.. a program... an executable.

Anyway, the one thing you guys get to control is what, if anything, the program is going to do with your data, both the information - like your name you type in - and the actual trade data you collect.

So, I've got some questions being asked, and a new configuration file which lets you take control of whether you share your data etc....

This is the penultimate build which is behind closed doors, I'm soon going to be able to collect this data to my server, so we'll start to see the application out there for download and more of you to try it.

However, I do still need more testers... Comment below to volunteer!

Update: You can now support this project at Patreon!

Elite Dangerous - Trading Tools - General Update - Progress Pt9

Update: You can now support this project at Patreon!

Right, it's been a week, but I've not rested on my laurels with the Elite Dangerous Trade Data Collection, prior to my spending sometime playing the new Beta 1.0 and Beta 1.1 I had taken my first pilgrimage to Earth:

But it gave me a chance to test some of the commodity capturing, especially in the stations with lighter hangar backgrounds.

Capturing went all well...

As you can see, we have Sol XML data.  I visited the three earth stations, the moon station, Mercury and the platform at Venus.  It was interesting to immediately see taking Gold from Mercury or Venus to Earth was as profitable as my run taking Gold between LHS1914 and FK5 2550 - the main run I had been doing previously.

other asthetic changes I've made is just making the console application look better, it is a console application to collect the image data, because it doesn't need to take a lot of processing power to tell you what it's up to.

Under the hood I'm also adding user friendliness, as I had the process Id being manually entered, but this meant people had to open task manager, add the process id column and a bunch of other stuff, which people just didn't want to do.  Least not my two lazy ass testers - I NEED BETTER TESTERS!

So, now the application will enumerate through the windows, find one named the same as the Elite Dangerous client and try to use that process id, before it'll give up and just ask you to enter the correct Process Id.

The World Reacts to the Mighty Jingles - #7 The Third Reich

We've all wondered, haven't we, what happens when Jingles releases a new Video?... In this new series I aim to help solve that mystery.... This week, The Third Reich...

And is it me, or does the chap at the keyboard look suspiciously like our hero himself?

Check back each Friday at 18:30 UK time for the next thrilling instalment, where might we find Jingles being Enjoyed?

4D Cinema

I've just been watching a report from the BBC's Jo Black about 4DX cinema, and it being invented in Korea... 4D cinema was not invented in Korea a few years ago, it was around at the American Adventure here in the UK in the 1980's and 1990's!

It was called the "Motion Master Theatre"...

You can see the BBC report here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-31143704

But you can find pictures of the 4D cinema at the American Adventure here:

http://www.ridemad.com/the-american-adventure-theme-park-its-final-year

The projector here:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/25566302@N00/445236520/

The motion systems were controlled by a DEC PDP11 mini-computer of mid 1980's production vintage, I've seen pictures of this system, but never saw it in person.

You can find pictures of the Motion Control room here:

http://www.theamericanadventure.moonfruit.com/#/behind-the-scenes/4521465560

I have of course rode the very uncomfortable seats at the park before it closed.

I broke Amazon

I broke Amazon... I've had an item on order since Monday, and at the time of ordering it was listed as in stock and I even paid for expedited delivery...

When on Tuesday it'd not been dispatched I really wondered why, so asked, but had no immediate reply, four hours later I started to chat with them and not only did I get my expedited payment refunded, but they insisted the item would be sent for delivery 1st class.

Unfortunately, since then I've seen the item appear as "Out of Stock", as "12 items in stock", as "Back in stock Friday", and as "In Stock"... So I've not been confident it'll be delivered.

Today, it's still not listed as dispatched, but it is still listed as "In Stock", however the price has risen £20... From Monday to Wednesday, £20...?

This is sold and dispatched by Amazon... I dunno, maybe my query cost them to answer, so they upped the price.

Either way now, if I get it before the weekend I'll be ecstatic, but just to get it for the original price I'll be happy...