So, January for me was upgrade month. Altima Network’s LAN infrastructure got a shakeup via new router (the D-Link DIR-625) to replace an aging and crash-happy Linksys, and the addition of an Gigabit ethernet switch to migrate my chunk of the LAN into wired mode. The benefits of the latter aren’t obvious, but it frees up some of the wireless band and, because Yggdrasil and my Slingbox are in wired mode rather than wifi, the former has a MUCH higher in-LAN transfer speed (and can thus better fulfill his role as a server) and the latter can output pretty much as close as you can get to a true HD stream.

And that’s just the LAN! Blastoise and Yggdrasil themselves scored some nice parts. Thankfully none of them involved cracking open cases.

For Blastoise, he gets a new mouse to replace those that were bundled with both tablets (their scrollwheels ground down, one of them stopped recognizing right-clicking and the other thought I was double-clicking everything). Specifically, he now packs a Logitech Anywhere MX. I’d originally eyed a Performance MX, but I was too used to the size of the Wacom mice and thought it better to get the Anywhere since it was closer in size. That and the Anywhere’s cheaper. :P Blastoise also packs a QuickCam Orbit AF, or as I like to call it, “Eyeball on a Stick.” Seriously, it rotates and stuff! (Well, you can turn auto-tracking off, if you are so inclined.) Finally, while this piece is portable, I predict that the Plantronics .Audio 655 USB headset will get much more mileage on Blastoise since using headphones on him is a HUGE pain– I would otherwise have to disconnect my surround speakers every time I wanted to plug in. Now, because he considers USB headphones a separate sound card, I can redirect just about anything there. The webcam and headphones pretty much render me Skype-capable, and I get the feeling I’m going to be using that quite a bit in the near future. :O

Yggdrasil now has a suitable keyboard… suitable meaning one befitting his role as a media server. The Logitech diNovo Mini is a very strange little keyboard, and not just by appearance. It’s a little off-putting to handle if you don’t know what you’re getting into.

First off, if you think you can just type normally on it, throw such a notion out the window, because you can’t… even if you have very small hands. No. It does NOT work that way at all. If, however, you own one of those cell phones with a slide-out keyboard, the diNovo Mini is pretty much going to be second nature to you. I am SO not kidding, this thing was MADE for txt-junkies! It’s essentially a bigger version of those kinds of keyboards, and save for some odd placement of the shift keys and some others, it handles almost identical to those phones.

The diNovo Mini also claims to have a battery life of 1 month at a full charge… we’ll see about that.

You do, however, lose out on F-keys, trading them for the Fn combos (surely a familiar sight for laptop users). I’ll admit that I’ll miss having at least F5 (refresh in Explorer and most browsers) but I think I’ll live. Also clearly absent are the niche keys like NumLock, Scroll Lock, PrintScreen and, oh, the keypad. If any of those are dealbreakers, well… *shrug*

Make no mistake, the diNovo Mini is CLEARLY meant for a media center box. With no F-keys and the touchpad and directional keys being consolidated into a circular… thing… don’t expect to be able to do a lot of heavy typing or any kind of keyboard-based gaming (unless it’s with a gamepad) with it. Things like URL entry, Twitter and IMs are fine, albeit at a much reduced speed than if you had a standard keyboard. On a media box like Yggdrasil, I don’t do much text entry on him anyhow, so this is fine– he is, after all, the ultimate video playback machine and is an old man of few words. ;P

Now, all that said, this little diNovo Mini is AWESOME. Because of the way I use Yggdrasil, I don’t really need a full-sized keyboard that’s quite awkward to handle given I don’t really have a dedicated surface for a real keyboard. The diNovo Mini is small, backlit and gets the job done.

Although not prominently advertised, the diNovo Mini can also be used on a PS3 via Bluetooth if you are so inclined. You have to flip a switch on the back of the keyboard after popping off the battery cover to make it recognizable by the PS3, but the option is there. (Speaking of Bluetooth, for PCs, don’t be thrown off by its mention of Bluetooth. If you lack a Bluetooth adapter, it comes with a USB dongle. It’s pretty much an either-or thing.)

I gotta get Yggdrasil a USB hub, though… I’m already out of slots. @_@ Well, I’m probably going to raid ThinkGeek again in the near future for moar shirts, so I might use my pile of Geek Points to nab a hub while I’m there if I’ve enough racked up. (Speaking of ThinkGeek… are you effing kidding me? A USB-powered electric blanket?! Next thing I know, there will be a USB pet rock… oh wait).

And now, to bed for me, as Kestine is giving me his “I can has pet and hug tiem nao?” mew. You do not blow off that kind of mewing. >_>

This is what my LAN looks like now:

Bwahahaha, no more having to move torrents over wifi between Blastoise and Yggdrasil!

Off to the movies for me~

Slingbox on wired = *DROOL*

It’s not that wifi mode is bad. You can actually pull a good quality signal over wifi… so as long as it’s in LAN and not via internet. But, if both the Slingbox and the unit you’re watching from are on wired, the video quality is AWESOME.

