So today’s update is the entirety of my six-pager. I thought about splitting it into two updates, but there’s really no point, so instead I split it with a “more” function.

Dream took about a month to do, and I think it is a rare series in which the art quality goes up slightly toward the end. I actually drew a lot of panels first and then shaded them on a second pass so if I got into a “rush to finish” mood, I would only be screwing with shading. One benefit of the darn thing being so sort is that I didn’t really need a storyboard – I could basically keep everything in my mind. There is also effectively only one reference sheet.

The freighter and crew are a cameo! The modular container ship Mage of Black Chaos is named after a Yugioh card and appears before and in Starcrossed; her captain, Albert H., also appears before and in Starcrossed (he just really can’t catch a break, either). According to Starcrossed – and I didn’t know this either – Albert was formerly the captain of the Comet. Why he switched to the private sector is beyond me.

[120312]

Some time ago I was having hard time falling asleep last time, and I had some thoughts.

The entire BKS/CL universe doesn’t actually have that much purely original content. From the very beginning when Bradly and Marsha came out a Calvin and Hobbes strip, it’s been a lot of Rule 24 spun together in a me and J way. Not that this is necessarily good or bad.

The ships in the last painting are primarily “classic” BKS ships. The aluminum foil and electrical tape ships that J and I made in elementary school gave birth to three of them. In retrospect, the foil and tape construction doesn’t really make much sense. I seem to recall that there was an even earlier paper and masking tape ship too.

In some strange way, the Comet is actually the oldest “character” in the BKS universe, given that it still shows up relatively frequently, and that the original drawing predates Episode 1. Vehicle classes like Crusades or Slick Wheels don’t count.

Kind of like how Professor Marril and White Fang made it out of the legacy era, I think a surprising amount of original BKS content “survived” the numerous re-spins of the universe. I don’t think anything from my 2D days ever made it into BKS, though.

Now the somewhat relevant part: I’ve written about drawing paradigms time and time again, but I’ve never really considered story paradigms until recently. In the beginning, during the early BKS days, there wasn’t really much of either. When I switched to “new style” in 2003, most everything comic related was still drawing driven, without too much concern for the story (I thought that was the easy part).

Starcrossed is basically the first corny, cliched story that came to my mind. Reflection is J’s idea. Even the Directorate story (arc), while revised innumerable times, was largely “see where it goes”, as was TIAIIS.

In retrospect, I think the first story driven thing I planned was the unfinished Back to Square One, which probably didn’t satisfy me due to the egregious lack of planning that went on in those days. The difference between “story driven” and “drawing driven” really comes down to wanting a “story like so and so” rather than “drawings like so and so”.

I will at some point probably elaborate on the BtSO setting. It’s eventually going to be relevant to the BKS/CL universe.

Only with Pieces, many years later, did I actually finish a story driven something. Whereas I tend to think of art paradigms as “by author”, I tend to think of story paradigms, well, “by story”; in much the same way that I feel Akamatsu was a strong influence on my early art, I think Ga-Rei Zero was a strong influence on Pieces. Interestingly enough, when I was in the middle of doing Pieces I watched the one-episode BRS OVA, which I consider a very good example of a compelling story in a compact package.

Even though it’s been a while now since then, I do consider the BRS OVA a primary influence in my drive to trim fat and cut down on story length. I was just telling J that if I could attempt to draw a compelling story in one page, I would do it, but I haven’t been able to be that clever yet. I do feel that there is still conceivably clutter in the 6-pager.

I’ve also been trying to tap my dreams for original content. This thing started out as a dream, turned into a painting, and then turned into this one-shot. I was mentioning to J that I thought that we were a lot more creative when we were younger because logic didn’t get in the way so much and in some way dreams share that same characteristic. The difficulty here is that dreams are either rare or just very difficult to remember, or, as things always go, a combination of both.

I didn’t actually intend to write a post between the last one and the next one, but I drew stuff when I should have been studying so here it is. It’s written kind of funny in that all my rambling comes before the pics, so I’m putting the break here.

When I finally finished Dream – that’s been my internal name for the one-shot as it was partially inspired by one; I haven’t thought of anything better, so that’s that – on Friday, I had the spontaneous urge to re-read what I am now referring to as “legacy comics”. These are comics pages one through 192, although after having re-read, I think a more appropriate nominal end may be earlier.

A long time ago, legacy content made up the bulk of my drawing experience both in “percentage of life spent” and physical drawing done. I’m pretty sure I failed to update my internal schema of things a long time after this stopped being the case, hence my comment in d348 about “new style” and “old style”. For almost as long, I think I viewed legacy stuff – particularly comics – in a fairly negative, “what a waste of time”, sort of way and largely put it out of view and thought.

