Media - our house - Page 2 | virtualwolf.org

A photo of the core box of Star Trek: Away Missions, plus three expansions. They're all quite plain, primarily yellow, and have transparent plastic windows where you can see the miniatures sitting in yellow trays. The core box has four light blue Federation miniatures and six grey Borg, there are two Klingon expansions (Chancellor Gowron which has four miniatures and the House of Duras which has five) both of which have bright red miniatures, and then there's the Romulan expansion for Commander Sela that has five dark-ish green miniatures.

YISSSS.

...now they need to get put away until my birthday next month. 😤 #FirstWorldProblems

Posted on 18 March 2026, 15:52

A photo of the beginning of our game, it's been set up on our dining table. There are a set of interlocking boards with artwork on them that looks like rooms on a Federation starship, with the rooms marked with things like "Engineering", "Bridge", "Sick Bay", etc. The Borg are all in grey plastic, and they're closest to the camera with two deployed in Engineering and the others not deployed yet. To the right are the four Klingons in red plastic, all holding bat'leths or various other Klingon weaponry, and then at the top and left are the blue plastic of the Federation team. There are character boards sitting in front of our chairs that have the stats of each character on them, and dice and other tokens scattered around the table.

We had @[email protected] over for Star Trek: Away Missions, and it was excellent! So much so that I've ordered the base game and some of the expansions for my birthday next month. 😁

I played the Borg, @[email protected] played Chancellor Gowron's Klingons (insert meme here), and @[email protected] was the Federation. It was really good, very close game in end: @[email protected] on 145 points, me on 140, and @[email protected] on 130. I definitely wasted some actions trying to unsuccessfully assimilate the enemy but I was playing the starter deck and I don't think that's set up for really relying on that as a way to score points. I started to get the hang of it by the end and am very keen to play more!

The only thing I'm not a fan of is the fact that they made all the miniatures' heads slightly larger than they should be so they're more like caricatures... kind of ruins the vibe for me, haha.

our house darkroom gaming star trek: away missions

Posted on 14 March 2026, 17:47

A photo of a quite nondescript display that has the blue edges of the circuit board it's mounted to poking out a bit from each side. (It still has the protective film over the display which is why the display itself looks a bit crap.)

My next little project has arrived! This is an ESP32 microcontroller attached to a 7" touch-capable display that I'm going to attempt to use LVGL with to consolidate the two Raspberry Pi Zero Ws that display our lounge room temperature/humidity/power dashboard clock, and the ESP32 that gives us a visual indication via LEDs of what the outdoor dew point plus outdoor and indoor air quality is.

our house diy darkroom new toys esp32

Posted on 4 March 2026, 18:04

A photo of a black mouse sitting on a dark grey mousepad. It has a two buttons behind the scroll wheel, another two to the left of the left mouse button, and you can't see it from the angle of the photo but there are another three around where your thumb rests. The whole design is a bit angular in places but isn't the absolutely ridiculous "We're trying to make this look like a Lamborghini" styling that you see in a lot of mice.

New mouse day!

My six year-old Microsoft Intellimouse's scroll wheel was starting to misbehave, and the rubber on the thumb rest was starting to go gross so I figured it was time for a new one. I specifically wanted a wired mouse and man there are not a lot of choices if you don't want to go wireless. My old Logitech MX518 was an absolute trooper so I figured I'd go back to Logitech, this one is the G502X and I am overwhelmed at the amount of buttons on it (11 in total). I'm not even sure what I'm going to do with half of them.

our house darkroom new toys

Posted on 25 February 2026, 13:22

A photo of the side of the thermal imaging camera sitting on a table. It looks like of like a cop's hand-held speed camera except much less chunky. It's dark grey with red highlights and and has big handle that you hold with a trigger that causes the camera to take a photo.

A photo taken with said thermal camera. It's showing my computer setup, an ultrawide monitor with a laptop sitting open to the left of it. The monitor is various shades of orange, shading up to yellow towards the top, and the laptop has the bulk of the heat in the middle where the keyboard is. The screen is relatively cool, and most of the rest of the surrounds are just blank purple, but you can see a faint warm patch in the desk where I had my arm resting when I was typing on the keyboard. There's a tracking point showing the warmest part of the image is middle of the laptop which is 32.7 degrees Celsius.

And today was in fact a double package day, I had also ordered a set of D12 dice from AliExpress (my very first order from there; all I wanted was a decent number of them to keep track of wounds when playing Kill Team, but all the D12 sets I could find were just a handful of D12s along with a whole bunch of other different types of dice which I had no need of) and while poking the site around I found a cheap thermal imaging camera so grabbed that too! I've always wanted one to double-check the insulation in the house and various other things, but I didn't want one that required a smartphone and app, and all the standalone ones were multiple hundreds of dollars at the very least.

This one works perfectly and was only $150, my only complaint is that somehow none of the USB-C cables I have actually register when plugged into it, I've needed to use the cable it comes with (which is USB-C to USB-A annoyingly, so I need an adapter).

our house darkroom new toys

Posted on 20 February 2026, 21:07

A photo of my home office desk setup: an expanse of white standing desk in its standing position, with a 34" ultrawide monitor in the middle, and my laptop to the left looking like it's suspended in mid-air (it's on a monitor arm/laptop mount). Underneath the right side of the monitor and the laptop on the left are two speakers sitting sideways on the desk. They're almost entirely white except for the rubber bit around the woofer cone and they look VERY sleek and modern. Tucked away, if such a word can be used to describe a honking great black box, at the left foot of the standing desk on the floor is the subwoofer.

