Emergency Services in America - A series special edition

While I was on primarily on holiday in the US, I used my idle travelling time as a passenger to record some footage and take some pictures of the emergency and security services of the USA. So I bundled it all into one for an Emergency Series in Scotland special edition!

Emergency Services In Scotland - Missed videos

I've made two more episodes of my Emergency Services in Scotland series, one before my holiday and one after. Here they are:

Orion EFT-1 Launch

In our second week in the US, we moved North from Miami to Orlando with the express purpose of getting down to the Kennedy Space Centre for the historic launch of the Orion Experimental Flight Test 1 (EFT-1) atop a Delta IV heavy rocket. We were there from 3am, right the way through to 9:44 am when the launch was wonderfully scrubbed..... Shattered but not defeated, we were back the very next day and got to watch the successful launch during the very first try! Hurrah!

Sadly, the stage commentator only noticed that the TV screens were well over a minute out, not the 10 seconds out they had believed, and so we missed out on doing a countdown. In fact, I was one of the few people where we were standing that actually managed to get a video of the launch - everyone else missed it! So my video of the launch is posted below.

The viewing site was built for the space shuttle launching 3 miles away, so the launch of the Orion was over 8 miles away! This means that the footage is not great. Also, at that distance, the rocket was out of sight into the clouds by the time you could hear it, over a minute after lift-off! Note that I included a panorama of the morning, just before the launch; lift-off is at ~25 seconds in.

Driving a Ferrari F430 at Homestead-Miami Speedway

While on holiday, I had the pleasure of driving a Ferrari F430 around the road course layout of the Homestead-Miami Speedway. I was originally supposed to be driving a Ferrari Challenge GT, but it blew it's clutch about 15 minutes before I got in it. So they gave me the Ferrari F430 instead, with an extra lap added on - and just as well!!! The whole experience was all over very quickly, but what an experience it was! I got to fend off a Porsche for a few corners too! (We'll just ignore my little incursion onto the grass on the outlap)

The video of my experience is below. If you're near Miami and interested in a racing experience of your own, you can check out the Miami Exotic Autos Racing website.

Aviation Videos

Although there are only a few aviation-related videos on my channel, I am a massive fan of flying and simaviation. On my way to and from the US, I was able to record all but one (wasn't at the window) of my flights. So for those who love aviation, here's my videos:

Chrismas Holidays

So I'm not long back from a winter holiday to the US and I finally have some time to catch up on blog articles. I'll be posting several posts catching up on various (and many) YouTube posts from before, during and the few posts I've made after my holiday. This will be a brief switch from game related stuff!

I'll keep this post rather short, but I will be once again switching focus of the blog and the YouTube channel to doing reviews. I quite enjoy doing them and I expect to get more free time to make them after the new year, so you have that to look forward to!

No Progress :(

I've been off racing for a few weeks. I have been a bit dismayed by my lack of progress in races lately. I know exactly what the problem is: I just cannot seem to get the car(s) rotated into the corners. Oh, and I seem to be having some trouble with my brake pedal.

So, addressing my problem, I decided to take a brake from races to improve my driving standards. Sticking exactly to my plan, after 15 mins of practice I joined a race at the Jefferson course of the Summit Point Raceway, in the reverse layout.

As usual, I did not come last by virtue of the fact I never spun out. Although I did almost get taken out by a flying Mazda!!!

iRacing - Flaying Mazda: The Sequel!

So I racing the Production Cars championship at the Jefferson course (reverse) at Summit Point Raceway, minding my own business, doing really badly, when I *just* miss a Mazda flying over from the other side of the track!

In retrospect, I really wish I had save the race replay so I could see that incident in glorious detail, but sadly I didn't. I'll be putting the full race up in the coming days!

Space Engineers - A Tour of the Hiira Class Light Explorer

I've been spending many hours on Space Engineers lately and I thought I'd give a guided tour of my ever ship, the Hiira Class Light Explorer! This was the first ship I ever made in Space Engineers and it's made using completely vanilla content. Take the guided tour below:



The Hiira Class is a ship designed to be taken into survival mode to be used as a starting ship. In survival, you'd normally have to start with some amount of "Platform" on an asteroid, with refineries and such to set you off. I didn't like the idea of turning up and building an epic space station, when you turn up ON part of a space station. I felt it would be a better experience to "arrive" in a ship, as if you'd travelled there.