As such, this is the first time in recent memory I’ve spent time actually reading some of the legacy comics, and as these things go, I noticed some trends that I had not noticed (or noted) before.

I’m not sure if J or I actually would have started drawing comics back in July of 98 had it not been a summer school exercise. I remember being very fond of comics, but concerned about how difficult it was to consistently draw not just something, but someone repeatedly over the course of many panels. Subsequently, I remember being impressed that we pulled it off passably on the first try – I mean, in Episode 1, you can actually tell Bradly and Keno apart in every panel.

So maybe J remembers differently, but from what I remember, we just kind of found ourselves doing comics. Thus, at least for me, the comics were for a long time not really about telling a story or anything of the sort, but more of a log of my elementary-school steam-of-conscious, sequences of random events fairly heavily influenced by whatever I was interested in at the time (there’s a lot of Roller Coaster Tycoon stuff, and some Starcraft stuff). Hence, these comics are more or less just like the regular drawings I was doing at the time.

Nonetheless, just like the random interaction of countless hydrogen atoms floating around eventually made up stuff like stars, and planets, and us, the random interactions of the various legacy characters over the course of several years do ultimately come up with something of a temporally dependent sequence of events. That is to say, while the direction of the legacy story is random, events do build on each other (and there is actually a lot of this event-building-on-event going on at some points), and I think the characters do develop slightly in their own subtle ways.

In the back half of the legacy era there are also increasingly often occasions where two or three comic page form a mini story arc. There is even a six page “story” later on. My 193 division between the legacy and contemporary periods is strictly based on art, but comics 185 to 192 actually start the continuous “story” that kicks off new style comics. So conceivably the end of the legacy era actually ends at 184, the last White Fang Show. I’m not sure if it’s surprising or not that both the shift in story and in art happened so close to each other.

Also during the legacy era, I think I discovered “character bloat”; the number of characters actually balloons toward the middle of this period and drops back down toward the end. Also – this was retrospectively surprising to me because I don’t think it was intentional, though it was both known and obvious that it was happening – the characters form cliques(!); certain groups of characters always appear at the same time, though some groups much more frequently than others.

Ultimately I think there is some worldview embedded in the legacy era, which is actually what I don’t like about it. In the last panel of the second line of 217, there is “Old Style Nick”. I have his comic “series”, and while it is only about 20 pages, and while it consists entirely of stick figures and blobs, it has a lively humor, an almost directional plot, and works much better as a comic on the whole. I don’t have Albert’s entire works, but I do have some samples, and his style was much cleaner and much easier to follow. Despite the nearby presence of what I now consider two superior works, I either didn’t notice or didn’t care enough to move my own work in any direction and just kept doing my own little thing.

That’s what I think really bothers me about the legacy era almost a decade after it has ended. Now it’s time to show some pictures:

Enter one clique of two characters that have really stood the test of time. We last saw Prof. Marril and White Fang in d250, for the fifth anniversary of NW. I think they really embody the stochastic process that drove the legacy era; suggesting, from scratch, that you want a comic bout a blue mouse and a half-wolf sounds utterly absurd, yet here they are, and like some random meme, they left enough of an impression on me such that they “got out” of the legacy era more so than any other legacy characters. It’s crazy when I (over)think about it.

This is the evolution of Prof Marril and White Fang over the course of about eight years. The first picture is from 2001/02, “Episode” 136, the episode in which White Fang is first introduced; he is effectively the last legacy character added before I started cutting the fat. The second picture is from 2002/09, Episode 185, the last legacy comic w.r.t. story. The 3rd, 4th, and 5th snapshots are from 2004, 2006, and 2007, respectively. Marril gradually decreases in height/width aspect ratio, and Fang gradually seems to gain some volume. I actually thought I was doing okay with the Prof by 2007, but looking at official art, he should still be shorter and fatter.

You’d also notice that his name is spelled wrong. It should be “Marill”, not “Marril”. As a tangent, most 2nd-gen (gold/silver) Pokemon went by their Japanese names when they appeared in the legacy comics, as US G/S didn’t release until the end of 2000 (Wiki says it was released in AUS a month before US!?). That’s just how hardcore we were back then. I remember beating Gold version in Japanese, then English.

As the evolution of Professor Marril clearly shows, I had much difficulty drawing anything that wasn’t geometric prior to and during the legacy era. Prof. Marril and Dr. Chu look pretty bad in retrospect, but there were definitely more complex Pokemon that turned out worse. But as I mentioned, I never really tried to do anything about it; I just kind of accepted most Pokemon as being out of reach and left it at that. But now it’s 2012. Back in d344, I mentioned something that I discussed with J, that I wanted to try drawing Pokemon again.

