Monday, September 26, 2016

Checking up on stuff

So after a great summer of FL (aka RL) I decided to check in and Unwind a bit. Went cruising from Tradewinds down south and around the Sharp Tooth Isle. Apparently there's not a lotta changes. The airport is there, NYC is there. All the islands seem to be in place.
Cruising the Blake
Met quite a few boats though, so people are still sailing these waters. On my way back up north I sat and enjoyed the sunset for a minute or two... The virtual sunset has somekind of calming effect on me - quite like a real sunset.
Sunset
Nah, it's not just the sunset... I found something that I found once before... Something shy... Only this time I'll check it out, if I can. It's right behind me...
Guess it?
Can you guess what it is? It's that patrol boat I observed back in june. It's still there, so maybe I can sneak aboard and have a look around. I'll be very quiet as last time it sorta disappeared when I clicked it.
Time for a sundowner
Right; Inspection time next time... Now, it's time for a sundowner and then back to RL, or is it the other way around? Still, - sure feels good to be back in the virtual waters now that the real ones are getting colder.

Friday, September 23, 2016

Silverrudder, live

Today is Silverrudder day... 400 boats, singlehand racing around the island of Fyn. Probably the worlds largest singlehand race - in my back yard.

Read all about it on the Silverrudder website. Here's a link to the livestream. It's also tracked on tractrac.

Thursday, September 22, 2016

Wind gone, now back

Nothing is static. Not even in computers. After running 12 months of testing, my RealWind (c) suddenly coughed up an error. Something about a problem with the windsource.
Wind is back online
What does that mean? It means flags, mills, windsocks and windmeters stopped changing. Huh? Lemme explain... For the past year the windtoys at Tradewinds YC have been displaying real wind imported from Copenhagen. Well, most of them... not the flags on the flagpole there on the left. Not yet. Tasha is very sensitive about that flagpole.
Yay! It works again...
However, just about anything else rotates according to wind from RL, and if you touch them, they'll even tell you the current wind and weather.
Windsock too
So where am I going with this? Don't get me started... For now this was just an update. I haven't been online for ages, but someone was nice enough to observe and tell me about this problem. Someday - when I find the time - I might release a box of windsources and windtoys to play with. It can make hundreds of sims have coordinates wind conditions - automagically. After that... who knows...
Me unwinding after a job well done
Maybe I'll stick it into a boat and see what happens... Sailing on real wind would make quite a difference from all those synthetic winds we have today. Synthetic winds have certain benefits, such as being able to set the wind right - right before a race. However, most synthetic winds serve the excact same wind to all boats. Puffs, lulls and shifts. Not much fun in tacking on a shift if everyone else gets it too...

Friday, September 9, 2016

Dear Microsoft

Dear Microsoft,

I finally decided to give your new system another go... So I went and bought me a superlight and handy traveling computer from HP. It's pink and supersweet. It runs your 64 bits version of Windows 10, and I'll admit it runs pretty good on two cores and a small SSD.


Today, for some reason, it decided to update; Obviously I clicked yes in order to get the latest, greatest and much more secure edition; From version 10240 to version14393... Huge gap. Must be worth it, right?

Imagine my surprise when the updater told me it needs 20gigs of disk in order to upgrade to that newer, safer version. Your system fills up most of the 32gigs available on my SSD.

Are you friggin kidding me? Do you really think that my brand new PC is already trash?

I suppose I could cleanse my disk and get 20 Gigs by deleting Windows 10. Is that what you want?