It's an as-compact-as-I-like vessel in which every major Space Engineers toolkit is provided. However, it has very little armour and only a few weapons, hence it is unlikely to see of Cargo Ships or Meteor Showers (both of which I'd want in survival) and that's where I think the balance comes in. It does also have more limited cargo capacity than I initially thought.

GTA IV - A Winter Emergency

"It's the first day of snow as an earlier than normal winter grips Liberty City.  With the snowfall catching the city off-guard, traffic accidents in the busy Algonquin district have stretched the emergency services to the limit. To try and help, an ambulance carrying a team of A&E doctors is dispatched to the Holland Hospital Centre to help alleviate the pressure." - LC News


Story over: All events in this video are, of course, completely fictional. This was also an attempt to show off my skin for the ambulance, in what was my first ever skin effort for GTA IV. For better pictures of the skin, see my previous post: http://hibblejaybob.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/gta-iv-my-first-ever-skin.html

It's good to get back to making videos! :)

GTA IV - I CAN DRIVE YOU GUYS!!!

So, I finally got back to making videos of GTA IV and, attempting to do a blue light run, I manage what I have done oh so many times in racing, that is to crash in the most stupid manner possible. So there...... FEAR MY RETURN TO GTA!!!!!

GTA IV - My First Ever Skin!

So I've wanted to try skinning for some time in GTA IV, but I've never been sure how to start. I've always been told "Try Google", but I hate that and I'm not a very good googler (I can never find what I need). So some kind people over on the British police Mods group kindly pointed me in the right direction, for which I was immensely grateful. Don't know about the group? Get yourself involved with the BPM youtube page. Once you've subscribed your way over there, try out some mods, and get involved by commenting in the videos and asking how you can get involved with the facebook group.

The skin itself is fictional and I drew influences from the UK Ambulance Services and the Danish Politti (police). It's based around a fictional (but UK-based) society where everything has a militaristic nature (hence the 184th Division). You'll also see this in how I've arranged the police ped skins, that are part of the fictional Liberty City Metropolitan Police. I think I will do more skinning in the not so distant future, but at the moment I do suffer from an unstable game setup, so I can't really enjoy the game or mine or anyone else's mods properly. :(

 I hope y'all like my first ever attempt at reskinning and hopefully there will be more GTA content to come!

Space Engineers- Torpedo Testing with some bite!!!

So a couple of days ago, I posted a video showing my first torpedo test in Space Engineers. In reality, it was just a peculiarly phallic shaped object hitting into a ship at high speed. But now, I've finally worked out a proper detonation mechanism to really give the torpedo some punch - Check out the results below!!!!! (See my previous post for more details about the torpedo)

Space Engineers - Torpedo Testing (First Test)

I've been playing Space Engineers a lot recently, and I've started expanding my designing. With one class completely made, and it's refit underway, as well as the construction of two more classes underway, I got to thinking about large scale offensive capabilities. This video is my first attempt at stringing all the concepts together into a functional system.

I'm not 100% sure if the warheads actually detonated or not, but they were at least destroyed in the collision. More testing will be required to get the detonation mechanism nailed down.

The torpedo itself has generally torpedo-like qualities - why fix what isn't broken! Cylindrical in shape to minimise the forward profile to prevent detection and countermeasures. The red passageway on the top of the torpedo (0:12) is the access hatch to the torpedo interior, which actually turned out to be surprising spacey (I will probably show it off once it's more finalised). The merge block visible on the right hand side is part of the launching mechanism.

This torpedo test was done against the standard Space Engineers "Red Ship".

Getting to grips with Game Stock Car Extreme.......

...... Or at least getting friendly with their tyre barriers anyway!


I've had Game Stock Car 2013 (and with the free update GSC Extreme) for a while and haven't been able to give it much time. I decided to change that and get to grips with the updated vehicles. I went through all the Formulas, from Vee to Extreme, and I made a reel of the crashes from practices and racing for all to see! I've been spending some time putting some mods on, and I've been really enjoying the game as a whole. Hopefully I'll get some free time and you can expect to see some good racing videos in the near future!