But actually, I started with White Fang:

I looked at a lot of references, but in general, if you aren’t trying to be overtly realistic, something like a wolf doesn’t seem to hard to draw. I felt like I could approximate a lot more than on figures and still have it appear more or less “correct”. Most telling of this might be that these really aren’t based off any specific subspecies of wolf, they are really just a collection of features that suggest wolf. I think we aren’t used to seeing wolves in our daily lives, so we aren’t as attuned to what they are supposed to look like.

I think I have a fuzzy ear fetish or something.

Marill was downright trivial compared to a wolf. Once you get into the paradigm of “aqua mouse” (the official description), the proportions and stuff seem to make a lot more sense.

More complex Pokemon haven’t been too difficult either (yet?). The top is from reference, but from that single reference you can already derive most of the views. The text beneath the lower one says “kind of like a concord”. Yes, that “turned out worse” picture is supposed to be a Lugia as well.

Besides Pokemon and wolves, I also apparently had a helluvalot of trouble with scale. Back in the day, everything was basically the same size. Dr Chu. went up to Bradly’s shoulder and they could both drive the same cars. Even in the most recent appearance of Marril and Fang, they are both the same size. I’m not sure why I never considered that these characters shouldn’t have been the same size. At least on Pokemon, the information was clearly available – every Pokemon has always had a height and width associated with it, even if no one ever looked at that data.

This is a chart of how things should be:

Many items of transportation appear in legacy comics. They are always drawn to fit the characters, but I reasoned here that, even given standard gauge track, it might actually be possible to make a slightly less than speeder-sized rail vehicle that a Pikachu could conceivably pilot. The “lab” cars are also conceivably, they just have to be about a third to a half of the size of a regular vehicle. Also of note: an actual boxcar (non-hicube, ~144″) is thrice the height of a sitting White Fang (~42″), who is more than twice the height of Prof Marril (~16″), who is also about twice the height of Kirby (~8″).

Regardless of all my previous notions of the legacy era, drawing the characters and the vehicles again actually made me really happy. In many ways this is really a childhood dream come true for me. Having the Lugia drawing be easy was immensely satisfying and it really made me feel like I’d come a long way since 2000 – regardless of whether or not I actually have.

I think it’s also refreshing in some way to draw something that doesn’t attempt to be bound by logic or whatnot; I’m once again finding the juxtaposition of the wolf and the mouse and the creatures and their cars quite charming, in much the same way I like the combination of old and new technologies (a la classic BKS ships, steam-powered hover barges, etc).

It’s also helped that we’ve kind of had this moe explosion in anime over the past few years. That’s kind of rubbed off on me, which has kind of rubbed off on this redux. Drawing pretty pictures didn’t become a goal of my art until I was far past the legacy era and so I never really thought of Prof. Marril and White Fang as being particularly pleasant to look at (in fact the legacy versions are pretty ugly), but this time around I think I could get away with calling them cute.

Anways, that’s it for this update. Til next time.

Today’s painting is the last of a series of three test paintings (the other two were posted last time). It’s a merged lineart painting, but I basically merged the lineart later in the painting process, and painted over a small portion. The drawing is actually dated for September of last year, almost six months ago. There was a small part painted sometime between now and September, and it was fast becoming a “dead” painting when I finished it up a few weeks ago.

I think the primary difference between this and 120131 is the point at which I decided to merge the lineart with the painting… in the older painting I intended to overwrite the pencil lineart entirely; in the newer painting I just wanted to get rid of it where it stood out the most. I think the reason I took these screens was to indicate when I merged; you can see that it’s much earlier in the latter.

Not quite sure how this sequence will affect future paintings yet; hopefully I’ll get to mess around a bit more over break.

I’m on page 4 of my originally 10-15, then 12, now 6 page one-shot, and it’s occurred to me that, for a while now, I’ve been drawing “new style” longer than I had been drawing “old style” (the division between “new” and “old” being comic 193). Whether this is really significant or now, I don’t really know, but it was just surprising when I thought about it. It’s like one of those time-will-pass-you-by-if-you’re-sleeping sort of things.

I’m actually writing this update because I was angry at a panel on page 4, but now I think I will try to get back to drawing.

Well, November’s update a little early as I’m gong to be busy next couple weeks.

We’ve certainly got a lot of mileage out of boats this year. This is probably the fifth or sixth relevant update. I don’t really remember what prompted me to draw this series (obviously the boats did, but I’m referring to the fact that I basically never draw 4koma about “The Adventures of D and J”, regardless of whatever stupidly funny things we do), but here it is in it’s full three-page glory.

