Back in December 2022, I bought myself a Laptop in the hopes that I would be able to take it anywhere and keep working or playing. The idea mostly worked, with the massive downside that I forgot entirely about which vendor made the Laptop: ASUS. ASUS, like MSI, is one of those that will silently push Malware, Spyware and Bloatware as a required Windows update, often hiding it as a new driver.

Welcome to 2023 everyone! Hopefully it will not be a repeat of 2020/1/2, that triplet wasn't a great year to exist.

In the far far future of 2022 crypto-currency has taken the world by storm. People are enamored with its potential, especially the blockchain, and try to integrate it into every aspect of their life. Friends and family are indoctrinated into the crypto-currency world until they too start bringing more people into it. Everything can be bought, whether it is legal or illegal, moral or amoral, helps or harms - nothing controls crypto-currency. You could almost call it a cult, a pyramid scheme or even an MLM. Unfortunately, this is not the far far future, this is the present.

Almost three years have passed since I did my original full hardware encoder showdown, and the field has changed drastically since then. NVIDIA brought out the Turing and Ampere architecture, AMD finally designed a useful GPU architecture, and even Intel is entering the market now. Finally no longer a Red vs Green battle, but a Red vs Green vs Blue - the full RGB experience! But also due to that, my data is now well beyond outdated, and its time to refresh.

All the way back in December 2020, I decided it was time to try out how far AV1 had progressed. At the time, SVT AV1 was the only encoder that produced reasonable results with near realtime performance, however that has changed now. A lot of work went into AOM AV1, and it is now capable of encoding in the “frames per second” realm instead of “frames per minute”. So why not take another look at things?

For a few weeks now I’ve taken a step back from the public eye, for various reasons. The main one is that I simply need some more time to myself, time to enjoy life a bit more than I used to. I’m barreling straight towards my 30s, and haven’t even experienced half of what I could have at this age, despite having the means to do so. So in the near, and perhaps far future, I will put a lot more focus on enjoying life.

I didn’t mind the addition of Pocket because I didn’t use it. I didn’t mind the addition of Hello, as I didn’t use it. I didn’t mind the removal of the original themeing ability, which was far superior to what we have now. Didn’t even really care about the removal of Flash either. What I do mind is when you ignore user feedback, push out a release, break every existing theme and make things look incredibly stupid, then continue to ignore user feedback.

Site was offline for ~2 days for maintenance, as I was moving the entire infrastructure to the new Server, which is located somewhere in the frosty north, and has plenty of hardware to handle the things I throw at it. For those on IPv6, the site should already be 100% online again, while for those on IPv4-only, it may take a day or so to update. During the move/maintenance I learned a couple things:

I wanted to upgrade my streaming setup slightly, and while watching other streamers, I noticed that some have added a "Now Playing" overlay. For the most part it's either embedded in a static overlay as text, or just free floating text. But that isn't enough for me.