[080702]

Well, again, best time to write these entries seems to be during lunch breaks and stuff. Here’s number one of two paintings I’m planning to do this time around and it’s the first “formal” painting I’ve done on the TC4200 as well. The second one will prolly go up for next week and hopefully I’ll feel like taking care of the story mess before the update after the next.

So really, the TC4200 might be the best art investment I’ve made since buying my original Wacom (The TC4200 was $50 more expensive, but as far as inflation and the devaluation of the dollar goes, it might as well have cost the same XD). Seriously, it is just that much intuitive to be drawing lines where you can see them, rather than on a standard tablet and looking at a screen. Whether or not this makes a significant improvement in art quality is still to be seen.

In general the TC4200′s not an extremely powerful machine and at least in general drawing, XP Tablet edition seems to give me a bit more lag than my Intuos 3 and my old 500m. Furthermore, it doesn’t do a great job processing those really large brush strokes either, and image manipulation (rotating, resizing, blah blah blah) take significantly longer than on the D830. Ah well. Pentium Ms are still cool in my book.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing, though. My paintings starting from C071120 have been following this trend of increasing brush sizes and especially with the last series of paintings have been looking – for lack of a better word “impressionist”. C080126 is pretty much the pinnacle of this trend. After considering it a bit, I’m really against this trend, so I’ve brought the brush size back down to 10-15 ish for this illustration. Not that the TC4200 can happily render anything much bigger than, say, 30px. Small improvement over the 500m.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but I’ve also reached the conclusion (and I don’t really know if I concluded this in the past) that it is much harder for good color to make up for bad lineart than it is for bad lineart to make up for poor coloring. Like in the case of Yuki I think the lineart was pretty fluid and it made up for the whole “impressionist” mess, but with Fate here, I feel like the lineart is pretty stiff and the painting (which I consider to be slightly superior) doesn’t do as good a job of covering up. Maybe just me though. Next painting is going to move away from my current lineart tracing strategy, though there doesn’t really seem to be a good fast fix for improving the quality of linearts in general XD. If only, if only.

Some other annoyances with painting on the HP. When you flip the thing into tablet mode, the screen covers up both the keyboard and the mouse. You don’t really need either of these when you’re doing the actual painting, but they’re nice to have. Keyboard moreso than mouse. A lot of times with the Intuos, I find myself keeping my left hand on the Ctrl + Z combination for quick undos. I’ve set one of my tablet hotkeys to do an undo, but it’s really annoying to keep reaching over to it. External keyboard you say? All my keyboards are PS/2 and the TC4200 is too new to accept such stone age devices.

It’s really annoying trying to keep the screen clean as well. I end up putting a square of tissue or paper towel under the side of my hand when I write/draw on the thing so as to prevent smudges from getting on the screen. One reason I really don’t like standard touch screen devices, all you’re gonna do is get smudges all over that freaking display.

Ultimately a tablet pc seems a nice thing to have for art. Maybe I’ll consider upgrading to like an X60 or X61 tablet somewhere along the line. The lowest X60 tablet I’ve seen has gone for an amazing $650, down from like $950 when I was looking for the TC4200. Prolly when the battery here starts giving out (Which seriously may not be long considering how heavily I’m using it).

[080413]

461 and drawn up to 480. Will try to draw 481 on tablet (again).

So J and I had a paintchat session just a little before I’m writing this update and I chose to draw on the TC4200 instead of my Intuos3 (about the 4th drawing session I’ve had on this thing; I’ve done a few doodles in class and a comic on the tablet PC as well) and I think the benefits are really beginning to show – aka, it’s beginning to feel a bit easier to use the tablet PC, maybe even over the Intuos.

One of the contributing elements is that between now and, errr… before, I figured out a major contributor to some of the lag I was getting in OC1.1 and less significantly in OC4.3. It turns out that there’s some dumbass setting that’s checked by default (press and hold the pen for right click) that somehow induces lag in the aforementioned drawing programs. Another setting “flick gestures” (or something like that) was another contributor. Turning off those two settings (and possibly the clean install) seriously made drawing a much more pleasant experience.

So here’s the chat from 08/01/09, about three months ago on the conventional tablet:

And here’s the chat from yesterday, on the TC4200. I’ve cut out J’s part on both chats in case he wants to use them as his own update (which I’d guess he would; both pictures have some color adjustments).