J agrees that, for the most part, this accurately depicts all the silliness that went with the first boating outing (except for maybe the “pew” on the propeller thing). I think J also agrees that the drawings relatively accurately depict the physical state of me and him…

Now while I have nominally labelled Nonsense Wars an “artblog”, I think I usually end up writing about computing and computers enough such that I think it could constitute a ghetto tech blog. Today’s update is no different; I last noted what I called my “hardware master plan” back in June, and, as this always go, I arbitrarily decided to “finally” execute on it.

In d333, I droned on about my thoughts on the MBA 11 in a very long and boring post. For the most part I wanted to see if I’d benefit from a lighter machine, so I went for what is more or less the lightest, thinnest non-netbook on the market and took it for a spin. I took the MBA out and about for a couple weeks (and played TF2 on it) and ultimately decided that I didn’t benefit that much from it. The one-pound difference between it and the relatively heavy X200 Tablet just isn’t particularly tangible when you have a backpack with a couple of other things in it. I was always worried about damaging the MBA as well, almost to the point of annoyance.

But that’s okay. Thanks to my l337 skills, I sold it for more (net) than I got it.

I wasn’t planning on trading up the X200 Tablet until the warranty ran out, but it turns out that that was going to be sooner than I thought. The label on the bottom of the machine suggested that coverage would end in August 2012. Lenovo’s support site said that coverage would end in January. I’m also trying to work out a “better” upgrade/replacement cycle. With the TC4200, I kept it for more than two years, during which the value more than halved. With the X200 Tablet, I’ve had it for somewhat more than a year, but I think I can get at least 75% of what I paid for it. At the same time, it might have been a bit too early to buy a replacement, so this buy/sell balancing act is a work in progress.

So here I write a brief X220(i) Tablet/x220t review. This is the first current laptop I’ve owned since the E6400 and subsequently the most expensive laptop I’ve owned since then. I believe the (i) indicates that the machine is base spec or close to base spec, but the base i3-2310M, 4GB, and 320GB hard drive (obviously I threw in an SSD instead of that last piece) are more than enough for basically everything I do – as most base configs have been for the past few years. The base price is about $1100 average on the Lenovo website, but I managed to snag an MISB unit for $825.

Let’s start with what’s always my biggest concern with new laptops: power draw and noise. I’m getting about 5.5W on average, but I’ve seen it go down to just under 5W. I believe this is a vestige of the problem I had with the X200 Tablet under Windows 7 where the idle power draw coming out of standby was a watt or two higher than going into standby. 5.5W (under Windows 7 to boot) is still better than the 6W I was getting on average with the X200 Tablet, so I’m not complaining. Moderate browsing with Firefox gets about 7.5W, which is about what I was getting with the less intensive thin-client test on the X200 Tablet, and video playback of 480p video is about 8.5W to 9W. the 56WHr 6-cell battery thus provides about 7 to 8 hours of browsing runtime.

Despite the lower total power draw, the temperatures I’m getting on the 2310M are actually about 5-10(C) degrees higher than what I was getting on the SL9400 on the X200 Tablet. The delta between full idle and a moderate load, a little more than 10(C) degrees, is also considerably higher. These differences are probably due to the integrated Sandy Bridge GPU (less net heat dissipation in a smaller area) and the architecture’s more aggressive (compared to Penryn) power gating, respectively. At the same time, chassis surface temperatures seem to be lower per CPU degree, so I can spin up the fan at 50(C)+ without the laptop warming up much (unlike the X61 Tablet).

RMClock, and all the other vcore software that I know doesn’t work for Intel architecture newer than Penryn, but load power draw doesn’t seem that bad relative to nominal TDP. The rated TDP for the 2310M is 35W, and I measured about 30W for full system CPU load with Prime95; that TDP may encompass full CPU and GPU load, though. At the same time, a real power draw of “only” 30W did not stop core temps from hitting nearly 80C at 80% fan speed; both of these figures are considerably higher than what I’ve seen and had to do on Penryn systems (though I think it was worse on Arrandale systems – more on this in a later update, possibly).

Overall build quality is marginally better than that of the X200 Tablet, but I’m really happy with what they did to the keyboard. I may have just gotten a dud keyboard with the older machine (different keyboard manufacturers, etc), but the X220 Tablet keyboard is the same full-size keyboard that Lenovo uses on the T410/T420, and the layout and feedback are both lovely. They added a standard “clickpad” (a touchpad was optional on the 201 series), but it’s hard to use because it’s so small, and I just don’t really like having to click the touchpad itself. It’s a nice gesture though, for what that’s worth.