Take this: I was pulling about 2.5mb/s when the Slingbox was on wifi, and capping out around 3. Now that I’m on wired, I’m averaging 3-4mb/s and capping at 6. Yes, there is a noticeable difference: HD video being piped through actually looks like HD, rather than just slightly-fuzzy widescreen streaming of HD channels. :D :D :D

And that’s just watching from Blastoise! I should go see what this looks like on the Slingcatcher downstairs (wired, hooked up to a HUGE Samsung LCD TV). It’s probably indistinguishable from if I had been watching from the actual DVR.

I’ve not switched Yggdrasil over to wired mode yet, I need to go dig up a couple more short ethernet cables. I’ve two more slots on this switch– Yggdrasil and my PS3 will be taking those. The old Wireless-N adapter’s getting put on Jin since we had to switch the network printer to wired mode, and I’ll fling the old wireless-g bridge at Robert so he can put his PS3 on the network.

2009 = bah. Maybe 2010 might fail less.

Resolutions? Screw that. Resolutions are poo. HOKEY PILES OF POO.
Seriously, they’re just attention-seeking statements of grandiose things you want to do. You end up botching them, and it makes you look like some two-bit flake who can’t keep your word. So, don’t bother with them! Let what comes, come… and if you screw up, at least you don’t look as stupid as you would have if you resolve to do THIS EPIC THING.

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I would have gone out today but I had to cancel because the router kept crashing hardcore and mother decided that enough was enough and it was time to switch it out. Now we have a D-Link that is actually a little faster and overall much more stable. The previous router was a Linksys that had just come out when Wireless-N had gone into beta… yeah, that was quite awhile ago. Probably some of the internal pieces had gone south… I don’t know. The D-Link I’d swapped in is supposedly optimized for use with streaming video, which in theory should be nice considering we have Slingboxes and Rokus and such all over. Still, I’ma try to migrate stuff onto ethernet where possible to lessen the wireless congestion (not to mention that Gigabit ethernet is sexy).

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My previous driver permit resets next week. Good riddance. I was saved to Rancho Cucamonga before, but I’ll restart at Fontana– madhouse it may be, at least their clerks aren’t as pithy. >_>;
Thankfully it appears mother has backpedaled on her “MY WAY OR NO WAY” stance in regards to training, YAY. I never wanted her sticking her fingers in this to begin with since she cranks up the stress and drama by a billion (and she has this thing about blabbing everything to Evil Stepfather, wtf).
I WILL have my Yoshi Car in my full possession this year. It would be nice if I could pull it off before Yoshi Day, but so as long as this ends with me walking out with my full license…

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There will be one, maybe two more Snowschemes, though they’ll be more about FUN WITH SNOW.
Mayhaps a piece for Crimson Day (Jan. 25), too… bwahahaha~

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Broken heater = best time to shower is before 3pm (noon-3 is when the house is warmest due to THE SUN).
This is important, I don’t take well to sudden temperature shifts AT ALL. x_x I already feel kinda icky and even one instance of temperature whiplash could… well, at the very least it would be a totally miserable experience.

Well, no, he doesn’t, but I am reminded of why I probably should have stuck Yggdrasil on LAN rather than wireless-n. My router tends to drop its wireless radio every so often until either it realizes something is wrong and reboots itself (usually within a couple hours of wireless radio dropping) or unless I go downstairs and reboot the router myself (because when wireless radio drops, I also can’t remote into the router and reboot from there). He’s going Gigabit LAN mode in January at the latest, I only have him on wifi for now because it was the cheapest option at the time, and I can always hold onto his wireless-n stick to be reused on another machine later on. ;P

Anywho… old man box is otherwise awesome. He’s loading up on music and such from Blastoise first, then I’ll copy over the games. It will be interesting to see how Yggdrasil runs games (he is certainly capable of it, packing a 9500GT after all… even though Blastoise is probably much better), but as far as video and such, he is a badass old guy. He ESPECIALLY benefits from Windows Media Center, particularly the Netflix instant view plugin. Running that on an HDTV is the next best thing… no, BETTER than having a Roku box. >:D

The only annoyance aside from the wifi is that most text is a little hard to read from where I sit, but that is easily fixed by forcing Yggdrasil to render text bigger– something I’ve never had to do on any other machine for obvious reasons.

Also like Blastoise, Yggdrasil has a cute beep that he makes on bootup. Typical for machines with MSI mobos. It’s sorta like how Samsung TVs have their 8-bit-sounding beeps that are reminiscent of the original GameBoy or, more amusing, the old Konami sound. XD

I thought my HDTV had picture-in-picture but apparently it does not… HOWEVER, slapping the Slingbox client on Yggdrasil makes for an acceptable workaround. True, it has a few seconds delay because of the network, but I can still fake picture-in-picture so I can still watch TV while doing other stuff on him. >:D