Books, Life and Upgrades.

I have been a bit quiet for a few weeks. Partially because life has been busy and is set to continue like that for a few weeks and partially I have been upgrading my main at home desktop.

My first generation Ryzen 5 was, after a half a decade of use, due an upgrade. Not having followed desktop CPU's that much it is always fun to catch up with what is hot and what is not. Long story short I eventually settled on a Ryzen 7 5700X processor along with a new motherboard and memory. Honestly I got a bit bored and just set an arbitrary constrain of a 65 watt processor - Just to cut down on choice.

It seems like a nice processor and it feels a lot faster than the Ryzen 5 it is replacing. Honestly apart from measuring the memory speed, that appears to be 40Gb a second, I have not done any measurements. I doubt I will unless I get into some serious performance work.

We have a desktop that was hitting about 9 years old. It was really only in operation because of Covid lock downs. My youngest was using it to play Roblox and Minecraft and of course school work. We decided to upgrade that as well. This time we settled on a Ryzen 5600G, we figured the integrated graphics would beat the NVIDIA 730 that it was replacing. It does so we have a very happy child.

I suspect I would have been quite happy upgrading to the 5600G. Particularly if I put myself on a 2 year upgrade cycle moving to the equivalent CPU a couple of generations on.

Books

I recently finished re-reading the first book in the Dragon Lance Series. A revisit to my teenage years. I was not expecting it to be great and to be fair it wasn't. It was however OK and fun to read. Worth the time revisiting and I may continue to gradually re-read the rest of the series. I am not sure I ever finished the series. Sitting quietly on the wood decking, sipping a coffee reading books to pass lunchtime will be something I miss when we go back into the office.

My next book is The Rings of Saturn. An entirely different book full of melancholy and decay or change. I am not sure entirely what to make of it. Certainly it helps to take the edge of any happy mood. I don't want to do a second read of it but I suspect I am missing many of the links the author is making. Heck I am not entirely sure if the walk the person is doing is fiction or fact blended with fiction. I wonder if there is a study guide to go with the book. It is however a very good book. It least the 90 pages I have read of it.

One of my goals is to finish the year with less books in the to read stack than the start of the year. The stack has gained one and lost one. Finishing the next book will put me out in front.

Roblox

I guess I have also finished The Advanced Roblox Coding Book (Heath Haskins). A simple introduction to coding in Roblox. Two of my children are into it so in a go where their interests are approach to parenting I am tagging along for the ride. It was a nice read, aimed at the teen market but still gets you going with Roblox development.

You can use Roblox Studio on Linux via GrapeJuice but I don't recommend it. Even on my newly upgraded system editing scripts would grind to a halt. Weirdly the 3D parts perform just fine. I took an evening to resize the partitions on my disk and install Windows. The editor works much better there. I think it is the first time in a decade my personal Desktop has had a Windows install. It is the practical solution. GrapeJuice uses Wine behind the scenes so I guess there is more work to be done there.

I haven't got very far into actually making something yet but we have certainly had some good conversations about it.

Health

Health wise I partially stalled with improvements. However that seems to have passed and I am starting to get back into it. As a motivational thing I am going to push to loose another 5 pounds as the next goal. Stress levels are fairly low and I have started to run a few miles a few times a week. Nothing like the training I was doing last year but good to be finally building up stamina again.

That I think covers it. Technically I don't feel like I have been up to much but my head is in a good place and I feel like I am making progress.