The speakers (and subwoofer) arrived today! I'm glad I got the speakers in white, they're very handsome-looking but also blend in to my desk rather than being BIG CHUNGUS OBVIOUS BLACK. I'll need to do some mucking around tomorrow to get the subwoofer levels right, and there are some switches on the back of the speakers that changes some frequency response to counteract them being so close to the wall so that'll be another thing to play with too.

I also need to go to Bunnings to pick up some sort of individual switch powerboard or adapter to plug the speakers and sub into so I can easily turn them on and off, because fuck me is reaching around to scrabble behind them trying to find the power switch annoying.

our house darkroom new toys

Posted on 20 February 2026, 20:54

A photo of my home office desk setup: an expanse of white desk with a 34" ultrawide monitor in the middle, and my laptop to the left looking like it's suspended in mid-air, sitting on its shiny new monitor arm/laptop mount. Underneath the main monitor is a USB audio interface and guitar load box.

I wanted to get a pair of Yamaha studio speakers so I can listen to and mix my songs on good speakers without needing to cart my laptop down to the lounge room and plug it into the amplifier there, but I'm quite short on space on my desk. I could fit the speakers but the left one would have to go exactly where my laptop stand was. I was doing a bunch of poking around trying to figure out what I could do, and discovered that you can get VESA laptop mounts that attach to a regular monitor arm!

So I bought a mount from Desky and another Ergotron monitor arm (I've already got my monitor mounted on one), the laptop mount arrived yesterday and the arm today, so now I'm all set up!

...now hopefully the studio speakers actually ship soon. 😛

our house darkroom new toys

Posted on 10 February 2026, 12:46

A photo of a three-player game of Warhammer Underworlds. It's played on three rectangular boards sitting together in a T-shape, there are tiles marked out with hexes, and the artwork is all dark blue like you're underwater. At the bottom closest to the camera are the Shadeborn, four lithe elves in very dynamic poses with very pale skin and wearing deep purple clothing. At the left are the Gorechosen of Dromm, a three-fighter warband consisting of very large meaty-looking warriors in large red armour, one of whom is clearly part daemon because he's hunched over and has MASSIVE arms and huge horns sprouting from his head. And lastly at the right are the vampires of the Crimson Court, who have pale blue skin, elegant armour, and red cloaks, with blood dripping from their weapons and the corners of their mouths.

A closeup photo of the bloody battle at the beginning of round two. All four of my Shadeborn are within one or two hexes of two of the vampires of the Crimson Court, with a third standing just behind them. And behind _them_ are the Gorechosen of Dromm, two within charge range of any of the Shadeborn or Crimson Court, and Dromm himself standing a little further back in the distance.

We were going to have a bad movie night with @[email protected] and another friend, but said friend had to cancel because he was coming down sick so instead we had @[email protected] over anyway and played Warhammer Underworlds instead! (The original edition, not the new one.) I played the Aelves of the Shadeborn, @[email protected] played the Khorne's finest, the Gorechosen of Dromm, and @[email protected] had the vampires of the Crimson Court.

Man it was a hell of a game, the start of the second round consisted of an incredibly brutal three-way fight between all of us, and the Crimson Court lost all but one of their warriors before the end of that round. My Shadeborn were doing okay, but I lost two warriors during the second round which denied me a couple of objective scoring opportunities, then Sylark was killed during the third round by a ridiculously long-range charge of 8 by the Crimson Court's remaining warrior Vellas von Faine. The Gorechosen only lost a single warrior right at the end (granted they only start with three), taken out by Valyssa of the Shadeborn, and I was able to score two objectives right at the end, which meant that the final score was 8-8-7, with the draw being between the Shadeborn and the Gorechosen! I'm honestly amazed that the Crimson Court managed to get so close with how badly it started for them.

our house gaming games workshop warhammer underworlds the crimson court harrowdeep the shadeborn gorechosen of dromm

Posted on 7 February 2026, 23:34

A photo of the box for Kill Team: Shadowhunt. The box shows a photo of a squad of Sisters of Battle (warrior women in black power armour) battling Chaos Raptors (mutated evil Space Marines in blue armour with gold trim wearing big jump packs). The tag line says "Faith versus heresy in the shadow of alien terror".

Aw yiss, guess who has even more plastic to paint!

This is a surprisingly weighty box given it's only got two squads in it, I guess it must be the tokens and books as well.

our house darkroom kill team games workshop new miniatures shadowhunt

Posted on 5 February 2026, 10:51

A photo of the aforementioned paper guillotine thing. It consists of a flat board with an arm on one side with a sharp blade. There is a piece of paper with some of the Kill Team character cards sitting on the board, with small chopped-off pieces of paper on the floor next to it and a scattering of the already-chopped cards sitting off to the right.

Achievement unlocked: bought one of those paper guillotine things that teachers have!

All of the Kill Team squad rules come in printable PDFs for chopping up into 120x70mm-sized cards for easy reference. I got one page in to chopping them out with scissors and went "Fuck this" and then remembered that these guillotines are a thing that exist, and man I wish I'd bought one of these years ago when I was into chopping out Magic The Gathering and Warhammer Underworlds proxy cards.

our house darkroom new toys

Posted on 23 January 2026, 18:56