Secrets We Keep

Today I finally got around to removing Microsoft's idea of a pretty picture (Clue: not mine.) from the lockscreen, which had reverted to type following The Incident. I set it to Slideshow and chose an old favorite: The Secret World.

In yesterday's post I mentioned how I thought Vanguard was one of those mmorpgs that looks better when you're playing than you'd guess from screenshots. Funcom's neglected gem looks great however you view it.

I was so happy to see some of my old favorites again, I thought I'd slap a few up on the blog just for the hell of it. No particular context or reason, just a good old screenshot post like the old days. It's possible I may have used some of them before, but there are more than twelve hundred in the folder so the odds are good.

Sunset. I love everything about it. The sunlight filtering through the haze, the reflections in the water...

I never tire of the way the light burns through the fog, the mist, the dust. Miasmas, everywhere.

They make everything glow. You could read a newspaper by that moon.  

Though you could always just turn on the lights.

Or maybe light a fire.

Then again, not everyone needs light. Or color.

We all shine, in our own way.

Some of us by day.

Some of us by night. Anyone for tennis?

Yeah, I'm on the night team but don't let that put you off. We're really not that good.

There can be a lot of distractions, y'know?

Some of them big.

Some of them small.

In the end, though, it's nothing we can't handle...

A girl..

Her gun...

And the night.

A Tale Of Two Emus

One survivor of my recent, involuntary desktop cull was the icon for the Vanguard Emulator. Seeing it exposed made me realize it's been a few months since I last checked in to see how things are going. 

Longer still since I visited the forums to read up on what's changed. It's not always obvious just from playing as the detailed and informative State Of The Game post from last October emphasizes:

"While, to the player, the game might seem to be finished, there is a lot of back end work that has not been set up yet. If painting a picture requires one to start with broad strokes and finish with small details - we are still on the broad strokes - but the players see the finished painting."

As one of those players I completely concur. Every time I log in and play for an hour or two I come away with an impression of an almost fully-restored game. My Disciple is Level 13 and he can explore, quest, level , buy new skills, upgrade his gear, harvest, craft, everything you'd expect in the early levels. He can even work the levers of Civic Diplomacy.

Getting on for eight years since the Live game closed down, just to be able to do that much is phenomenal. As someone who tends to enjoy low and mid level gameplay more than endgame activity and who's very comfortable pottering around alone in a seemingly deserted world, I would be more than satisfied if the current iteration was as far as the team were able or willing to go. 

They wouldn't, though:

"...we are not finished, and we will not be finished for some time. We have come so far, but we have a long way to go. Our overall goal is to make the game as it was in its prime, pre-Free To Play Changes."

I couldn't say with any certainty what were the differences between the final subscription version of Vanguard and the first F2P ruleset. As I recall, the game began with a focus on group-play but then there were several, substantial revisions, first making the game easier, then much easier and highly soloable. Later, but well before the sunset, much of the former difficulty was restored and there was a brief focus on endgame raiding before the game went into maintenance mode and previously hard-to-get items like flying mounts were given away to anyone who wanted them.

Where the F2P conversion stands in all that and what kind of cut-off it represents for any given aspect of the game I have no clue. All I know is I found ways to enjoy every era almost equally so wherever the music stops is likely to suit me just fine.

This afternoon, when I logged in, I did what I usually do, namely saddled up and rode out to enjoy the gorgeous scenery. Even now, I find Telon one of the most beautiful virtual worlds I've ever seen. The graphics may be showing their age but, much like Lord of the Rings Online, the deep, fluid, emotional commitment behind the world-building makes the place feel preternaturally real.

By happenstance and good fortune, I ended up following one of my favorite routes in the whole game, along the riverside from Khal to Ahgram. The dry, sunbaked grassland between the two cities shimmers in a heat haze under the merciless blue sky. 

The brittle, yellow grass, taller than a young Raki, ripples in the hot wind coming down from the mountains. Dust cakes the hardened dirt road, where camels stand idle and towers cast welcome shade for the merchants as they pray for rain.

