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!

The slow updates lately have been somewhat regrettable, but with J updating so rarely these days, I’m not terribly motivated to do my part either. Of all the things we blabbered about at our Fanime panel, I think “doing a webcomic with someone” is probably the advice I’d be most inclined to support given all the crap we’ve been through. It has come down to the point where I need to be a little sick and a little bedridden to update…

Nothing really worth mentioning about today’s comic page, page 14 of [i]Pieces[/i]. It’s been only four months since I wrote this now, but it feels like a damn long time. Going forward with the comics right now, I’m doing kind of a free-flowing, unplanned “continuation” of this story, largely as I feel that that route is a lesser evil than the route of working on the “continuation” of the “main” story arc. Lesser evil in that’s it’s less clunky – and less difficult, I guess – to conduct. All of Pieces was supposed to have been posted by now, as I mentioned in an older post that I couldn’t find, but as with the main story arc, stuff happens, I don’t draw enough, and the posts get delayed. Next week (or next update, really; I intend to post in less than a week to make up for the recent failings) will be a painting again.

The rest of this post was going to be about setup, as a continuation of my last post, but I’m going to throw some other random shit in there. It’s weird typing “2011″ on everything…

The last time I talked about setup was more than a year ago. The image I used in that post is probably my “official” setup for 2010, despite having been taken at the end of 2009; that’s just the way things were through most of 2010, until stuff got changed up real fast towards the end of the year.

Likewise, the above picture will probably end up as the “official” 2011 shot, despite having been taken at the end of 2010. A couple things have changed since the last shot, but it’s definitely not the most dramatic transition. Most obviously, of course (at least for me), is the second SyncMaster 204B, which finally gives me a pair of matching displays. I also have a speaker set with a [i]sub-woofer[/i], whose only purpose is to serve as a footrest. There’s also a fair bit of rewiring, and of course, the TC4200 has finally been replaced, after some two and a half years of service. I never did figure out what was wrong with the TC4200. I parted it out and none of the buyers ever reported anything amiss with their parts, so I’m super stumped on that one.

These next two pics are just some trinkets I saw in Hong Kong this year. $1100HKD is approximately $150USD (it’s 1100/7.75 fwiw), and a base 1 x 1 “nanoblock” is about 2-3mm on a side. The actual molding on the nanoblocks is more like a megablock than a Lego brick.

I’ve talked about keyboards before, but not ones quite like this one; I don’t know if I’ve publicly mentioned my disdain for “normal” keyboards, bluetooth devices, or anything powered by batteries in general, but this keyboard checks all those boxes.

I like this keyboard, though, because it does away with a mouse. My ideal portable keyboard (say, for use with a tablet when the screen is down) would have been something like the ThinkPad UltraNav keyboard because it’s a) compact, b) light, and c) integrative, but they seem to cost a fortune (read $50+) if you want the USB ones (not that the PS/2 ones are all that much cheaper). This is a Dell XPS M2010 keyboard, and you’ve never seen it on sale anywhere, because it’s not actually sold individually; it’s part of a laptop Dell made in 2007.

The keyboard works just like any other laptop keyboard when docked to the M2010, but it’s actually a standard bluetooth keyboard when detached. I obviously picked it up in one of these once-in-a-couple-week deals on eBay, so it comes at little to no cost to me; there’s a proprietary battery, but some clever schmuck has figured out how to properly connect regular batteries to the thing with little modding. My X200T also comes with a built-in bluetooth adapter, so everything works out happily in the end, even though it’s not quite the way I originally imagined (ie with the UltraNav business).

At this point I realized that I don’t think I’ve ever posted a picture of my freshman dorm setup, but since then, there’s been this battle for space between myself, my laptop, and my eyes. I need enough space between the front of the desk and the front edge of my laptop such that I can easily rotate an big sketchbook, but the laptop also can’t be so far back such that I have to lean forward to read the screen. During freshman year, my D830 was already as far back as it could have been, so someone other than me won the space battle for sure, but during sophomore and junior year and the advent of giant desks and the E6400, it was a bunch of moving the laptop (and dock) back and forth and back and forth.

This last picture is what I hope will be the beginning of the end. After much mucking around with external displays since 2009, this is my current dorm setup. Even after I originally brought in an external display, I did not realize that the “proper” solution to the space battle was simply to make the external monitor the main monitor and the laptop the secondary display. The large screen makes text legible even if the actual display is further back, and the external keyboard frees up additional space because there isn’t a touchpad in front of it. I had the opportunity to find this solution in 2009, but I blew it, and I couldn’t have found the same solution with the crappy 1024 x 768 “loaner” display I was using for all of junior year.

Too bad only a couple months to use this setup. That’s all for now.

Well, I suppose it’s time to write another update, eh?

Let’s see… do I have any comments about this page… no, not really. The pin-board thing in panel one turned out better than I’d have thought. In general maybe this page is a little noisy… but I think all of my pages as of late are as such, simply due to the (crappy?) way that I shade at the moment.

Anyway, here’s something relatively old and non-drawing related again. This is a Lego “clock” I built in spring quarter for ART160. It took the majority of the quarter’s weekends to put the damn thing together (really doesn’t help that I can’t really move my Lego shit anywhere), and it may or may not have been worth it. I don’t think I’ve posted it before, and I don’t know why. In retrospect it would’ve been a great way to fill an update.

