Spacewocket
It means nothing but it sounds good.

Author: Sardoken

Moving Away From Water Cooling

By Sardoken on

When we first built our PCs, 2 years ago, AIOs were all the rage (as was RGB). Unfortunately, as time passes, water coolers degrade, their performances lower and the pumps become noisy. After checking my usual hardware forums (meaning: PCMR), it appears that more people are moving away from water cooling.

I decided to go for a Noctua NH-D15S. Since we had to change the PCU cooler, I also decided to change all the case fans because, let’s face it, Corsair’s PSUs may be the bests, their fans are horrible. One of mine was vibrating at a high speed and one of Soforah’s RGB fans was flickering for no reason. We also got tired of having so many lights inside of our cases, it easily tires our eyes and induces headaches on longer gaming sessions. So, we went back to our all time favourite brand: Noctua.

It took me 4-5 hours to strip our two cases of all the bloat from our previous builds and install the new cooling equipment. It was the first time that I had to remove thermal paste from a CPU, it was super easy with alcohol wipes.

The result is excellent, the temperature levels are down as well as the noise of the fans, even at higher RPM. This concludes my once in a life time attempt at trying other brands for my PC hardware.

Little tip: when you use Google to search for technical specifications, always set the date of the results to “last year”. I wanted to know if I could use PWM fans with my motherboard and the answers I found were that only DC fans could be used for the chassis. It appears that these answers were outdated and that the latest ASUS motherboards automatically detect the fans and can perfectly handle PWM.

TLDR: Our PCs no longer look like Christmas trees trapped inside of an aquarium. Corsair cooling was bad, Noctua remains the best.

Xmas Holidays: First Week

By Sardoken on

Our home working computers are hidden inside of a wardrobe, the apartment is fully decorated (picture above), the laundry basket is empty and everything is planned to the last detail. But you know how it goes, after 3 days the plan was entirely changed…

We were supposed to watch the second season of The Boys, followed by Truth Seekers. Instead, we’re re-watching one of our favourite TV shows ever: Dark and it is as good as the first time we watched it.

TLDR: We’re on holidays, we don’t follow the plan we had made and we’re having a blast. The best moments are often unplanned.

By the way: it’s my birthday and Soforah is making her infamous vegetarian lasagna for this evening, we’ll just have to pop it in the oven, life is good!

The Craft: Legacy

By Sardoken on

A young girl has a tough time adapting to her new life after moving to her stepdad’s town until she finds out that she’s a witch… Instead of the film being a remake of The Craft (1996), it is a sequel set 20 years after the original.

We both love movies and TV shows involving teenagers with powers (witches, werewolves, vampires,…), so The Craft: Legacy was a hit for our first movie of the holidays. It was fun and entertaining with enough twists to keep us interested until the end.

Of course, it involves a few rituals for witch three occult consultants were hired by the production.

Writer/director Zoe Lister-Jones based much of the film and its characters in her own adolescent experiences. When she was in seventh grade she shaved her head and wore men’s leisure suits, so she was often misgendered. She also moved into her mother’s boyfriend’s house at a young age and had to adapt to living with young men she hadn’t grown up with. (source: IMDB)

Lately, we’ve started a rerun of X-Files on Amazon Prime and we’ve been quiet shocked to see how David Duchovny has turned.

Seriously, what happened? I know that he’s really into fitness lately, did he abuse hormones or is it the natural ageing of the awesome Fox Mulder? After all, not everybody can stay young forever, except Tom Cruise, of course.

My WoW Strings

By Sardoken on

Having to reconfigure addons like Elvui and Arkinventory is a lengthy process through which I’ve gone too many times. That’s why I post these import strings here for safekeeping. If anyone would stumble upon this post (which I doubt since I make zero effort to promote) and have questions about my UI, don’t hesitate to ask, I’d be happy to help 😉

elvuiDownload
detailsDownload
arkinventoryDownload

An Eventful Week-End

By Sardoken on

We’ve built an entire winter village, we’ve received our Homepod Mini, we’ve transferred our characters to another Realm and we’ve even seen Donald Trump, beat that!

Our Winter Village

Since it was impossible to log in World of Warcraft this week-end, mostly because of the impossibly long queues, we decided to cozy up and build our Lego Winter Village while watching Christmas movies. It was amazing and I only wish that there were more buildings available or that they would re-release the holiday train (which I’d buy in a blink).