As I cantered across the plains, I found myself wondering whether the recent issues with my PC had somehow improved the graphics. Maybe the drivers I reinstalled? Everything looked even more magical than I remembered. Vanguard has always been a game whose screenshots don't quite do justice to how it feels when you're playing but I think the ones I took today come close.

I didn't do much more than ride the roads, stopping occasionally to kill a skeleton by the ruins of a temple here or a scarab beetle under a tree there. The login message explained there'd been a difficulty pass on mobs to bring them up to the required challenge level so I was curious to see if things felt tougher. So long as I stuck to the mobs I was meant to be killing solo, everything felt fine. 

When I reached the towering walls of Ahgram the sun was almost down. Long shadows darkened the waters in the harbor and the light was almost blue with dusk. It had been a glorious ride. I struggle to think of any mmorpg where I find so much pleasure in simply traveling.

Vanguard is one of the handful of online games I would miss like a friend if it wasn't there any longer so the persistence of the relationship beyond the virtual grave feels little short of miraculous. Another game I'd miss ferociously would be EverQuest II, which is worrisome, given that of all Daybreak's portfolio, EQII is probably the most at risk.

For some years I was concerned by the apparent lack of anything resembling a working emulator for the game. Although it can sometimes seem as if every lost mmorpg can be readily found again in the emulator greyscape, as Wildstar's exiled fans can attest, there's no guarantee.

With that grim thought in mind, I'm exceptionally happy to be able to confirm that today I took the Far Journey once again to disembark at the Outpost of the Overlord, where my latest ratonga necromancer, now a lofty Level 3, is resting after her efforts. It wasn't on any Live server. It happened on the EQ2 Emulator Project.

A companion to the Vanguard Emulator and linked on their website, I've looked at this one before but this is the first time I've been able to download, install and play the game. There are full instructions here, including the necessary links and I had absolutely no issues following them to get the game up and running in short order.

Once I'd made a character I was surprised to find myself watching a narrated slide show laying out the history of Norrath, from the Rallosian invasion to the Shattering. The emulator requires the Altar of Malice client, so I'm guessing this was the introduction you got back then, when you installed the game from scratch. 

I'm not sure whether I ever saw it before. Bits of it seemed vaguely familiar but that could be because I already know the story or because I've seen very similar introductions in other games. 

Whether or not it was really new to me, I watched the whole thing with both interest and pleasure. The illustrations are sumptuous, the voiceover is mellifluous and the whole thing makes for a very good primer on how the world got to be the way it is. 

Whether a genuine first-timer would get as much out of it as a veteran is another matter. I tend to feel having new players sit through long lore cut-scenes before they get to play their characters can be something of an own goal but then I guess it never did Final Fantasy XIV much harm. Compared to that carriage ride, this is barely a bump in the road.

The EQ2 emulator as it is right now, based on the very small fragment I experienced, feels considerably rougher around the edges than the Vanguard emu. Nothing wrong with how it looks or plays, more in the technicalities. 

I ran into several UI glitches in the half hour or so I spent there. None of the icons on the bar at the foot of the screen worked and I couldn't open my inventory with the keyboard shortcut. I suspect I may have glitched something by running ahead of the tutorial prompts and clicking on things before I was told to.

I'm not complaining. It makes me feel safer just knowing the emulator exists, especially since there's also the option to set up your own server. With that, it feels highly unlikely EQII fans will ever end up slumped on the Wildstar bench, out of the game for good.

I have no intention of playing on the EQII emulator regularly. I probably won't even check in on it every few months, like I do with Vanguard. I'm happy playing - and paying for - the Live version. But if that ever goes away...

Dude, Where's My Stuff?

Azuriel mentioned, in a post the other day, he'd been having some issues migrating data from his old PC to the new one he'd just bought. SynCaine dropped by the comments to wonder why, if the data in question happened to be games, Azuriel was even bothering. "Why migrate games?", he asked. "Wouldn’t it be faster to download them off Steam than do whatever it is you are doing with multiple harddrives?"

That really made me think. I haven't bought a new PC (I wish!) but I have had to revisit all of my data following the involuntary renumbering of all my drives. 

