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Jumping Ship or Why I am Ditching the Surface Pro After Five Years

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After 5 years of using the Surface Pro, I’m going back to the iPad.

Back in 2010, I bought the first iPad when it first released. While it can’t really replace a laptop computer,  it was good for web browsing, writing short documents, reading eBooks and PDFs, and gaming. Also, these new tablets last longer since they used ARM processors opposed to Intel or AMD processors found in laptops. Furthermore, they were optimized for touch compared to desktop operating systems. This gives a better experience compared to trying to touch traditional user interface elements found on Windows or Mac OS X.
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Goodbye Nvidia, Hello AMD Radeon

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It’s official. I have went over to the red team for video cards. It doesn’t come at a surprise given Nvidia’s anti-competitive behavior with the whole Geforce Partner Program fiasco, which they ended up killing after massive opposition. Aside from dealing with terrible Nvidia Web Drivers on macOS High Sierra and overall glitches with my eGPU with a Geforce GTX 980 Ti, it was the last straw. I eventually sold my EVGA Geforce GTX 1070 Hybrid  and got back 86% (excluding shipping costs) I originally paid for it back in early June.

Given that Apple have a strong bias for AMD Radeon graphics cards since they don’t seem to like Nvidia either, I had to go to the Red team. However, it’s going to be expensive because of those stupid Cryptominers buying up all the AMD Radeon GPUs to mine fake digital currency that probably doesn’t worth anything. Thankfully, I managed to get these two cards pictured above close or below MSRP thanks to Crypto crashing. They are:

  • MSI Amor Radeon RX 580 8GB – Bought this in mid April 2018 for $280, which this particular model originally retailed for $240. It’s an impulse buy since I didn’t want to deal with the Nvidia Web Driver issues anymore. It was apparently used for mining for Ethereum for at least 3 months, before the person realized they will never make the money back. It’s his loss. I simply re-flashed the original BIOS and it worked nicely on macOS and plays all the games I usually play well. There is one problem. Trying to use any application that uses Apple H264 encoder like Final Cut Pro X would lock up the machine since it relies on the iGPU, which the Intel X99 platform doesn’t have. Since the hardware encoder on the RX 580 isn’t compatible, it just causes issues for those programs. So, it’s back to the drawing board.
  • PowerColor AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 – It’s a known fact that Vega cards are a laughing-stock of the gaming community due to its disappointing performance to watt compared to Nvidia’s offerings. The RX Vega 56 almost takes as much energy as a Nvidia Maxwell Geforce card only producing slightly above GTX 1070 performance. However, those darn miners bought up all the cards, making them insanely expensive (over $700) when it supposed to retail for $399 (currently, it goes for $500). Thankfully, I got mine for $385 and it was only used for mining for only a few weeks apparently. Given how clean the card is and that the BIOS is not modified, it’s believable.

So how is it like to go to the Red Team? The Vega 56 works flawlessly on my computer as H264 hardware accelerated encoding and decoding works flawlessly. Video exports a lot quicker on the Vega 56 opposed to the RX 580. As for gaming performance, it pretty much matches the GTX 1070 or slightly better. I haven’t fully benchmarked the card in 3DMark, but it’s definitely fast. However, I notice the card’s fans runs a bit louder, thanks to the reference cooler.

As for the RX 580, I only needed to upgrade to the latest macOS and run the script to make it work with Thunderbolt 1. For the most part, it works better than the 980 Ti as the computer no longer freezes up after several hours along with other glitches. This should be enough to keep my non-retina MacBook Pro 2012 15 inch running a bit longer until I can afford a new MacBook Pro.

In short, is it worth it to ditch Nvidia? Definitely given how nasty Nvidia’s business practices have been lately. Hopefully AMD will build a more competitive card with Navi that can actually compete so Nvidia can’t abuse their large market share.

Plans to Create a Mascot Character

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Back in January 2017, I planned on creating a Mascot character which will serve as my blog’s (Chikorita157’s Anime Blog) main identity and replace all those header images. Of course, the idea didn’t go anywhere since I do not have the funding for it. A year later and some crypto mining on the side later, I think I have some funds saved up to make this happen.

Recently, I created the concept character design in Custom Maid 3D2 since the expansive character customization can at least give me the an idea for an initial character design. The final character design will look similar as in the face, hair and figure, but her outfit will differ in the final design. I plan to use some reference material for the outfit. It can be outfits worn by other characters as a reference for the final design.

Aside from that, I have to vectorize the initial 2D Anime-style design before sharing them, so there aren’t any pictures yet. However, I spent the time to write the initial character profile, which I will share.

If you have any ideas, feel free to share them in the comments or on Twitter.

Name: Hanamori Rie  (花守 理恵)

Birthday: May 14

Age: 18

Background:

Hanamori Rie is a cat girl who comes from the Kansai region. She is born from a middle-class family. Both of her parents work in technology and have degrees in Computer Science. Rie is currently a freshman college student majoring in Information Technology. She doesn’t have many friends since she is shy, except a few, mostly with other girls around her age. She loves using her MacBook Pro. On her free time, she plays video games on Playstation 4 and the Nintendo Switch.

