I've "Switched"!!!

See....., not what you thought, huh? I'm the father of two teenagers, my daughter is almost 13 and all that that implies. OK, so let's move on to the more pleasant topic,..... the almost 16 year old son. He has shown signs of coming out of the middle school to 10th grade funk which was the bane of our existence. But the last few months, he's actually been more useful and quite a bit more pleasant to be around, a switch that has led me to become more involved in his hobbies. In today's world, that quite often involves gaming. He has 2 main interests in that area; PC gaming which he participates via the gaming PC that I built for him a couple of years ago. It's still relatively current and very usable so doesn't need attention at this time. His other gaming interest is the Nintendo platform (which is a relief for my wife and I).

   

From the standpont of straight-up technology, I think that this platform is really interesting. A very successful adaptation of the favorite from my rather brief days of video gaming; the NEC TurboGrafx16.

Or more specifically, the legendary, NEC TurboExpress.

This thing was (technologically speaking) the "Tour de Force" of the mobile gaming world of the late 90s. In a world where the typical handheld gaming device was a monochrome Gameboy, with weak, chopped down games, the TurboExpress had color and played the full-sized NEC TGX16 games! The only problem....., it ate batteries like an 8 year-old does candy! Unfortunately, the NEC console was a distant 3rd in the gaming platform world of that era. I only got involved with it because my favorite arcade game, Galaga was only available on it! 

Fast forward 30 some-odd years, we now have a successful marriage of the power of nVidia hardware with the marketing might of Nintendo, and you get the Switch! A console platform with a mobile form-factor, capable of playing the full games. I've become so intrigued by the concept that I've began researching extending the capabilities of the system. 

A major part of our lives these days, is the amount of time we (Josh and I) spend on a school bus traveling to and from swim events. Sometimes, it's many hours in one sitting. Texas is a big state! What I learned from driving the team around is that they will often play Switch games together to keep the boredom at bay. It's apparent to to any observer that its a struggle for them to play together in "table-top" mode when multiple kids need to crowd around the relatively small 7" screen. The other issue is the struggle to keep the screen stable on a moving bus. The solution?

The Gaems Vanguard Black Edition, "personal gaming environment" for $299 of course! Uhhh, no..... I don't have $300 just to run out and buy something like this, and on top of that, it doesn't resolve the issue of power. Not only does the thing not resolve the issue of powering the gaming platform, it in fact creates another need for AC power in the 19" screen that's built in to the case. So in reality, it's simply a fancy case sized to hold a game system, and a LCD monitor to display it, so really, it doesn't resolve the problem of playing in a mobile environment nor real of portability either. What's then is the solution?

The top image is the Dell Latitude E7240; it's about a 3 year-old ultra portable notebook that's less than 4 pounds, has a 12.5" 1366 x 768 screen built into a nice aluminum case of less than 1 inch. The lower image is a Suaoki D100 26,800mAh power bank with a critical attribute of having an AC plug as well as 1 USB Type-C, and 2 USB 3 "Quick-charge" ports as well. Why is the AC plug "critical", and what does one have to do with the other?

It appears that the Nintendo Switch, despite having a USB-C power/connection port, does not comply with the power draw standards set for that type of port. Sooooo, it's generally accepted as a bad idea to power the device by anything that's not officially sanctioned by Nintendo! Besides that; in order to send a signal to an external screen, one must use a dock which has an HDMI port, so yeah...... So my little project needed to have a source of power that has an AC plug for the adapter, AND a lot of power to drive the screen and the Switch itself. The Latitude was free courtesy of a client who killed one and I was tasked to replace it, leaving me with a laptop with a dead motherboard, but functioning screen. The power bank came about because my wife decided that she should carry our old one and that I was free to buy a replacement of my choosing.... thus leaving me with marching orders, and the freedom to buy the D100! Anything else is required to complete this project?

I did have to order a controller board from China for the screen in the laptop. It was about $20. I also need a case to build it all into as well.