The three of them together give me four terabytes of storage, three-quarters of which should, theoretically, have been pristine, seeing that one drive came with the PC and another I bought later. By that reckoning, only one drive should have had legacy data from my previous PC, the one I took out of the old and installed in the new.

That in itself would be confusing enough but in fact I also transferred a bunch of stuff from several old drives because it seemed easier than what I had been doing, namely sticking them into enclosures as using them externally. As a result I ended up with all kinds of data scattered across the three drives, a mess which I only partially cleared up by creating specific folders and copying data across.

It seems like it ought to be simple enough to pile everything into the case then sort it out after but there are several problems with doing it that way. The main one is the discipline and organization required to make a good job of it. Another is the time it takes. The real killer, though, is the tedium.

Here's the thing: I love inventory management so much that the idea of sorting terabytes of data into a coherent, ordered system always feels like it's going to be really good fun. I actively look forward to it, which is how I keep ending up doing it. 

The reality is somewhat different. It is fun to begin with but, like an awful lot of things, the fun stops before you get to the end.

If I'm sorting and tidying physical inventory (As I was this afternoon, when I opened a door in the lean-to we ironically call the conservatory, a door that hadn't been opened for at least a decade and a half, to find the space behind it entirely filled with dessicated driftwood, which I foolishly then began to clear out.) I pretty much have to finish what I've started. You can't really leave a job like that half done. We would literally not have been able to get out of the back door.

Digital tidying is much easier to give up on, unfortunately. When it stops being fun I tend to just bail. Unsurprisingly, with a six-year old computer, that leaves one hell of a lot of loose ends and most of them in a tangle.

It doesn't help that platforms like Steam and Amazon Games are so willing. They're happy to let you make multiple Libraries on different drives, then sew them all together invisibly so you never have to think about what's really stored where. It seems like an ideal solution until you find yourself having to stitch them all back together after some catastrophe tears them all apart.

I've spent a good few hours these last few days doing just that, with limited success. If you haven't tried to find them, you might be surprised where all these companies choose to hide their files. It's not in one, logical place, like it used to be back in the good old days of EverQuest, when I would routinely just open the game folder and find every single related file in there, somewhere.

If you're prepared to dig deep enough you can usually find most things. It can be quite good fun, a kind of digital treasure hunt. Satisfying, too, at least when you find what you're looking for. I was pretty pleased with myself when I finally located the save game files for Secret Files 2: Puritas Cordis and managed to get the new installation to recognize them. I'd have hated to have had to play through thw whole thing again.

Some other missing pieces, though, I still haven't been able to find and sometimes even finding the right files and putting them in the right place doesn't make things work the way they should. Steam, for instance, has a set of protocols for moving files from one installation to another that has to be followed if you want the games to be recognized, let alone playable.

I could do that. It wasn't hard to track down the information and it would just be a question of following the instructions. Sure, it would be fiddly and annoying, but I'm confident it would work but, as SynCaine says, why bother? 

I have an answer. It's one I've been giving, often with a certain degree of smug self-satisfaction, for years. "It's the way I do things". Yeah, not much of an answer, is it?

I have a lot of ways I do things. I don't use menus. I like to have desktop icons for everything. I enjoy locating the icon for the app or game or program or utility or file I want visually. It's an aesthetic choice but it has an element of almost religious fervor to it as well. It always felt like the right way. I almost said the "morally correct" way. 

Only now I'm starting to think that, like an awful lot of other unconsidered practices of mine, it's really just a habit. I learned to do things a certain way a long time ago, when it was either just the way they were done or when there wasn't any other choice. When new ways of doing those things came along I either didn't notice or, if I did, shook my head somewhat condescendingly and said "No thanks, I'll stick with the old way, thanks. If it ain't broke..."

Except I'm starting to think that something doesn't have to be broken to be capable of improvement. I know. Revelatory!

It's also beginning to occur to me that my preferences don't represent much of a coherent aesthetic after all. I embrace minimalism. I turn off almost every option in most utilities I use. I like the cleanest possible appearance in browsers and websites. I actually seek out and install add-ons that suppress functions the designers put in to be helpful just so I can have everything looking as sparse and barebones as possible.

