Tuesday, January 6, 2015

Into the bathtub

OK, to redeem my past failures, I present you with something useful. The 1st thing I thought of when I received an iPad is doing it in the bathtub. The excellence screen compensates for it's smallness. Yet the size allows me to port my favourite AV stars into the bathtub.

There's unlimited steamy hot water for your pleasure, or whatever temperature you desires. You can use whatever lubricant you use, oil or water based, and tons of it. In the enclosed bathtub, inside the closed bathroom door, in the middle of the house, probably will ever notice the orgasmic noises made by the stars continuously.

I made a rack across the bathtub for the iPad so I have two hands free for whatever! But the iPad is inherently unstable. I couldn't function as I was continuously worrying if the iPad will get wet or fall into the tub.

I have been satisfying myself in front of the big screen TV. But after a while it's too much hassle. You have to move the furniture around so you have a suitable "chair" right in front of the TV and yet you need to control the video search down to every frame. And then there's the clean up. Before that, you worry about where your protein ends.

Increasingly, I have been using the portable more and more. After I get excited at the desktop looking at my video stars, I usually don't want to wait until everything is set up on the big screen. And that you need the whole house all by yourself. So I just plug the external drive to the portable and go somewhere cosy.

It's only logical that I move into the bathroom again. First, I put a plank of wood across the tub and put everything on it. It's sturdy, none slip but it's a bit heavy and would get wet a little. It doesn't matter as long as you find somewhere to store the wood.

Here I reused old pipes to make a lighter frame. Plastic covers on the frame serves as platforms for everything. There are fixtures on the pipes that prevent the covers from slipping sideways.

I used a single external drive instead of file servers and media servers. I have old DVD videos up to blue-ray disk images. It's demanding on my network plus you need compatible software on all the computers and TVs. An external drive turn out to be the most portable thing. It's also encrypted. Decryption is on the fly nowadays and transparent.

The most important trick is using a wireless mouse with a middle wheel. In the beginning I though of editing off all the video parts and doesn't excite me and keep a short climax clip. It didn't work and it's not going to work. Too much work and too much thinking about what to cut and what to keep. Now with a virtually limitless external drive, the problem is how to navigate, especially inside the bathtub when you hands are wet or worse, oily.

Nowadays things are so fast that you can use a single for forward and another for backward. If you keep forwarding, very soon the end of video will be reached. But then you still want other keys to skip 5 sec, 1 min, and 5 min. You want some video player that can be programmed and you have to remember your programmed keys.

I thought the touch interface would be nice, but no. It's OK but not ideal when you want to go backward and forward, forward a few second slowly to a few minutes quick, and then the same backward. Also, it's not nice to move the fingers all over the screen when your sticky/oily/slippery hands have other better things to do.

That's where the wireless mouse comes in, blue tooth or anything wireless. Wired mouse will do but most have a long wire that becomes clumsy in the tub. With a wireless mouse basically you can isolate the computer and rest from water. You only need to touch the mouse, which is not connected to the computer. And whatever happened to the mouse, it will not drag anything with it.

Basically the mouse can do everything but the super icing on the cake is the middle wheel. I never really used it because touch is a lot better on land. On the high sea about my tub that's different. Actually you want a trackball or joystick that's won't fall into the waters. But the wheel is superior. Most video player support the middle wheel, what a surprise! If each tiny step of the wheel moves forward 30 sec, you can scroll past the whole movie very fast. If each step go backs 10 sec, you have a very fine control to get to the heart of any scene. I wish the step size is programmable. Also the mouse clicks are of course usable to go to near the end of the movie immediately.

It's so good ...... the first time I dropped the mouse into the bathtub! Believe me, the feeling is a lot better than dropping the portable or hard drive into the bath. I thought the low cost mouse is totalled. But then after drying and a few bangs, it worked as usual.

The 2nd time the battery ran out. It's that good. (But the battery wasn't fully charged in the first place.) Then I got out naked, found the charger and plugged in. When I finished, I put everything carefully out of the tub, only to forget the power cord. The tip of the power cord went into the water. Luckily it isn't a electrical plug. I think it will work when it dries. Let's see. Next time I will check the battery first. A fully charged battery goes for at least a few hours and I don't think I can last that long ;-)

The improvement that I can think of is to deliver hot water streams to the other side of the tub where my back is. By definition you cannot have deep water in the tub, only one to a few inches, or your hands cannot function well. You have to warm up the tub for your back first, and somehow to keep the body warm if you stay long.

ps. The mouse is of course optical that doesn't work on clear plastic.