Recap - A new venture! - Emergency 4

After seeing several discussions of Emergency 4, and various mods for it, I decided I'd give it a bash. I've not done a proper review yet, nor have a I done any of the campaign missions. There is a freeplay mode in which you have a city that will experience a wide variety of situations that you need to safely respond to. I did a fairly long freeplay mode video which you can watch below. I plan on doing more videos and reviews on Emergency 4 and its mods in the future.

Recap - Emergency Services in Scotland

I've not been out and about all that much lately, but I've been out enough to get a few good clips as part of my Emergency Services in Scotland series. There's clips involving the fire brigade, police, accidents and ambulances! Enjoy the 3 videos below:

Recap - iRacing

I've only done a few races on iRacing since I've been away and I've only put one online. It was a reasonably good race, right up until I smashed my car into the barriers on the last lap! You can see that the clip above, and you can watch the full race below:

Some Time Off

So I've been pretty quiet on here the past month - I've been catching up on work and haven't had time for making videos! However, I'm back and I have some new video making software I'm eager to try out, so I'm going to try to be a little more active here and on YouTube.

So with that in mind, check out the posts to follow (^^^ That way ^^^), were I'll be recapping what you missed from my YouTube posts!

RealVision ENB Review

Mod: RealVision ENB by SkyrimTuner
Link: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/30936/
Game: TES V: Skyrim
Note: The score for this game has been revalued based on my new scoring system. 4/2/15.


So I'm finally back to reviewing some Mods and my mod of the moment is definitely the RealVision ENB by SkyrimTuner. I'm doing a complete playthough of Skyrim again, and I decided to experiment with different ENB's before starting. The RealVision ENB was by far, the best one that I found.

First things first, what is an ENB? The ENB series is a set of graphical modifications for games; using an array of post-processing effects, rather than amendments to the game engines, to get the improved graphics. You can read more about the ENB series, as well as get ENBs for this and other games by following the link in the description. The ENB is a fixed program, but what you download are configuration files made by different users to get different artistic effects. Some focus on trying to be photo-realistic while others make the game seem more fantasy, and so on. As you might imagine, the RealVision ENB focuses on a realistic appearance.

So, what did I think about the RealVision ENB? Everyone who's played Skyrim will have that one vista that made them just stop, look out at the view and just go "wow". But as the game wears on, the scenery can wear a bit thin. Well, the RealVision ENB makes you have "wow" moments at most of the views in the game. I know people will say that Skyrim's scenery looked fine before, and they're right, it does. BUT. The RealVision ENB makes it look absolutely stunning. I did think the notion of the better graphics would wear off, just as the originals did, but after a dozen hours or so of gameplay, I'm still finding these big vistas, different times and weathers, and even little places that just stop me in my tracks. It is that good.

Other than the graphics, what else did I like about it? Well, some ENB's I've seen before have been largely as-is, with little or no documentation. While RealVision ENB does not ship with any documentation, the guide on it's Nexus page is very thorough and I was able to get everything working with ease. Follow the guide properly, and you should have no problems. I also liked how the various options for ENB settings are nicely packaged into little drag and drop folders making them really easy to install, quickly giving you the package you want.

As much as I love this mod, I do have one slight concern: I have a reasonably good gaming rig, but this mod takes my GPU up to 100%. I can run the game and all my mods for it, including the ENB, at over 40 FPS. My worry is that many people will not have gaming setups as I do, and as a result, the frame rate they get might be too low to be enjoyable. That's not to say they can't use the RealVision ENB, but it does mean they will have to change the settings of the ENBs using the various text files that are part of the program. It's not impossible, but I've taken a look through the settings files and I couldn't really make heads or tails of it, although I do admit I've never really looked into what they all do. The summary here is that the mod will be usable by all, but for some people, the installation might not be quite as "drag and drop" as it was for me.

So that little issue aside, I really loved this mod. Starting a new playthough of Skyrim, this ENB was enough to make me completely fall in love with the game all over again! All the videos and pictures in this video are footage taken from my game. I seriously recommend giving it a look and if you are interested, you can follow the link in the descriptions. Hope you enjoyed this review!

Not a rookie anymore!!!

To reaffirm what the title says: I'm not a rookie anymore! After doing my second race at the Jefferson course in the Mazda's, I finally got my D-class licence, opening up a whole load more racing opportunities on the roads!

