Author: Adrian

Categories
Technology

One year on

Somehow it’s been a year. Not since that (although it is), but a year since I built my computer (yes, I know I only blogged about it in May).

Even between March and May, I had already added new components to it (the LED strips and an extra fan at the rear of the case). As a reminder, here’s what it looked like then:

And here’s what it looks like now:

Apart from realising that it photographs better with the side glass panel taken off, and that the colour scheme is different, there’s a few significant changes:

Cooling system

This week (yesterday in fact) I changed the CPU cooling system from the stock air cooler to an AIO water cooler. It does add two black tubes into the interior, but it’s generally more spacious inside now and I like the look of the three extra RGB fans at the top. It’s still too early to see what difference it will make – I think it is a couple of degrees cooler than it was, but it also does have a few extra fans that are venting the case now. I always wanted to get one of these, but for budgeting decisions I decided against it a year ago.

GPU

The graphics card is still the same, but I have rotated it 90 degrees into a vertical orientation. Again, I think it looks much better this way round, particularly with it’s coloured ring that is now visible, and this is how I always wanted it. The lights in the ring were spiralling before, but for some reason it doesn’t always. Don’t worry about the fan not spinning, it’s only supposed to do that when it gets hot.

Storage

You can’t actually see it in the picture, but in the last year I have added two new hard drives. I started off with an 8TB and a 4TB drive (as a combined virtual drive), but then I added an extra 12TB so I could mirror it. Earlier this year I realised I was running out of space and in order to avoid rebuilding the virtual drive, I would need to add an extra physical drive. I added a second 12TB drive, but because of the limitations of the original settings I had to rebuild the whole set-up anyway. It took a while, but eventually I got it how I wanted and it should now allow me to expand it again more easily.

Step 1: Originally. Step 2: Last year. Step 3: Currently. Step 4: Future arrangement?

I am also starting to run out of storage on my main SSD drive (thanks Microsoft Flight Simulator) so at some point this year I’ll have to add some more there (or move some applications to my secondary SSD drive).

But that’s for next year, and apart from that, I can’t think of anything else I need/want to add. I realise I’m now a generation behind on both processor and graphics card technology, but I’m fine with missing out for now. With the price and scarcity of components right now, I’m glad I bought my computer a year ago.

Addendum: I do need a new keyboard and mouse. Preferably wireless (at least for the mouse).

Categories
Film Review

The Truman Show

It’s been a while since I’ve done a full film review (in this format) but it’s time again now. It’s not that I’ve not seen any films, it’s just that very few have been worth blogging about. So this week’s entry is about The Truman Show.

Why did I watch this film?

This is a film that a few people have mentioned over the last couple of years, and mostly in a “this film is iconic, you must have seen it” kind of way. I had never even really heard of it so I assumed it was fairly recent and I had somehow just passed over it. Turns out it’s from 1998 (the computer screens definitely date it to around this period), so it’s not quite old enough to be a proper cult film, and not quite recent enough for me to have seen when it came out. Anyway, I came across it on Netflix at the weekend and decided it was worth a shot.

What did I think of this film?

When describing this film, people had always explained that it was about a guy who was constantly being filmed for reality TV, but that he had no idea that he was. I never quite understood the full premise behind this but it sounded like an interesting concept. So it wasn’t until I had seen it that I fully grasped how it worked. And I realise that I’ve not explained it the best way either so I would just recommend watching it for yourself.

It is generally a funny film but there are a few more serious moments too. It definitely made for some light-hearted Sunday evening viewing that didn’t require too much thinking about, whilst at the same time not being a complete switch-off film. The idea that reality may not be what it seems reminded me a lot of Inception (a film I do really like). Afterwards you start to wonder if your own life might actually be just for someone’s reality TV viewing and what the consequences of that would be. If that is the case and you’re watching me right now, I’d like to apologise for having to watch me write this post over the last half hour or so. (Don’t worry, I don’t actually think that is happening.)

Will I watch it again?

I did really enjoy this film and would probably put in my favourite films. It’s not quite in my best ever films yet, but I would definitely watch it again and I think it could only go up in my favourite rankings. In fact, I’m tempted by a second viewing just so I can take it all in again knowing what’s going to happen at the end. Highly recommended.

Categories
Miscellaneous

Abandoned blog posts

I was struggling to come up with some new content so I decided to look back at blog posts I had previously started, but never finished. Most of these were started during my various blog hiatuses, but never got published for various reasons. Here’s a few of the more interesting ones. Maybe one day I’ll finish them.

Beards (Last modified: Unknown)

This post was a follow up to “Mebbies Aye, Mebbies Naw”. I was going to incorporate it into the Revisited post, but it didn’t make the final cut and so never got expanded beyond a series of bullet points. I could share the list here, but then I can’t post it in the future.

