So, This Is Summer!

OK; the reality is that I've done very little "work" as related to my actual job. But I've gotta say, I don't remember ever having a summer where I've had so much to do so quickly after the end of the school year! We knew going in that we were going to have to "front-load" our summer since the beginning of July would bring an avalanche of items out of our control.

Right out of the gate, we took our vacation. So, it's appropriate that our little white-water-rafting trip in Durango, Colorado was a pretty good analogy to the summer so far. It started out busy, but fun. You see us paddling with big grins on our faces! We had to get that vacation in immediately before everything else happened......

..... then this! We went over a big rock, went into the hole on the other side, didn't have enough strong rowers in the raft, so the whole thing got stuck in the hole and we start going over the side. You can see my leg sticking up over the right side there. I started out on the left! My wife and son (who were on the right) are already gone. What you don't see is that it's going to go up on it's side (again) and everyone else will go out as well...including the guide. So, we got back from our little trip up to Colorado tired, but happy...... then it just goes downhill from there.

 First, I have 3 training days in the space of a week for new systems at school. 

Then; on top of our friends coming to visit, my brother/sister-in-law complete with their four children fly in from Austria! Both things are awesome, but both happening at once made for a busy weekend.

Oh! Did I forget that on the particular Friday that the friends were arriving, and the family was flying in, my other sister-in-law delivered her baby...... yeah...... 

That morning, I also went over to a commercial client and started the process of doing a 3-year rebuild on their main PC. 

This was over the 4th of July weekend, after which I promised to have the newly rebuild computer online on Tuesday morning the 5th. Fireworks symbolizing this and the 4th is all too appropriate! In the middle of this, I've been helping my brother-in-law car shop for a large SUV so that they can have a car to drive their large family around the country. Yesterday, I finally had a day off. 

OK; not really. I forgot to mention that my wife was offered a new job last week (yes, in the middle of the craziness). So yeah; my worse nightmare. Moving my elementary teacher-wife's stuff and since her new job isn't as a classroom teacher, it all had to come home! Therefore, the last two day included moving stuff out of her classroom.... in 100 degree Texas summer heat! Yup.... this is what I did on my "day off". I started by making the second trip to her classroom and filling up the space previously known as the garage. Then the wonderful woman that I married volunteered to take all the kids (our 2, sister-in-law's 4, other sister-in-law's 1 of 2) over to the grandparents for swimming. So I spent the rest of the day, reloading a laptop for my commercial client since it's MS Updates stopped working, building my brother-in-law a HTPC from old parts so they could watch Kodi and watching YouTube. 

 Half the summer's over and I'm exhausted already!

 

HTPC Build-Log: Part 3..... It's been a good week!

It's been a good week......, no check that; it's been a GREAT week..... in the HTPC world that is! In the last build-log, I had said that the ID Cooling coolers were delivered, but there were other issues that delayed the update of my HTPC fleet. Anyway; "we have overcome"!

I got momentum when the delayed conversion of our bedroom HTPC went off without a hitch. In fact, the speed and ease of which this theoretically "out of date" A75/A6-3600 motherboard/CPU combo went about it's tasks was a surprise. My pride would like to attribute this to me applying these older (read cheaper) components to jobs that it does particularly well. I may be right, or I might be just lucky; who knows, who cares? The fact is that this combination of pretty prosaic parts are an excellent match for it's intended job of a HTPC. If you haven't been keeping score, here it is:

• $48 - ASRock A75m-ITX, AMD A6-3600 MB/APU combo (eBay)
• $12 - ID Cooling DK-03, Heatsink/120mm fan (Amazon)
• $0 - Silverstone SG08Lite case (old machine)
• $0 - Seasonic 500w PSU (old machine)
• $0 - Intel 80Gb SSD, Hitachi 500Gb HDD, Slot-loading DVD-RW (old machine)
• $60 - Total 

 

No; you are not looking at the inside of the SG-08. This is in fact, the inside of a Silverstone SG-05. ??? So, after the sucess of the "Viking" HTPC, I moved right on to the replacement to "Bronco" machine that fulfills the HTPC role in the downstairs den. Since it was a low-powered "thin" PC it uses a "wide-voltage" external power supply. The issue I had on Sunday was that it used a different adapter than what I was using. In the ensuing 2 days, I realized that there were several random adapters from dead laptops that I've accumulated. In the pile, I found HP one that worked. After a quick OS load-up; this machine was ready as well! Again I was a little surprised by the speed of this machine! At least this board should be fast, since it's LGA-1150 of the "Broadwell" generation. Anything else left to do on this?

