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. >_>

Yggdrasil is a media center. Therefore, it seems fitting that he should behave as such on occasion. So, for the past few hours I’ve been tinkering with him on that front (by the way, it’s still effing cold in here)

First off… whatever anyone tells you about Boxee, ignore it. Boxee sucks. True, it’s only in alpha for now, so I’ll have to revisit it later as it’s further developed, but I found it overall to be very very MEH. Its metadata scraping is quite mediocre and couldn’t get half of my stuff right, and it’s just a chore to navigate… so screw that.

If you are packing Windows 7, however, its version of Media Center is AWESOME out of the box (hi, access to Netflix and CBS’s library and parts of NBC/MSNBC and some others). It’s vastly improved from the Vista version, in terms of being able to get around and run things other than TV, so if you don’t have a TV tuner– I don’t because I use Slingbox– you aren’t SOL this time.
If you want to crank it up even further, though, and you don’t mind doing a little work (mostly renaming and such), then loot MediaBrowser, MetaBrowser and MediaRenamer. Depending on how big your media pile is, you’re looking at spending an hour or so renaming and pulling metadata, but it’s worth it since you’ll be able to loot cover images and other shinies, and everything just looks much more polished.

Also don’t forget to loot a codec pack and, if you’re running 64-bit, its add-on as needed (I’m partial to K-Lite but just about any major pack will do). And for those among us whose stash is stuffed with Matroska (MKV) files, this should tell you how to force WMC to let you run that file type. (BTW, Hack7MC is an awesome blog if you want to twink out WMC on 7 even further.

MKV files are kinda why I built Iggy to begin with. See, things like the PS3 and Slingcatcher don’t like MKV files (and have pretty lousy support for even standard files that don’t use a specific grouping of codecs). Surely the developers could yank some hyper-technical explanation, but it’s largely assumed that they omit support for MKV because it’s often affiliated with LOLZ TORRENTS AND PIRACY. It’s not really fair to blow off MKV (and the torrent file type for that matter) because of what it’s used for. Shame on you, Sony and SlingMedia and other major media device makers, for hating on MKV!

Ahem…

All that said, there are some things I would like to see in WMC (most likely they’d be via plugins):

- Proper support for Hulu (and Sling.com, which carries much of Hulu’s library in addition to its own stash). Currently the only known workaround is the Hulu integrator which is less of an “integrator” and more of a “close WMC, launch Hulu Desktop” widget

- YouTube support (I am honestly surprised that this wasn’t included out of the box. Apparently there was a YouTube plugin for the Vista incarnation of WMC but it hasn’t been updated/ported to 7 yet.)

- addition of other IPTV channels into Internet TV (sup, Revision3 and TWiT)

and finally…

- Slingbox support. Dear god, WANT. Add it as a plugin, as an Internet TV channel, or as a subfeature of the actual TV section, but FFS, just add it already. I know it can be done because there’s already a Flash-powered version of the Slingbox client and while Netflix streaming runs on Silverlight, the method of shoehorning it into WMC can’t be that much different than Flash (else how would one be able to tap into the CBS library?). Please please pretty please write a plugin for WMC, SlingMedia? ;_;

Welp, that’s all for now.

also, brendala you might want to dig around inside Iggy sometime, I looted some more Disney Afternoon you might want to pull. >_>;

Apparently, yesterday was National Cookie Day. No wonder Mrs. Fields kept sending me coupon codes and such (well, more than the usual).

Though… apparently December is a clusterfwegh of National (food) Days. The 1st was National Pie Day. Today (the 5th) is Repeal of Prohibition Day.

Other particular food days of interest:

12/8: National Chocolate Brownie Day
12/12: National Cocoa Day
12/15: National Cupcake Day (note to self: tweet this to Tara Platt, ultimate cupcake fangirl. I am so not kidding, she squee’d when I tweeted a Jezebel link for the Periodic Table of Cupcakes XD )
12/16: National Chocolate-Covered Anything Day (I presume pocky is included?)
12/17: National Maple Syrup Day
12/21: National Hamburger Day
12/25: National Pumpkin Pie Day (hello, whoever came up with this is a MONTH LATE)
12/31: National Champagne Day (well THAT’S convenient)

—

Dear NBC minions (or whoever they outsource to) who code iPhone app tie-ins to their shows:

Please please please make a Twitter Tracker app!
In addition to being able to replay the Twitter Tracker segments on Conan (because flash support on the iPhone/iPod Touch is dumb and only supports Google, thus locking out the NBC video archive and Hulu and just about everything except YouTube and I think Vimeo) and link the relevant Twitter accounts, there is so much fun to be had with a Twitter Tracker app– mainly things involving stupidly-amusing text animation and abuse of the Twitter birdy!