That doesn't sit comfortably with a desktop covered with so many icons I've twice had to reduce their size just to get them to fit on the screen. It's doubly ironic seeing that I take some care to set desktop backrounds that change every ten minutes, pulling pictures at random from files containing hundreds or even thousands of images, and yet I can barely make out what I'm looking at for the forest of thumbnails cluttering up the foreground.

When the glitch forced me to use my old installation of Windows 10 with its six-year old profile, more than three-quarters of all those icons simply vanished. Until I read that comment of SynCaine's I'd been diligently working to put them all back. Now I think I'm going to forget they were ever there.

More than that, instead of trying to find all my Steam and Amazon Games files and somehow teasing them back together, I think I might just delete the whole lot. Clear out the entire package and start again. Just download and install the games as I want to play them and let someone else worry about where to store them when I'm playing something else.

I'd want to be sure I had my screenshot files backed up but the saved games should be in the cloud. And even if they're not, what are the chances I'll ever want to start a completed game from a save, anyway? Have I ever done that in four decades of gaming? I doubt it.

It's not even as though you can play any of these games without an internet connection so the worst that could happen, if I suddenly decided I wanted to play something different, would seem to be a (relatively) short delay to download and install before logging in. I'm always doing that for new games anyway and it's not a problem. 

I'm still mulling it over but the prospect of clearing what would most likely be a terabyte or more of local storage is almost as appealing as the sight of a clean desktop. I've been trying to think of the downsides but I haven't come up with anything yet. If anyone has a good reason why I shouldn't sweep the decks, please don't keep it to yourself.

Otherwise, I think I'm going to do what everyone else probably did long ago: store my stuff in someone else's place.

All Round To Yours Next Time, Okay?

My plan (I had a plan!) this weekend was to post something on Saturday, when I wasn't working, then take a rest on Sunday, when I was. So, naturally, radio silence yesterday and now here I am on Sunday, posting after dark...

For once, I have a kinda halfway decent excuse: on Saturday evening, Mrs Bhagpuss and I watched Eurovision. 

I can't remember the last time we watched it together. It was probably back in the '90s. Even the last time I watched it on my own must have been about a decade ago. I vaguely remember having it on in the background while I was playing some mmorpg or other.

This time we actually sat down together and watched it all the way through. Well, the twenty-five songs, anyway. Then later I watched the final half-hour of the voting in bed, while Mrs Bhagpuss was falling asleep listening to the radio. We are old. 

Not as old as Eurovision, of course, or the Eurovision Song Contest as we called it back then. It was a big thing in my childhood. In those days of limited choices, there were a number of major, annual televisual events that just about everyone watched, whether they were interested in them or not: the F.A. Cup Final, Miss World, the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show...

Of all of them, when I was between the ages of maybe eight and fifteen, Eurovision was probably the one I looked forward to the most. I started off watching it because I got stay up late, then I watched enthusiastically and by my mid-teens I was watching it with a sneer. I still watched it, though.

Later, as a student, I watched it ironically and then in my thirties I watched it nostalgically. By the end of the nineties, when I was pushing forty, I ran out of ways to watch it without feeling enervated by the bloat and the sag and the tedium. 

The timing was perfect. I began playing mmorpgs and all but stopped watching television altogether. For a decade or so I didn't bother to notice who was representing the UK or even who'd won. Thanks to EverQuest, those are my lost years. Eurovision is the least of the omissions.

Coming out of that shadow, I had some peripheral sense that the contest itself had changed. I knew it had always had immense camp credibility but somehow there seemed to be an element of mainstream respectability creeping in as well. 

I also came to understand that the glory days when any British entry would be all but guaranted a top five place, if not an outright win, had receded into the kind of history they teach in schools. Even before I stopped watching, a disturbing poiltical edge had started to creep into the voting. I took it that , while I'd been away, the creep had become a canter then a full-on charge. 

Plus most of our songs were so bland as to be invisible. That probably didn't help.

