Saturday, March 24, 2018

A Skyrim question for those in the know...or willing to test this


I was talking to another Skyrim player today, who asked if I had ever resurrected/re-animated a dragon.

No, I couldn't even imagine how such might be possible...right? You kill it, you take its soul immediately, no oppo to resurrect.

No, he says, there's a gap between the death and the soul capture where you might resurrect it. If your spell (and I guess your appropriate magic skill) is high enough, you can, he says.

I have not tried this? Any matching experience on this?

You do reach a point where you get to summon a dragon (Durnhevir or something like that). I haven't found it that useful.

Monday, March 12, 2018

Upgrading from XBOX ONE to XBOX ONE X


For unexpected reasons, I got to buy a new Xbox One X this month...i.e., it basically cost me nothing. Otherwise I probably would not have.

So Microsoft wised up re XBOX ONE the past few years, with several things:

1) you can finally attach an external disk and install games onto it, so that you aren't space-limited to the internal drive it came with that cannot be upgraded. So there's also disk-management tools in the XBOX OS now, to format, transfer, and delete games. Yay! I did not know this, but it was a long time coming, given that the One had 3 USB ports.

2) somewhere 2-3 years ago the finally released a 360 emulator, so that you could continue to play your 360 games. Well, some of them, anyway...after saying for some time that there would never even be such an emulator, all of a sudden there was. Yay! Fallout 3/FNV come back. Oblivion does not.

3) with the release of the One X, now there's built-in help for new owners to be able to upgrade from old box to new one. This would be me.

Unfortunately, it's not as smooth as it should be.

It should not take an Advanced Degree to figure this out. But it almost did...

But you have a bunch of things you need to do.

1) Update the entirety of the Xbox One. If you're me, this could be a problem--it requires a real no-data-cap internet service, which is not what I have. So I didn't even BUY the X until I could time it with a visit to mom's house where she DOES have such a thing. It still took several hours. First I updated the OS on the One, then all the games that wanted it. (Mom's internet speed is decent but not extra fast.)

1A) Make sure that while you are online at this point, that you launch every game that has saves, so that all those saves are synchronized to the Xbox cloud. If you don't, those saves are going away.

2) You copy the "personal profile" (aka login & prefs) from the One, onto an external hard drive. This takes maybe a minute or so total, incl power up/down. There's a size minimum on external drives, so you can't do this with a thumb drive (which is stupid, since your profile is tiny).

3) Attach that external to the One X. Start the One X. It will copy your profile from the external disk. There will be some login monkeying around, some prompting about little things, but you will quickly have a profile on a new, but empty, machine.

4) You need to have the One X update itself. This turned out to only be 800 MegaBytes for me, so reasonably fast.

5) OK, not a step, per se, but it was nearly 10 pm by this point, so time to go home.

6) Next day--power up the One. You have to find where you can tell it "allow game transfer" in Settings. The reason you want to do this is that you want to copy all the games from the One to the X, over ethernet. This should be fastest. You have to be online to do this. You could also pop that external disk back on the One, copy all the games to the external, move that external to the X, and transfer them off the external; I didn't try this. 

7) Power up the X. Also online. Go to Settings/Network something, where it will say "Transfer", and let you see the One. Clock on the One icon, and you will get the list of games that can be transferred. Click all you want, then Go.

8) Wait until done. My two machines ran that at about 300 megabits/second the entire time, but it did still take a while, because we are talking about 275 megabytes. I guess I thought the Xbox ethernet would be gigabit like every other machine I have, but maybe not.

9) Power down the One. Unplug it completely.

10) Restart the X. Somewhere along here it is going to ask you about changing your home machine to the new one. This will log you out of the One, which is fine, because I'm going to wipe it and sell it anyway.

11) Try things out. Every single one you transferred. Because some of this won't go properly. Be online for this, so that it recovers all those game saves you did in step 1A.

12) I lost my game saves for FNV. Granted, that's a 360 game, I've no idea how those work internally. But my FNV saves are gone. The game does start up ok. But there are zero saves. I don't know if the Dishonored 1/2 saves are there or not, but not important: if I touch that again, it will be to start over. Grow Up seemed ok. Just need Skyrim and Fallout 4 to work. Wolfensteins aren't here yet. Diablo 3 looked ok--did I test if far enough?

