[090712]

So. Back to art for this entry.

So we’ve seen these before. This was my last set of general sketching tomfoolery before I ran the comic into the ground trying to finish it up. Now that it’s over, I can get back doodling. So I did some last night…

So ok, not quite as experimental as the last batch, but more or less the same; I just want to give a fair comparison for the next bit. This is done more in the style of what’s been done in the comic itself with only one flavor of (attemptedly) consistent shading. I think I said #4 in the first image was the best of that lot way back when I posted this in… November?

Anyway, I’ve been going on about putting an exponential amount of extra time into a drawing for a small increase in quality since d233. Well, here we go:

At this point, I think we cross the line between “sketch” and “finished drawing” (albeit in pencil). The figures in the first three images are probably like 15-30 minutes, whereas the two in the last image probably took 45-60 minutes; so we’re putting in like double the time for a small, but significant (I think at least) increase in quality. When your entire drawing time is only an hour, doubling ain’t bad, but if this were a colored piece, we’d be talking going from 5-10 hours to 10-20…

All the little splotches and shit are from my scanner. I think.

Ok, that’s it for now.

Even more Art Grind…

6-6: A full-body shot! Whoo~! We finally get to see 518′s feet, which are digitigrade. I tried drawing her from the 3/4 behind view, because I’ve never drawn her from this angle before. Seems to have turned out okay. Sometime I need to find a picture of someone actually having their shirt tied the way 518 wears it so I can draw it accurately…

6-7: Diner Waitress 518~! Ponytail moé moé! *ahem* Aaaaaanyway, I thought I’d draw 518 with different clothes for a change and the hair somehow naturally followed. I’m pretty happy with how this one turned out (the style is slightly different from normal, but I still like it). The claw and hand both look fairly “natural”.

Those of you with sharp eyes may notice that her name tag reads “Unit 518″.

6-8: Someone suggested that I try drawing 518 in a more “realistic” style. So I did, and here is the result. I guess it looks okay, but it feels somehow “off” … maybe because I’m not used to the style…

6-9: I discovered while drawing this one that a good way to check that 518′s hand is drawn correctly is to cover each half of it in turn and see if the other half still looks like a “normal” hand. If both halves check out, the hand is fine.

[090703]

My biggest qualm with Win7 (at least with the RC) is that it still takes up more than 7GB on disk (as measured by the size of the Windows folder). I do believe that a large portion of this 7GB is taken up by legacy drivers and whatnot, but it’s still about three times the size of even a year-old XP installation (as measured on my desktop) that has taken up a bit of bloat. I’m fairly certain there will programs like nLite or vLite that can reduce the on-disk footprint, but it’d be nice if Microsoft could do something about this 7GB, which doesn’t even consider programs, page file, system restore, etc.

Other than the disk footprint, the RC doesn’t really seem to eat too many resources, though benchmarks across the web have shown it to be slower than XP in some scenarios. The Pentium M 740 on my TC4200 is just able to playback 720p video without lagging, so the Pentium M 750 on the test machine should be able to do the same, especially since its about a hundred MHz faster. Such is indeed the case, but opening things like task manager whilst a video is playing will cause it to stutter a bit; this doesn’t happen on the 740 with XP Tablet. So the processor takes a bit more load, but the memory usage isn’t out of the ballpark and I think the RC is reasonable in both these regards.

I’m also not too fond of how Vista and Win7 have tried to shuffle a bunch of folders and control panel all over the place to “simplify” the layout of the OS. I’m fairly certain you can probably mess with everything so as to layout the OS like XP, but I’ve been trying to use 7 as it would be out of the box, so I don’t have to tweak it everytime I do a clean install. It’s not too hard to get the general gist of things, but yeah…

Ok, that’s enough about Win7 for now. The really good thing that happened to me is that I finally figured how to make my TC4200 read SDHC cards. Way back in d209, I commented about the fact that, with my CF-SSD setup, I got a meager 6GB of overall storage, with an effective 3.5GB of usable storage. Well, that figure has gone down to like 2GB in the past couple of months, as I’ve loaded a couple more things onto the main drive and as half of the SD cards is full of music.

Because I don’t like to store media on the main drive; this whole business boils down to the fact that I have < 1GB of usable space for anime and whatnot and this has really been getting annoying these past couple months. It means I have to reload the card after I watch two or three episodes and I don’t really have any flexibility in what I can watch without reloading the damn thing. I originally bought a 16GB SDHC with the 4GB CF in anticipation of such a problem, but as I’ve said… SDHC didn’t work.

In December or so, I tried using one of these Addonics dual-CF adapters and a slower 16GB CF along with my 4GB main drive, but the HP BIOS sucks balls and can’t address two physical drives in the single HDD slot, so teh 16GB drive was forever stuck in PIO mode, which is a bunch of fail. Still using the dual-CF adapter since it’s a better fit than my original adapter, but I had to return the 16GB CF.

More recently, someone pointed out that HP had released an updated driver for the Texas Instruments card reader than comes on the TC4200. This driver revision was released in June of 2008, meaing that I didn’t know about it at all, because I bought the TC4200 in March of 2008, and downloaded all my drivers in early April. I used that same set of drivers for my CF reinstallation since they all worked fine. Furthermore, I didn’t expect HP to release a new driver almost three years after the TC4200′s original release.

Now, the guy and HP’s site said the new driver would fix the fact that “The notebook PC does not recognize 4GB SDHC (Secure Digital High Capacity) from SanDisk, Panasonic, Toshiba, etc. when inserted”. Since they only mentioned 4GB SDHC cards, I figured that the original 4GB limit of the SD format would still apply and that SDHC cards greater than 4GB would still not be recognized, so I actually didn’t bother looking into the driver for a while.

Regardless, I ultimately installed the new driver and discovered that it did work with 4GB SDHC and my old 16GB SDHC and that really made my week. No more pokey 2GB crap.

Ok, that’s it for now.