Like most tablets (and all the convertible tablets I’ve owned), the X220 Tablet has an IPS screen, which is also lovely, and one of the reasons I keep buying convertible tablets (the main one is obviously to draw, though I don’t seem to do much of that these days, huh?) in an age where they’re becoming increasingly niche. Viewing angles are great, but I do think the colors were a little better on the X200 Tablet. The display assembly is also considerably thinner on the X220 Tablet, probably because all X220 Tablet have LED screens, whereas some X200 Tablet – like mine – still used CCFL.

In general, Lenovo did a great job slimming down the chassis between the X200 Tablet and the X220 Tablet, but then they decided to screw up all their hard work because the 6-cell battery increases the maximum thickness of the machine by almost a centimeter! It’s absolutely ridiculous because the battery feels like it’s mostly air; it just feels like some engineer got lazy and didn’t want to pack the cells into the thing more efficiently. The maximum battery capacity has also dropped from 66WHr for the X200 Tablet to 56WHr for the X220 Tablet. In and of itself this isn’t a big deal given the lower average power draw of the latter, but they lowered the sheer amount of battery without lowering the net weight of the laptop – both laptops weigh just under 4 pounds. Lenovo also decided to move the (stereo) speakers into the display assembly, increasing the width of the lower screen bezel to an egregious 1.5 inches, while decreasing the number of media buttons present. Finally they got rid of the bi-directional hinge, which is a minor, but unexpected downgrade.

Still no ThinkLight, too!

Benchmarks for the 2310M and HD 3000 are widely available, so I’m not really going to get into it. They’re like 20% and 100% faster than the P8700 and HD3470 I have in the T400, and use much less juice, so that’s pretty good. The HD 3000 is actually sufficient to run SC2, possibly at medium settings too, which is fantastic, especially for integrated graphics. The “ThinkPad wireless” (RealTek) card I got with my unit is rubbish. Why the original buyer didn’t upgrade (for free) to the Intel 1000 is beyond me; I get one bar of wireless for every two I got with the Intel 5300.

Solid state has gotten really cheap these days. A lot of people still think it’s expensive, but I firmly believe this is because people are only considering the price per GB. In absolute terms, 80GB is plenty for a lot of people, and even in relative terms (other than cost per GB), an 80GB Intel G2 is twice the price of a 500GB spinner and fifty times faster. Having both monitored the price of solid state and been on the bandwagon since 2008, I wouldn’t think twice about buying an 80GB Intel at the current market price of about $100 if I didn’t already have a few. I maintain that taking a machine to solid state has been the only PC upgrade where I’ve noticed a tangible increase in performance. Buy an SSD.

One thing to note is that the X220 Tablet (and the standard X220) both use 7mm high 2.5″ hard drives. If you want to upgrade to a bigger HDD or to an SSD, you need a 7mm high drive, which is still less than common these days. Luckily Intel jumped on this bandwagon relatively early, and anticipating the eventual execution of the master hardware plan, I replaced my old Samsung RBX drives with 7mm Intel G2s quite a while ago. I believe you can somehow shoehorn standard 9.5mm high drives into the X220 series if you really want to, but don’t quote me on that.

Overall, I’d say the X220 Tablet is really a case of two steps forward and one step back. There are a good number of incremental upgrades, but the few facepalms here and there really make me cringe. I will say, though, that, at least for me, the move to 16:9 isn’t a huge a deal. While you do lose your 32 vertical pixels, the added 86 horizontal pixels means that, in total, you get more pixels this generation, which I would consider a better measurement of gain or loss (within reasonable limits – a 1M pixel by 2 pixel screen is obviously a stupid idea). I like to think about it this way: people complained going from 4:3 to 16:10, and then from 16:10 to 16:9, but at least in the 12″ realm back in the 4:3 days, the best resolution you could get was 1024 x 768; now you can get 1366 x 768, which is almost a 40% increase

And my 16:9 anime finally fills up the entire goddamn screen.

This month on Nonsense Wars…

J should actually be pretty much done with classes now. Hopefully we’ll see an update from him.

This is the last page of Pieces! Very much like the end of the NW arc, it’s very late, but that’s only partially my fault this time.

Having been able to sit on this for a while, I actually still think that this is the longest I’ve been satisfied with a short story (or even a long story) like this after I’ve written it (this was actually finished before the academic year). At the same time, that may just be because I haven’t drawn crap since then. There’s too much other shit to do, and J’s slacking off hasn’t helped much either – I daresay usually I feel much more motivated to do my own drawing when he says he’s working on his.