Because, you know, this almost sadistic love of Twitter Tracker’s abuse of the bird is universal. If you like Twitter, it’s funny. If you HATE Twitter, it’s even better! Take THAT, bird!

So, yes. Twitter Tracker app… please? :(

♥, Yoshi

…dear god I’ve become an iTard.

—

And now Blastoise goes to sleep while I tweak Iggy some more. It has been suggested I slap Boxee on Iggy because he is a media center box and Boxee is supposed to be the most awesome media center software EVAR!!! or something, so I may as well give it a whirl. If Lifehacker gushes over it and even does features about building a dedicated system for Boxee and there are iPhone “remote” apps for it… then it can’t be mindless hype, right? >_> Guess there’s only one way to find out.

Also remember this Snowscheme? Consider it a clue for the next ‘09 piece. >_>;

*click*

One could easily say that if I wanted a media center box, I could have just dragged Blastoise over here. Except I like having dual monitors, not to mention there are things that Blastoise can do better than Yggdrasil. Blastoise and Dinah have been off for the past few days so I could make myself break in the newcomer. :P

As far as oomph goes… well, technically Iggy IS superior to Blastoise. 3 GHz vs. Blastoise’s 2.2, 1GB video card vs. Blastoise’s 512mb (but Blastoise’s is gaming-grade)… the old man is, numerically, only really lacking in RAM and that gets fixed in January. However, Blastoise is preferred for gaming because I don’t have to crank up text so I can read stuff and he has an actual mouse (albeit with a broken scrollwheel). If it’s something that isn’t text-heavy, Iggy will suffice.

though it can’t be denied that WoW and CoH are nothing short of drool-inducing on an HDTV…

I may look into getting a more appropriate keyboard to use on Iggy… at the very least, something backlit. The Logitech diNovo looks really nice…

Iggy is OMFG generous with the USB ports… potentially. His mobo has four on the rear, the case provides an additional two on the front… but his mobo has 3 more pin blocks for USB things, so if I really wanted to I could put in 3 mods that could give me a crapton of USB ports. o_O

What Iggy truly reigns at, and the reason he exists, is video playback. SD, HD, any format you could think of… he runs it, and it is HAWT. (Yes, this even includes YouTube!) Well, of course it is, he’s hooked up to a bloody HDTV! And this is on a VGA connection, though I could plunk down some coin and get an HDMI adapter (because like hell am I going to use the one on his mobo, that would involve giving up my GeForce for onboard Radeon). Despite being capped at 2-channel sound due to TV speakers, sound isn’t bad either. But, then again, considering there are 3 easily-provoked bulldogs downstairs, maybe it’s a good thing Iggy lacks the full surround setup…. bass triggers CACOPHONY OF WOOF, and that is bad.

I’ve Painter installed on here and my workspace imported from Blastoise (I didn’t know I could do that, up until now I was reconstructing my toolbox every time I reinstalled or configured a new unit) but I’ve yet to actually draw anything yet. I suspect Blastoise may still end up being favored for Instant Ramen because I’m so used to dual monitors, but I gotta try at least once on Iggy, if only to see how an HDTV affects things…

On that note, very soon I’ll be starting on the 2009 Snowscheme pieces– since I ran out of time last year, it looks like a Deeum+Baby Garm piece will be first.

ALSO:
Phantasy Star Zero or as I still call it, Lunar in SPAAAAAAAACE.
I has it! Got it for $23 after eCerts and free shipping.
Sega brought in one of my favorite character designers for this one (hence all the “Lunar in Space” jokes) so unlike PSU you will never hear me bitch about lolified costume designs and such. Kubooka has come a loooong way since Lunar, and for the better, and I think he might have slipped in nods to Gundam and Tales of the Abyss, bwahahaha. XD (seriously, a lot of the male CASTs look like mini-Gundams, and I coulda sworn I saw short-haired Luke and Natalia’s hairstyles in here… and RAmarl uniforms look very, VERY much like Jade’s clothes, hah)
ANYWHO, because I’m sure some want to know: I rolled Blastoise (HUcast), Dinah (HUcaseal) and Leslie (RAmarl). Poke on the AIM or what have you if you want friend code-ness, I know LF will. :P

And now I shall nom on pringles while watching Craig Ferguson. >_>

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