• $39.68 - Gigabyte GA-B75TN motherboard (eBay)
• $34.28 - Intel Pentium 2030T CPU (eBay)
• $19.99 - Silverstone NT-07 HSF (Amazon)
• $12.54 - 4Gb DDR3 SO-DIMM (eBay)
• $0 - Other 4Gb DDR3 SO-DIMM (spare parts box)
• $0 - Crucial M4 mSATA 256Gb SSD (spare parts box)
• $0 - Power adapter (closet of doom)
• $106.49 - Total

Well.... yes. The SG05 is a temporary home. My ultimate evil plan is to pick up a Silverstone PT13. The reason is obvious: it's so small and cool! What about the 3rd HTPC?

I get to do this all day Saturday, and I do mean all day. I'm an academic competition coach and sponsor at school. While my debaters fell just short of advancing to state level competition, my top Social Studies kid is an alternate to the Regional Competition this year. So I get to drive him and all the others from both high schools in our district, 2 and a half hours East and South into the heart of the Piney Wood to Stephen F. Austin University at Nacogadoches. In order to get there on time, we'll be leaving at 5am, putting me getting up at 4am since I have to get the bus. We'll finish around 4pm. I'll be getting home somewhere around 9pm! Therefore, despite the arrival of the 8-pin EPS adapter, there'll be no finishing the HTPC in the main A/V system till Sunday. Here are the numbers for the last machine.

• $30.25 - Gigabyte GA-F2A78M-HD2 motherboard (eBay)
• $66.35 - AMD A8-7600 APU (eBay)
• $40 - Corsail Vengeance Pro 8Gb DDR3/1866 RAM (eBay)
• $5.81 - Creative Labs Soundblaster Live Soundcard (eBay)
• $0 - Ahanix D-Vine5 case (old machine)
• $0 - Intel 120Gb SSD (parts box)
• $0 - Hitachi DeskStar 500Gb HDD, Sony Blu-Ray optical drive (old machine)
• $106.35 - Total    

All of these totals include not only the cost of parts, but also the shipping costs as well, so I figure the grand total of $272.84 is pretty OK. That's about $90 per on 3 pretty up-to-date machines that do their jobs well. They are going to allow me to "cut the cord". The end of Netflix, and the end of Cable TV service. Those 2 things by themselves come to something like $80-90 per month! That puts this upgrade to paying off in 3 months! Do I wish, I was already done after all the planning and waiting? Sure I am, but I'm OK with the progress so far. I can see the end of the road from here!

Build-Log: Devil In The Details..... Part 2

 

Sorry about the angry rant the other day, but let me start here by saying that things got much better as the weekend went along. Saturday was a really good day for the mail people, when things got delivered exactly when they were supposed to. Even the CPU coolers being sent from China! 

So, I was envisioning a relaxing weekend with the exception of the frantic string-trimming to beat the week-long oncoming rainstorms that is. I even took a nap on Saturday and planned on getting my computer building groove on come Sunday afternoon. That was the last thing that went right!

It started off with a little "house-cleaning" done (so to speak). I have a co-worker whose little girl decided that their PS3 require coinage like an arcade machine. The penny was enough to cause the machine to constantly shut down as soon as it was powered up! Once I got a Torx security bit for it and got the machine apart, the coin extraction wasn't much of an issue. After that, it never would come up at all. It gave the constant "blinking red" light of a "general fault-state". So, it's going to go home tomorrow.... not working.

Then I moved on to the first of my 3 HTPCs that have been waiting to be updated. I had all the parts on hand and just needed to put the board into it's Silverstone SG-05 temporary home. How much trouble could this be? I didn't even need to plus in the PSU since it takes outboard DC power. Yeah....... that didn't go well at all since the jack was of a different type than any adapter I happen to own. So, one fully constructed computer with I can't power up!