This actually gave me a lot of trouble tracking it down. There are tons of these light weight "hard-shell" cases out there for things like GoPro cameras and external hard drives, but they just aren't big enough. After hours of fruitless searching, it occurred to me that I need to search for a case designed for something bigger, but also commonly carried around, ..... which led me to the drone case. This one by DBPower was $22 on Amazon with free shipping! So, all I'll need to do is to cut some new foam to fit my pieces and figure out a way to attach a carry strap. 

Why? Well..... being a dad to a teenager isn't the easiest thing in the world. And our time with them under our room is limited. Sure, it sounds good to raise them to appreciate what we do, but that isn't always a practical reality. I'm on the back end of my 50s and he just started driving this year. We aren't going to have that many interest in common. I gave up a few things this year to be his swim coach, is taking some more time to show an interest in his hobbies isn't much more. Plus, it's kinda cool! I'll put up another post when I get done. 

Storage In The Modern World and A Bit of Luck!

Some of you who've been reading my ramblings for a while might think that I have a storage obsession..... and I might. However, as anyone who has ever worked professionally in the IT world will tell you. That's actually the norm. We get paid to be prepared for and to recover from disasters of digital/ Binary proportions! See what I did there.....

Although I haven't worked in that world for over 10 years now, those principles are ingrained into my thinking. So, backing up and storage capacity is always on my mind. Right now, I'm in the process of taking my file server from 3 drives and 6 terabytes of HDD space to 4 drives and 8Tb. Some might consider that excessive, but really not so much when you consider that each of the 2 HTPCs have at least 500Gb as a scratch disk for temp storage and my desktop workstation has 4Tb by itself. .....and that's not counting any of their relatively small SSD boot drives. My rough rule of thumb is always to have at least as much as the combined capacities of all of our home computers' storage space in the file server that functions as backup AND media server.

What I had done in the past when using Microsoft's Windows Home Server was to simply trust in it's built-in redundancy schemes and call it a day. Well.....first of all, I've decided to move away from M$ now that WHS is a dead product and secondly decided to move to a more sophisticated (read secure) backup/redundancy set up. I think I've previously discussed migrating to NAS4Free before, so I'm not going to get into that here other than to say that in order to fully implement ZFS in an efficient manner I needed a 4th, 2Tb drive which will allow me to still have 6Tb of storage while losing only one drive's capacity to parity. I'll do a detailed "build-up/rebuild" post on the retooled Spectre when it's up. So, that's it? That's all I'm going to talk about this morning? A rebuild that hasn't even happeded yet?

Oh NO!!! Not by a long-shot! I'm going to talk about this: the Drobo Mini.

As you can see by this image, it's external storage.... with a twist! So; it has 4 bays, "so what"? Ah....let me start from the beginning and tell you a little story. 

Much like House with Wilson, many of my little ideas come from conversations with someone else. This last summer while my "location video" producing brother-in-law was here with his family, we discussed all things computer but as part of our little project to rip our DVD movies to digital files, he made mention of the fact that he had many external hard drives that he's collected and used them as necessary to store the many gigabytes of video files for his job. And that they are just kind of a necessity of his work-world. My question to him was that; "aren't they too slow" at USB 2.0 speed? His reply was, that it was pretty much the best he could do since Firewire was dead and that Thunderbolt was too difficult to find AND too expensive. Holy Interfaces Batman! That sounds like a challenge!

After consulting the Bat-Computer, I came across the Drobo line of storage. Yes; that which is most beloved of professional photographers and Mac-o-philes the world over.Of course, being of the "great unwashed" (PC users), I knew squat about them, but I did learn that they were pretty much "desktop" devices "Rats! Foiled by the Riddler"! Wait-a-minute; according to the bat-computer (that's Google to you, Bat-brain), there was a portable version that had hit the market in 2012.