Last year's effort, which I didn't see or hear but did read about, was the nadir of nadirs. A double null from both the jury and the popular vote. I guess at least it couldn't get any worse.

I didn't watch last year's contest but I had been meaning to, just as I'd been meaning to watch the show for several years. My interest and enthusiasm began to rekindle following wins by the likes of Lordi and Måneskin, not acts that particularly appealed to me but ones that suggested the tenor and tone of the event might just have moved on from the predictable, dull

This year I was on the fence right to the last minute. I might have missed it again had it not been for my recent computer troubles. At about half seven last night I logged in, meaning to get down to writing a post, when a pop-up from Windows asked me if I wanted to update or reschedule. 

Forgetting I was on an old installation of Win10, thanks to the drive swap, I recklessly hit the "Update Now" button, only to realize too late it was going to take a couple of hours or more to catch up with all the updates I'd missed in the last five years.

I still had my laptop next to me from the previous recovery session so I fired that up and watched the first episode of Portlandia on DVD. When that ended I thought about watching another but it was exactly eight o' clock and I thought I remembered that was about the start time of Eurovision. 

I checked. It was. I put it on, then I went to make a coffee. I mentioned to Mrs Bhagpuss what I was doing, and she said she'd just been thinking of watching it as well, so we watched it together. 

It was pretty good, too. It was too long, of course, but then it always was, and the presenters were ninnies, but then they always were. As a spectacle it was hugely improved from what I remember but more importantly so were the songs. 

Okay, there were a few dull spots (Switzerland! Stand up! No, sit down again!) and there wasn't anything I'd be likely to run out and buy or rush to post here, but there were several I'd happily turn up if they came on the radio and a couple that sounded not much different from stuff I listen to from choice. Couldn't have said that a few years ago. As the NME put it, "only gammons still look down on Eurovision".

It helped that our song was strong and our singer even stronger. I don't get partisan about much but I have always had a commitment to the UK in Eurovision. Even when we field a complete embarassment, as we have done all too often, I still can't stop myself from hoping it'll somehow transcend its awfulness and bring the trophy home. 

This time it was easy to cheer Sam Ryder on to his very near victory. He's like a human cartoon. You'd have to be humorless in the extreme not to wish him well. Space Man is a more-than decent pop song and he really sells it. He can sing, which obviously helps, but perhaps more importantly, he's really easy to remember. If you haven't watched the show you may not appreciate just how significant that is.

I watched his performance just like I watched the other two dozen. I thought he had a fair chance but there were some other strong contenders and everyone hates the UK so I wasn't really expecting much. Just not coming last would be an improvement on recent years.

The full Eurovision experience takes about four hours. I like the voting but it can go on for what seems like forever so I took a break and watched an episode of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (Season 2, in which she really is crazy, rather than Season 1, where she's mostly just sad and sweet.) 

When I tuned back in the voting was about halfway through and I was amazed to see the UK right at the top of the poll. It stayed that way to the end of the jury votes. In the old days that would have been it. We'd have won.

Not any more. These days, the final result is some arcane hybrid of national juries and popular telephone votes. I haven't made any attempt to understand how it works and I don't intend to start now. 

However it's calculated, the upshot is chaos. Songs that were languishing in mid-table can suddenly be catupulted into the top five. Leaders can find themselves shunned, sending them sliding back into mediocrity.

The main outcome of the influx of popular sentiment was the result everyone had been expecting: Ukraine got the sympathy vote, the solidarity vote, the protest vote, the moral vote and every other kind of vote. It helped that they also had a very strong song. 

They shot up to the top of the table with what looked like an unassailable lead. It was. Sam Ryder got a solid shout, enough to keep the UK in second place but nowhere near enough to unseat Ukraine, thank god. That would have been excruciating.

No, coming second to Ukraine in this exceptional year is the best possible outcome. Things could not have gone better if there'd been a script. Ukraine get their wholly deserved, highly charged, politically and culturally meaningful win and the UK gets rehabilitated after a decade or more as a Eurovision pariah.

The Eurovision tradition is that the winner hosts the contest in the following year. Let's hope this time next year we'll all be watching Eurovision 2023 live from Ukraine. I'll be there for that.