Anyways, I don’t think there’s a question whether or not the yesterday image is better than the 08/01/09 image. The issue is that it’s hard to tell if the improvement is due to the benefits provided by drawing on the TC4200 (and I couldn’t really pinpoint what those are besides just being able to see what you draw) or some other external factor. I don’t want to come right out and say “due to an increase in artistic ability” because that could mean anything here. Another thing to consider is that this paintchat took barely half an hour (if the OC millisecond counter is to be believed) and I definitely felt like I was erasing much less than with the Intuos.

Nonetheless, TC4200 drawing seems to be looking up now, thouhg it remains to be seen how well it holds up in a “real” completed piece. I think it’ll do really well for the most part; I just don’t realy have the time to push out a completed piece at the moment. I’m mildly worried that drawing on a screen will forfeit my already crappy abilities to draw without a screen (aka with the Intuos3), and render THAT 400 dollar investment useless. to take an optimistic perspective, it might make me BETTER on the Intuos.

Why that matters at all is because there are limitations (I think) to the TC4200. The machine is relatively slow (something like just over twice as slow as the D830 on wPrime 32M, BUT about 40 percent faster than my 500m). Because all my graphics programs are single threaded (especially OC; that seems to make no use whatsoever of the second core) it shouldn’t make too much of a difference. Nonetheless, I had the Pentium M 740 running full tilt whenever I was actively painting in the paintchat yesterday… but I’m wondering if that’s just the networking mode that eats up so much computing juice.

Specially when I keep undoing and redoing big filters in PSP, it’s not that helpful to have a single core Pentium M.

I think there’s some program I could use to make the TC4200 act like an input device for another computer but I haven’t looked into it nor know how good the performance will be. If it’s decent though, it means I’ve got a $450 Cintiq which doubles as a laptop. That’s some pretty sick shit there.

Also, first paintchat session yesterday after a connection broke:

… and that’s all for now.

[080407]

460!

So I drew a comic (479) on the TC4200 last week. For the most part it sucked balls, but it looked like a comic and not a piece of crap. I’m at least becoming confident that while there’s a upper limit to art quality that needs to be pushed forward, there’s also a lower limit to art quality that’s slowly being pulled up as well. Like my worst art now is still better than my best art two years ago. Something like that; at least in the same vein.

On the whole, I’m very happy with this laptop. There are very few downright less-than-good things I can say about it, and while drawing seems to be one of them, part of the problem may just be my less-than compitent tablet-based drawing skills.

There are a lot of small touches that, while not very significant individually, I really liked on the whole. I might have mentioned that the keys seem to be textured to resist wear a bit better than standard Dell keys. The clickers on the trackpad and touchpad are also reubberized for the same effect, as is the palmrest, which seems to have a protective sheet over it. I like how they did away with the legacy ports and included three USB ports instead (and one on each side of the machine to boot, rather than three in back or something). I even comment on the power cord; it’s about twice as long as the ones I’ve had on Dells and I can use the machine on my bed in my dorm. That’s a really nice change. Then there’s the hidden latch and the little scrolling thing on the trouchpad and I could go on and on. Regardless, my 500m has worked five long years and deserves a rest.

I did a clean install over the weekend with the 80GB drive I raped from my 500m and lo and behold, HP’s software still kinda sucks. There were like three or four drivers for all the little custom buttons and inputs on the tablet and I wasn’t really sure which ones did exactly what and which ones I needed so I played around with them and stuff still doesn’t totally work. Some of the functions overlap with the functions provided by Windows Tablet and it’s all a very confusing mess. The tablet driver was also kinda flaky, so I stuck with the Wacom driver (though I had honestly hoped that HP’s driver would help the drawing). This is actually the first time I’ve done an installation from a non-proprietary external optical drive (my dad’s Latitude X300 has a proprietary one) and I’m surprised how smoothly it went, especially considering I used an old desktop IDE optical drive with an adapter instead of something more conventional (no other choice here: I sold my external Plextor drive a long time ago).

Tablet mode actually had some uses that I didn’t foresee. When you’re reading manga or a PDF file, you can use it like an ebook and have a portrait screen. When you’re watching anime in an inconvenient location, it can also be easier to switch to slate mode than to have the thing in laptop mode. So on and so forth.

