I open this with a trivial yet recurring gripe about Amazon– I click “group into as few shipments as possible” and… “HELLO WE ARE GIVING YOU THIS NOW WITH THAT FOLLOWING WHEN IT BECOMES AVAILABLE” which is Amazon-speak for “both of these items are not in stock at the same warehouse so we’re splitting your order up anyway, lol.” Argh. Why even give me that option in the first place if they never listen? Seriously, it’s only actually consolidated properly ONCE that I can recall. I shouldn’t bitch because it’s still free shipping, but… packaging waste is boo.

That said, the Logitech Speaker Lapdesk N700 arrived first, with the wireless N card (a D-Link) to follow shortly. (FYI, the lapdesk came from the Amazon Arizona warehouse… the next closest station is in Nevada?) I held off unboxing it until it was time for bed, and here we are.

It’s, uh… quite big. Definitely not something I can shove in my messenger bag or easily haul around with me. Its size, however, is inconsequential to how freaking AWESOME it is– the underside has this padded fabric that’s similar to what you’d find on nice textured furniture and does not heat up at all. You can’t really hear the fan but it IS on (mine shipped with the fan switched to on). It’ll be a few hours to see if it’s able to drop Dinah’s peak temperature, but it HAS slowed the uptake quite a bit– it previously took Dinah about 40 minutes to cap out at around 136F (based on Speedfan). About an hour in and she’s at around 120F. If it doesn’t really put a dent in her final temp, that’s fine… as far as heat control goes, as long as this enables me to put her on my bed without clogging her vents (and thus trigger an overheat), it’s a success. :P Old laptop is old after all…

The ultimate awesomesauce, for me, is the speakers. They override the existing speakers with nary a fuss– just a few minutes pulling some drivers over Windows Update or what-have-you and you’re good to go. And woooow, I never knew how crappy Dinah’s speakers were until now. OMG. This lapdesk won’t give you freaking 7 channel surround but it’s stupidly better than what passes for laptop audio (short of putting on headphones). They are also much more sensibly placed than Dinah’s onboard speakers, which are often blocked off by pillows. You can toggle the volume either through the side buttons or Windows’ volume slider; there’s no OSD if you use the buttons and you’ll have to keep tapping to get where you want.

If you have a laptop, get one of these, even if you don’t have heating issues. The underpadding is comfy and the speakers rock! Not cheap at $80 (softened by about 20 for me due to spawning Amazon eCerts through my bank’s reward program) but sooo worth it. I’ve used laptop coolers and they were flimsy and not very lap-friendly…. Logitech just hit laptop coolers out of the park with this one. :D

Only one little snag and it’s not really related to the lapdesk– I can’t use my mouse with it. No room on the card table that Dinah normally sits on, since the lapdesk is so big. I’ll need to go dig up a firm mousepad or something. I can live with Dinah’s touchpad for now, though.

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Meowch: All four cats are getting their vaccinations next week. Who gets to pay for them (but doesn’t get to go because HURR DURR EVIL STEPFATHER and his wanting to go just so he can look at the other pets even though every time I go to Dr. Berg’s office it’s usually pretty empty)? Me. :P

Poor Kestine, though… dude HATES to be in a carrier. Pile that on top of someone taking his temp by sticking a thermometer up his butt, and having to listen to Daisy hiss and swear at the newbies in Cat Demon… and probably someone wanting to give him eardrops since he always has some kind of ear wax. Not fun. :|

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Post-It Notes’ LAN version is Not Hamachi: yet mother is pushing for its usage as a Hamachi replacement as she can’t be arsed to reinstall it and log back into the house VPN. *FACEPALM* I don’t care how cute the deletion sound is, the Post-it notes app is clunky as hell and I have to go through all these menus to send a note over the LAN. If this was about not wanting to reinstall Hamachi, fine…. but we could have used GBridge instead since that runs off Google. o_O;

Awesome kitty Kestine likes to rub his face on freaking EVERYTHING. Doorways, table legs, MY legs, box corners, and ninja laptop Dinah’s wifi parts.

