Posts Tagged ‘yggdrasil’

Derpbox Part 2

Saturday, September 10th, 2011

– Bad PS2/3 component cable is bad. Shame on you, Sony– you put this thing in one of those awful, pain in the ass to open cases, and the audio part of it doesn’t even work. And because I had to practically tear apart the box to open it, good luck on getting a return/exchange. I’m convinced half the price goes into all the packaging!

– PS3 is… really weird about A/V inputs. You would think it would auto-detect based on what cable is plugged in, but you have to do it manually. It likes its HDMI too much and like hell am I going to go through the trouble of switching back and forth between capture box and HDMI, so it’s out. PS2 w/ component is the way to go for now on this side

– I’m assuming the Wii isn’t going to give me much, if any trouble since it DOES auto-detect. Good Nintendo, you actually do something right for once. :P

– PSP component out cable (along with replacement PS2 component cable) on order.

– I had thought Blastoise could play without lag… but I jumped the shark there. He can go lag-free… for a few minutes, and then it’s just as bad as everywhere else. There’s pretty much no way around it, I’ll have to do a passthrough. Good thing this got sorted out early on in my playthrough or else it would have been rather icky.

Looks like my next Amazon box is going to be a bit cable-happy. In addition to the replacement and PSP cables, also looting an RCA Y-adapter for mother, and a mini-DisplayPort to HDMI (this goes on Dinah).

Derpbox

Friday, September 9th, 2011

I has a new toy. It’s the Hauppauge HD-PVR, which is pretty much the ultimate capture box out right now that doesn’t require you have a monster of a machine to be able to run it. The doods on YouTube and Justin.tv that capture game video pretty much swear by this thing, thus! It’s currently hooked up to Yggdrasil since he’s the most powerful Windows machine (Dinah can pwn both Iggy and Blastoise but I have to buy the Mac driver separately… bah)

Getting it running, however… was kind of a pain, and it isn’t so much about the box as it was the consoles I was testing it with. The original plan was to feed my PS3 through it… well, that’s out because it entails having to tell the thing “HAY YOU USE COMPONENT INSTEAD OF HDMI OKAY?” rather than, you know, autodetect like everyone else. So I dragged over my old PS2, which this component cable is supposed to work on. Success?

…partially. Now I was getting video but no audio. Aw hell. Tried both the front and rear ports, and nothing. I was about to rule the box a dud but decided to try with the PS2’s original SD composite cables (yellow/red/white). Aaaaand that one worked!

So, in the end, I looted a bad component cable, but because it came in one of those crappy blister cases that are supposed to be theft-deterrent…. yeeeah, good luck trying to exchange it. Well, it was one of those cheaper cables anyway, and I can live with SD for now since my first capture project will be a full replay of the original .hack games.

Without recording, I only get minimal lag, enough to be playable. I would reeeeeally like to avoid having to do a passthrough into my TV if I can help it, but if not… well, I’ll just have to deal with it. But I’ll do THAT tomorrow, running around and carrying gear back and forth down the hall is tiring. @_@

In other news, I also have a bigger memory stick on the PSP. Yay~

(Instant Ramen Sketchbook) Stick a beard on it, dood

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

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;)

(WIP) Ships DO grow on trees!

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

…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

Unconventional Input

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

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. >_>