Flu, Holidays, taxes and suffering from mental illness!!!

Well Hello interweb and I trust that the ether in which you exist is treating you better than my ether has been treating me.
I have experienced a mixed bag since last we spoke and most of it a grey shade of shite.
The good, in fact the best news is that I finally got the holiday booked, not at quite the price I wanted to pay and I am now bereft of a few organs to help pay for it but I really cannot wait to be out of this shitty weather and not have to deal with imbeciles on a daily basis.
Even if it is for only a couple of weeks it may be enough time to prevent me going totally loco.
And so it is off to the Maldives once more, Summer Island to be precise.
Summer Island was the place we first visited in the Maldives back in 2005 a few months after the Boxing day tsunami. It was a very tired looking place but the people who worked there more than made up for it.
I fell in love with the place and have been back on no fewer than 7 occasions since and this upcoming trip will make trip number 8.
This particular private island has been totally renovated and is looking pretty swish to be fair.

The other major bonus is that I have saved enough Emirates Skywards points to upgrade to Business Class. Result. I may post a few pics from the island whilst there if I can be arsed but to be honest a bit of snorkeling, sailing and night fishing and a few treatments in the spa is about all I am going to be getting up to.

The thing I am most concerned about is that I shift this damned flu that has hit me for the last 5 days, it is awful and I am not usually one to whinge too much about things like cold and flu but this is a real nasty fucker.
So bad I was curled up next to the radiator at 4AM Saturday morning to keep warm like a dog I actually called the out of hours doctors when I could stop my fingers shivering. I managed to drive in to see them and they confirmed it was viral and the fever of 38.9 could be brought down with ibuprofen.
Did I want a script? No thank you I can buy them for 30 pence a box from the supermarket so no I don't want to pay £8.20 for them thank you.
Granted they did bring the fever down but the coughing and rest of the snot and aching limbs is still there and just to add insult to the whole experience on my way home from the hospital the police pulled me over.
Apparently what did I expect when driving around through the drug capital of Sheffield at 4.30 am in a Black Grand Cherokee with tinted windows that is registered in the S11 (nice area for the most part of the city) area. Pleasant enough young coppers and they literally just waved me along and wished me good luck with my cold.
In the good news camp my tax return is filled in filed sent and the tax I owe has been paid, yaaaaaay. And you have no idea how smug that makes me feel. (this coming from a man who at one point in his life owed HMRC £75000) 
So as you can see interweb life has been a mixed bag of late and I have only managed to consume about 3 bottles of wine in 5 days. Maybe that's why I have the shakes and it is nothing to do with the flu?????
In other news I have not really even felt like gaming much to be honest and so haven't but did revisit Modern Warfare 3 to play what in my opinion is one of the best levels ever "mind the gap". Made for a great MP map as well.
Well I have one shift at the hospital to complete Wednesday evening if I am recovered enough and then a couple of weeks in paradise which to be honest cannot come soon enough.

And so we come to the part of my blog post where I try to impart some sort of wisdom or wise ass comment but I am really struggling today interweb so I will leave you with this thought,
 The thing people have yet to learn is nobody gives you power. You just take it, and dealing with some of the people I have to deal with on a daily basis my own theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted and suffering from a mental illness.

Peace out yall, THE BAGSTAXXX

GT Omega Racing Chair review and dropping balls!!!

Hello again interweb, I was somewhat surprised today to briefly see a small amount of blue sky, I had to pinch myself to make sure that it was real. The weather has recently here in Blighty been a pale shade of shite for weeks now with about a 3rd of the country under water.
Viper still hasn't decided where we are going on holiday yet and we are only a few weeks from departure.
Anyway yesterday I took delivery of a rather heavy box containing my new office / games room chair.
It is a GT Omega racing chair and weighing in at £169.00 plus postage is not the cheapest chair on the market but here are a few of my thoughts on the chair.
First off its bloody heavy and getting the box up the stairs to the games room was a bit of a struggle due to my glass back.
The reason I bought it in the first place is due to having had 3 operations on my spine already and probably needing a 4th. My previous gaming chair had no lumbar support and was getting quite painful to sit in.
Anyway after getting the damn box up the apples I opened it up.