Rie spends most of her time on her computer writing on her blog, messing around with computers, playing musical instruments and gardening. She is usually seen wearing cute clothing with a lot of frills, including Gothic Lolita fashion.

Hair Color: Dark Blue

Eye Color: Blue

Weight: 46 kg (101 lbs)

Height: 149 cm (4 ft, 11in)

Three Sizes: 87 cm, 59cm, 80cm

Personality

Hobbies:

  • Gardening
  • Playing Musical Instruments
  • Computers and Programming
  • Video games
  • Watching anime and reading manga, especially magical girl and yuri genre

Skills:

  • Ability to speak and understand Japanese and some English
  • Coding in several programing languages
  • Playing Piano and the Clarinet

Favorite Food: Onigiri

Favorite Things:

  • Japanese Pop Music, including idol music
  • Apple computers and iPhones
  • Yuri in general

Dislikes:

OMake: Märchen Mädchen Production Woes

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Kyouko walked into Rie’s bedroom. She saw Rie crying in front of the computer. It appears that she watched episode 9 of Märchen Mädchen on Crunchyroll. She is a big fan of this show since she likes the characters and magical girl shows in general.

Kyouko: What is the matter Rie?

Rie: The animation in the ninth episode of Märchen Mädchen looks so terrible that it made me cry. Poor Hazuki-chan.

Kyouko: Let me see. It can’t be that bad.

Several minutes later…

Kyouko: What is wrong with Hazuki’s eyes?

Rie: I don’t know!

Few minutes later…

Rie: That is like the worst animated scene I have ever seen in anime since I last saw Ore, Twintails ni Narimasu.

Kyouko: Oh my! That looks terrible.

Rie: I know! It’s sad because I really enjoy this show.

I hope you enjoy this screen cap story. I always do an April Fools prank, but I can’t seem to think of one this year. After messing around with the photo mode of a game involving maids, and of course allows people to create female characters from anime.

If you haven’t read my editorial regarding the production issues with Märchen Mädchen, it’s on my main blog. I have to admit that I enjoy the story, but it’s sad to see the animation fall apart. Hazuki does not deserve this mistreatment.

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The Continuing Comment Woes

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Since 2016, I have been struggling in getting more comments on my main blog at chikorita157.com. My main blog focuses primarily on Anime. Sure, I overreacted in April 2013 when I complained about the lack of comments. I basically cried wolf since 2013 is a very good year for comments with 637 made in total. The problem didn’t become worse until 2016 . Last year, only 299 comments were made, which made me become very frustrated. After all, discussion is what makes a blog a blog. Not only that, allows me to potentially come up with new ideas for posts. This is probably one of the reasons I didn’t write many editorials last year.

After 2015, things took a turn for the worse. It’s understandable that anime blogging is not what it used to be as many of the blogs. Looking through my blog roll, most of the blogs are in fact inactive or no longer exist. Given that this month have been a terrible month with only 11 comments, one of the lowest amount of comments per month aside from June 2017, which only have 8, it upsets me. Seeing the lack of comments in my stats is very demoralizing, especially when I compare myself with other blogs who receive more comments per post. This also doesn’t help with my real life issues that I am still dealing with aside from the lack of social interaction over the past year and a half.  This gives me a sense of feeling that nobody is really reading my content and that I am wasting my time. Believe me, I enjoy sharing my thoughts about anime, but not when there is no comments or discussion.

Something needs to be done to prevent myself from experiencing burnout eventually if this trend doesn’t change. I want to discourage likes and encourage more commenting. Of course, that won’t work since you can’t disable likes on the WordPress.com reader. Subscribers can still leave likes even if likes are disabled in Jetpack. Even commenting on other posts on other blogs, nowadays, not many leave comments back as they used to. I am left with just being lucky just to receive a few comments per months. This is not helpful with my well-being since it gets somewhat lonely besides talking with my family.

You can help resolve my frustrations at least commenting on some of my posts that you find interesting. The current goal is to have at least 25-30 comments per month (including replies I will make on the blog). If you have a blog, I may comment back, if I can leave a constructive one and not for the sake of doing it.

In short, I do not enjoy complaining about this issue. I hope things will get better from here.

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3DS Capture Card Get

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Some home-brew is not quite a great way to capture since NTR capturing is buggy and doesn’t support DS /virtual console capture. Also, there is now a risk that Nintendo can ban your consoles if you use certain home-brew.

Since I got a Vita capture card from Katsukity and still works after hours of streaming Atelier Firis and some of Blue Reflection, I decided to buy a 3DS one since I have some money I can use. I decided to buy a used one from Japan, which cost about $309 in total using Amazon.co.jp and Tenso. It comes will all the accessories and the serial key to se the program. This significantly cost less than the ones sold new, which will cost $450. Loopy does not currently sell any and if there is any, it will cost over $600.

