Last night was a rather tiring night.  Or rather, I think it was the day’s work in the body.  Both my eldest and I were pretty exhausted, so the errands we needed to run were somewhat interesting.

One of them included getting some fish for our new tank.  I had some fish when I was younger, and I find the sight/sound of an aquarium rather peaceful.  It also teaches kids some level of responsibility, without having to worry about massive cost overruns.  So, cats and dogs, out of the picture.  My youngest ended up picking some Show Guppies.  They are surprisingly small to start but they sure do look neat.

After setting them up in the tank, my wife realized that the filter wasn’t working properly.  The fish were shaking, and scared.  That is a weird thing to see in such a small thing.  So I spent 30 minutes figuring out what was wrong, and it turns out there was a bit of sand in the impeller.  Fixed that and the fish were super happy, swimming all over the place.  We’ll wait a few weeks, maybe a month, then see if we can pick up some more.

Interesting side note here.  I use google for nearly everything, and I’m slowly teaching my wife how to use it as well.  I had asked her to find instructions to remove the impeller and though she was looking, she really didn’t have any luck.  About 5 minutes on my search and I found it.  It’s an interesting notion that while google is a powerful tool, there still is a significant learning curve to really make the most out of it.

Healthy Gaming

August is a good month and a bad month.  I am Canadian, and there’s a law here where you have to drink beer during the summer.  It’s a little known law, but the fine is having to drink beer.  The month of August therefore has a lot of beer and that doesn’t really jive well with belt sizes.

While I do have a workout plan, some nights it’s quite hard to get going or finding the time, especially after a long day and you just want to relax.  I’ve had an exercise bike for nearly 15 years now, and I’ve thought for some time about converting it to allow some PC gaming.  Console gaming I’ve done on the bike for a long time, but a mouse and keyboard can get tricky.

I did a bit of research and had a pretty solid idea of what I wanted.  A table like structure, where I could put either a laptop or keyboard, slightly larger on the right for a mouse.  There are a surprising number of options out there, depending on your set up.  I rummaged through my supplies at home and found a tread and riser (the step and backplate from stairs) from a previous reno that I could use.  Only to hook it on the bike, which has handles at an odd angle, and make it removable.   I found some bicycle tire hooks that did the job – they look like big J hooks, that you can screw in.

Long story short, I was able to put it all together in about 10 minutes.  I played some D3 for a while, finding the right spot for good reception for my wireless keyboard and mouse.  You don’t even realize you’re exercising, which is really the best part.  And it’s set up in such a way that my wife can use it easily too, so win-win.

Diablo 3

Patch 2.3 brought in Kunai’s Cube, which is a sort of gambling machine that requires various components to work, depending on what you want to get out of it.  The main ingredient is Death’s Breath though, and you need 10-25 per pull.  These things only drop from rare and above monsters, only 1 at a time, and at varying percentages based on difficulty.  I’d get maybe 10 per rift run or so.  Suffice to say, it’s the new bottleneck.

Luckily, I have a lot of odd pieces of gear on me and I could create a setup on my monk that uses the Sage’s Set, which increased the Death’s Breath drops by 1.  A bit more tinkering is required, but I should be able to do T4 without any big hiccups, which should provide me with 25-50 drops per run.

Kunai’s Cube is certainly a neat mechanic, and the ability to passively slot legendary affixes is really opening up gameplay to some interesting combinations.  I’d say it’s more than doubled the amount of gearing options available, and should make GR runs hit the 90s before the season is up.  That would be something.