Interestingly, it’s also hard to find wallpaper for the thing. You only need 1024 x 1024, but it needs to work centered in landscape or portrait mode, which can be challenging. At the moment, I’m using this rather simple Aria wallpaper which just happens to work without any modification (though the wallpaper I had on my 500m nearly worked well) [100614: dead link].

So I changed the hard drive here in part to squeeze the battery and in part to increase storage capacity. I bought the drive a while ago specifically for the low power consumption (and it was on sale at Fry’s; planned to make a non-external-powered external drive, but that never materialized). It’s a Fujitsu MHV2080AH (80GB, more than I thought I’d ever need at the time, and still more than enough considering how I impulsively delete/move stuff now and then. All of my machines now have 80GB drives; unless you count Colette’s pseudo-external 500GB) and it’s a little loud, but it as an idle power draw of 0.6 watts, which is still pretty damn good for a 5400rpm drive. The 40GB Hitachi 5k100 that came with the TC4200 drew 0.9 watts. The Hitachi 4k80 I had in my 500m drew the same. Active power consumption is about 2 watts for all three drives, but we aren’t doing any really heavy disk work going between class to class. Ideally what we’d want is a Hitachi 4k120 drive (0.3 watts idle, desite being a 4200rpm drive), but I’d have to buy it and I haven’t been able to find it cheap.

In my battery squeeze quest, I considered swapping the Pentium M 740 with a Pentium M 1.3/1.4 (11-27 watt TDP versus 6-22 watt TDP, respectively), but I was in Newark with my good friend generalachoo who suggested that I should undervolt the 740 instead. Since all laptop BIOSes are a piece of crap, this implies software undervolting, which is not a terribly elegant solution, but extra battery life is more important than elegance here. Using the free RMClock, I was able to stably shave abut 0.3 volts off every SpeedStep level on the 740, dropping the idle voltage from 0.9880 volts to the lowest allowed voltage (at least by RMClock) of 0.7000 volts. Full throttle voltage went from 1.3080 volts to 1.0040 volts. Not necessarily a good representation of temps, since I’ve been using it on my bed for a few hours now. I could have brought in the Pentium 1.3 or 1.4, but like I said, RMClock wouldn’t let me bring those below 0.7 volts, so it’d be a pointless loss in performance, considering the machine is idle 90 percent of the time.

All in all I estimate that I’ve gained about 30-40 minutes of battery from the drive and the undervolting. I haven’t actually done the whole battery drain test, but based on the relatively accurate (at least for this battery) windows battery monitor, I should be getting anywhere from 4.5 to maybe even FIVE hours under light loads (notetaking and browsing only with screen brightness at uber-low). The 740 also idles at least ten degrees lower than it used to, which is a pretty good drop as far as undervoltng goes. Got a similar result with Colette’s Athlon XP. Completely stable under Orthos/Prime95 for at least an hour on each Speedstep setting (and significantly more at lowest and highest) I might add.

Anyways, I’ve been playing with the undervolting settings on my D830 as well, but I ain’t done with that yet. I was hoping to draw another comic over the weekend, but it didn’t happen. Oh well. That’s all for now. Have a nice day.

[080331]

459! This update actually being written on time! (as opposed to early XD)

So. There is absolutely nothing special about today’s comic. At all. Therefore, I have absolutely nothing to say about today’s comic. At all. Over the break I drew 477 and 478, but they were both pieces of crap, which is somewhat unfortunate. Too much time got taken up for the car project and other odds and ends, whose status ensure that I will have plenty of entry material for the coming weeks.

Anyways. This entry is being written at dinner on my old laptop whilst I am eating my dinner. Sadly, it may be the last entry being written on this computer. My TC4200 came in the mail today and will begin some real roadtesting tomorrow when I start classes for spring quarter; if it lives up to my expectations I’ll reformat and retire the 500m at the end of this week.

I’ve been playing with the TC4200 for all of the last five hours and my thoughts have largely been positive.

This TC4200 is around two years old, assuming the memory (which is timestamped) was not replaced within the machine’s lifetime. I bought it from an ebay seller in Canada for what I think is the relatively small sum of $450 USD. An X41T, as I have said before, would have cost me $600. The TC4200 has a 1.733GHz (technically that should be .733 repeating; fractional bus speeds ftw) Dothan Pentium M 740, 512MB of DDR2 533 (also repeating) memory (actually a downgrade from my 500m which currently has a full GB), a 40GB 5400RPM drive, 12.1″ screen, blah blah blah. Physically, it’s an interesting change for one who has only used a long line of Dell.