Personalities (Revisited) (Last modified: 4 July 2014)

Arguably this one shouldn’t appear here, because it did eventually get published, although 6 years later than originally planned. It may have been interesting to have another data point to compare against though.

Quants and Quals (Last modified: 4 July 2014)

This was a post that never got written beyond the title. I can’t even remember exactly what a “Quant” or a “Qual” is, but I think it was something to do with personality types who focus on either quantity or quality (but of what I can’t remember). And I can’t remember which I would have been…

Car Troubles, Part 4 (Last modified: 12 December 2014)

This post would have been a follow-up to Car Troubles, Part 1 and Part 2, and also a Part 3 which I also never posted (or actually even started). I appear to have written half of a post about the time that my car’s fuel gauge needle got stuck on full. I can’t remember this event at all so it’s interesting to read it back (or at least the first half of the story). This would have been a different car to parts 1 and 2, but I have no idea what event part 3 would have referred to. I’m sure I could add a couple more parts to a “Car Troubles” series if I wanted to now.

Hey, I hope you loved it! (Last modified: 9 January 2015)

In January 2015, I wrote a post about the things I had got up to over the previous Christmas. I ended with the phrase “the adventures continue elsewhere…”. Well, this post would have been where that happened. This post would have been about my trip to Philadelphia to visit my brother and his family. The title of this post comes from a Pentatonix music video and was a regular catchphrase used by my niblings during that week. This post never got past the title so I can’t remember what would have been included.

I like warm hugs (Last modified: 9 January 2015)

The second follow-up post about my trip to the USA. The title is obviously taken from Frozen (and was also a popular catchphrase at that time), but again, I didn’t get any further than a title.

Gonna Fly Now (Last modified: 15 February 2015)

Of the three posts about that trip, this got the furthest with a whole three and a bit paragraphs (although I did note that “This article was a lot longer, but I’ve cut it down a lot.”). This post was about the logistics of travelling to the USA but it never got finished, mainly because the other two parts would have been more interesting and they weren’t going anywhere. It probably didn’t help that I started with “I was almost not going to post this, but I decided I had to. Mainly just so that I could use the title. [Bonus points for the first person to figure it out].” The bonus points are still available…

Categories
Technology

How I fixed my mobile data problem

I know nobody reads my posts about my mobile phone, but someone someday somewhere may find this useful (if that’s you, do say hi) so I thought I’d post this.

About a month ago, my Samsung Galaxy S10 Lite got the “One UI 3.0” update. At the same time, my phone stopped connecting to the mobile data network. It could still make phone calls and texts, but whenever it wasn’t connected to wi-fi I couldn’t access any internet data. Weirdly it did still sometimes connect to mobile data, but this was unpredictable and was somewhere between a few minutes or several hours later (if at all).

What my phone icons should have looked like (left) vs what it actually looked like (right)

I searched the internet but couldn’t find anyone else who had this problem. I tried turning the mobile data setting on and off, resetting the network connections and clearing the caches. I even wiped my whole phone and reinstalled everything, but still I couldn’t get it to connect to mobile data.

I phoned up the Three helpline and they just guided me through the steps I had already done. The one thing I hadn’t done was to try my SIM card in a different phone. In the meantime, they would send me out a new SIM card.

I duly tested my SIM card in an old phone and unsurprisingly it worked fine. I had a strong feeling that a replacement SIM card wouldn’t fix the problem but I waited for it to arrive.

It still didn’t work with the replacement SIM card, but I went into the SIM card manager and noticed that “Mobile data” was turned off at this point. And setting the option to “SIM 1” fixed my problem!

The Mobile data setting in the SIM card manager

I was going to blog about how this seemed to be a separate, hidden “Mobile data” switch at the SIM card level to the one at the system level, but I’ve not been able to replicate this at all. Every time I turn off one, the other turns off too and vice versa. Was this not happening before? I don’t know. Was the SIM card setting somehow stuck in the off position? I don’t know. Did the new SIM card help? Probably, even if only because it meant I looked in the SIM card manager settings. Does my phone mobile data work again now? Yes.

So if you have a problem with your mobile data, the SIM card manager may be the place to look. But it also may not be. Because I don’t even know if that was the problem, but after four weeks trying lots of different things it’s now working again.

Categories
Lazy post

Icy conditions

The snow and ice may all be gone now, but my leg still bears the mark of it (or rather the lamppost that I slid into)…

Categories
Pondering

In the office

Whilst I was going through the data for last week’s post, I noticed that most of my journeys where travelling to or from work, particularly in 2020 when travelling for fun wasn’t allowed. It seems quite obvious that I’m now working from home more often. But in previous years I would have had more days out of the office: on training courses, on business trips, on leave (yes, I have taken some in 2020, but not as much as before). So just how many days do I normally spend in the office each year? To be clear, this is just talking about how many days I’ve been *in the office*, not how many days I’ve been *working*.