Patience Is A Virtue. Keep Telling Yourself That.

Here, as promised, or more likely threatened, is the extremely quick and boring post on my progress with EverQuest II's Overseer system It's an update to a post from more than two weeks ago, which I optimistically titled "Good Things Come To Those Who Wait". They do... but be prepared to wait a long time.

I've been diligently doing my Overseer missions in EverQuest II every day without fail, even when I really haven't had time for them. These last couple of days, things have been so close to the wire timewise I haven't even been able to make space for my Guild Wars 2 dailies, the first time that's ever happened, but I still I managed to get my Overseer missions done.

Despite those heroic efforts, it took me the best part of two weeks to get any more Legendary-quality missions. Eventually, a couple of five-hour yellow missions dropped and a couple of days ago, from one of those, I got my first ten-hour Fabled mission. From that I got a couple more Legendaries, so now I have almost enough good ones for a full slate.

It's also allowed me to look at the potential rewards for the standard and bonus chests for the purple missions, which confirmed, as suspected, that the 295 Resolve gear is in there, along with the green, Celestial missions that take, from memory, fifteen hours to complete. 

There are also a bunch of new agents with new traits that fit the new missions, a couple of Visions of Vetrovia mercenaries and a vast quantity of crafting books, potions and other items of less obvious value.

It seems to me that progress is a lot slower this season but I also believe that's an illusion. So much relies on RNG and there are so many possible rewards. Last season I think I had some very lucky rolls early on, while this time it's been the opposite. At the rate I'm going, I won't start to pull the really good stuff until it's just about to be made obsolete by the Panda quests.

Logically, the better rewards come from the higher-quality missions, which are also the longest, with the best of all coming from the bonus chests from Celestial quests. Well, you'd think so. 

During last season, I never really felt I was getting better stuff from Celestials than from Fableds but once again RNG makes it hard to be sure unless you go in and check the exact contents of the chests, which I don't believe I ever did. 

I will this time. When I actually get a Celestial mission, that is. If I ever do. And then I'll come back and report on what I find.

I'm curious, even if I'm the only one!

Thief Of Time

It finally happened! I missed a day! The daily posting streak that lasted more than eight months has come to an end at last. 

It wasn't by choice but I can't say I'm sorry. I don't have an addictive personality but I do hate to break a streak. That's how I gave up drinking without even meaning to.

Posting daily hadn't been any kind of a problem until we got the puppy but these last few weeks have been something of a challenge, as must have been obvious in the quality, or lack thereof, of some of the posts. I wasn't expecting looking after a puppy to bite quite so voraciously into my leisure time. With me only working a couple of days a week there's certainly plenty of it. Even so, it turns out it's quite hard to do anything much with a dog asleep on your lap.

Really, though, it's been gaming that's taken the hit, not blogging. I've dropped from several hours a day to maybe a couple, if I'm lucky.  Most of what I'm doing is dailies and point and click adventures. It doesn't offer an enormous amount of inspiration for posts... although you'd be surprised what I can spin up out of almost nothing. Or, I guess, as a regular reader, you probably wouldn't.

Despite all of that, I was determined to keep the streak going, even though of late I've been cutting it very fine, not starting until eight or nine in the evening. That's what I was doing last night, when Windows 10 piped up to tell me there'd been a calamitous error and it would have to go and lie down in a darkened room for a while.

I was literally halfway through a short and boring post about Overseer in EverQuest II (Which we'll still be getting, so don't start cheering just yet.) when the whole thing shuddered and shook, then disappeared. It's taken me until a couple of hours ago to get things up and running again.

I still have no idea what went wrong but I know what happened afterwards. My PC turned into a time machine and took a trip back to 2016. 

It was very weird. The PC closed down and restarted and when it came back my desktop was completely different. Not only had the screen resolution reverted to something I haven't used for about fifteen years, there were only about a third as many icons and most of those were different, some for things I didn't even recognize.

To cut to the chase, after a some digging around in the debris I discovered all three of my hard drives had swapped letters. The E drive had turned into the D drive and D was now C. 