Straight away the chair had a touch and feel of solid quality. Removing all the contents of the box and laying them out before assembly gave me a reassuring feeling that this was a quality product.
After a quick read through the destructions assembly began. I had read a few reviews which said that it required 2 people to assemble the chair but I began anyway.
The bolts that fasten the base to the back are already inserted into the chair back and so a quick unscrew with the supplied allen key had these out and the back was quickly and solidly attached to the base.

The bolts are solid and the fitting is spot on, fastening them up to almost tight all the way around and then finally nipping them all up tight I find works best making alignment that bit easier.

Ok so that was the base to back bit completed with no problems at all. I left the covers to after full assembly but you could attach them at this point, Simply use the M6 bolts to attach the uprights and remove the screws from the base and use them to attach the bottom covers.
Next we need to attach the mechanism to the base of the chair and this is where I am sure many people have ended up scratching their heads and swearing a little before realising that the instruction that are included are totally wrong.

The bolts are already fastened into the base and so need to be removed. Then the mechanism needs to be placed on the base and fastened to it. The destructions tell you to make sure that the handle is on the right side and the image shows the handle sticking out on the right side.
If I had done this then the adjustment under the seat would have been behind the seat and this makes no sense at all.

So I trusted my instincts and put it on the way I thought it should go with the adjustment thingy to the front of the seat and the handle sticking out on the left.
I am not sure if the destructions mean the handle is to stick out on the right when upright or not but the image shows it sticking out whilst inverted so just be aware if you buy one and assemble it yourself.
The next stage is the bit that I guess is easier done with 2 people but as I am a stubborn old bastard I decided to make a cuppa and then do it on my own.
It only took a couple of attempts before the seat was fastened to the base and the chair was installed into the games room / office.
You can as an optional extra buy locking castors but as mine is resting on a rug I did not think they would be needed and I was right, the chair moves around fine when I want ti to and stays still when needed.
Time from opening the box to finally sitting in it was 60 minutes including a coffee break.

The pillow and lumbar support are great, especially for my glass back and the chair kind of makes you sit correctly. You can fully recline the back and pretty much lay flat out and I could easily fall asleep in this chair it really is that comfortable. The height is also adjustable
It feels solid and is without doubt the most sturdy piece of furniture that I have ever put together.
Whilst not the cheapest chair on the market I do feel that for the amount of time I spend sat in it it is well worth the price.
In other news I was perusing twitter as is my want on occasions when I saw that Tmartn the youtuber had tweeted that he had a super hoarse voice.

No need to go to the doctor tmart, your balls have dropped. Now we wont have to listen to his squeaky voice anymore. His video's may actually be watchable with the volume on.
Anyway interweb that's probably enough from me today so I will leave you with this thought,
I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability,

Peace out Yall, THE BAGSTAXXX

Netduma R1 settings and Happy New Year :)

Well Happy New Year interweb, Och ma heed I think is the expression. Ouch, I drank far to much expensive champagne last night but was also asked if I would post up some screen shots and details of the settings I use on my Netduma R1 and so it is with this request that I find myself hungover and sat in front of my PC in the games room.
All of what I am about to put down below is what works for me with the R1, everyone's set up and connections are different and so what works for me may not work for others.
There are a few other factors which I will discuss after I have put down my settings. I would also say at this point that I have owned an R1 since February last year and so have been through a couple of upgrades and a lot of tweaking (not twerking, Jesus, bagsta twerking now there is an image). I have also run many tests to see if things like throttling works.
Most of the games that I have these settings for are for Call of Duty and have been tried on Black ops 2, Advanced Warfare, Black Ops 3 and even Call of Duty 4 Modern warfare the one true and best Call of Duty ever made.
So here we go,
I have British Telecom fibre to the cabinet internet piped into my home to an Open Reach modem.
This then connects directly to my R1 router and no other router is included.
My router is placed at least 2 feet away from any other electrical device. (This is important as my cordless telephone kept interfering with the R1 and making it reboot)
Out of the router comes a cat6 cable into a Power plug Which then distributes the interweb all over my home network.
This gives me with everything on the R1 set to 100% around 30 MB download and 6 MB Upload with a base ping of 11MS.