Getting a 2nd place at Jefferson, this race was also my first ever laps led in iRacing. Still learning and still seeking that first win, hopefully a change of scenery will help! Onwards and upwards.....

My second race at Jefferson is below:

Back to iRacing!

Back to iRacing for the first time in a good few weeks. Did a quick race at the Jefferson Course at Summit Point Raceway. No qualifying, 10 minutes of practice and starting last on the grid: I wasn't expecting much! Much to my surprise then when, after a wonderfully manic first lap, I come out in 3rd place! The video at the top is a commentary of the first lap as well as replays of a funny incident involving a flying Mazda!

The video below is the full race video from my perspective! The first lap is well worth the watch!

New Channel Video

Hello Everyone!

I'm currently revamping my Youtube channel to make it easier for new and old viewers alike, to find their way about the different series I do. I've already posted the details of the new look, and now I've made a channel video to tell new viewers about what I do. Take a look below:


I've got several reviews in the works for the coming months so stay tuned! And don't forget to like and comment on the videos: views are all fine and good, but it's also good to know what the viewers want too!

New Channel Look!

Hi Everyone!

I've not had time to do all that many videos lately, but I have just finished a new look for my Youtube channel! There's a preview below check it out for yourself here! It should hopefully make it easier to navigate the several different series that I do! 

Hope you enjoy!

Day 2 at the Commonwalth Games

A bit belated now, but on Tuesday I went to the shooting events at the 2014 Commonwealth Games, at Barry Buddon, near Carnoustie. It was a great day out and, as a competition shooter myself, it was a great chance to watch the professionals at work, as well was getting to see other events.

After delays caused us to miss the rapid fire pistols, the first event we got to see was the finals of the Men's Trap (clay pigeon shooting). We had a competition among ourselves to try to get a picture of a clay being hit. We all managed to get one! Here's mines below (you can see the puff of pink smoke) :

The first part of the finals were over and it was time for the medals matches, with Australia pitted against England for the gold medal. Australia went on to take the gold medal, and so began a rather windy medal ceremony, with the armed forces marching the flags to be hoisted.

A renown clay pigeon shooter himself, the medals were presented by Sir Jackie Stewart OBE in his famous tartan trousers!

The flags of the medallists: Australia taking the gold, with England taking the silver and India won the bronze medal match to take the bronze medal.

After the trap event, we hurried back to the 50m range for the men's 3 position final. Despite turning up 5 minutes before the event started, there were no seats in the grandstand and then some: the organisers had grossly underestimated the attendance of the finals events. We left the range and watched the event from the TV screen outside. It was a close event, with England's Daniel Rivers taking a phenomenal win. Having been second most of the match, Hammond from Scotland slipped down to 6th during the standing shooting. He was eliminated and Scotland's other entry quickly followed in 5th. Unfortunate!

While we were outside, the fullbore event finished and so began a fullbore tradition! The winner is carried through the crowds high on his chair! I didn't see any of the fullbore, but I saw his scoring card afterwards. It was a great win and another gold medal for England!

Sadly, we were not able to stay for the women's 3P finals, but I was avidly following it in the car journey home and was delighted to hear Jen Macintosh of Team Scotland getting a well deserved silver medal! Another friend of mine was shooting the day before in the men's prone shooting: Ben Kelly, shooting for Isle of Man, finished an impressive 26th out of 40 in his first games, including leading the field at one point in the event!

My final picture from the day is a badge I got from the police at the event. Aside from the competitions, the police were the one memory I take away from the day. All the police officers at the Barry Buddon Shooting Centre were fantastic: smiling, saying "hi" and "thanks for coming",  as well as dishing out some banter around the venues! They really were a shining example of customer service, making everyone feel welcome and involved - more so than the volunteers, I'm afraid to say, whose job it was to do that!

So hats off to all the officers from Police Scotland at Barry Buddon and other Commonwealth venues for really bringing the games together! Hats off too to all of the athletes, who put on some spectacular performances! Both me and my cousin were really taken by immersion of speculating at these events, it's our first time at any major sporting tournament. Just ashame the next games are so far away!

It's not all video games and dash cam clips!