In the case of the wireless-N card, it was just one facerub too many, because the fat purple end of the card snapped off and the card shut down. Thankfully Dinah didn’t freak and go all Blue Screen of Death, but her wireless-N card is now officially dead.

Oops.
I don’t blame Kestine enirely, though… old card is quite old (I think I got it a few months after I originally got Dinah) and it was starting to flake out. I’ve ordered a D-Link* Wireless-N card off Amazon (yay having enough rewards points to slash off half the price!) and also a Logitech lapdesk (combo cooler fan/speakers) because ninja laptop has been running VERY hot as of late.

For now I’ve fallen back on using the original onboard wireless-G… and remembered WHY I boosted Dinah to N in the first place. Wireless-G sucks! :P Actually, wireless sucks as a whole– mind you, this is coming from someone who loots podcasts left and right and at any given time is either running YouTube, Slingbox, Netflix, South Park or the TWiT Live stream– and I moved as much as my crap as I could over to wired mode earlier this year. Wireless-N is the closest to wired mode as I can get, and is the only form of wifi I’ll stick on a machine on this network ’cause I’m spoiled on my awesome gigabit ethernet that I use to pass things around inside the house network.

As for Kestine… well, he’s a bit frustrated that he can’t rub his face on Dinah for now. XD It’s funny that he goes specifically for her wifi stuff– the card and the corners of her monitor lid, which are supposedly where the wifi receiver bits are. I wonder if they emit some low-level EM wave that cats find interesting enough to facerub?

* = old router and wireless-N card were Linksys (obtained at the same time), new router is D-Link, which has been AWESOME thus far, so may as well go D-Link for the card too.

Bigger is still better: Pizza Wednesday, doods. The weekly tossup between Pizza Hut and Papa Johns is complicated a little more this time around; the former rolled out a new event pizza type (the Big Italy, yet another attempt at an extra large… dude, why can’t they bring back the Big New Yorker? THAT was awesome!), yet with the latter I’ve piled up enough rewards points to get a free pizza. Ordinarily free pizza would trump everything (because seriously, what’s better than free?), but when it comes to new/event rollouts, I gotta try it. It doesn’t help that I’m a wing addict. >_>;;;

Live from Azeroth: Yoshi now has as much of the t10 Mage armor (“Bloodmage’s Regalia”) as she’s going to get, and there’s nothing more I can pile up Frost emblems for… so any future emblems I’ll just convert into Primordial Saronites so I don’t need to kill my gold buying ‘em up to make the ICC craftables for my alts or guildies. :P Any future gear upgrades Yoshi will have to get through ICC, most likely in 25-man mode. (That said… while inferior to the Frozen Bonespike that Yoshi’s packing now, I want Halion, Staff of Forgotten Love since its essentially the WoW version of Planet’s Burden, Yoshi’s signature weapon everywhere else).

I will slug that Lich King in his noobish, ice cream-hoarding face, yes I will. >:D

While old man Phil would be next on the gear supply chain, I need to throw in Rei stat, to unlock the craftable leather/mail pants. I’ve, uh… lots of rogues/druids/hunters/shammies in the guild who could use those things and I’ve kept them waiting for quite awhile (with Robert on break, I’m the only in-house ICC crafter-dood, after all). And, of course, Rei can use ‘em too.

No Kon Do: BOOOOO. :( I liked Paranoia Agent (or, “what happens when Japan turns Law and Order into headmessy anime”) and Paprika (which I definitely need to revisit for the dub, hehehe I’m terrible). If you’ve no idea as to who this awesome dood was, do yourself a favor and watch either of the above. :O

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

Yggdrasil booted! Yay!
Because Microsoft is a bunch of tards about using upgrade media on virgin drives, Iggy has to do the “double-install” workaround so he’ll activate. Given how much of a pain he was to just turn ON, this is acceptable >_>; Once his OS checks out, I’ll load him up with the stuff that makes him awesome. >:D (Painter, Hamachi, VLC, WoW, etc.)

He went 64-bit, by the way. He might struggle a little until January, but I’ma crank him up to 4GB. (And Blastoise to 8!)