There is a pleasure in the pathless woods

There’s an oft quoted passage in Lord Byron’s 1812 “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”. Like a lot of things you can read into it what you want πŸ˜‰ Is the narrative poem the melancholy tale of a disillusioned man and his travels? A stanza features in the romantic film “The Bridges of Madison County” when Robert Kincaid dedicates his book to Francesca Johnson:

  There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
  There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
  There is society where none intrudes,
   By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
   I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
  From these our interviews, in which I steal
  From all I may be, or have been before,
  To mingle with the Universe, and feel
 What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.

(Canto 4, Stanza 178)

Ships that Pass

If you ever find yourself enjoying the likes of Brief Encounter and The French Lieutenant’s Woman then you just might like this passage from Henry Longfellow:

“Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing,
Only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness;
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.”

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. The Theologian’s Tale; Elizabeth. Tales of a Wayside Inn. 1863.

 

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The Cobb is the name for the ancient harbour at Lyme Regis which features in the film The French Lieutenant’s Woman. It is here that Charles first encounters Sarah.

 

Arctic Coolers

 

Ok, this isn’t a tech review, just a few words about hands-on experience with a third party VGA cooler. I’ll leave benchmarking to the experts πŸ˜‰

Unfortunately a graphics card fan packed up on us in an overclocked i7 system. It crashed, burned and even produced the dreaded BSOD πŸ™ After determining that overheating wasΒ the problem we decided to go for an Arctic Accelero Twin Turbo 3 to remedy the situation. Β£40 seemed a reasonable amount to gamble on a Β£300 card.

The GPU is sandwiched between the fans and the backside RAM and VRM cooler and installation was pretty straightforward with no glue needed. MX-4 compound is pre-applied. You only have to make cut outs in a protecting film, apply the thermal conducting pads, and screw the lot together. Hardest part was finding the last screw holding on the old cooler-it was under the sticker saying do not remove, removal will invalidate your warranty πŸ˜€

PC ran noticeably cooler and was completely cured of all the overheating problems. In fact I’d go so far as to say it runs better than when new. Quieter too. Sooner or later we always seem to end up with heat related performance issues and so on a recent Haswell build we’ve put a non-stock CPU heatsink on right at the start.

 

Getting back into it

Well it’s been a while but now we’re getting back into it. I think that after getting to grips with web basics we went on a far too long hiatus and now it’s time to pull our fingers out. The whole site needs to be optimised and reworked with more content added on a regular basis.
A little video game development is in order this year too πŸ˜‰

“It doesn’t matter how slow you go as long as you don’t stop”Β (Confucius)

Shadow Man game re-release

w00t! just started to replay this on Steam and lovin’ it. First played it on the Dreamcast and have been hoping for a re-release for years. It’s playing just fine for us and has some bonus content too. More importantly it’s just as enjoyable as the first time round. Original is carefully stored in the attic πŸ™‚

R.J.