No it certainly is not! Tonight I had the wonderful opportunity to be a spectator for the quarter finals of the team badminton event at the 2014 Commonwealth Games at Glasgow. We unwittingly wandered to what would turn out to be one of the best seats for watching the Scotland-Malaysia games on court one.

 

The first games were the mixed doubles, and holy hell, the Scottish pair of Blair and Baniker pulled out an absolutely performance to win their match, two games to one. It was an absolutely electric act, with some of the most insane rallies I've ever seen, including several spectacular series of smashes by Blair!

 The games were close, going point to point in a painstaking battle, but eventually Scotland came through to win the mixed pairs match. I didn't realise the zoom on my camera messed with the focus when on video mode, but I managed to catch the final of point of the match!


Sadly, Scotland would not go on to win the rest of the matches and lost the quarter finals, but it was great to be there in the stands to watch the great games played by all the athletes from all the countries across the 4 courts. Sadly I'll be at work, so I won't be able to follow the semi-finals and finals in the coming days but I wish everyone good luck!

On the way back, there was even enough time to stop off for a great meal at the Dakota hotel at the outskirts of the city!.

More Emergency Videos!

I've added another couple of emergency videos on my channel, showing clips from the past few weeks, including my first ever clip of the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service in action. Although, it would have been nice to have gotten the clip without the fire tender almost running me off the road!

Here's the clips:

iRacing set!

With exams done, I can finally get some serious racing done. I've put a few racing videos online lately and here's a few more! The first video is my most intense oval race to date, resulting in a 3-way loggerhead for 1st place with me coming off second. A great, clean race - great fun!

The second video is another fantastic race for me; racing the Mazda MX-5's at Lime Rock Park. It was great fun and despite crashing twice, I fought off a last lap challenge and held on to 3rd place - my first ever podium in iRacing.

This third video was one I raced a while back and did a post-race commentry for. It was a devastating race: I was in 2nd place, fighting for the lead, when a mistake put me behind a back marker who promptly took me off the track! Went from fighting for the lead to dragging it home in 9th place. Hmph!

The final video is another race in Street Stocks at Charlotte Motor Speedway. This was a good, solid race where I brought the car home in 3rd place to complete my 3rd podium in three races, having never had a podium before then!

My shortest race in iRacing!

Did a lot of racing this week on iRacing. The pinnacle of the events was supposed to be the Mazda MX-5's at Summit Point Raceway, but that race turned out to be my shortest in my iRacing career so far *sadface*.

Here's what happened:

Back to LCPD:FR

Been trying to get back to LCPD:FR for GTA IV recently, but I'm having a lot of trouble with stability for the moment. I've also updated my vehicle lists with new works, and also older works that I really like. Time allowing, I'll do another post on the vehicle mods I use. For now, credit lists can be found on my latest LCPD:FR videos.

The stability issues have prevented me getting to enjoy LCPD:FR much lately, but I've made a couple of videos of my adventures during my burn-in tests. Enjoy!

High Speed Ambulance Escorts

I've done a good few videos over the past while showing the police and ambulance services going about their work. While I have a great appreciation for the work they do, one of aspects I am particularly impressed by is ambulances on high priority responses, being escorted by the police.

These ambulance escorts require great care and implementation so the ambulance can reach it's destination safely, with the police going fast enough to get the ambulance there promptly, but not so fast that the police leave their ambulances behind! There's already an ambulance escort video on my youtube channel (http://youtu.be/IGVZOdVv3VA), but here's another two fantastic examples I've caught with my dash cam over the past few weeks:

Street Cars at Charlotte Motor Speedway Trio!

Another couple of days in iRacing, doing a trio of races at the Charlotte Motor Speedway.The races weren't hugely successful - being blighted by several crashes - but they were fun and I did finally get out of my rookie oval licence which is always good!

I'll be following these videos up with highlights at the bottom of the videos for those that don't want to see absolutely everything.

I'll do another post when I've got the highlights done, but for now, here's the full videos:

More Emergency Videos

Another collection of ambulance and police clips from around Edinburgh and the Lothian and Borders.

Back To Racing

Put these videos online a while ago. I've been getting back to iRacing, making videos of my journey through the rookie categories and onwards. I'm starting to get back into road racing, although I am still regularly doing oval races too.

The first video is my first road race in a long while, where I had a great save from a first lap incident. After several ups and downs, finished 4th which was not too bad.