Every 50 seconds, the belt in the “front” is supposed to make a full revolution. There are two “lifts” on the belt, and while they aren’t exactly 25 seconds apart, they’re close. Each lift takes one marble up to the top and dumps it into the top rocker. Thus, every 50 seconds you get two marbles in the top rocker, which has a total capacity of 12 marbles. When it fills up, five minutes have passed, and the weight of the last marble tips the rocker which dumps all but one marble (the one that tipped the thing) into the bin at the bottom. The displaced marble makes its way into the second rocker, which also has room for 12 marbles, and thus a time capacity of an hour. When an hour passes, the weight of the last five minutes tips that rocker, and a marble falls onto the third rocker, which has a total capacity of 12 hours.

Or at least, that’s the theory. In practice I got anywhere between 49 and 51 seconds on the belt and that could vary depending on the slight weight differences of the marbles. While putting this thing together I discovered that the tolerances on marbles is very, very poor… the diameter of the largest and smallest marbles of the “the same size” varied by at least a millimeter. I bought 3 bags of 50 marbles to get about 40 “good” ones, ones that were small enough to fit in a 2 x 2 hold, but not too small such that they tripped up the belt loading (which was super sensitive to small variations in size). I also bought a janky new Star Wars set to get enough chain links for said belt.

One of the salient features of this thing, the big acrobat wheels, actually have a functional purpose – the belt, in addition to lifting marbles, also serves to connect the gearbox (old technic motor FTW!) to the mechanism that raises and lowers the smaller lift in the “ball pit” (see the video in a bit) which is really stiff. If the wheels aren’t heavy enough, the axle to which they are connected will slip with much fail. What I really want to do with this now is somehow integrate the drive thing onto the base plate.

Anyway, here’s a crappy video to demonstrate.

Lastly, I mentioned something about “proper dual-screen action” in d263, but such a thing isn’t proper unless you have two of the same monitor.

A year and a half later, the dream comes true… I was able to pick up the second Samsung 204b for a steal on eBay for a total of 3200 x 1200 cumulative pixels. Might talk more about this next time, but that’s it for now.

This post was written nearly a month ago, but it didn’t get posted because of the painting stuff.

[101107]

This is kind of the pivotal point in Pieces. This is also where the art kind of bottoms out, though the difference between this and page 1 really isn’t much.

This next thing is a bit interesting. I worked on Radmind (or rather a Windows port of Radmind) this summer, and the code that I wrote has been audited and actually committed to the sourceforge repository. You can see my name in the commit history starting from about nine days ago (when the code was committed; I actually started back in June). If I’d known the commit history was going to be tacked on without any auditing, I would have tried to be tidier…

I didn’t actually make any major changes to the overall function of the Radmind toolset, but I’m pretty sure I put in a couple thousand lines of code largely for reading and writing to the registry and saving registry data using the Windows API. Mostly a bunch of string manipulation including a bunch of conversions between “wide” characters and, well, “narrow” characters. I think I got pretty good at pointer math and the like after a while; the registry data dumps are binary files written and read one character at a time.

And of course, an obligatory shoutout to the best Windows API function call evar, ConvertSecurityDescriptorToStringSecurityDescriptor. I wish I had pictures to show with this part of the post, but I don’t know of what I would have taken pictures. Maybe my desktop with notepad++ and a bunch of command line windows open…

Anyway, the skateboard. We are effectively making a steel model of what should be aluminum skateboard. It’s been kind of diluted in the grand scheme of things, but I think our board is going to be the only ride-able model in the class. Assuming either of us can actually learn how to ride the thing, that is. It’s hard to tell how much of the difficulty is due to our inability to board, and how much of the difficulty is due to the poor performance of the fairly stiff and heavy device itself.

Anyway, before the project deadline was extended, we had ample discussion concerning how we should make the model. Because we wanted to using tubing, we couldn’t really stick a pattern on the laser CAM and have it do the work for us. We couldn’t really use some of the foam-ish modeling material recommended for this type of prototyping either. We considered wood and PVC but concluded that we’d ultimately have to make the same cuts and fishmouths that we’d have to make it metal tubing.

And that was the problem with the metal tubing. We had to make 22 fishmouths at angles between 5 and 45 degrees and weld it all together all within a week (originally half a week!). The fishmouth setup wasn’t as difficult as we had been led to believe, but it was definitely time consuming and came with a high degree of hand-waving. We had to mill the aluminum blocks ourselves (though in hindsight, I think v-blocks would have done the trick just as well) and eyeball where to make each cut (if we were going to not take a day on every pass at least), which really did make for happy welds in the end.

First time the board was completely assembled. I ultimately did most of the cutting and drilling, and my partner did all of the welding, largely because she was far more proficient at using the arc welder. My oxyacetylene welding isn’t that bad, but I’d been on an arc welder like once between today and a year ago. Even then it took me an entire shop session to make the blocks, largely because I hadn’t used a mill for about a year either.

I’m ultimately not sure if painting it has made it better or worse; I think the red we used turned out more industrial than we expected.

That’s probably it for now. I’m going to do another painting before the month is out. Or at least, that’s the goal…