Family Portrait Part 3: ..... Impersonal Computing?

OK, the title was a bit of a joke, although, I'm not all that certain what to call this category of all our various computers that are not routinely used by a particular person. Last time we talked about the fact that in many modern American homes, people have one, and in many case, more than one digital device that they use on a regular basis. Regardless of form, be it notebook, tablet, or phone, these are personal computers, by definition. So, then what are the other various machines that are scattered about our houses that don't belong to anyone? For us, they are generally something that's connected a large display so that they can access media content either distributed through the internet or our own network. 

For our system, I'll start at the core; the server. Ours has grown from a bunch of scrounged together parts running the first version of Windows Home Server which was housed in a cheap case, to what it is now through a series of steps. The first big step was the addition of a caching RAID controller that allowed for a degree of redundancy. That was back in the mostly backing-up stage of it's existence when I was just experimenting with serving media. However, as things went along and I went from just a bunch a ripped CDs to movies, the server has taken on a greater role. In the last year, I've ripped more and more of my movies from their original optical format to something that can be accessed throughout the house as well as be easily portable. This has taken the amount of necessary space to a whole different magnitude. I just thought I had a lot of storage when I had 2, 2Tb drives in the old server. The new server will have 5! It will be built in a Fractal Designs, Define XL R2, partially because it has 8 drive spaces, but mostly because it's one of the few on the market able to take the EATX sized SuperMicro server motherboard that will run it. I haven't decided whether it will become a 24/7 server or continue as a Friday to Sunday machine as in the past, but suffice to say that it's grown beyond what it was!

 

The next type of machines are actually the fastest growing category in our house, the HTPC (home theater PC). They've gone from 1, to the soon-to-be 3 in fairly short order. Granted I've had one for quite some time. It came about back in the days when there wasn't an "HTPC" term and the purpose built cases didn't exist. I had to use a Antec "desktop" case for it. But it remained at 1 for a very long time. A few years ago, I got the Ahanix D-Vine5 case you see above from my friend Pat and it has remained the home for the HTPC in my primary A/V system for quite awhile, suffering through 3 motherboard changes in that time. A couple of years ago, I picked up an Cooler Master Elite 130 Mini-ITX chassis to create a second unit when my brother sent me one of his technology cast-offs; a first-gen "Core" i3 processor on a Zotac motherboard. Later on, I picked up a low powered Gigabyte board with a Celeron CPU and it went into a much nicer Silverstone SG-08Lite case as befitting the master bedroom. It's current purpose is for us to catch up on TV show episodes that we've missed or occasionaly bouts of YouTube watching.

The third, will go into service as soon as I locate another HDMI cable so it can attach to the downstairs TV. It came to me this summer when I was visiting family in Taiwan and my brother gave me his "spare mini-server". He has a couple of interesting behaviors that has benefited me over the years. He works in technology and has the wherewithal to dabble in whatever he's interested in.... which includes low-power computing. ......And he tends to buy things in multiples whether he needs it or not! So, this last trip, he gave me an Intel Mini-ITX MB with an on-board Atom processor. Not terribly powerful, but enough to run a small HTPC. It's in an ugly plastic case, but I'll eventually find it something appropriate like the Habey cases that are clearly Apple Mini knock-offs! We have 3 stand-alone televisions, and there is a PC connected to each of them. Is that all?

No, not yet! This kind of ugly "beast" of a ThinkPad came to me recently when a friend dropped it off for me to retrieve files for him. Like many ThinkPads, it started life as his work machine, then went on to be his personal PC when his company retired it. After a long and fruitful life it's fan had given up the ghost and he bought a new computer. Like so many others, he hadn't backed up his files and needed me to get them off; after which, he left the old girl with me. Unbeknownst to the beasty, it's about to become the "garage computer"! There'll be a post on the "garage computer", so I'll leave it at that for now.

I know that this is actually under a different category and post, but let me pay a quick homage (the French say it so much nicer) to the little guy that made all this happen: Powerline Networking technology. The original owner whole built our house and spent quite a lot of money installing speakers and running wire everywhere should have done that with networking..... but didn't. So I have a 2 story house with no networking to the second floor! My options were to spend hundred (thousands!?!) for an electrician to run it, but I was able to call on this little known technology that uses the electric wiring in the house to move data as well. In the past, it had been a little glitchy, but the current version is pretty darned reliable and fast to boot! My ability to have all the various computers everywhere is very much thanks to the Trendnet 1200 AV2 kits that came in the mail a couple of weeks ago! Nothing like "wired" networking!