13) Oh crud. Fallout 4 wants to do ANOTHER UPDATE, 17 GB this time. Ouch. I can't do that. Skyrim wants to do a 7 GB update; small enough that I let that go, but it does mean data will be a little tight the rest of the month. F4 is not getting that update yet.

14) Try out other games. Mostly that worked, I didn't try everything, but you need to, to be sure that all online sync gets done ok.

15) Bad discovery: my Skyrim game saves won't load. Apparently they are not portable, somehow. I can see them, incl the little screen-capture for each one, but if I choose one, it starts to load, then the screen goes black and stays there. If I press the "Home" button, I get a seg-fault crash that is so hard that the machine powers down--and I don't see any of it: screen stays black until the power light goes off. Wow. This equals a loss of, um, how many hours was it? "a lot" comes to mind.

Update: that crash is so hard that the controller won't restart the device. You have to hand-push the power switch on the front of the X.

16) Tried "New Game" in Skyrim. That works fine, but I really didn't want to be throwing away the old character. No idea what is going on.

17) I wonder if the Fallout 4 saves are broken too...I'd be ok with starting over there

18) Try loading Oblivion. The box says "Xbox One and 360" but no, it won't even allow the attempt. Power up the One--same deal. Not going to be doing that...I was willing to keep the One around for Oblivion, but no need.

19) Fire up the One and wipe it clean (well, except for the two Assassin's Creed games that came with it).

20) EBay. 

Whew. Harder than it should have been.

Upgrading a Mac is simpler than this. You do it entirely over the wire--just did it last week. Coupla mouse clicks and that's it.

This is probably the first time MS has actually done this, really. I don't know what Windows 10 does for changes/upgrades...I recall it being nothing for Win 7, when you are changing machines.

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Update: I have just gotten actually high-speed internet at work yesterday morning.

So I did all the updates on X 1 X. All good. Forgot about checking the F4 game saves, will do that tomorrow.

Because it was the HS stuff finally, I went to the Xbox store and bought Oblivion. Was reading about it the day before, apparently it's gotten a fresh re-release with some kind of "Enhanced for X1X" activity. It's not new 4K textures, but it's something in that direction. I tested it on a 4K tv, and by golly it looks better than HD. Very impressive. Just couldn't install from the DVD.

Oblivion is of course still a 360 game, but there it is...4K. Yeah! The key things to remember is to boost sneak before leaving the training area, and do a custom character class so that the major skills are the ones you are going to use the most.

Thursday, March 08, 2018

How to get your sounds into High Sierra for custom use

I have had a custom "new mail" sound for years and years.

A new machine arrived recently...well, ok, new to me. I have a 2011 IMac 27 inch. Same screen as I had at old job 5 yrs ago. Very nice. Very inexpensive, $650. Has High Sierra already.

So can I use my custom sound(s)? No, apparently not. Or not anything like the same way. Used to be that you could start Mail, go to Prefs, click the little menu for New Message Sound, there would be the standard list, and also a choice to add something to the list. So I had used that "add something" previously.

High Sierra: No such animal.

Finding the correctly explained solution was harder than it should have been, but the solution itself is pretty easy.

You have to have a sound file. It has to be ".aiff format". A tool like Audacity (free) will do the conversion for you, where ITunes will not. (Did it used to? Could swear that was once a possibility...)

You have to move that file into ~/Library/Sounds.

You can do this via Finder, with "Go To Folder" (aka "command-shift-G"), and enter ~/Library/.

You will then see the list of everything in Library. This folder used to be visible for you all the time, now it is not. This is Apple locking down things so you don't shoot yourself in the foot.

Find the Sounds folder, double click on it. Now drag your .aiff sound file in there.

Quit and restart Mail. Open Prefs. Click on the New Message Sound menu. Viola! Your sound is at the bottom of the list. Hooray!

I think this same approach is true for Sierra, and probably going backwards a while, altho previously you could also use the "add something" choice.

So I now have my new-mail sound back working again. And maybe I'll do some others now too.

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Ringtones are a different beast, but a similar process.