So, I decided to move on to the main HTPC from my A/V rack. Now that the HSF had arrived from China, I was set to go, right!?! I pulled the machine, got the old motherboard and boot drive out and proceeded to do the install. My most difficult issue was trying to decide which SSD to use as the new boot drive. After settling on an 120Gb Intel instead of the 160Gb (it's got a 500Gb storage drive), I got it connected up. .....Black Screen...... That usually means bad or incompatible ram, As I pulled the 1st stick out, I realized that I hadn't connected the 12v EPS power.... OK, that explains it. This was followed by 1 minute of angry frustration and 15 minutes of digging through my boxes of stuff. Yes, this board takes the new 8-pin EPS power vs. the standard since P4 days, 4-pin! The quiet little SFX PSU in that case only has the 4! And; I found out that you can't just use a second 4-pin via adapter since I have one of those. So, that machine is 95% done waiting for the new adapter to show up from somewhere around Austin.

I was about ready to throw something through the window when my wife called me for dinner. While I was eating my breakfast burrito (we eat breakfast for dinner on Sundays), I calmed myself down thinking about doing the third machine. I was 100% sure that one would get completed since I had put it on a testbench and set it up. As I was walking up the stairs to get the machine out of our bedroom, my wife calls me over and says that she wants to watch episodes of Elementary that we missed last week! So, no computers (or PS3) got finished after an entire afternoon of working on stuff! Some days you win, other days you get your behind handed to you......

Upgrading My HTPC(s): Part 2

Just like the real S-3 "Viking", that the U.S. Navy retired in 2009, and Lockheed has recently been trying to resurrect; there wasn't supposed be a "Part 2". Then on the way to upgrading the rest of my HTPC fleet, a funny thing happened..... I know; you're probably already rolling your eyes, right? So, I'm going to go ahead and explain the "why" and then the "how" of it. ..... And NO, I'm not doing this to make myself feel better about spending another $50. So here goes:

Last week I came across a motherboard on eBay that was packaged with a processor and the HSF (heat-sink-fan) that ended up costing $48 with free shipping. From a purely economic standpoint; if you can upgrade something for less than $50.... you should do it! So, here are the "players". It's an ASRock A75M-ITX with an AMD A6-3600 APU. We can start with that the processor alone often sells for around $50. Granted, it's cheap, but so are any of the hundreds of the P4 boards out there. But that still doesn't answer the question of why?

The machine that I was planing on not upgrading was the "Viking" HTPC in our master bedroom. It's hard to believe that it was originally build in the later part of 2012. A couple of years ago it got rebuilt into a Silverstone case with a very low-powered "Ivy Bridge" generation Celeron which occasionally struggles, but is still pretty usable. However, while Intel processors of the "Core" generation wipe the floor with AMD, their integrated graphics aren't anything to "write home about". So....., if you want something that does a nice job with video, where processing power takes a "backseat"; your pretty much back with AMD's APUs. 

In this case the A75 chipset boards are from second generation AMD APUs. The A6-3600 chip I'll be using will not only have 4 CPU cores, but also an onboard Radeon HD 6430 D GPU which is a pretty good thing for an HTPC. So, it comes down to the fact that this board would be significantly more powerful than the Celeron 847 for a fairly minimal investment. If we were to continue on our current use case scenario where we occasionally get on to the internet for Youtube and catching up with a TV show on a network site, I probably wouldn't bother. However, our changeover to using Kodi (XMBC) on a regular basis changes the hardware demands.The machine now routinely has to process 1080p streams. This is just something that Intel's integrated graphics of that generation does well. Which takes us back to the $50 economic answer to the technical question of whether or not I can/should upgrade a system. And that translates to be: You Bet, if the benefit/need is there and the price is low enough!

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!