Family Portrait 2016: Part 2, Personal Computing

It is 2016! We each have personal computers! Actually, I should say, "devices", since we all have more than one and they aren't all computers in the sense that most people understand them. There are 4 of us, and we all have at least one notebook (aka Laptop) computer, and one tablet. I'll get back to the "at least" part a little later.

In today's world, it's the notebook computer that's the typical product and it's the desktop that's a specialty item. Now that our children are at or close to teenage years, we all have uses for an actual computer. The last holdout was the daughter who started on a notebook computer playing games both online and locally loaded. But then, she went completely iPad oriented when she received her first one a couple of years ago. Last month, she announced to me that she intended on putting a "computer" on her Christmas List. I told her to take it off because, in our family, those are "regular use" items and not something special. WOW, what a different technological world a few years have made! Her reason was that she wanted to have her own Minecraft account, so didn't want to share with her brother! Anyway, that get's us to our current situation. We all have a "main" machine that we work on. 

 

My son has gone through a series of various ThinkPads back to an IBM (!!!) ThinkPad A21p, many moons ago! Every couple of years, he's gotten an upgrade just as soon as somebody else upgraded from a machine that was too old and slow for their use. Of course, they've always been ThinkPads with the exception of my ill-fated foray into old gaming laptops first with a Clevo, that followed by an Alienware. Then, back I went, to the faithful ThinkPads, generally of 15" screen size because he mostly used them to play games on at home, till this the current school year when he started the 7th grade and needed to carry a machine back and forth. So, now he has a ThinPad X220 that's compact, thin, light and plenty powerful enough for doing PowerPoints, Google Docs and light research on the web..... oh, and the every-present "flash-games" that all middle school kids play! Minecraft has moved over to a "self-built" (me, not him) gaming box that got it's start from my brother sending an ASRock, Mini-ITX board populated with a second-gen Intel "Core" i5 processor. Eventually, it received my old third-gen i5 processor. Today, it does a nice job equipped with that, an Intel SSD, and an nVidia GTX 650 graphic card (so it can stream to nVidia Shield devices). More on that later as well. We have it hooked up to the new Sony 55" 4K TV in the game/media room. 

His "personal" device, is the nVidia Shield Tablet. It has a nice 8" IPS screen, a powerful K1 Quad-Core processor and capable of streaming games from his gaming machine since that has certain level nVidia graphic card in it! He loves it when he's not "on restriction" from not keeping grades up to snuff! If you haven't read my earlier post on this thing, I'll go over the high-points quickly here. Other than the typical Android type things, and the game streaming that it can do, it also has a dedicated gaming controller as well, plus the capability to connect to an outboard monitor via HDMI and function as a "console". It's really a pretty slick concept and nVidia's execution is very nice.

 

On to the daughter. She, like her brother started her computing life via ThinkPads. In her case, custom (by Daddy) painted lavender, X31. That was replaced by a ThinkPad Z60t.....right around the time she got an iPad. The rest (the laptop too).... as they say; was history. That is, right up until last November, when she decided she needed her own machine so she could have her own aforementioned Minecraft account.

Then, she (I) got lucky! I had a friend who had a Sony VCPEH, a decent 15.6" screen "desktop replacement" of the "Sandy Bridge" Core generation. It was brought to me with an apparently dead screen/video sub-system to retrieve files. Indeed, the screen refused to light up regardless of what I did. However, it did output to an external monitor indicating the GPU was still good. They had already bought a new machine and didn't want the computer back after I got their files off. So it sat under my desk for several months then in a box due to our move to the new house. When I started looking into my daughter's request, it occurred to me that maybe I could just replace the panel on this Sony. This required me to take it apart so I could see the model number. When it went back together, the screen came back to life! This was followed by me digging into my parts boxes for more RAM, and a drive. So now she has an i5, with 8Gb of RAM, and a 160Gb Intel SSD. Like a certain overgrown elf, Daddy wiggled his fingers and made a computer appear.