Some days it’s easy to tell when I went to the office, I made a morning peak journey in one direction, and an evening peak journey back in the other direction. Some days it’s more complicated as I come back a different route, or get off at a different station to walk a bit further, but it’s still generally obvious that I’ve been into the office. Other days it’s more complex as I’ve gone somewhere else after work, but I generally always head home afterwards. Although strangely I have travelled to work more times than I’ve come home, mainly as a result of occasionally running home instead. There’s also the possibility that I’ve travelled into the office and then gone elsewhere for the bulk of the day, and there’s a number of half days which I didn’t count specifically, but hopefully it should all balance out. Suffice it to say, these values are all very approximate.

I think there should be 222 possible days in the office per year (365 – 52 Saturdays – 52 Sundays – 8 bank holidays – 31 days leave). Yes, I’m ignoring leap years and that some years may have extra weekends or bank holidays. As I said this is approximate.

So, counting up all my journeys, here’s what I get:

YearDays in
office		% of working
days in office
201421094.6%
201519186.0%
201620491.9%
201720793.2%
201818282.0%
201917880.2%
202015368.9%

And whilst 2020 is lower than 2019, it’s not dramatically lower. But is quite a bit lower when compared to the high of 2014. It’s hard to tell if this is a general downwards trend, or is just related to some jobs/time periods having more business travel. For 2021 I’m currently at about 61% in the office, but given that we’re only six weeks into the year this could obviously go up or down before the end of the year.

And coming back to my initial reason for looking into this, I spent approximately 25% less last year on travel around London than in 2019, but I was only in the office 14% less than than the previous year. I’m not sure what the point behind those calculations is – I’m sure I could draw something else out, but that seems like enough for now.

But with a dataset of all my journeys for the last seven years there must be more that I can discover. What else would be interesting to know? My longest journey? My day with the most journeys? How many stations I’ve been to? Let me know in the comments.

Categories
Money

Annual Travelcard, or Pay As You Go…

Just over seven years ago, I moved to London. Before that I had always had houses and jobs that I could either walk or drive between. Now though, I had to get the train every day, and also to pay for it. I started off paying for each journey from my Oyster card top up balance, but in January 2014, I realised that I was topping up a lot and that it might make more sense to get an annual travelcard. The main advantage of a travelcard being that all journeys within the chosen zones would essentially be free, so the more journeys made, the better the saving.

So why is that relevant? Well, I’ve kept a record of every journey I’ve made, and every January I compare how much I would have spent on pay as you go versus how much I paid for the travelcard (plus the extra journeys outside my travelcard zones). Unfortunately I no longer have the exact statistics for the first few years, but in 2017 I saved £246.50 (and I think a few of the earlier years were even bigger savings).

2017 Travelcard2017 PAYG
£1581.70£1828.20

Fast forward to 2018 and I moved house from zone 3 to zone 4. Now, not only was the travelcard cost more, but there were fewer transport options so I was less likely to use public transport. The calculations were more complex because I moved halfway through the year, but I think I ended up spending £96.40 extra by having a travelcard and not making the most of the journeys.

2018 Travelcard2018 PAYG
£1869.90£1773.50

For 2019, I decided to renew my travelcard. Yes, I had lost some money the previous year, but it was complex with moving house, and maybe I would make more journeys this year. And so, in January 2020 I calculated how much I had spent the previous year, and unfortunately found that I overspent by £234 by having a travelcard.

2019 Travelcard2019 PAYG
£2052.80£1818.80

In order to confirm my calculations (there’s daily and weekly PAYG capping I hadn’t taken into account), I decided to do a three month trial of using pay as you go (though obviously on contactless now, rather than having to top up an oyster card) until the end of April 2020. But then COVID and lockdowns came in, so my three month trial ended up becoming a one year trial. With an increased number of days working from home and less travel away from London, it should be clear that PAYG was going to win this year, but by how much? A couple of weeks ago I calculated my travel costs for 2020…

2020 Travelcard2020 PAYG
£2086.80£1354.30

With a £732.50 saving, PAYG was a clear winner for 2020. I imagine it will still be the best option for the rest of this year until things get back to normal again. I’ll review this again next January, but at the moment, I can’t see a travelcard being a sensible option for me, at least until I can make a lot more journeys.

Categories
January Habits

January Habits: Journaling

It’s January, and whilst I don’t particularly do New Year’s Resolutions, I thought this month I would share some habits I’ve recently started and want to continue with.

I first came across bullet journaling in a BBC News article in August 2019 about someone who had used it to save enough money to buy a house. Essentially the premise of bullet journaling is making quick journal entries (aka “bullets”) for tasks/events/notes and managing these between a series of “collections” and logs. It sounds quite complex (and it is a bit), but supposedly once in the flow you can use it to organise everything (including finances, hence the house saving). You can read the full how it works here.

