This is not the Xenogears sandship you’re looking for. :P

He even has fancy-pants nonsensical glyphs on that wheel-that-probably-serves-no-purpose (well, maybe it generates gravity). They’re very shiny!
As for his avatar being present on the ship as a hologram… I can totally imagine Yggdrasil just bumming around on the bridge, blowing bubbles out of his pipe from the captain’s chair. XD He’d definitely have Prinnies as his crew, dood! :D

It’s also occurred to me that if Blastoise and Dinah are mecha, and Yggdrasil is a spaceship, then would my house LAN itself be… a space station? o_o I may have to draw that, too… Ah, now I kinda want to go on a DS9 binge. >_>;

I’ll cut a wallpaper to stick on the old man box, see if I can get some automated desktop paper-cycling action on him. Bwahaha~

Now… do I sketch Blastoise’s mecha body, or go play FFXIII? (Dood, I took it out of the cellophane but haven’t gotten around to patching my PS3 and such. o_O;)

…or do trees grow on ships?

I don’t usually draw mecha or air/spacecraft (even though I burned away WAY too many weekends assembling such things out of Lego bricks as a kid) but… I don’t know. I must have been browsing the /mecha/ board on Wakachan and next thing I know, Painter’s open.

This, of course, is Yggdrasil in mecha form. And by mecha, I mean spaceship. I figure a media server would translate best as a ship rather than a giant robot. You would think that because his avatar is based on Fusoya, I’d duct tape a giant freaking beard on his spaceship form… no. :P I do, however, figure that it’d involve a Lost Universe-like arrangement in which Yggdrasil’s avatar would be present on his ship as a hologram.

Avatar Yggdrasil’s power as being a megacaster would translate to spaceship form– twin laser cannons, as you can see, but like any self-respecting spaceship he’d have missiles– bonus points if they’re anime-grade missiles and can bend at 90-degree angles FOR NO REASON– and a supercannon hidden somewhere. (Indignation in laser form?!) And as for healing? Hm… I’d imagine he’d have external ports that Blastoise and Dinah could latch onto for speedy repair-and-reload stops.

Ah, it’ll be fun to color this. :O

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*