Even better, it would allow you to intermix drives of all different capacities and makes, all while keeping a RAID scheme going giving.....TA-DA..... DATA REDUNDANCY!!! Oh; it gets better! There's a bay to take a mSATA SSD to allow caching acceleration, has BOTH USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt pass-through interfaces! All built into a 7" x 7" carbon-fiber reinforced "soft-touch" case with 2 whisper-quiet cooling fans and the smallest power brick-ette you ever saw. What's not to like?!? .......uhhh.....the $649 "List Price" (yikes)!!! Even the $399 Amazon price is pretty stiff, since remember; you have to provide your own drives!

Yeah; this is about what I felt like. For a tech-head like me, it's pretty much like the 16 year old who saw, fell in love with, then went to the Porsche car lot and looked at the price sticker. That price is all well and good for a professional who's writing this off as a business expense and is expecting to make money with it, for an "enthusiast" like me, it amounts to taking a Saturday afternoon and going by the Ferrari and Aston Martin dealers to look at the new models! 

Then, this happened! On occasion, you can still find really good deals on eBay! On Tuesday; St. Patrick's Day, just randomly surfing, I came across not just a Drobo Mini on eBay at a decent price (about $150 at the time), but it was fully populated with 4 Western Digital Blue 320Gb drives AND a Crucial M4 256Gb mSATA SSD! OK, so after I slowed down the heavy breathing, I decided to just keep an eye on it "just in case" it didn't go into an astronomical price-point that I couldn't justify. I got home yesterday afternoon and it was at about $190. At that point, I put my eBay strategy into play; which is deciding what it was worth to me, the max that I was going to be willing to pay for it and setting that as a limit. The amount was $250. Here's my rationale (such as it is for something I don't need to have): 

• At worse, I can sell it for at least that and get my money back since they sell for well over that amount on a regular basis. Know you product!
• The amount was reasonable given it's price at that point and since "that point" was within 45 minutes of the end time (which as an awkward weekday, before the evening so most folks are still at or trying to get home from work). 
• I could completely "walk away" without a blink of an eye since I really didn't "need it", and I can afford it right now since I'm doing a series of computer jobs that would pay for it.
• It was fully populated meaning that I can put it to use immediately without paying one more dime to buy any drives, although I have several sitting around right here. Further more, this would allow me to buy bigger ones (2Tb) over time and replace them and the Drobo is set up for me to replace them "on the fly" and restore the data on the ones that were in use since that's one of it's major selling point/features.
• And for some reason that guy put a 256Gb mSATA SSD in there as the "accelerator" which was completely unnecessary since the firmware sets a 64Gb cache limit! Again; do your research and know your product. Therefore, I at some future date can pick up a 64Gb drive for that purpose, and move the 256Gb one to my ThinkPad X1 with has an empty mSATA socket to up the storage capacity of that machine which I was planning on doing anyway! 
• In the final calculation, I had to figure about $70-90 on the plus side for the mSATA that I'll end up using in my ThinkPad. I could if I was so motivated, sell the 4, 320Gb drives for at least $15 each. That total would be around $130.

In the end, I bid $237, which was below my "cut-off", and won it at $225 (free shipping). If I deduct the other amounts which was the drives in it that I'm going to retask or replace, that will put the "bare" Drobo Mini at less than $100. At the end of the day; if I find that it's not useful or I just want to get my money back out of it, the transaction should turn a profit. Will I do that? Doubtful: I'm certain I'll be able to use it as a semi-portable storage solution that has built-in redundancy and is upgradeable. And in the today's digital world; is there's no such thing as having too much storage!?!

