New miniatures, and a painted vehicle.

I was over come by the urge to buy some new miniatures this month. Seeing two posts on the net is what made my choice on just what miniatures I was going to get. The first post was from 15mm UK, and this one showed the new range of Star Vikings Space Dwarfs (Squats). I had to have them!!!!! Also in that range was some Orc like figures, so I had to get them as well. The next post was related to 15mm head swaps, and who had the best heads. GZG was the leader in that post so off to GZG web store, and I got some heads and other stuff. I ended up getting a pack of each of the mercs, to packs of trikes, and two packs of the tracked trikes. All in all GZG stuff does not need any write up from me the stuff is top notch.

As to the 15mm UK miniatures, I have some thing to say. The Dwarfs are fantastic...... The other guys are a bit lacking. The Wusuq guys heads are just ok. One guy the leader is great but the others have a grill in front that looks just crapy. I must be honest it looks like the others were rushed to finish, and if the heads were better I would have nothing but great things to say. So I am looking at head swaps for them.
Any way here are some photos.

As all way click to see a larger view of each photo. In the top you can see the heads, with the leader on the far left with a great head.

Next was a surprise for me. My brother is into models, and mostly like air plane, and ship models. This past fall he did not have any thing to work on so I gave him one of my Old Crow alien fighters to pint up. As he IS NOT a miniature painter he was not sure what to do. I told him to painted it how ever he wanted to. This past weekend he was over and brought it back, and to my surprise!

He did a fantastic job, and one color scheme I would not have thought of. So do I give him the rest of them to paint????

Back to painting

I have not painted in a while, and hit my bench yesterday. I have some GW plastic beastmen I have for SBH warband, and wanted to see how I do with 28mm stuff. I have not done a 28mm guy completely in a very long time, and I thought what the heck let me just see what happens. My first thought was just  paint the figure to be playable, and that will be good for me.

So I painted up a guy and I feel he is very good, and a great restart to me painting 28s again. Some of my challenges are I do use paint for miniatures, and my brushes are all for my 15mm guys. So I started out with a guy, took a photo with my trusty new Blackberry Bold (90% of all my miniature photos were taken with a Blackberry phone) and it sucked!!!!!! I spent a half hour trying to figure out my camera on the phone with no luck. So skip the progress photos. I got a good start, then off to my Son's first confession at church. Few hours later I was back at the bench, and I broke out my old canon camera, and her is the first shot.

Then I kept at the painting till it wad finished.

'

My next challenge was I just upgraded my laptop, and did not have all the software loaded on it. I have a Dell Lat D630 running PinGuy OS 12.10 beta (Linux). So I installed an old version of Picasa, and got the photos edited and uploaded.

Now I am off to son's first wrestling  match.

Noel

Tablet Life.......

Over the past few weeks I have been really playing around with my Tablet, and my daughter's tablet. We both have Android tablets, as I do not like Apple, and will not buy any of their products. With the super storm, I was in need of movies for my tablets, and other media to keep us busy during the down times. So after the storm I really did some thinking on how to best use my tablets and media. One idea was to start streaming my media in my house. Now I have a number of systems in my house, and would like for just one point for all my files to live. Having to copy all my stuff from one device to another all the time sucks, and takes a ton of time.

So here is my current lay out of my house.

• TV room, I have a 64 bit win 7 machine hooked up to the TV.
• Kitchen, I have a full Win 7 desktop with a HD Monitor, TV tuner card.
• Bed room, I have a win 7 laptop hooked up to my TV.
• Office had a win 8 (yuck) game rig.
• Tablet one, ASUS transformer tf101
• Tablet two, Samsung player 5"

I do not want to play with the game rig, as I want it for just games, but the rest I want to get all hooked up to streaming. Now I will be replacing my TV room PC with an Android player. This is a small device that turns your TV into an Android tablet. So with my wants listed I headed to Google to see what I could find.

For Video conversion this is what I am doing, and please note this is being done with DVDs that I own.
First I needed to rip my DVDs, and using the TV room computer I installed DVD Fab to do this. This is a free simple DVD ripper. Once I have the DVD ripped to the hard drive, I wanted to make it more Tablet friendly, and yes you do loose quality doing this, but I do not mind the lose. To turn the Vob files into a format I can easily play on Android I use Free Make Video converter. This is an easy and fast tool to do the job. My goal is to get the files around 2gb, and DVD fab will get them to just over 4gb in size.

OK so now I have my videos in avi (mpg) format and I can play on all my computers and tablets now what. Do I copy these to my devices?? No that is a total pain, and this is ware my next find comes in to play. Serviio is a media server, and it took about 15 minutes to setup and run, so I was watching movies on my tablet and the end of 15 minutes. And I mean it, it was very simple and easy to set up and use.
With Serviio I can stream my video, my music, my photos, and more.To view the media on my tablets I install the Serviio GO app from the play store. And to view on my Windows systems I use VLC player, and open the bookmarks. Both of the connections methods I will cover in later posts.

So now my plan is to move the TV room PC to a closet and keep it as my media server, and just connect to it for streaming media. I can connect to the media server from my tablet using a great remote desktop tool called SplashTop. Install it both on a tablet (yes even IOS) and the desktop and it creates a great remote connection.

This hole process is very simple to setup, and I will be doing a step by step of each part in coming posts. The first will be on converting DVDs to vob files (ripping the DVD to your hard drive). If you use a different approach to get your media up and shared please comment, and I will look in to it, as I love this stuff.

Noel

GRUNTZ 1.1 released.

Well I have been waiting for this release for some time now and it is here. I was not informed by email that is was ready but I was checking my Wargames Vault account and saw it there for download. So I have printed it out in full color, and will be taking it for a comb binding this week. I have all way wanted to bind my own book so today I got started on that project.

I started by printing the book in parts. Pages 1 ~ 20, 21 ~ 40, 41 ~ 60, 61 ~ 80, 81 ~ 100, 101 ~ 120, 120 ~ 136. I set them to the printer in booklet format, so one one page of paper I will have 4 pages.

OK with the booklets printed I needed to keep the pages together. To do this I stapled them, and yes the stapler does not reach the center of the page. So I took page one of the booklet, and marked it up as so. First I found center, then I had to find the off set of the stapler from its front edge.

In this photo I have a 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper, in a make shift jig of a computer (on left), box  (in back), on top of a box (bottom). The paper has lines (click for larger view). There is a center line, then the offset line. As you can see the stapler's front in on the offset line and the staple will end up on the center line when done. I have also marked ware I will place the staples. The only line I draw is the off set in light pencil and cross it ware the center of the staple goes.

 

In this photo you can see the staples. I just punch the staples through the pages right into the box below, starting with the center, and making sure the pages stay in line before moving to the next two staples.

Now I then gently remove the pages from the box so the staples do not rip through the paper. Next lay it flat with the staples sticking up, and lay a ruler along the staples and start a fold. Once it starts to fold bend the staples over as if they were normally stapled, and finish the fold to complete the booklet.

Now you see the booklets I created using this method. I have 7 in total, and I now have to figure how to put them together as a book. I will start with a needle and thread, and loop through the staples and knot each booklet together. Here is a web page that shows some thing like what I am doing but they are using holes for the thread, and I will use Staples form my holds. I am thinking of gluing a strip of cloth ribbon to the back edge of the outer booklets. Sowing the strips to the staples, and then bending them out to glue to the book cover when done. Kind of like L brackets on the front and back booklet. The I will glue the backs of all the booklets, to the back of my binding, then glue the L brackets to the inside covers.

So I hope to finish this supper geekey project soon.

Noel