Then there's my wife. And since I just recently wrote about her machine, I'll just quickly recap here. Several years ago, I talked her into a second-hand iPad (1st gen) because I knew of one I could get cheap. That was like 10 of these things ago! For me, they've been like the episode of the classic Star Trek, "The Trouble with Tribbles". They just keep multiplying! There is of course, her progression through the generations of these things. That was followed by the expansion into "kid territory" when the children were both elementary school age because Mom had them using apps to suppliment their school learning. All of that was part of the greater issue; that of her starting to use them in the classroom with her students. This grew into a full-scale conversion from a set of old ThinkPads to "older" iPads, and now to iPad Minis. We're up to 5 Minis (not counting my daughters) and one iPad2. Oh, and my wife is now on a 1st gen iPad Air.

 

Comparatively, her notebook computer progression is rather simple. She uses, mid-sized (15") ThinkPads. I typically get her something in the "T" Series, although, she's had "A"s, as well as "Z"s. We are how literally in the middle of moving her from a T500 to a T530. I've had SSDs in her machines for some time now. The newest machine has a 480Gb, Intel 2500 with 8Gb of RAM. Otherwise, the machine is unremarkable, but completely adequate for her needs. She hates it every time I do it, but I upgrade her about every 2 to 3 years as you can probably tell by the model numbers of the latest round. She swears it's more often, because I tend to reload her OS every year in between.

As for me; I just wrote about that issue a couple of days ago, so won't repeat it here other than to say that I'm going to talk tablets soon.

The Big Picture..... Err; The Family Portrait: Part 1, Phones

 

Lately, I've talked a fair amount about individual computers in our home system, but haven't "gone around the horn" (an American idiom meaning "to cover everything", to our international readers) in quite a while. So, it being around New Years, both Julian and Chinese calendar-wise is probably a good time as any to take a look at my ever changing home system..... before it changes again!

 

First of all; let's define a few things so that we can all understand the situation. We're a modern American family, so in terms of technology (which incidentally is what this blog is all about), we have a desire/need to stay connected as well as have expectations of leveraging technologies for our jobs, and leisure. So let's look at how we accomplish all that. I'm going to break this up into categories and today's is phone day.....

 

Communication is the most basic and fundamental of these needs and going back to around the turn of this last century, we gave up the use of "land-lines" for our phone service. Today, our family uses a combination of "smart" and "dumb" phones. My wife and I use the Apple iPhone 5S. They're still the "5" series because it accomplishes what we need it to, but not the "6" even though we qualify for an "upgrade" because we hate to change phones and the "6" doesn't do anything that we need done that the "5" doesn't. We use the iPhones since my wife was pretty tied to the Apple "Eco-System" since she uses iOS devices in the form of iPads both personally and in her teaching. I have an iPhone because my son does not communicate well and translated "I don't want an iPhone" into "Daddy, doesn't care" while my wife was doing her upgrade! I was quite happy with Android! My fault for allowing my 10 (at the time) year old son to carry the message to Mom. 

I do use a Pebble "smart-watch" because I'm a classroom teacher and don't like to constantly look at my phone. It's been absolutely the best technology decision I've made in the last 5 years! Now I can see when it's the doctor's office regarding an appointment (because nobody want to have to call those people back) or the daughter's school with an emergency (because with daughter, it's always an emergency) or God forbid, my wife (for obvious reasons)! On these rare occurances, I can excuse myself and step out of the room and take the call. I've pretty much stopped wearing my other watches unless we're camping.

My other phone accessory is something I go back and forth on: the Panasonic "Link2Cell" system. On the surface, it's one of those things that's a really great idea. What's not to like? You walk in the house, and put down your phone somewhere in the neighborhood of the "Link2Cell" base, and the Bluetooth connects the two together. It hands off the phone functions to the base and like magic, it's a cordless land-line so you don't have to run around the house looking for you cellphone when it rings! You just pick up the nearest cordless phone from the system and it talks back to the base through the usual 2.4Ghz system. ...... except, not really. You often have to remember to go to the base and push a button because the system didn't automatically connect. Then you have to remember to NOT use the actual cellphone since it's now in "headset" mode and you can't talk into it. Well, you can, but no one will hear you. And sometimes, there are signal issues. Can't decide whether I'm under-utilizing it because I'm not used to it, or because it doesn't work well. Jury is out on this gizmo! 

The kids have "dumb-phones". They are kids and the only reason they even have phones is for communications since they're on opposite ends of towns and attend schools that neither my wife nor I are teaching. Plus, daughter walks to a friend's house after school and we like to know when she's gotten there. Why "dumb"? OK; call us old fashioned, out of touch, whatever..... My son is 12 and daughter is 9: these are to communicate only, not so they can start developing what we consider bad habits of constantly messing around on their phone with earbuds in, and not paying attention to the world around them! End of rant.