This is really random, but I was doing some space de-fragmenting in my room, and managed to break the nose piece off of the Kagurazaka. When I was putting it back together it occurred to me just how long that thing has been around. The last referenced post in the search link indicates that it was complete in January of 2006. That’s more than half a decade!

It’s a little less surprising that this year marks the 10th anniversary of 9/11. It’s more surprising that it’s been 8 years since Columbia. Or even more surprising that the 2000 Concorde crash was 11 years ago (somehow that always seems like it happened much after 9/11). I actually listened to the captain of Flight 1549 talk on the radio the other day.

Well, that’s probably it for now. It’s crunch time this quarter.

This is, I think, by far the longest we’ve gone without an update since high school (about a month since the last update). I’ve more or less given up on kicking J to update, and am just updating when he does. Obviously I’m just taking the blame off me. So we’re not really officially dead yet, just very much in limbo as these sorts of things generally turn out to be.

… and so here’s the second last page of Pieces. As expected, I still haven’t actually drawn anything significant since then, so in a way I’m glad we have this “break”. Those paintings I mentioned a month ago never happened either. I’m not too sure why I didn’t have the time over break (for all the past breaks I can remember I’ve always had the time and inspiration to do at least one) – I had the sketches and all ready – but it just didn’t happen.

Instead (well maybe not outright instead of painting), I replaced my trusty E6400 with a T400 in the same spontaneous way I replaced my TC4200 with my X200T.

But then again, kind of like my TC4200 swap, this one has kind of been in the making for a while… as the IT guy in my family, I’ve been trying to standardize the machines I have to manage since forever (forever = 2006 or so), like any good IT person. I got close with the D600s (3/6), but people bought new computers and standardization became a “never gonna happen”. But somewhere along the the line, I convinced everyone to switch to E6400s, and I was able to use standard image on standard hardware, which allows for the existence of a hot-swap backup unit and all that good stuff, and everyone is happy, myself included.

Somewhat related is that I want to get rid of desktops. In these days when an iPad has more processing power than my first laptop, there just isn’t a need anymore; laptops have been able to provide sufficient computing power for everyday tasks since the Yonah Core Duos were introduced. Desktops take up power and space, and they gather a lot of dust really fast. Furthermore, eBay has taught me that the value of stuff goes down real fast, and it’s terribly difficult to get rid of desktops and desktop hardware if you want to recoup even a fraction of your original costs. So I want to get rid of desktops while they’re still worth something.

My E6400, along with the exorbitantly expensive E-Series dock and less expensive stand replaced my dad’s 3-4 year old desktop, which I am now in the process of parting out. That completed standardization. The original rationale behind this swap is that I don’t need a second laptop anymore after this quarter, as I’ll be living at home for my grad program. Eventually I was planning to replace my desktop with a second laptop (or maybe even a USFF!) again as part of “no more desktops”, but that was in the future…

Anyway, I seem to have jumped the gun a little fast. I’m not quite sure if this was the original plan , I had initially intended to use an old D630 for the rest of this academic year as my dorm DTR. I wasn’t happy with this solution for a number of reasons, so suddenly I was looking to buy… something. Originally it was just going to be something cheap and temporary (aka salvage an eBay machine – I was even thinking of using my Socket-M-Dell-GPU testing machine (an M1710 with a flaky power jack), but this all seemed very silly.

When I saw that T400 come up on eBay, I knew that was what I wanted. It’s got idle power draw less than that of the E6400. It’s got TPFanControl so I don’t need to use some silly fanless hack. It’s got a cheap dock, media bay batteries, a thinklight, and cost all of $370 without a hard drive. I even have tons of ThinkPad adapters from the scrap heap at work. This is also a rare unit with switchable graphics! I can play SC2 with acceptable frames AND get my 7.5W idle power. It’s like buying my cake and eating it OMG ZOMG!

We all know specs aren’t important anymore. P8700/4GB/64GB/X4500 + HD3470/WXGA+/DVDRW/9-Cell doesn’t mean anything anymore, the point was that it’s faster than my current desktop (yes, the 2.53GHz, 35W P8700 is faster than my overclocked, 2.66GHz, 65W+ E2140. Isn’t technology amazing?), and eats less power/makes less noise. 4GB is nice… was going to sell the extra DIMM, but it’s worth nothing. HD3470 is more or less graphically equivalent to the NVS160M my brother uses to SC2. I popped in an old school Samsung SSD (because even in this space I don’t notice that faster SSDs are faster) and cloned Windows 7 from the E6400 (yes, this was really ghetto and I was surprised it went well).

So I guess this begs the question – why didn’t I just get a T400 back when they came out in 2008?