I plan to streaming Ultra Sun and Moon when it comes out in a few weeks. A full review on the card will come in December.

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Passing of My Grandmother – A Short Reflection

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The past three months have been somewhat rough. Although things are going well at work, excluding social networking and blogging woes, it’s obvious that I have an actual life. The past weeks was rather tough since my grandmother has passed away yesterday at 91 years old from an untreated sepsis.

While I got to visit her two times before things took a turn for the worse, my younger sister had it rough since she and my parents visited her almost every day until the end. Still, it’s rather sad to lose her considering that she took care of me and my younger sister when we were younger and she gave out some money when she was healthier.

From this, this definitely bought out the worst of my relatives or rather my uncles and aunts given that all of them except my mother and one uncle decided not to treat her from a vote. If they decided to treat her, there is a possibly of her living a bit longer, which is something that she wanted. The worst part is that other family members didn’t get a say in the matter, which is why some are angry at their decision.

Understandably, while it’s unfortunate that it has to end this way, there is a life lesion to be learned. One should appreciate their parents and not take advantage of them since they worked hard to raise you. One should eventually return the favor. Thankfully, I am grateful to have support from my coworkers, friends, my younger sister and parents to get through this sad situation and I hope my grandmother will rest in peace.

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Vita Recording Setup Relives

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During the Fall, my HDMI to Component converter has kicked the bucket just under a year. With that, I couldn’t record any Vita footage with my current setup. I thought about upgrading to a Game Capture HD, but it will pretty much render my HD PVR collecting dust forever. Not only that, the HD PVR 2 does not work with EyeTV, meaning that my next possible option is to get a HDFury Gamer 2 cables so that I can continue using my setup. Sure, it’s pricy at $159 (I paid $151 for mine), but it allows me to maintain my setup along with being able to capture Playstation 4 footage when I get one after Idolmaster 3 releases.

At one point, I will eventually get a Vita with a Capture card, which is still $413 plus 40 dollar shipping since I want to cover a few games that you cannot play on the Vita TV. Since I am covering games that are compatible with the Vita TV at the moment, I am holding off so I can make a few more upgrades to my Mac Pro 2006 used for gaming and recording footage with 2 Intel Xeon X5365 3.0 Quad Core Processors and a nVidia Geforce GTX 970 (will be selling the 950 to offset the costs since I won’t need it anymore. While it will use slightly more power, it will beat the Mac mini 2014 by a mile, at least for multi-core and graphics performance.

With that, time to work on the Yoru no Nai Kuni review, sooner than later since I’m half way done with the game.

Finally HTTPS

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See the green padlock? The traffic is now encrypted.

I have planned on switching to HTTPS for various reasons not because Google now gives a small boost for sites that implement HTTPS, which implements encryption. These days, people are worried about privacy and HTTPS fixes this by encrypting HTTP traffic with a SSL certificate. This insures that traffic is not being snooped by hackers.

While it’s not necessary to implement HTTPS to WordPress blogs, but it gives some benefit such as increased ranking, enabling Google Chrome notifications (since that requires SSL) and improving the security. Encrypting traffic gives a slight performance penalty, but it’s small given how powerful server processors are.

To get SSL, you can get it three ways: buying an SSL certificate (which is around $7-9 for a single domain and $30 for three domains at Namecheap), using Cloudflare or use Let’s Encrypt. I had to get a multi-domain certificate since separate certificates were not working with my site. If you just run one site on your server, this won’t be a problem.

For a VPS setup, you simply need to create another vHost pointing to port 443 and add the following to your vhost configuration (example uses Let’s Encrypt):
SSLEngine on
SSLCertificateFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/yourdomain.tld/cert.pem
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/yourdomain.tld/privkey.pem
SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/yourdomain.tld/fullchain.pem

And that’s it. After you have your HTTPS up and running, change your blog URL in Settings > General and add HTTPS to the blog URL. After that, install the WordPress HTTPS plugin to automatically redirect all the content to use HTTPS so you won’t have mixed content errors.

To maintain your search rankings, you should redirect HTTP to HTTPS automatically. Do this by adding the following to your .htaccess file:
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !^443$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?yourdomain\.tld [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://yourdomain.tld/$1 [R=301,L]

This will allow search engines to direct current search results to HTTPS instead of HTTP and preventing the search engine indexing your content twice, which can reduce your search rankings due to duplicate content. If you did everything right, you should see a padlock or a green padlock on the address bar.

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Mac mini as a Home Server – Final Thoughts

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For awhile now, I have been thinking about getting a Mac mini as a home server since my WD Mycloud isn’t cutting it anymore. Before I moved, I used an old 2007 Dell desktop as a home server, which ran Windows Server 2012 Essentials. While it did the job as it serves as an active domain controller, file server, Bittorrent and other things, I wanted a low power server. With that, I decided on the Mac mini.
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