Here’s a peculiar thing that I noticed, the number of world active cases has dropped slightly. There are now 26,077,453 active cases world wide, and 2,321,990 total deceased. Is this a trend reversal on a worldwide scale? Nothing really to report in Australia. 9 active cases in NSW that are not overseas acquired. And 1 active case in Victoria that’s not overseas acquired – probably the hotel guard.
Shutting the borders and all the uncertainty the government is causing is taking it’s toll on the economy. Since we can’t get backpackers in anymore. Dan Murphy (Yes he was called that on TV!) has been trying to get prisoners to pick fruit cause the locals won’t do it, however the fruit growers won’t have any of that. Otherwise he thinks he can bring in some pacific islanders in through Tasmania (of all places) cause he won’t allow them to quarantine on site at the fruit farms. I’m expecting to see fruit prices increase if we don’t solve this soon, and there’s longer terms implications of food security. Remember the important things that make a country viable into the future is it’s ability to produce food without outside assistance. It’s ability to produce energy (think electricity and petrol), which we are lacking. And I think you’re thinking petrol is so not “green energy”, however we use it for everything in society. Our crude oil products come from Singapore cause we don’t produce it here. Its ability to defend itself, which we are also lacking without outside help.
Also we have lost the Rip Curl Pro competition to NSW because we can’t make decisions fast enough.
This photo says a lot of the times we live in
Finance and Economics
I enjoyed the following talks:
- The talk with Godfrey Bloom – former UK politician. Gives you a different view on the lock downs. He is like an angry man who seems to make a lot of sense.
- Patrick O’Shaughnessy chats with Chamath Palihapitiya on the major problems facing the world.
The SEC is scanning reddit to see if there was misinformation intended to manipulate the markets. The people on reddit responded with
I think the old institutions are having trouble dealing with a digital first generation who are accustomed to going on raids together in online games. They just playing THIS game in exactly the same way as they would an online game. They don’t care about losing money cause they didn’t have much money to begin with. There are no leaders, each person contributes their own part and makes their own choice. That is how you co-ordinate in an online game, and this is how the digital first generation co-ordinate. Project management will not have use to a digital first generation. The way they are talking about finance and investing is worth going into. Here’s one of my favourite thread.
Imagine hiring a dozen guys with MBA and PhDs, paying them huge salary only to have the fund down 53% in 1 month. There are only two trading options – LONG or WRONG. And don’t forget it’s all fun and games until the gamestops. The only reason the stock market goes down now is because investors are rotating out of high risk assets like blue chips into meme stocks like GME.
The reality is we’re all being a sold a lie, we are currently funding the boomer generations retirement. When it’s time for the rest of us to retire, there will not be enough pension or retirement money. This is simple demographics problem, there are less young people than old people. 20 years ago, if you were asked the question is $1 million dollars enough to retire, the answer would be “Absolutely”. If you ask the question now in 2021, the answer is probably a “no”, simply because inflation should not be treated as a single CPI number, it’s should be treated as a vector, each item has it’s own rate of inflation. When the news says the economy is recovery because house prices are going up – there is clearly something wrong, a huge disconnect on why is house price asset inflation associated with economic recovery?
The best performing super fund returned 9.9 EOFY 2019, where as US based Pantera Bitcoin fund returns 61% for that same period. Bitcoin is trading at $50,500 AUD or $38,500 USD
I think Tesla is going to be $1,264. The calculation is you take the current share price, add the stimmy, and you get that price target.
Amazon who already pay the minimum wage is urging the federal gov to force that on it’s smaller competitors to put them out of business. And let’s just call it for what it is, Bezo quit as CEO because Elon Musk overtook him as richest man in the world.
Other Stuff
Don’t buy any negative ion products, its actually radioactive and gives you cancer.
Places to eat at if traveling between places in Australia. More fancy than the meat pie I had at a road train stop on the way to Coober Pedy!
US Feds are going to launch a domestic terror war. Sometime when people go on about guns in the US and they fail to understand is that the founding fathers in the US made it ok for individual citizen to bear arms in case the government goes rogue the people can defend themselves and storm the capital as they have done.
Indian Farmers are not leaving from their protest until the government backs down.
Here’s a size comparison of all the fictional space ships!
Tech
Let’s talk PC. I’m not going to dumb down the next section, as it’s mostly to geek out with fellow tech people, so feel free to skip ahead.
The new desktop has been named “Dark Singularity”, for my curiosity of black holes. Here’s some photos of the build process
The parts list with commentary – a lot of thought went into each part.
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X – Released late last year, really hard to find in stock AND at non-inflated price. Ended up having it shipped from the US from Newegg as it was the cheapest way to get it. Sold out a few mins after I placed order.
Mobo: ASUS ROG STRIX X570-E – Bit pricey but it gave all the features I wanted. Which was heaps of USB at the back, ability to connect all the USB ports at the front of case including the USB-C, and utilise the PCI-E Gen 4 for future proofing. This is the only part I picked up in person at a shop!
RAM: Crucial Ballistix 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3600 CL16 Memory – There is an advantage with having 3600 / CL16 as it is the best ram speed to take advantage of the new CPU. Had this shipped over from the UK. It’s also low profile to fit under the huge CPU cooler I have!
GPU: ASUS GeForce RTX 3070 STRIX Gaming OC 8GB – Released late last year, also hard to find in stock and at decent price. Jumped on it, and it was out of stock within hours. Went with NVIDIA to allow ability to run Tensor Flow and other ML stuff. Debated about a RTX 3060 Ti, and a RTX 3080 which is more expensive, but ultimately this works out perfectly. This was shipped over from NSW.
