Data-driven decision making is the only way to go
At the end of last year, I documented the never-built parts list for my dad’s PC.
Now, nearly 26 months since the original parts list request, that system has finally been purchased and assembled – and at just about the worst possible time.
Continue reading “26 Months Later: My Dad’s PC Build (July/August 2020)”
I have a lot of stuff I’m working on right now. Some are large projects (e.g. Olaf guide, Fall of Nations), some are smaller (like individual articles), and there are a few that are sort of in between (e.g. B5 giffing). If my study schedule goes as expected then I have ~8 months of less than a full-time study workload. After the 8 months is over I don’t jarringly stop all content, but I can’t realistically study full-time and do content full-time simultaneously – time just doesn’t work like that.
Over the past couple weeks or so I’ve spent quite a bit of time figuring out what and how I want to work on things over this coming 8 month window, and how long I expect each project to take.
Aka “that time I told a Twitter user to fuck off”.
Continue reading “2018 US violent crime statistics by race/ethnicity”
A few weeks ago /r/leagueoflegends ran a contest for reaching 4 million subscribers to the subreddit. There were four categories, and four winners in each category. With around 2 days left on the submission deadline, I submitted a Loss parody for the category of “4 image description” and ended up getting first place, winning myself 1848 RP.
Here are some notes about the submission I made.1
In the course of my RoN modding adventures, I decided to make a broad-scope “tech demo” style mod, showcasing some of the moddable aspects of RoN that I felt were being underutilisied – and hopefully learning a few things in the process.
After trying to mod a few things that I feel have been vastly undermodded, I ran into.. some problems. After much frustrating troubleshooting and testing, I realised this was due a limitation of RoN’s mod manager.
I then got to work on how to get around it.
Continue reading “My Workaround for the Limitations of the RoN Mod Manager”
If you’ve ever tried to browse the Steam Workshop for Rise of Nations, you may have been frustrated at how none of the entries appear to have thumbnails. I looked into this and it appears that this is because the native mod uploader does not support thumbnails.
Nonetheless, by using a workaround, last night I became probably the first person to ever have a thumbnail for my RoN mod on the Steam Workshop. Here’s how I did it.
Continue reading “How to Add a Thumbnail to a RoN Mod on the Steam Workshop”
This is an important update, but I’ll try to keep it relatively short.
Back in April of this year, Nick — who I helped with a gaming PC back in 2014 — was looking for a new system to get him a step up in performance. His old system was going to be given away / sold, so simply upgrading that was not in the cards.
The new system was to have essentially the same purpose and priorities as his existing system. The budget wasn’t particularly strict as long as it was under 2K and performance needs were met, but I obviously also didn’t want to just burn his money. Some people like to spend right up to the allocated machine’s budget, whereas others just set an amount as the maximum and leave the specifics up to me. Nick is the latter.
For me, a history of building systems began before I’d ever technically “built a system”.
Note: despite being published in 2019, this was actually written primarily in 2017. I had wanted to release it alongside part 1, which unfortunately got caught in “people not responding to questions” limbo.
Continue reading “Systems I’ve Helped Build – Part 0: Introduction”
In June of 2018, my dad expressed interest in a parts list for a new computer, and I obliged. For the next 12 months 17 months2 he continued to express that interest on and off, and so multiple times during that time period I diligently updated the parts list based on the current market.
With Black Friday / Cyber Monday deals wrapping up, it’s now plausible that the year will end and the system will still not be assembled, so I’m locking the current parts list in place as a demonstration of a build at this price point with roughly these priorities.
Continue reading “♫ Despite 12 months of parts lists, the PC was not built ♫ (Nov/Dec 2019)”