It's hot up in here. Now I'm not saying Palm Springs hot, but today is supposed to get to 107 around here. Thankfully power is back for most of us, the French fire had it all turned off for what felt like forever. In reality it was probably just over 24 hours, but when it's this hot and there's no electricity to run a cooler or AC and you live in an old double wide mobile from the '70s it's as hot inside as it is outside except without direct sun.For some reason my generator isn't getting fuel either. I spent some time taking the carburetor of and cleaning fuel lines but no good. And i know it works because if I sprayed ether in the carb it would fire up and run a second. I may just need to soak the carb in some cleaner for a while because it seems like it's just not picking up fuel.
Yesterday was miserable for a lot of people. The French fire came basically right into the town I live near. It may have burned part of the high school I went to. I have two friends who's homes were just a few hundred yards away from it. All in all the fire is barely 900 acres as of the last update, but it's still only around 20 percent contained. Thankfully it's in an area now that doesn't threaten people's homes. The thumbnail there is a fire map, the red shows the affected area and the yellow represents areas still without electricity. As of this post that map was updated around 13 hours ago. It's still burning, but it's much slower moving now and there's a lot of air support on this one.
Here's hoping the fire crews are getting what they need because in this heat wearing 70 lbs of fire retardant gear while hiking all over the hillsides and rocks and through brush to manually dig fire lines makes heat illness a real risk. The app being used here to monitor this activity is called Watch Duty. It's completely free and shows live updates for fires anywhere you may be affected. You can even track aircraft in real time fighting the fires if you choose, but I wouldn't recommend that without being on WIFI unless you're data is truly unlimited because it'll eat through whatever mobile plan you've got really fast like that. In any case I'd highly recommend this app if you or someone you know lives in a fire danger area. Not a plug, just a credit where it's due.
For now though, let's get to the actual WRUP.
Okay here we are. I missed last week because it was just busy from sun up to sun down and weekend and I was exhausted.
Are you looking for a CPU cooler to match your new beige PC case? Well, does Noctua ever have the cooler for you. The NH-D15 G2 (very flashy name) is new to the air cooler market and has a denser fin stack and a couple more heat pipes than the previous version air cooler. It also sports an offset design which help with clearance of those pesky RAM sticks and PCI slots. And the fin stack itself is asymmetrical. Noctua claim this creates up to 20% more surface area for the fans to cover. There's even a couple different versions of the air cooler available with high and low convexivity to best match the CPU surface coverage for your die. Tom's Hardware has the full scoop here including the price.
Be cautious when buying your RTX 4090 because there's a new scam in town. Recently it was seen that a 4090 was taken apart and found to not be a 4090 at all, but rather a 3080ti. The die has been polished and freshly laser etched with AD102. This is the proper label for a 4090 GPU but in fact the GPU is a GA102, the 3080ti die. The scam is pretty deep considering the laser etching and repackaging. Average users wouldn't know the difference until it was taken apart and even then if you don't really know what to look for you may not see the issue. Here's info from TweakTown
Okay guys, that's it this weekend. As usual I'm busy and some day I'm going to figure out how to make this stuff work during the week days instead of eating a Saturday. Have a good one and stay cool out there.
What's the game look like this time?
AJ: Recently downloaded the '80s arcade game Jackal and the Jurassic Park Classic Games Collection for PS4/5, so it appears I'll be enjoying another throwback summer weekend.
Greywolfe: well, we're here again. i'm playing ultima 2. it's going. got a boat and everything (sorry, yoda) and am laying waste to the land to get gold to upgrade my stats to play the game :P - ultima 2 is a very wild and bizarre early video game design.
Scrooloose: I'm still forging ahead in Ghost of Tsushima and I started Sunless Skies which is a charmingly dark and really well written rogue-like in the same vein as Sunless Sea.