When I first powered the thing on, the fan kicked in like a bitch for a couple seconds (I really hate how some desktop graphics cards and motherboards do the same thing; it’s really annoying) before it loaded into Windows in about a minute. The BIOS on this computer is a piece of junk; it’s very poorly layed out if you ask me. Dell’s more recent BIOS iterations have been falling into the same groove, which is somewhat unfortunate.

The guy probably didn’t load the thing with an HP recovery disk, but there was still a substantial amount of crap I didn’t need in the provided installation so I spent a few minutes deleting some stuff and setting Windows to my preferred settings (I don’t have the software to do a full reformat here in my dorm, which is, again, unfortunate).

After piddling with all the litte settings and making sure basic functionality was all good (wireless, ethernet, USB, blah blah blah), I obviously flipped the screen down and tried the tablet mode. I kinda know how to use XP tablet edition having used a TC1100 and an X41T, but when you’re trying to do day-to-day tasks in tablet mode, things get annoying somewhat quickly (I guess it could just be me not used to it yet, of course).

Writing on the TC4200 is actually quite pleasant. Tablet PC edition’s handwriting recognition and correction software is usually much better than I thought, but can have fits of random which J has seen on AIM. The really big thing is that it doesn’t like interpreting symbols and it tries to correct words that it doesn’t know (like a more forceful version of autoformat/spell check). “Writing” in AIM with J, it makes all my “meh”s “men” and all my “cuz”s “out”, etc. There are also some circuitous functions to backspace or delete or insert, etc, but like I said, overall, better than I thought.

Drawing seems to be a different story. When you simply move the mouse around the screen there’s a bit of lag, like the mouse has a bit of intertia and you’re pulling the dog on a leash. I’m pretty sure this is intentional, but I have no idea how to turn it off. This lag seems to either go away or not be a bother when you write, but somehow it’s different for drawing.

Drawing performance, oddly enough, seems to vary across programs! Drawing performance is pretty much crap in OpenCanvas 1.1; it lags quite a bit and I have a hard time doing precise strokes. Paint is actually a bit better, and OpenCanvas 4 offers performance that’s not too much worse than my Intuos3 tablet. This leads me to believe this whole mess is a software problem, so hopefully I can find some way to get rid of it, if not just suck it up and get used to it.

Overall, drawing performance is a bit worse than I had hoped for. I guess that’s why a Wacom Cintiq starts at $1000. Overall computing performance is better than my 500m by default (1.73GHz Dothan should be just under 50 percent faster than my 1.4GHz Banias), so I have no complaints there.

Battery life is very impressive. I’ve had the thing browsing and playing music on and off to simulate my usage patterns in class and it’s within the fourth hour as I write this. and down only seventy six percent. This is simply amazing. I am definitely impressed. To boot, this is with a relatively high power (drawing) Pentium M and a not so energy conservative Hitachi hard drive. I could easily see 7-8 hours with the normal extended battery, maybe up to HALF A DAY with the expensive 12-cell extended battery. Those figures are simply incredible.

It’s not as light as I would have hoped. Then again, four pounds must just not be that much lighter than 5 pounds, since 5 pounds just isn’t that much lighter than 6 pounds. Then again, I went to the Stanford bookstore today and picked up (pick up as in physically pick up, not as in purchase or anything like that) a Lenovo X300 and a Macbook Air, and holy crap where they light. And thin. I don’t like Macs, but holy cow that thing is an impressive piece of engineering.

At this point, the TC4200 has just gone into standby (at 5 percent battery) just under its FOURTH HOUR.

So. Pictures. You can see the size difference between the TC4200 and my D830. This is the first ultraportable class machine I’ve owned; the D830 is considered “mainstream”, though the D830 is a bit lighter than most lower-grade 15″ machines. On the other hand, I think the TC4200 is heavy for its size. It’s also pretty thick with respect to say, the XPS 1330 or a Sony TZ (or is that SZ? or ST? Goddamn you Sony and your queer numberiing), but to someone who started with a 6lb 14″ laptop in 2002, it’s pretty darn small. Sorry if the pics load slow. Comcast seems to have throttled my up bandwidth even more…

That’s it for now.