Because there are things the E6400 does better that were more important to me at the time.

On the whole the E6400 is built better. It’s more solid, not necessarily in a way such that I’d be more comfortable dropping it over a T400, but it doesn’t creak and groan as much. Having taken both apart, I also think the E6400 is more elegantly assembled, largely due to its sparing part count. The Dell is also thinner and lighter, and I still like the ID a little more than the traditional (if not now slightly diluted) ThinkPad ID. The E6400 also has better port selection (4x USB, DP VGA out to the T400′s 3x USB and only VGA out; I think everything else is equal) and easy component access. Dell also has better warranty and service on the Latitude line, and they do Windows re-installation stuff much, much better than the competition. The latter is why I still think the E6400 is more appropriate as a “fleet” machine.

On the other hand, the T400 has more features. It’s got better third-party support (ie TPFanControl), and stuff like switchable graphics and media bay batteries, both of which Dell did not implement on the early E-Series, somewhat to my chagrin. Some of Lenovo’s notebook utilities (ie Power Manager) are also much better than Dell’s equivalents, but their reinstall procedures suck. There’s also the (lol) ThinkLight which may or may not really be better than a backlit keyboard (I never used mine much in the end anyway – swapped it to my brother’s E6400 last year).

Back in 2008, I wasn’t quite as sensitive to notebook noise as I am now. Therefore lack of fan control didn’t mean anything. Back in 2008, I didn’t know SC2 was going to release in mid 2010 (heck, I didn’t think it’d release in the next five years), so bridging the gap between integrated and discrete graphics wasn’t a concern either. The big “thin and light” battle (after the release of the original MBA – think Lenovo X300, HP Envy 133, Dell Adamo) meant thin and light were really important, too. I was also loaded with Dell power adapters and overall more comfortable using their hardware.

But things change and now I’m tired and going to sleep.

Til next time, which may not be for a long time.

EDIT: This swap has actually been in the back of my mind for a long time! An excerpt from d295, 100929:

…  I’d prefer that something like i8kfangui still worked with the E6400. The fact that ThinkPads have TPFanControl is pretty much the one big pull for me towards the Lenovo side. That being said, if anything catastrophic were to happen to the E6400, I think my replacement with either be a T400S or a vanilla T400.

I really like the idea of the T400S, the general thought of an ultra-portable, main-stream sized kind of machine; no one else has really tried to pull it off (maybe the Latitude Z600 or something), but I would think there’s a definite market. I like the T400 (aside from the fact that it can use TPFanControl) because it has switchable graphics. This was really a non-issue back when the E6400 released (hence my changing over to an integrated graphics E6400) since I wasn’t “gaming”, but the release of SC2 has changed things a little.

After messing around with the Beta, I’d originally thought that the game would’ve been playable on the X4500MHD integrated graphics, albeit at the lowest settings and all, but it seems like it’s not quite the case…

I daresay, I’ve been slacking almost as much on this as J has recently. I can see how it can be hard for J to post if he’s always as swamped as I was this quarter, but at the same time I think I could have made time to update if I’d really wanted to.

We’re almost at the end of Pieces and I still don’t have a plan for going ahead with anything. This might get dicey really fast. It doesn’t help that I actually still haven’t drawn anything this quarter, and I still have to study for a test on Thursday. I bet I’ll have [i]some[/i] kind of crap to do over break too. If someone could actually give me a storyboard to draw, I think I’d actually be motivated.

I will probably be trying to do some experimental painting instead of comics, though. I have something in mind that I’ve been meaning to try for a while (aka since the start of the quarter), but obviously it just hasn’t happened. Business on the eBay side has been doing well, so that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing instead, I suppose.

Urgh, I guess that’s it again?

Now that J’s finally written another update, I’m motivated to write one myself. This could again be the last post in a _very_ long time, given J’s recent track record. At the time same time, I haven’t really had a chance to draw anything since more than two weeks ago. Somehow it’s effectively turned out that I have three project classes, so it’s kind of been rough, especially when two are group.

That’s really it. That’s how much life sucks right now.

And in today’s comic, Dogma class SHDs. The bridge is actually modeled after that of the Declaration class airships in the older Directorate storyline, though within the context of the story, the reverse is most likely the case. Only a couple more of Pieces to go and I have to think of something else clever…

This week I finally took some pics to supplant my long delayed post about power line networking.