What's in our com-roadmap when it's finally time to replace the "5s"? Not sure that I'll go back to Android despite the SNAFU that caused me to be Apple-bound originally. I have to say that I like the lightning connector WAY more than the ill-conceived micro-USB. At the end of the day, the likely thing that will keep me from switching is the convenience of not having a different cord than the one my wife uses. 

Being Grateful For What I Have

I hope those of you who read this blog on a regular basis don't get the wrong impression! Despite my various posts, my life is not one long series of new, ever cooler gadgets! A lot of it is just me trying to keep up with the fast pace of modern technological change and to do so without having to expend what I consider to be ridiculous money. In reality, I often sit in wonder at what my modest income has been able to afford me. 

My daily driver "workstation" is an "Ivy Bridge" generation i7 with a Crucial half-terabyte SSD and 32Gb of RAM along with 3 more terabytes of mass storage. All this goodness resides in the Cooler Master Cosmos II Ulber-Case and attached to 4 pretty nice Lenovo ThinkVision monitors which affords me enough desktop real estate to do pretty much whatever I want without having programs double up in space. I use it every day and have never been frustrated in not being able to do ANYTHING! It's pretty much perfectly suited for my needs. 

However, for me, my real prize is the ThinkPad X1. No it's not the later carbon fiber model. It's the original one built around the "Sandy Bridge" i5. Spec-wise, it's not all that impressive. The screen's 1366 x 768, 13" The CPU is of course 3 generations old now, and being "non-carbon" means that it's significantly heavier as well. However, there's hardly anything I don't love about it. It's thin and light in the real sense of those words. The screen is a nice size and low enough resolution for my aging eyes to be able to see well. The SSD, and 8Gb of RAM make it fully capable of everything that I use it to do. As soon I pry her old T500 out of my wife's fingers, it will get a 600Gb Intel 320 SSD in the 2.5" drive bay. Last night I cloned it's Crucial M4, 256Gb mSATA SSD onto a Crucial, 480Gb M500. While that was going on, it occurred to me that never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I'd be able to own a cutting edge design notebook computer with over a Terabyte of solid state storage in it!

From The Ridiculous To The Sublime!

 

It's pretty much all over, but the "cry'in".... With the exception of "mass storage" and I do mean MASS, as in 2Tb or over.... the day of the spinning hard disk drive is over. With the price that they're at today, there's absolutely no reason to not have one in your machine. If you keep an eye out for the constant sales going one, it's not even that challenging to find a 240/256Gb SSD for under a $100! And I don't mean one of those "no-names". I'm talking Sandisk, Mushkin, Crucial, and even some Samsung. It really hit home last week when I was replacing a failed hard drive for a client. I had done some estimates for him between $200 on the low end and $375 on the high of the range from using a "small" (240Gb) SSD for the OS and programs and using first his onboard SD reader for file storage then on to the mSATA later. He decided to go this route because the 1Tb SSDs are still too expensive. While I was shopping for a good drive and SD card, I realized that I could do a 480/512Gb SSD for the combined cost of the original concept! I was able to pick up a Micron C400, 480Gb drive for just short of $140. Sure it's "last gen", but still a nice drive and a huge upgrade from his failing mechanical 500Gb Hitachi HDD. And since his ThinkPad T430 has an onboard mSATA connector, he'll be able to add one of those for more internal storage down the road.

Speaking of....  while shopping for his drive, I came across one of these. A Crucial M500 mSATA drive of 480Gb capacity for $149. I picked it up and plan on cloning the 256Gb, Crucial M4 in my ThinkPad over to it.

In addition, I'm going to take the 600Gb, Intel 320 that was in my wife's (now retired) ThinkPad T500 and put it in the 2.5" drive bay of the X1 giving me over a Terabyte of solid state storage in a sub-1", sub-5lb Ultrabook! Sure, that drive is a SATA-II, but it's file storage, so I think it'll be "OK". I'm not even sure what to do with all that storage, but hey; it's there if I need it!

In the middle of this, my wife's new machine, a ThinkPad T530, got a 480Gb, Intel Pro 2500. Not the fastest SSD, but dead reliable. 

