XBradTC

Which, we’re uploading a video to YouTube, and that takes forever, and sucks up all our bandwidth.

Hope to have that up in about an hour or so.

One of the issues with having blogged for 8 years is, what do I talk about now? I’ve told just about all the funny stories of my time in the service. And I’m not going to tell you all the stupid stuff I did, because I’m not entirely sure the statute of limitations has run out on some of them.

And there is really not a lot of interesting stuff going on here. I lead, by choice, a very quiet, dull life. I had my adventures in my youth. So, unless you want to hear about the email exchange with my sister regarding replacing the magnetic latches on the shutters, there’s not a lot to talk about on the home front.

Oh, alright. Here’s something. I got a new phone. The old phone worked just fine, but years of use and abuse meant the charger receptacle was getting very iffy, and I couldn’t charge the phone reliably. And boy did it need charging. It sucked through battery life like you wouldn’t believe. So, I ponied up and bought a new Samsung S5. I like it, but man, setting up all the apps and accounts is ridiculous. What a pain. Given that I mostly use my phone to read Twitter on smoke breaks… BTW, I’m @XBradTC on Twitter if you want to follow.

The video we’ll be posting shortly is World of Warships. Do you play? Not surprisingly, I’m XBradTC on World of Warships also. And I’m always looking for friends to team up in a division with.

One key aspect of playing in a division is voice comms. WoW doesn’t support voice chat. TeamSpeak does, but it’s expensive. So LT Rusty found a free app, https://discordapp.com/ that supports voice and text chat. The user interface is a little wonky, and takes a bit to figure out, but once you get it working, it’s very simple and handy. In fact, we tend to use it quite often to just chat, as opposed to using it in the game.

World of Warships doesn’t have organic replay support. You can save your games for replays, but you have to actually go into the game folder and add some text. If you have enabled replays, and you want to share them with me, that is fine. Just email me the file. If it’s really good, I might upload it to my YouTube channel.

The other app I use in connection with WoW is XSplit Gamecaster. It is a video capture app that you can use to capture the action. There’s two ways of doing that. You can either record the battle as you fight it, or you can simply open the replay file, and then record that. That’s the method I tend to use. There’s a subscription version that has original video quality with no watermark, but I’m cheap, so I use the free version, and you get the watermark.

It works pretty well with Microsoft Flight Simulator X: Steam Edition as well.

I’ve recently upgraded to a much more powerful laptop, and while I’ve downloaded FSX: SE to it, what I haven’t done is add all the goodies that I use normally to improve the flight sim experience.

My favorite plane is the PMDG 737NGX. The realism, the graphic quality, and the Flight Management System is incredible. I also use a web based flight planning system, called SimBrief.com. My usual home airport is KPSP Palm Springs International Airport. And when planning a flight, I’ll go to FlightAware.com, and look to see who is flying out of KPSP in a 737, where they’re heading, and what their route is. And I’ll just input all that info into SimBrief.com, and it will generate both an FSX flight plan for me, and a PMDG flight plan for the FMC. In addition, I’ll open up my Avilasoft Electronic Flight Bag for flight planning, and tracking. All the while, I’ll listen to LiveATC.net to try to time my flight as closely as possible to the real thing. It’s a lot of work! Of course, since I use FS2Crew to provide me with a copilot, that cuts back on the workload a bit. But the video files for a flight are so huge, I never upload them. It would suck up literally hours of bandwidth.

What else? Really, World of Warships and FSX: SE are the only games I play on the computer. Most of the rest of the time, I’m looking for interesting stuff to share with you, dear reader.