Lightning Strikes: The ThinkPad T61

NO, we didn't suffer a lightning strike. We had a bit of a lightning upgrade though. About a month ago, I was trolling the local Craig's List ads and can came across a poorly written ad for a ThinkPad. And of course, this peaked my curiosity, so I fired off an email to the seller to see what it was about. He turned out to be a recently graduated high school kid looking to sell all his various pieces of computing gear so he could by a Mac before heading off to college. The ThinkPad was a machine that he didn't use which had belonged to his uncle who had given it to him when he (the uncle) upgraded. In fact the kid, who was at work wasn't even sure what it was, but thought it was a T410. Therefore, at the listed $80; I jumped at it. Well....after several twists and turns (fairly common for Craig's List), I was finally able to meet him and it turns out that he was waaay wrong! It was a T61. Although, clearly NOT anywhere close to a T410, it was still a very good price for a T61 in nice condition, so I bought it. At which point, it promptly went under my workbench because I didn't have a use for it.

As most of you are aware, computers on a network need names so they can be identified. And given my geeky nature, I use military aircraft names for this. I also try to use groups which have similar names which roughly are associated to their function. They range from fighters for our daily use laptops like the very advance F22 "Raptor" for my X300 to the rather utilitarian C130 "Hercules" for the WHS file server built from old parts. The new T61 has been named the "Lightning II" for the F-35 depicted above. It replaces my wife's Z61m "Eagle". I know the logical progression would have been for this new machine to be the "Raptor" and the X300 to be the "Lightning II", but I didn't think about it then and will just have to live with this little screw-up in logic!

 

I've been VERY busy doing client work for the last month, so it mostly sat there under the bench, but when I did have a few minutes to look, it left me very impressed. It was in such nice condition that the original product "features" sticker was still on the lid. It really looked like a nice high-end corporate machine that just sat on somebody's desk for 3 years then surplused.....and I'm willing to bet, that's exactly the case. I did an image restore and it ran very well afterward, but mostly it just sat. Periodically I thought about what I wanted to do with it. I thought about replacing my Z61m "Tomcat" with it, but that seemed a waste since that machine sits in the closet most of the time given it's status as a "mobile studio" for a photographer that doesn't do much outside work. Plus, I had decided that I wanted to put an SSD in it since older machines of this type are really great candidates for the gains seen from this type of upgrade. Although SSDs have come down greatly in price, bigger ones (larger than 128Gb) are still pricey for someone like me. 

Then, one day I got my "marching orders". This came in the form of the wife walking in to the office and telling me that she needed another machine, so she could take one to school with her. Her new school district doesn't issue laptops and she wanted to have something that she could use there and not be tied down at her desktop. She wanted ot know if I had any ideas, at which point, I pointed under the bench and smiled. So I told her about the T61 which just "needed" an SSD for which I was given the approval to buy, then and there! Of course, this was what the last post was about, when I got lucky and came across the 240Gb Sandisk Extreme for $155 on Amazon's "Deal of the Day". Less than a week later, the Windows 7 running, ThinkPad T61 "Lightning II" was up and running. 

Total spent: $235 for a "Penryn" C2D processored, WSXGA+ (1680 x 1050) paneled, 240Gb SSD, DVD+RW optical drive equipped laptop that I guess originally cost close to 10x what I spent! I'm going to say that I'm pretty happy with the build and believe that lightning did indeed strike on this one. But most importantly, my wife is VERY happy with her "new" and VERY fast machine!

Amazon's Daily Deals

Even Frugal Propellerheads that keep an eye on everything need a little luck every now and then! A few nights ago, my wife reminded me that I needed to order some 3.5mm headphone splitters for her classroom before I went to bed. So I rolled over, and got on the laptop to order this thing. Weeeeell....in the midst of this, I noticed that Amazon was running a "deal of the day" as the Sandisk Extreme 240Gb for $154.99! I nearly fell out of bed! I had been charged with getting another laptop ready for my wife, by her highness, and as luck would have it, I had lucked into a nicely spec'd T61 for $80 on Craig's List a month or so ago. All I had been waiting for was to find a good deal on a bigger SSD. I'd say that 240Gb qualifies as a "bigger" SSD since I run 128Gb ones on my machines!

So anyway, from just dumb luck, I'll have her in a pretty quick upgrade from the Z61m that she's been working on. It needed a rebuild anyway, so it'll get that, and go to her new school with her.