Propellerhead Gear: HTPC Upgrade

The home theater PC (HTPC) in my main A/V system is built in an Ahanix D-Vine case. Originally, it had some pretty pedestrian parts in it although the bones were good. Over time though, it got the Intel E8400 "Wolfdale" CPU processor from the original Blackbird, along with 8Gb of RAM, and it was decently powerful for what it was asked to do. Much like Japanese car manufacturers, I like to do a mid-generation facelift before any major rebuild. And as the small HTPC is already on "2nd Gen Core" platform and now the main workstation is on an "Ivy Bridge" i5, changes need to be made to this old girl. 

Originally, my only idea was to upgrade it's small 64Gb Mushkin Callista SSD to something bigger. It was going to be part of the "cascade", taking the 128Gb Samsung from the interim workstation build, but I came upon this 120Gb, OCZ Vertex 2 a few weeks ago. And since this SSD was an odd 3.5", vs. the normal 2.5", it couldn't ever go into a notebook, so into the HTPC it went. 

The other change ended up being this: a 500Gb/7200rpm Hitachi 5K drive which replaced the 500Gb/7200rpm, Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 that was in there. You might be asking yourself, why did he do that? Well, other than my long-running bias against Seagate drives, that particular Seagate is PATA. And with my FreeNAS box having a Promise dual IDE controller and only 3 drives to fill it out.....I needed/wanted a fourth PATA drive to fill it out. So I picked up a used 500Gb SATA drive to go into the HTPC and moved it's old drive.

And of course, with the new drives, comes a new load for Window. As much of a pain in the behind that it is, there's nothing like a fresh Windows load to make a machine run fast. Although this little side-trek didn't take any parts from the Blackbird rebuild directly, it was effected by it peripherally. What happened to the old 64Gb Mushkin SSD? It went into a client machine and therefore fulfilled a purpose as well as defrayed the cost of the upgrade. I charged the buyer $50 to upgrade to the SSD from a mechanical drive, and the 120Gb OCZ SSD cost me $60. So I guess upgrade that doubled the size of my boot drive costs me $10 and some time to reload the OS.

Anything else come out of this little upgrade? Well.....now that you mention it..... While I was researching, I came across this Thermaltake DH-202 HTPC case. I've always found the D-Vine a little lacking in front-panel access and info, and this case has not only lots of controls, but also a 7" display so if I'm just doing something; say doing Windows updates, I can do it right from the machine vs. having to turn on the whole rig. Or if I'm just trying to stream some music from the server. Just sayin'.......
 

"OCD" Tendencies and Control

I know; this thing starts off sounding like some kind of Sophomore Psychology paper, but I promise, it's not! OK, I do have a little bit of "a thing" related to keyboards and mice. I seem to have been on a never ending quest for th ultimate in the keyboard/mice combination for years now. However, in the last few years, I seem to have settled on pretty much one or two brands and styles of input devices. This Sunday morning blog will be devoted to what I use to control my various media consumption devices in our system. In fact, as I sit here typing this, I've got the living room HTPC working playing music streamed from the file server in the office.

On the notebook side of things, it's been pretty easy: there's simply nothing better than the traditional ThinkPad keyboard. So much so, that I even use one on my secondary XP OS desktop computer in the UltraNav form, which is really a ThinkPad keyboard married to a conventional PC connection.

Actually, if I had a magic wand, I'd create a wireless version of this for HTPC functions and be done with it, but unfortunately we don't have that yet, soooooo........ 

  

So, my alternative is the Logitech DiNovo series of input devices. Over the last few years, I've had a lot of experience with this (and other) series from Logitech. This all started when I realized that I typed faster and more accurately on laptop style keyboard vs. the regular kind. However, back in those days, keyboards with that style of keys few and far between. Eventually, I found the first of DiNovo series and got one. I hated the lag in the Bluetooth receivers of that day, but loved the feel of the devices. Eventually I found the wired "Illuminated" KB, in combination with the "Revolution" mouse was perfect for my desktop needs, but the HTPC was a different animal all together. What was needed was a compact unit with some level of mouse function built-in, as well as wireless interface better than RF. Enter the DiNovo Edge. This elegant package was pretty much everything I needed all-in-one device.