I liked the idea of this, so I started in September 2019 following the official bullet journal rules with a ‘future log’, a ‘monthly log’ and some collections. It all started off quite well, but I soon dropped the longer term elements and just did the ‘daily logs’.

My first ‘Monthly log’ and my ‘tracker’ which only got to day 4…
My daily log pages from September 2019, back when we could go places…

However, I missed out a lot of days and rather than being a forward planning tool, it ended up being a record of what I’d done (or what I could remember I’d done) and I gave up in February. Fast forward to August and I decided to try again. At first I just kept the daily log format similar to how I had been, but then in October last year after researching other people’s BuJo layouts online, I settled on a new weekly format. And with a couple of tweaks it’s what I’ve been using ever since.

This week’s log pages (at time of writing)

My new setup uses a double page for each week which I set up on the Sunday evening beforehand. It takes about 10-15 mins each week to draw the lines and do the initial filling in, but I’m actually quite enjoying doing it. I still use my phone calendar for longer term events, but being able to see one week ahead just seems to work for me. It’s also quite nice to spend five minutes at the end of each day to reflect on how that day was and what I’ve done (or not!). Although not wanting to when I’m tired and wanting to go to bed is probably one of the hardest things about this, although I am trying to do it everyday.

At the moment, most of the items are basic household tasks such as “buy bread/milk” (tomorrow’s only task!), but ticking off items is also quite cathartic and I often add mundane items just so I can mark them as done. Hopefully one day soon I’ll be able to go back to putting in exciting events that are happening and places I’m going to. I’ve also thought that I should use it to track emotions/mood, but that’s one I’ve still to work out. At least I can now tick off “write blog post” for this week.

So that’s it for January habits for 2021. Has anything interested you that you might want to try? Anything else I should be doing? Let me know in the comments. I’ll revisit these later in the year (probably July or December) to let you know if I’ve kept them up!

Categories
January Habits

January Habits: Cold showers

It’s January, and whilst I don’t particularly do New Year’s Resolutions, I thought this month I would share some habits I’ve recently started and want to continue with.

Until November I had only had a cold shower maybe two or three times: when I was 15 and staying in a 1960s scout hut, and a few years ago when my boiler stopped working. However, since November I have had a cold shower every day. But why?

I measured the water temperature at 10 degrees (Celcius), but I think it does fluctuate slightly

A few months before I came across a YouTuber saying that cold showers had changed their life. I did some more internet research and found loads more people saying how they had started having cold showers and it had improved their lives. According to people on the internet, it’s better for your skin/hair, helps weight loss, improves testosterone and loads of other stuff whereas some people just claim it’s all pseudoscience. I’m not sure if any of those are true, but they’re not the reason I’m doing this anyway.

I still secretly hope the water will be warm when I stick my toes in and I’m slightly disappointed when it isn’t. The first few seconds are horrible, but after that, and once the whole body is under the water, it feels absolutely fine. In fact, it feels better than just fine. Rather than just “having a shower” every day, I now feel like I’ve achieved something each day. And that small win first thing in the morning is definitely something that’s needed in these hard times…

Categories
January Habits

January Habits: Exercise

It’s January, and whilst I don’t particularly do New Year’s Resolutions, I thought this month I would share some habits I’ve recently started and want to continue with.

One of the hardest parts of being in self-isolation was not being able to go outside to exercise. I’ve occasionally gone for a run first thing, but along with waking up earlier, I wanted to make this into more of routine. I’ve noticed previously that days that have started with a run have generally felt much better. Even I’ve mentally forgotten by the time I’ve gotten into the office that I started the day with a run, the psychological benefits last throughout the whole day.

And so I decided that every day should start with a run. Nothing complicated, generally just a simple run around my block (which is just over 2km). You may recall that I ran 5km every day back in September, so I knew it wasn’t impossible. I wasn’t going to run on weekends as I like to do my longer runs then, but even after only a couple of weeks, it already feels very odd to have breakfast without having been for a run first.

There is however a big challenge. Now we’re back in lockdown, exercise outdoors is only allowed once per day. A 2km run first thing in the morning is fine if I’m heading into the office afterwards, but if I’m working from home and only allowed out once per day, do I really want it to just be for a 2km run around the block? And what about days when I want to do a longer run anyway?

And that’s partly why this new habit is “exercise” rather than “running”. Whilst a 2km run first thing is nice (mainly for the smugness of being up and about before everyone else is up), sometimes it’s not going to be the best option for that day. And so if that means my daily exercise is staying in with a Joe Wicks workout video, or meeting a friend for a long walk, that’s fine too. Just as long as I try to do something every day.