The second is one of the few oval races I've ever done where it has been clean, constant racing from start to finish and was the best race at the time for me!

Emergency Services in Scotland - Ambluances

It seems I have more of these clips than I originally anticipated! Another few clips of ambulances on emergency calls in and around Edinburgh. One of the videos is somewhat of a "special" of ambulances making their way through busy traffic. These clips show what can happen with savvy motorists on the road: all the drivers noticed the ambulances coming in good time and got out of their way in a very effective manner. It is a departure from some of the things I've seen on the road (sadly, not filmed) where people just do the complete wrong things when confronted with emergency vehicles.

In the coming weeks I will be doing a video on how to drive safely with emergency vehicles on the roads in the UK, and I have another video where I will analyse a certain incident I saw on the road. I hope you can tune in then, but for now, here's the videos from the week:

More dash cam videos!

More fun on the roads with the Police, ambulances and of course, the local wildlife!

Emergency videos

I have a dash cam on my car now, and I've decided to put on Youtube some clips of emergency vehicles at work around Scotland that I've captured driving around.

It's got me thinking alot about how I act around the emergency services and I'm going to make a Youtube video talking about my suggestions for dealing with the emergency services (stuff you won't see in the highway code, but probably should be there).

But for now, here's the videos:

Back To LCPD:FR

Now that my project is over with and I have a short break before exams, I can get back to the wonderful world of video games! Before last week, I hadn't fired up a game in anger in almost a month. Been playing some Titanfall and also had a night on the town with LCPD:FR. This was largely just a test of stability, but I ended up having alot of fun and I made 4 short (ok, short by my standard) videos showing off some of the more interesting calls.

Upon seeing some wonderful ENB's for the GTA IV, I tried to play with them installed, however the frame rate I get can be counted on just two hands, so I've decided that now is the time to look at upgrading my graphics card. The graphics card is the only component of my computer that was original to machine when I got it, and for the last year or so, it has become more and more noticeably obsolete. So In the coming weeks, I hope to get and install a new one! Expect my videos to be a lot more pwetty!

In the mean time, I leave you with the videos I put up today!

Some Racing Clips

I recently stumbled across these wonderful incidents from my days of single player Race07 - Enjoy!

PAYDAY 2 Series: A Heist Gone Wrong

So me and my friends have been playing Payday 2 on a regular basis for some time now. We have accumulated many many hours of footage. The funniest (and least offensive) material is making its way to Youtube as time allows.

To start with, we'll be posting full games showing the painful hilarity of us getting to know the game. Once we start getting into our routine, we'll whittle it down to the funnies.

Hope you enjoy, here's what's online so far:

Back to racing!

So, in the rare few minutes I get off each week from university work and real work, I've taken up iRacing! It's time to put my brilliant new equipment as well as my skills to the test against some highly skilled racers online. And how do I stack up? Well, not great (see below)!


Oh well, I'm still getting used to a new sim, as well as my new equipment, on tracks and cars I've never really driven before. While you might think I'm just making excuses for myself, well I am, but these things are very important! - particularly because of the licence and safety rating that iRating uses, but more on that later on! For now, if anyone wants to see my full second (and most successful) race, it's linked here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX5qVTsH-88

My friend encouraged me to start iRacing, he's been doing it for year. Some of his videos are great and his channel is well worth checking out. Below is my favourite, and remember - this is perfectly legal!

I'm Not Dead!

So new year was a good time for my previous work: new years day brought the 2000th view to the Youtube channel and recently, I got my 10th Subscriber. Small victories - not bad for a few months work!  I know I've posted nothing this side of the year, this is because of University. With me being in my final year, most of my time will be dedicated to my studies and research for the next few months.

Rest assured! I do still have a plan to put more stuff online, just finding the time to make and edit it might be a struggle. I've got plans for a couple of little documentaries as well as reviews and videos of games and mods. Those that liked the videos of the LCPDFR mods, more of those will be appearing to show off the new LCPDFR 1.0, pretty much as soon as I can get the game to bloody work.

My pet-project of Simraceway's Test Drive Tuesday videos is pretty much at an end now too. They seem to be just repeating cars that have already been done. There will be more racing action to come, but on a variety of different simulators.

Hopefully it won't be too long before I get some time off to do some videos!