Chair freaking get yesterday. Took a little bit to unpack and set up but it was a simple assembly.
I was actually able to sleeeeeep. In fact, I think I slept better than in my old chair. :D It’s nowhere near as noisy (just the sound of things rubbing on faux-leather) and is quite stable and supports me much better and totally worth the $160 I dropped on it.

But ya, this was a needed reminder of the value of a good night’s sleep. Of course, chair of awesome should not replace an actual bed, but considering mine is a bad kind of demon and is trying to kill me… >_>;;;
I think part of the fix entails new and MORE pillows. (Seriously, the ones I have now are crap. Old and flat and I have to double ‘em up to have any effect.) Better still, if I could move the bed juuuuust enough so it’s up against the wall so I can pile up pillows at an incline… oh yeah. There are other factors but these are things that can be done in the short term. I just need to clean up the perimeter of my room ‘ such, and unfortunately I can only do that when everyone else is gone so mother won’t stick her nose in and invent reasons to get all drama-queeny. -_-;

…ah, chair. While Best Buy calls it an office chair, this is more like a chair/ottoman set you would use to put up your feet and watch TV in as opposed to doing work. A “slacker’s office chair” if you will.

As promised, the villains version. Maya, Ralse and Zeirkain up top, Lucas and Satoshi below. (Dude, that gun. “Bang.”)
This is pretty much the first time drawing the Pearl Rose doods (except for Ralse and maybe Maya, I forget if I’ve drawn her yet).

The surrounding rose is going to be all drybrush. I’ve no shortage of reference materials for THAT, har har. *points to the giant freaking archive of rose pictures on the LAN from back when mother was a “omfg roses” and such*

—

Today, I get THE CHAIR.
UPS says “out for delivery,” so it’ll probably get here later this afternoon. That sucker’s getting assembled right away. Once I post this I need to drag the broken chair out of my room to clear up space.

Sweet, sweet faux-leather and steel. Should be not only much more comfortable than the cheap excuse for a seating pad on the old model, but also much more stable (the old chair was laminated wood with some kind of metal spring-things that let it swivel and recline). Once it’s set up, don’t be surprised if I sleep for the rest of the week. @_@

—

Finally…

This isn’t just more mindless Craig Ferguson lulz. Who’s that on the far right?
Yus, Sam Riegel was on yesterday’s episode. Quite fitting that Mr. Spoony Bard would be part of the Late Late Show’s official Greek chorus. Or at least, I thought it was hilarious (because I am still the Worst FF4 Fangirl Ever). ;P
This twitpic cracks me up so freaking much. XD
(Also, he’s a pretty convincing Tiger Woods impersonator.)

Oof.

So I’m asleep in this old wooden/laminated POS (because my bed sucks and is trying to kill me) and it snaps off the base, nearly causing me to tumble off. Which I thankfully do NOT.

But now I have no recliner chair. Fffffffffff or something. I mean, I was going to replace it soon but… yeah.

This shall be the successor. Pity Amazon does not carry it else I could get free shipping but oh well. That said, included ottoman = yay (well, ottomans are always yay) and since it uses a ring base instead of wheels, it can be used on carpet. (GOOD. I hate floor mats!)

In the meantime though… I gotta sleep somehow. *Yoshi’s bed spawns a /gg bubble* >_>

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

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. >_>

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.