As it happens, the Drive Formerly Known As D used to be the C drive in a previous PC. I'd added it to the new one a few years back. I had three bays, so why not? I just popped it in as it was and I've been happily using it ever since. 

It never really occured to me that it had a full installation of Windows 10 on it. When the drives swapped names after The Incident, the entire operation switched across on reboot, kicking me out of everything I'd been logged into, removing all my saved logins and passwords and generally making it impossible to do pretty much anything.

Oh, and The Incident, whatever it was, also completely removed all the graphic drivers along with all the Ethernet drivers and a bunch of other stuff as well, some of which I've probably yet to discover. It was not pretty, I'll tell you that much.

It was also late and for once I managed to act like an adult. Instead of either trying to get a post up using my laptop or staying up half the night trying to fix things I just shut the whole lot down and went to bed. As I said at the start, if I'm honest, I was relieved to have a good reason to miss a day's posting.

This morning I spent several hours trying any number of possible fixes with no success at all until just before lunch I finally managed to get the Ethernet adapter working again. It really helped a lot, being able to look things up and download stuff on the PC I was trying to fix rather than having to do it on the laptop or my Kindle Fire.

None of the obvious solutions, like just renaming the drives, changing the boot order or physically swapping them over worked. The C drive refused to change its name, I couldn't even find the boot protocols and the motherboard doesn't care which slot the C drive is in. 

Reinstalling Windows didn't work because I couldn't make a boot disk thanks to the laptop and an older PC I happen to have lying around refusing point-blank to believe I have admin rights, even though it literally says right there on the screen that I do. Several other bright ideas turned out to be dim. I was starting to get annoyed.

What turned the tide was finding the original installation DVD for the motherboard and using it to reinstall every driver and then physically removing the graphics card and re-seating it in the other PCI slot. Even after the drivers were all installed, for some reason it was only moving the graphics card that got me back online. I have no idea why.

After that I decided to accept the new normal and just give the old/new C drive permanent status. Not that I had much choice. It took me the rest of the afternoon to copy all of the necessary files to recreate something as close as possible to my old profile in both Windows and Firefox. 

It involved a lot of security checks and verification codes, most of which got sent to devices that either I no longer use or own. Even the ones I do use seemed to be having problems of their own. I really need to get all of that sorted out. It's a perpetual nuisance. 

It was not a fun time but as I type this I'm pleased to say things are near enough back to where they were twenty-four hours ago. The only concern is that I still have absolutely no clue what original failure was about so it could very easily happen again at any time.

The upside is that everything now seems to work a lot faster. It had been bogging down horribly for quite a while and I'd been thinking of doing something about it. Now I can forget it again!

As for the blog, I am going to take this opportunity to stop posting daily. Or rather to stop feeling I have to post daily. If I have things to post, I'll post them but I'll probably go back to my old pattern of mostly not posting on work days. 

Of course, there are only two work days in my work week so that still leaves plenty of time! No-one's safe just yet!

The Magic Touch

Today I heard some sad news. Apple is about to discontinue the iPod. According to the report on Pitchfork, the iPod Touch will remain available in the Apple Store and via authorised retailers until current stocks are exhausted and then that will be it.

I bought my iPod Touch twelve years ago and it's still working perfectly. Until Covid put a stop to my regular commute (Mrs Bhagpuss started driving me to and from work during the pandemic so as to avoid travelling on public transport and we've stayed with that since.) I listened to podcasts or music on the Touch several days a week.

Even though there are many more obvious ways to listen to music these days, until this year I'd been in the habit of ripping new CDs to the iPod and listening to them that way. It's only in the last few months I finally decided to stop, mostly because the 32GB drive was so full I had to choose something to delete every time I wanted to add a new purchase.

The iPod Touch wasn't my first MP3 player. That was a Creative Zen Nano I bought in 2006. It had an amazing 512Mb of storage and an am/fm radio. I used it a lot and was very happy with it until I filled it up, which as you can imagine didn't take long. 