It used to be like this (forgive my crappy ASCII art):

{ 192.168.1.102 Motoko } —–\
{ 192.168.1.101 Colette } —– { WRT160N } ===== { DSL modem } ===== { Internet
{ 192.168.1.xxx other } —– { 802.11g } —–/

(where ===== is a wired connection and —– is a wireless connection)

File transfers were always out of Colette and into either Motoko or other (usually X200T), and I could get up to 1.5MB/s (megabytes) on a good day, or down to ~800kb/s (kilobytes) on a bad day, depending on how happy the network was. Traffic always had to double back on the 802.11g, and that may have capped my maximum transfer speeds. Both Motoko and Colette were 802.11g to boot. That 1.5MB/s isn’t terrible, but it’s not great either, and you can often drop packets and get some file corruption.

I had considered running really long Ethernet cables from the WRT160N to Motoko and Colette in the past, but my door doesn’t close very well when there are two Ethernet cables stuck in a corner or on the floor, so that never really flew. Long Ethernet cables also aren’t that cheap, but neither are power line networking kits. Netgear charges some $100 for a base station and another $50 for a single output. So when I saw it at Fry’s, I of course decided to pick up a WD LiveWire kit, which gives me 8 ports on two stations for just $100!

That’s the box.

I tested it at my dorm at first, intending on returning it if it wasn’t much faster than 802.11g, but I got about 3MB/s from machine to machine:

{ A } ===== { megabit connection to God knows where } ===== { WD LiveWire } ===== { B }

… and so I decided to install it in my network.

Now it’s kind of like this:

{ 192.168.1.102 Motoko } ===== { WD LiveWire } =====\
{ 192.168.1.101 Colette } ===== { WD LiveWire } ===== { WRT160N } ===== { DSL modem } ===== { Internet
{ 192.168.1.xxx other wired } ===== { WD LiveWire } =====/
{ 192.168.1.xxx other wireless } —– { 802.11n! } —–/

It was kind of tricky squeezing the box into my mess of cable, but I ultimately figured something out that was relatively tidy.

And obviously that’s when I realized I overlooked something. I can’t ever get 3MB/s between Motoko and Colette because any transfer there still has to double back over the WD LiveWire (instead of 802.11g). So I have to split that 3MB/s into up and down bandwidth and I still get 1.5MB/s (megabytes) in that scenario. So fail. The good news is that it’s much, much more consistent (as I don’t get 800kb/s days anymore), and transfers from Colette to any 802.11n client still get up to 3MB/s (megabytes)!

The question is whether or not it would have simply been better to switch Colette and Motoko to 802.11n wifi cards, but given that each such card (from a reputable brand) cost some $40, the LiveWire seems like a pretty good deal still. Plus I have a wired connection in my room (courtesy of the extra two ports on client LiveWire box), which is quite appreciated.

That’s all for now, I think.

It looks like we’re falling into a cycle of like “update every 10 days” or something. As long as it’s consistent, I don’t really consider it that bad a thing… but I haven’t had any time to draw in like forever. School sucks. Page 15 of Pieces. I want to at some point set up an easier way to just view the comics, etc, but I don’t really know how I’m gonna do that…

There’s a Slick Wheels class locomotive in the last panel. Whoo.

Recently we’ve (myself, J, and the one and only generalachoo) have been playing a bit of Yugioh. Yugioh gets revived like every break, though we generally stick to the same antiquated card pool, though it’s chill that way. I do agree that it’s nice being able to use shitty cards and still be “competitive” within our fairly limited metagame. For the first time since I started doing YGO, I’ve gotten card protectors other than my stalwart UltraPro ‘Dragon Red’ sleeves.

They aren’t that good as sleeves… J says it’s more like “character merchandise that doubles as protectors”, or something along those lines.

We’ve also been playing with an old building toy called RokenBok. There was a period when me and my younger brother played with this a lot, but like all toys it got shut away in some bin after a while. J and I have been going through bins and piddling around with old toys (Tomy trains for one), so this naturally got onto our ‘to do’ list. I think the way we build now (for Tomy trains and for RokenBok) is drastically different – well, obviously, I suppose – than the way way I wouldn’t built this stuff when I was kid. I feel like my old mantra was “use any many of the pieces as possible”, but nowadays we just go rando or by theme. Maybe more on this some other time.

Cue our masterpiece, the “Spiral of Doom” (J’s name).

I’d post a picture for Yugioh… but what the heck would I post.

I have a problem set class this quarter for the first time in a while. Back in freshman year, I was throwing away a bunch of scratch paper trying to figure some of the stuff out, and I figured there had to be a better solution. Sometime in sophomore year I started doing problem sets on tablet and printing them out – so you can “throw away” scratch paper without doing anything – though by that time the problem set classes were already declining. I just wanted to say that I feel hella pro when I do problem sets digitally. Just like I feel hella pro when I talk on the phone with a headset.

Next time: powerline networking!