So, what does all this SSD shuffling tell you? Am I just nuts? Maybe, but it's really that the capacity of today's solid state drives have them in a place to replace virtually all mechanical drives not used in mass storage. Here's the telling thing: in no case, did I pay more than $150 for any of these drives! And additional benefit? They are so fast, that just the one change, allows machines that are several years old to be completely usable and even down-right fast and inexpensive! There's just NO reason to still be running a machine with a mechanical hard drive!

Planing The Franken-puter

Some of you may remember the Pinncacle Stream-Genie "portable" computer that I scored a few months ago. This machine is one of the oddities of the computing world variously called "lunchbox", "luggables", or maybe even "portable desktops". They are essentially a bunch of desktop-spec components put into a semi-custom (they don't sell very many of them) case designed for specific functions. Their work tended toward the esoteric; ranging from "port-sniffing", to weapon control for the military. As notebook computers have become increasingly powerful, their already small market share has gotten even smaller! So, they are rare with a capital "R"! However, they are interesting though. A lot of which has to do with the fact that they use largely "off-the-shelf" desktop components. 

So much so, that when you pull all this stuff out of the box, you end up with the inside of an ATX case. OK; granted that you have an LCD attached to the "bottom" of it, and that it's a really small case! However, it's never-the-less, still a full-sized ATX case. 

On one side, you have mounting for an ATX pattern power supply and a full, 7 expansion slots.

On the other side, are drive cages for normal 3.5" and 5.25" drives; 2 of each. There is also an area for an intake fan covered by a grill. 

 .... and on the other side of the "floor" past the 15" LCD is a fold-out keyboard, complete with a touchpad. This connects via a pass-through to the back where there's a double PS/2 connector for the motherboard's I/O panel. The LCD display has the same arrangement in the form of the familiar HD15 "VGA" connector that you can see in the first side image above.

So, it took me a little while to get all this out of there! This machine was a highly specialized, extremely expensive tool used for onsite video streaming back when processors weren't powerful enough to do the work via software, so there were several expansion cards with LOTS of chips on them to do this work in "hardware". This was quite a computer in it's day!  What am I planing to do with it?

 

I'm thinking maybe a portable gaming machine! What!?! Yes, I'm aware that I'm not much of a gamer..... well, actually, I'm not any kind of a gamer, but still..... it's really a cool idea if you think about it! So, here's the plan: 

• Install a motherboard capable of taking a modern enough chip that can run real (non-Minecraft) games.
• Move the power supply from above the I/O area which is coincidentally where the CPU and it's heatsink/cooler sits to the other side of the case. The drive side of the case has an area for a fan that's a perfect fit for SFX sized PSU.
• Replace all the drives with modules that will allow me the greatest amount of flexibility. Icy Dock makes some nice ones.
• Install a recent, but cool-running graphics card such as the nVidia GTX 750 that would be capable of running modern games at playable fps.

 

Although this "works-in-progress" project will end up being a blog series as I acquire parts for it, I am OK to show you this since I bought it already. It's the Gigabyte H81M-S2PV LGA-1150 Micro-ATX motherboard that I recently picked up off of the local Craigs List for $35. Many of you will recognize that although, it's the new mainstream CPU socket, the H81 will indicate that it's the "low-end" chipset, incapable of the finer points of gaming hardware such as over-clocking. There are a few other cheap-o features as well, such as 2 RAM sockets, only 4 SATA ports of which only 2 are 6Gbp/s, and not even an internal USB 3.0 header! AND what's with the 2 PCI expansion slots vs. only 2 PCI-e expansion slots (only one of which is 16x)! But really! How much do you figure I'll try to cram into this thing anyway!

OK..... let's start with this.... it's I/O panel. While you're looking at the fact that there's only 2 USB 3.0 ports on it, you might have missed that there 2 PS/2 ports. Yup, that particular feature is scarce as hen's teeth dating back to the LGA1155/56 boards, but on a board for a Haswell CPU!?! Perfect for my situation though since I have that passthrough for the attached KB/Mouse! Although the case will take a full-sized ATX board, it's still pretty tight in there, so the compact Micro-ATX 9.6" x 7.1" board will give me a little breathing room in there! Yes, I know that it doesn't have much in the way of features, but I'm not looking to make this into an every day user or ultimate "fragger". The idea of this machine is so that it's capable of doing mainstream gaming on a portable platform, not to make it the best thing ever!  I am excited though. Roughly, I'll install a decent sized SSD to run the OS, and eventually a video card that won't embarrass itself, but I'm not going to stuff it full of gear that I won't use or need in a rig like this. Stay tuned. This is liable to get interesting!