The Touch wasn't even my first MP4 player. That was a Sony Walkman with 4GB storage and a two-inch screen. I downloaded videos to it and watched them in my lunchbreak. I watched the whole of the first series of The Trip with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon on that matchbox-sized screen and it was perfectly fine.

Good though those players were, it was the iPod Touch that really sold me on the whole mini-computer in your pocket deal. It had a wifi connection and you could watch YouTube and browse the internet. I even used my Touch on holiday to find and book hotel rooms on the fly.

You could play mmorpgs on it, too. I still have Celtic Heroes installed, a game I played and wrote about back at the dawn of the blog. 

The operating software on my ancient device has long been superceded by newer versions of iOS and it's been something of a struggle to get iTunes and my iPod to play nicely together for a while but we muddle along. I could have replaced it long ago, of course, either with an iPhone or a newer model but why spend the money when it still does everything I need? It still works better than most other tablets and devices I've had.

I've never been a fan of Apple. I don't like iOS or iTunes and I find the reputation for user-friendliness of both quite laughable. Nevertheless, I am a huge fan of the iPod Touch. It's always done just what I wanted and it's never let me down. The twelve-year old battery still holds enough charge for a couple of days and I can find things on it without wanting to throw it across the room.

I guess I could jump before I'm pushed and buy one of the remaining newest models before they disappear for good. On the evidence of the one I have, a replacement could well outlive me.

They're viciously expensive, though, and as I said I've finally reached the point where I don't use mine as much as I did. It's past the point where buying another would make any sense. I'll probably just let the one I have drift on until it stops, much like I plan to do.

To commemorate the passing of an icon, I thought I'd use the function I treasured back in the days of the commute: the iPod Shuffle. I'm going to shuffle and post the first five songs that come up that I can also find on YouTube. I promise not to edit for coolness or to prevent embarrassment. If I was willing to put them on I ought to be willing to show them off. 

Here goes...

Never Say Never - That Dog 

Oh, wow! That's so cool! I didn't even know that was on there. I don't own any albums by That Dog but I went through a phase of converting all the music videos I downloaded from YouTube into MP3s and uploading those to the iPod. Didn't we have it a while back? I should have put that in the rules - no repeats of tracks I've used on the blog before. I didn't, so tough. No-one's going to remember anyway. I don't, even.

Let's roll the dice again...

Some Kinda Love  - The Velvet Underground (Version 2 - The Matrix Tapes)... and it's not on YouTube. Version 4 is but not 2, for some reason. 

Try again...

Ghosts - Motel Raphael

Geez! I forgot that even existed! I barely remember hearing it the first time. I have absolutely no idea who they are (Turns out they're from Montreal) and as far as I recall that's the only thing of theirs I ever heard. Their Bandcamp is still active but the newest thing on there is a couple of years old. I used to like to listen to a lot of stuff that sounded like this. Still do, if I'm in the mood.

Okay, come in number three...

My Alibi (Piano Version) - Lloyd Cole

I guess the law of averages was with Lloyd. I have a bunch of his albums on here, after all. This is from the outtakes and demos collection, self-deprecatingly named Cleaning Out The Ashtrays and once again I'd forgotten all about it. My Alibi is one of my favorite later Lloyd Cole tunes but I wouldn't say this is my favorite version. More of a curio, really, although I do like the weird, otherworldly coda. Here's the original by way of comparison.

Two more...

Suicide Club - The Modernettes

I have a suspicion these guys are Canadian, too... yep, Vancouver, formed in 1980... I bought a double CD of theirs after watching a bunch of their stuff on YouTube but I don't think I've ever listened to it all the way through. I'm not sure you'd get away with a line like "Down at the Suicide Club/That's where the girls are" nowadays.

Last cast... here's hoping it's a good one...

run - pennybirdrabbit

Aahhhhhhhhhhh! <Screams with joy!> Oh, come on!, That's a result, right? Another great song I totally don't remember and with a great video I don't remember either. This is exactly why I love my iPod Touch so much and why no other device I own really hits the spot. Have you ever tried to get a PC  to shuffle the contents of a folder? I have and it wasn't pretty.

God Bless the iPod Touch! May it never truly die.