I drew this neat thing over my little Christmas vacation. It’s an anime-style cartoon of our little family, ready for the holidays.
I drew it in several pieces because I was afraid of wrecking it by having to use the eraser a lot. Fortunately, I didn’t need to erase too much because it seems that my artistic skills have improved at least that much, even though I have not practiced in quite a while. On the down side, the entire drawing is spread over four pieces of paper.
Well, I’ve been lamenting our scanner for some time now. The old Umax Astra adds large yellow bars to anything scanned at full-page resolution, and it’s the slowest scanner I’ve ever seen. The computer also frequently “looses” the scanner - as in, I’ll be scanning and then suddenly the computer behaves as if someone sneeked into my office, unplugged the scanner, and ran off with it.
So I used some Christmas gift money to order a new one. The new one is also a flatbed scanner, but it includes a document feeder, so I’ll finally be able to cannibalize all of my D&D books and turn them into small, searchable PDFs like I’ve always planned. It may even be handy for scanning printed photos (why on Earth we have printed photos, I can’t say), but we’ll have to see about that.
In the same order, I threw in a new DVD player. The player in the bedroom has been getting a lot more use these days since I’ve been using it to wake up Abby before school and also to entertain Berta and I while Riley is getting his last before-sleep feeding. The problem is that the old player has started stuttering during playback.
There is now a stack of broken-down DVD players in the bedroom, since I’ve been shuffling them upstairs when we replace the one in the living room. I used to use a region-free player that I bought via Pat, but that one doesn’t even spin the disks anymore.
So the new player is a Philips DVP642. I hear good things about it, like that it has a hidden menu that lets you disable region encoding. That would be swell. While I was online during the purchase, I quickly downloaded all of the available firmware revisions for it. That should ensure that the features I want will still be available and enabled on my player after it arrives and is installed.
This player is also supposed to support direct MPEG-4 and DivX playback, which means all of those movies I download from the internet should play on there. Now all I need is a DVD recorder that has the same features as this one plus DVD+R writing, and I’ll put it in the slot where the Terapin is.