It may be worth checking your speeds with your ISP router before setting up the R1.
OK so now we are connected to the interweb we need to set this bad boy up so that it consistently puts us into low ping lobbies. It can be a little daunting at first but the Netduma forum is full of people who can and will help if you ask in a polite manner. However here is what works for me.

On the Congestion control page under the Anti flood you can input your bandwidth settings. We got these figures earlier mine were 30 down and 6 up. Here I input 28 down and 5 up. I do this because it leaves a little excess just in case.
Download and upload caps for me are both at 70%.
This works for me but I will add that many people swear by lowering the upload to something like 10% so that the upload runs at around 300k-500k, I have tried it and it makes no consistent difference to me but the amount of people who do this means that there may some mileage in it for you to try despite it defying all the laws of physics.

Next we have the distribution flower, at the moment there is a minor bug in the software which renders this part of the process much easier to set,  Simply make everything have the same prioritisation by clicking reset and make sure that share excess is ticked.

Under Miscellaneous settings Untick things like IPV6 etc, the image above shows what I have mine set to and scroll down the page and make sure that bleeding edge and auto cloud are ticked.

Now to the Host filtering page and the Geo filter. This for me is the backbone and most brilliant thing about this router. It allows ME to decide what distance I am happy connecting to a host with or what ping I am happy to connect with.

First off make sure that under your device the filter is saying disable. This means that it is enabled as if you click on it it will "Disable" it. So many people don't get this and for the life of me I cannot understand why.
I set my filter to cover the UK and Northern France with ping assist set to 30 MS and on Black ops 3 I will usually be put onto the dedicated server on the South Coast of the UK.
If it puts me into lobbies in the Netherlands I will lower my ping assist or tighten up the filter as that server plays garbage for me.
Many people in the States say that the Seattle server is really bad so they avoid that one.
If you only want to connect to a certain ping you can put your home in the ocean and put your filter to as low as it will go and input the ping you want to connect to. However remember that it will not connect you to a game with a lower ping than you can actually get.
Also remember and this is VERY important, any changes you make will take 2 minutes to come into effect. This is a built in anti cheat feature. I know I know it's unbelievable to think that people might cheat at Call of Duty.

For the most part these settings work well for me and playing Team Death Match for the most part I will go positive. Before the R1 my KDR on TDM struggled to be positive. Here is a screen shot from a couple of days ago.

A few other factors to take into account, when playing game modes like Domination on Black Ops 3 I have never seen so many corner camping flag camping little shits massaging their precious KDR in any Call of Duty I have ever played. With this in mind you may have to alter your play style to how the lobby is playing.
You will also need to be very honest with yourself. I am as guilty as the next man of screaming "GODDAMN LAG" at the screen when I am killed when in reality I simply was not on target. I have seen players upload video footage claiming that they were getting horrendous lag but when you watch the video they are simply not actually on target.
After months of testing and tweaking playing with the Geo filter on and off I can say that there is a marked difference overall in favour of using the Netduma R1.
I am not affiliated with them in any way and the above are simply a few settings of what I use on a daily basis to connect to hosts with low ping which is after all, all the R1 really claims to do. It will not turn you into a gaming god by plugging it in, It WILL help you get into lobbies with low ping to host and help sort out any congestion on your local network which will help level the playing field and give you a better gaming experience.
It is not plug and play and can be a little frustrating when first setting things up but as I said before, pop along to the forum and there is a lot of really cool helpful people willing to help if you are polite.
Its also worth remembering that the developers of games are also responsible for quite a lot of any remaining WTF moments in your gaming.
Also remember that the R1 cannot affect who else the game lets into the lobby you are in and this can have a negative affect on a game but go shout at the developers of the games for that one.
And as a final thought, A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete idiots!!!

Peace out Y'all. THE BAGSTAXXX