Brad’s 20 First World Problems: March 2016

Published on Thursday, March 10, 2016 By Brad Wardell In Personal Computing

 

In no particular order:

  1. GoGo Inflight is unreasonably slow at this stage. I’m writing this from the plane and it’s about the same speed it has been since the start which is to say, it has fallen relatively behind in usability. I’m not trying to watch a video or anything, just browsing web.
  2. Apple’s usability has declined since the death of Steve Jobs. The more I use the iPhone 6 the more convinced I am that he would never have approved this design. The off button being on the side is really annoying for a variety of reasons. 
  3. While I love my Surface Pro 4, it is not always easy to recommend it due to the amount of tweaking it takes to make it work right. It’s most a series of poor choices in the defaults and some tuning issues with SkyLake.
  4. I’ve been playing the MOO beta.  It’s still in early access so it’s not fair to judge it.  But I will be curious to see how those who poo-poo’d GalCiv III treat MOO.
  5. I can’t believe how little I care about the 2016 election. There is just no winning. Frankly, all of the candidates are awful.  Trump is ghastly. Hillary is a monster. Bernie has clearly never worked a real job. Cruz is probably an actual psychopath and Rubio looks like a deer in the headlights.
  6. I’ve decided I don’t like getting old.
  7. People getting obsessed with their particular piece of computer hardware astounds me.  They’d probably consider me a hardware whore then. I swap out NVIDIA and AMD cards in my machines daily. 
  8. My current go-to card is an NVIDIA 980. Why? because there’s no AMD card I can find with 3 freaking display ports on it. All my 390s have DVI. Seriously, what high end gamer is using DVI still? DVI needs to die.
  9. On my recent media tour, every game site I visited relied on a VGA connector (not even DVI).  It’s 2016, it’s at least use HDMI.
  10. Why is it taking so long for Display Port 1.3 parts to come out? 4K monitors are wonderful. Everyone should get one – as soon as Display Port 1.3 comes out.  Look for that.
  11. I recently got a Dell 5k monitor. It is absolutely amazing.  Windows 10 actually works fine on it.  High DPI on Windows is viable.
  12. I ran through my games to see who handled 5K well.  Civ V needs a UI update.  GalCiv II’s UI scales but it tries to stretch horizontally which looks ridiculous. Sorcerer King is perfect – detects display, uses Super high DPI UI all automatically. Sins of a Solar Empire is unplayable. Ashes of the Singularity works great but you currently have to manually increase the UI scaling which is annoying (hopefully fixed by release). GalCiv III works great but it needs an even larger UI option.  Supreme Commander FA actually did ok. 
  13. All the traveling I’ve done lately has made me miss my family to crushing level.
  14. I now use an ad blocker. Why? Because too many sites have ads that suck down all my battery. I don’t mind the ads, but ads that use 30% of my CPU on a Skylake processor isn’t acceptable. Fix your problem and I’ll turn off my ad blocker. And yes, I have turned off Flash.
  15. I was never cut out to be a manager. I’m just too mean. It’s a weird thing. I really like people. I’m an extrovert. But as a manager I have terrible people skills. I apologize to anyone who has to deal with me. I know how hard it is, I have to deal with me 24/7.
  16. I recently discovered I have Aphantasia. That is, I can’t picture things in my mind. This has always been the case, it’s just that I assumed everyone was like this. When I discovered this, I was skeptical that other people could actually conjure up a vision of an apple or a person in their mind. “You’re suggesting you hallucinate on demand?” I scoffed.  Apparently, I’m the freak.
  17. I’m ready for a 10 core CPU, Intel.  I swear, given how much Ashes of the Singularity does to push the hardware, the game should ship with every high resolution monitor, 6 core or more CPU, video card, etc. 
  18. I am spending more and more time on Reddit and less and less time on Twitter.  I feel like I have to walk on egg shells on Twitter now or their SJW gestapo will obliterate my account.  That’s being overly dramatic. But I’ve been pretty disgusted seeing people who spent years siccing their dogs on isolated people onlne now in involved in “stopping online harassment.”
  19. I’m surprised at how primitive Siri remains.  I would have expected to be able to ask her “What time is my flight today” and for her to know.  Google Now not only reminded me of my flight but told me how long it would take to get to the airport due to an accident on the freeway. 
  20. I’m pretty excited about Vulkan (new graphics API) but it seems like people should be giving MS more kudos.  DIrectX 12 is actually pretty damn impressive.

 

I feel…cleansed.

 

And the plane has landed.