There was a couple of downsides though. Even though it was compact compared to a regular keyboard, and included pointing functions, it was still a little large AND oddly enough, it doesn't include multi-media control functions such as "play/pause", "skip", "Stop", etc.! 

Enter the Logitech DiNovo Mini. This little device is a full-functioning keyboard (thumb style) with pointing function almost identical to the Edge. Actually I came across it trying to find something to use in my classroom that would do more than advance PowerPoint slides and be small enough to hold in one hand and/or slip in my pants pocket. 

As you can see, it has a pretty normal keyboard layout and is in fact, extremely compact. 

Another plus is that it uses the exact same Bluetooth 2.0 EDR receiver that the Edge does, so I can actually have both devices connected and in use at the same time! Actually, I have one receiver attached to either HTPC and just move the devices around as necessary. It may seem odd, but I usually have the Edge with fullsized keyboard in the bedroom and the Mini in the living room mostly as I've found that I rarely if ever type anything in the livng room machine, but quite often will do some web-surfing in the bedroom. 

Now of course, with us moving to day-to-day use of the ThinkPad tablets running Android, I'll be looking at Android control solutions like GMote.

This is of course the "next level" and will take some work to get comfortable with, but that's part of the fun isn't it?!?

It's Summer!

Well; it's not actually not quite summer yet, but it's close enough. Close enough for a Frugal Propellerhead to plan for the summer. For a teacher, summer means quite a bit more time on our hands to do what we want, and of course for me, that would mean working on all things having to do with computers, home audio AND photography. Unfortunately that can also mean spending money, lots of it and that's something that can't happen. So a satisfying Propellerhead summer takes a little planning.

First of all, we need to take a look at what needs to be done, then we can talk about how to deal with that in planning. First of all, my daughter's custom lavender ThinkPad X30 is a little long-in-the-tooth. It specs out as a PIII (Tualatin) processor with 1Gb of RAM running XP! Although the size, and operating system is fine for her, the hardware is past due for an update. Fortunately, the X30 is built on the same chassis as the X31 which was a whole generation (if not more) forward in technology. It's built on the Pentium "M" (Banias) platform which completely skipped the hot running P4 series. Being built on the same chassis, I can simply move the lavender lid/screen assembly straight over. I will have to repaint a new keyboard bezel which was a different part, but that's not a big deal. Maxing the RAM out to a full 2Gb will have Katie all set for another couple of years! 

The trick here is that I didn't wait to buy it this summer when I have the time. Several months ago, I came across an ad for an X31 barebones-"base" (w/o LCD assembly) on the ThinkPad Forum for a song....so I bought it and stuck it in a cabinet.

 A few months ago I started seeing 128Gb, 1.8" SSDs selling for a very low price ($125). I was working on my "Ark" project at the time and bought one for it; then I started thinking about it and realized that I should probably pick up another one to upgrade my X300 since the load on it was getting a little old and would need a reload soon anyway. This second 128Gb SSD actually came in at just below $100 so into the cabinet it went as well. 

 Around that same time, the next generation of Sandforce SSD controllers came out and I ran across a special on the 128Gb Mushkin Chronos SSD for less than the price that I gave for the 60Gb Mushkin Callista SSD a little over a year ago. 

 The next project waiting in the wings is a Windows Home Server 2011 upgrade from the original WHS that I'm running now. I can't really claim good planning for this one, but rather it's the result of good fortune! I was having an email discussion with my brother last week about some projects that he's been working on and he described several machines that he's upgrading from the older Intel socket 775 line to the more current "Sandybridge" i3/i5/i7s. One of these project was a WHS 2011 machine, so I replied by telling him about the WHS file server that I cobbled together from free and traded-for parts. The upshot is that he offered to send me his left-over 775 boards, CPUs and misc parts! Although, the socket 775 may seem old to him, it's plenty new enough for me, and with a dual core processor on board, I'll be able to upgrade to the WHS 2011 as well since it's a 64-bit operating system. 


He also sent me a few other parts which have gone into upgrading the my XP computer, my regular workstation as well as the HTPC which will be receiving the 60Gb SSD that was in the workstation. So; things are lining up to be a busy summer ahead!