Cooling: Noctua NH-D15 – One of the best heat sink and fan combo. Cools better than a many AIO. But geez it’s huge. It’s pushing right against the video card, that makes it now impossible to remove the video card without removing the CPU cooler first.
SSD: Samsung 970 EVO Plus 1Tb M.2 2280 NVMe – Wanted 1tb, and this seems best bang for bucks in terms of speed and price. Shipped over from the US.
HDD: Couple of mechanical HDD pulled over from old PC.
ODD: LG WH16NS40 Super Multi Blue Internal SATA 16x Blu-ray Disc Rewriter. – This is actually an upgrade from the old DVD drive on my old pc. Why do I still have an optical drive? Because the kids have DVDs. It’s not really required in this day and age, and I had considered ditching it and just having an external optical drive instead. Shipped from the US
Case: Fractal Design Define 7 XL Tempered Glass Dark Tint Black – I normally keep a case for quite a few years, so this is a worthwhile investment. The reasoning for this case was it has ability to put an optical drive, it’s a full tower, and the CPU cooler was going to fit! It’s huge and gives lots of possible future expansions as I like to cram heaps of stuff into my PC. Shipped from NSW
PSU: Corsair RM 850W 80 Plus Gold. – Chosen cause it was not crazy expensive, and it is gold rated. It is also compatible with CableMod cables.
OS: Windows 10 Pro – Pretty standard, this was what I was running on the old pc. You can get a license key on Amazon or eBay for 11-30 bux!
Mouse: Logitech G502 wired version – Had this mouse for some time now. Works well, you can adjust the weight inside. Could have probably gone wireless but I hated having to keep it charged when I use to have wireless.
Keyboard: Logitech G915 – This makes typing a joy. It also lights up the all the keys you can use in a game I’ve noticed when playing star wars battlefront II. Refer to previous post about this keyboard.
Case Cooling: 3 x Corsair LL120, 1 x Corsair LL140. – Went with RGB fans for the pretty looks, since the case has a huge window. Provides a bit of that wow factor. I’ve also move all 3 of the 140 fans that came with the Fractal case to the front of the case, but they are really not that great. Would maybe replace them with the Arctic fans in the future, but not really on the priority list.
Fan Control: Corsair Commander Pro – This is what is controlling all the RBG and the corsair fan. I found it on sale at a huge discount is the only really I have this. But it does make all the lights sync up.
I have some CableMod cables coming to clean up some of the black cabling. It is not really necessary but decided to do it as there’s advantage to have the GPU supplied by two independent cables rather than 1 table with a pigtail that I currently have from the PSU.
Things that went wrong.
-After putting everything together, pressing the power button, I got nothing on screen and the motherboard was coming with a DRAM error. CRAP i thought. But I was expecting this to happen, it’s an easy fix – turn on the laptop downloaded the latest BIOS onto USB stick, put it in the back and press the button.
-Pressing the button did nothing, I had to trawl through the manual on how the button works, and you have to press for 3 seconds, this will then update the BIOS on the motherboard to be able to accept the new generation of Ryzen Zen 3 CPU. Note – do not turn on power or unplug until update is finished.
-CPU-Z was giving me the incorrect speed and timing of my RAM and I couldn’t work out why. So I went back into the BIOS changed I only set the Frequency to 3600, and CAS# Latency to 16, which resulted in no POST (PC doesn’t turn on), which then required a BIOS reset but using a screwdriver to short two of the pins on the motherboard to boot again. So what I discovered is that RAM store the recommended settings profile as a Intel XMP (eXtreme memory profile), which on an AMD Asus motherboard is called DOCP (direct over clock profile), and setting the BIOS to use th DOCP fixed that issue.
-I’m using the Corsair iCue software to control all the RGB, and that doesn’t control the light on the motherboard, not sure there’s a way around that. The light on the motherboard just lights green to indicate temperature, which is fine I guess.
-The default multi colour rainbow profile for the GPU is only found when you start up the ASUS Armoury Crate and delink it from the syncing, which also means you need to set it each time if you want it as when you start up the PC, the iCUE software will take over again and link it to the current lighting profile. Bit annoying, I’m a little fond of the rainbow unicorn look.
-The cabling on the back side is a bit of a mess with all the fan and RGB cables., I will fix that up when the cablemod cables arrive.
Tips for a people thinking of building a PC.
-Currently COVID times, and things are in short supply, it took close to 2 months to find all the parts I wanted in stock and have it delivered. Plan ahead and be prepared to jump onto store websites to snipe parts off when they come into stock.
-You don’t need to pay the price gouge set by some stores, you just need to be patient.
-You can find windows 10 pro license key on Amazon or 11 bux, saving you at least 200 bux.
-It requires research to make sure the parts play nicely together. The biggest issue would be for me that the RAM needed to be a certain height so that the second fan can fit on the Noctua D15 CPU cooler.
-I used https://au.pcpartpicker.com to configure and find parts and which stores had in stock. I also used https://staticice.com.au/ to find shops with the cheapest price. But if you really want a part, you need to actually go to the store websites and those sites don’t update fast enough. Also you need to consider shipping and trying to get items shipped together as much as possible to save on shipping fees.
Future expansions – nothing really for right now.
-Still thinking about a custom loop water cool. I have the space in the case for it, and have planned it in such a way as to leave that option open.
-Other things I can do is the turn the case into it’s server configuration allow a total of 18 positions to install hard drives.
-I’m also thinking about some SSD in RAID configuration for redundancy.
-I’m also thinking about some HDD in RAID configuration to back up the home NAS.
Of those those looking to dive one day, you don’t actually have to spend tonnes of money. You can find parts to suit your budget. I usually refer to this guide as a starting point on what parts to get. Anyway hope you enjoyed my though process I put into building this PC and the rest of this update.
Here’s some pics I thought were funny. Enjoy your week.