Apple Homepod Mini

We bought it to replace our Bose Mini speaker. I had no expectations and I was already resolved not to use Siri because I thought that I would feel silly talking alone in my apartment.

First, setting it up was as easy as usual: detected and recognized by all my Apple devices out of the box. The sound quality is amazing, it fills perfectly my living-room without exaggerating the bass like Bose usually does.

What I use the most is Siri. Yes, I know what I said earlier, but operating my music player without having to use anything else than my voice is incredibly useful. I can navigate through my music, set up a timer, check the time or the weather and even add songs to my playlists without having to get up.

Realm Transfer

Draenor is the most populated WoW server in the world. How does that translate in terms of gameplay: horrible lag, impossible queues and a constant feeling that you’re about to be disconnected. What do you get in return? Full cities and people everywhere, very active chats the feeling to be part of a huge community. Is it worth all the negative points? Certainly not!

We’re now less than a week from our winter holidays and I can’t picture myself waiting 2 hours in a queue only to be disconnected after an hour and returned at the back of the queue.

And the problems aren’t only related to the launch of Shadowlands, we’ve been experiencing laggy zones for months, which makes relaxing activities like fishing nerve-wrecking.

When Blizzard announced the free transfers to lower population realms, we moved our guild and all our characters to Stormscale. The cities are still filled with people, the prices at the auction house are decent and the experience is entirely lag-free, even fighting mobs or summoning our mounts feel smoother.

As the transfers were complete, I had to change the names of a few characters, since they were already used on the destination server. My Blood Elf Paladin is now named “Dumar” and I love it, it has a nice crusader ring to it.

We’ve seen Donald Trump

We were building our Lego village while watching Christmas movies, among which: Home Alone 2. As Kevin is alone in New York, he ends up at the Plaza hotel where he asks his way to no one else than Donald Trump.

Donald, you’re everywhere lately!

Two Hours Before Launch

By Sardoken on

We logged in WoW yesterday with no intention to take part in the big Shadowlands launch. We had the time to complete a few dailies/world quests, then the lag made it almost impossible to do anything else than read the chat and feel the excitement.

As we logged out, Orgrimmar was filled like I haven’t seen it in a long time. Thousands of people side by side, waiting for an event to start, this is the kind of moment that makes World of Warcraft so amazing. No other game can give such a fantastic feeling.

All we have to wait now is 10 days before we can finally join the fun.

Last Day Before Shadowlands

By Sardoken on

People are getting ready to enter Shadowlands or, at least, to participate to the huge lag-queue-bug fest that is an expansion launch. But we won’t be there. Woooooot?!

We have almost the entire month of December off and we’d like to start leveling our characters at the beginning of our holidays. So, we’ll resist the temptation, we’ll even lock our experience gain until the 4th of December.

Even if there’s something incredibly exciting to be in the first wave on release date, Sof and I have participated to too many expansion launches to still believe that the experience will be smooth. The game will truly be enjoyable 10 days later. Hopefully, by then, the queues will be smaller, the competition for the quest objectives will be less savage and the lag will be reduced.

Meanwhile, I’ll be fishing in Pandaria or killing rares in Nazjatar…

1BR

By Sardoken on

“Sarah tries to start anew in LA, but her neighbours are not what they seem.” (source: IMDB)

The movie isn’t bad but it’s just not my cup of tea. It’s a bit psychological, but not too much. Things happen, but slowly. I don’t know how I made it until the end without falling asleep and I don’t even know why I don’t feel like trashing the movie in this post.

Maybe that it was a good movie but that it wasn’t really my kind of horror. I’m more of a “teens get murdered in the woods” or “my sister is possessed” kind of guy. 1BR plays on the nerves the frustration, a bit too much for my Saturday evening.

Lego Winter Village

By Sardoken on

I don’t think that anyone would be surprised to learn that we’re Lego fans. We’ve already built a few Lego sets in the past, including the Death Star.

A few weeks ago, we purchased the Elf Club House to add a bit Lego fun to our Christmas decorations. Well, that’s how it started… We now have a pretty nice winter village that’s over the 4000 pieces, we also have Lego tree ornaments and a Lego Christmas wraith!

I’ll post more pictures as we complete the builds.