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!

 

2016 Summer Projects

School's about to be out for summer! I'm literally sitting in my last class which is taking their final! Pretty much all the paperwork is done. I'm not moving rooms this year and neither is my wife. Plus we're not moving houses either! As far as getting projects done; last summer was a complete wasteland where all of the above happened. So yeah, I'm really beginning to contemplate what-all I plan on getting done this summer.

The number one priority is to get the "Globemaster" server off the ground. It's pretty much put together, just not "finished". Now that all the TVs have fully functioning and updated HTPCs, they're just waiting for me to get the server done to serve the media. However; it won't be the first thing to get done.

No.... this will be first. That is moving the downstairs HTPC from it's temporary home in the Silverstone SG-05 case to the Silverstone PT-13b case. It's really that small and should be sitting on my porch right about now. Some other HTPC equipment will move into that old case and it will go live with my brother/sister-in-law. I'm excited. I've been waiting some time to find this case at the $53 price I paid for it on Amazon. 

This is also on the horizon. I've got an appointment on Monday to take in our dozen or so computers in to be recycled at an actual eCycler in Dallas. That's been hanging over my head for months, so it'll be great to get done.

 

But the BIG project will be this. Ripping our movies and the rest of the CDs into the server. 

Then there's this. Yup, scanning our old photos into digital form. 

If you get the impression that there's going to be a lot of digital "grunt-work", you'd be right! I'm kinda looking forward to it though.
 

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!

The "How" and "Why" of Upgrading My HTPCs

There's a price to be paid; both literally and figuratively, to having lots of computers! It's not a static hobby! There's are constant changes which is both the fun and the frustration of it. Now that my workstation, all of the laptops and the server are either in "good shape" or at least "in process", what about everything else..... my non-personal PCs?

Let's look at what's out there. Other than the server, there are 3 HTPCs and their job is pretty much to run Kodi and to server as the front-end to our media which will reside on the replacement server (aka Globemaster). It's actually a bigger job than it appears since all of our TVs are now at least HD with one that's 4K spec. Pushing pixels to those displays is not nearly as easy of a task at what it used to be! So, let's take a look at the players involved.

 

The whole situation is kind of "a house of cards" really so lets start with the simplest situation. Part of my main A/V system in the upstairs media/game room is the "Hawkeye" HTPC. It's a Asus E350M1-Pro motherboard living inside of an Ahanix D-Vine5 case. That board was AMD's first generation of APUs which combined an actual GPU inside the same die as a CPU. As you can surmise from the bare heat sink w/o fan, it's not very powerful. However, it does the job. If you don't mind the 3 minute boot (on SSD.....ouch) and the 1080p limitation (it's connected to the 55", 4K Sony), then you're good. However, if you compare what those first gen "Llano" chips can do vs. the current ones, it's not pretty. 

The reason all this happened in the first place was that, recently, while looking around at other things, I came across this: a Gigabyte F2A78M-HD2. That's an A78 chipset board with a FM2+ socket capable of taking AMD's then new for 2014 "Kavari" series of APUs. These chips 4 generations down the road from my old one, are built on a 28nm process with a 45w TDP. It was also $20! So, after a month of patient watching and waiting, I was able to nail down an A8-7600 processor for $55. What's so special about the this little "Kavari" chip? Here's the thing. This particular SKU can not only be run at the designed 65w TDP, but also at a 45w low power setting. It has 10 total cores, allocating 4 to the CPU and 6 to the R7 GPU giving it plenty of power. Enough so that AMD advertises as capable of driving 4K specs, but in reality their goal is the HD one, which is 1080p at 30fps while gaming with challenging titles. Given that it's going to be an HTPC, that's more than enough. Warts? I wish it had 4 instead of 2 RAM sockets, and it lacks an optical digital out for sound. I use that to send the audio to my home theater receiver for much cleaner decoding, but hey; I can spring for an stand-alone soundcard for that!

 

What about this? I have 2 other TVs in the house: one in the downstairs living room and one in our bedroom. Our TV watching habits are basically spit between, cable TV, movie watching (via actual media like DVD), and content over the internet. This split varies between the location AND is slowly changing from more cable to more internet with movie watching via media staying the same. Strangely, unlike others, we don't stream Netflix or use Roku, we'll watch TV via the network's sites, Youtube and Kodi (formerly XBMC). So obviously, having a computer connected to these TVs is kind of a need. Some of you might remember my "Viking" build in the Silverstone SUGO SG-08B Lite case. Inside is a very low-powered motherboard, the Gigabyte GA-C847N-D with an onboard Intel Celeron 847 CPU (17w TDP). I do have a DVD drive in there, but not sure why. The onboard graphics seems to do an adequate job, but the engine is the aging "Ivy Bridge" processing. This machine will stay the same.

Last summer, while I was in Taiwan, my brother gave me this. It was one of his spare boards. An Intel DN2800MT mounted in a little plastic generic case. Don't be confused if you've never heard of it, much less seen anything like it. Boards of this type are made for "industry" typically used in computers that run automation of one kind or another, hence the very low-profile everything! Oh, and it's powered by an Intel Atom N2800 which is a dual core processor running at 1.86Ghz drawing 6.5w TDP!!! I've got it running HTPC duties on the 3rd TV, but it struggles some. One of it's issues is that the chipset only allows it to address 4Gb of RAM running on a single channel..... and that's despite the 2 SO-DIMM sockets. It's nice to have versus not having a machine down there, but that's about it.

  

Enter the Silverstone SUGO SG-05 and Gigabyte GA-B75TN. What? Another weird board? Yes, a $30 (local Craigs List) complete with power supply case and....... wait for it....... $24 board! Quite often, "weird" means cheap! In this case, this one was brand new even. OK, let's look at this MB. It's LGA-1155 meaning anything from the Sandy/Ivy Bridge generation of processors. This not only gives very decent power, but pretty good onboard graphics if the CPU is chosen wisely. On top of which, it has an onboard mSATA socket thus allowing the primary storage to be right there as well. It doesn't even require a regular power supply, capable of using any barrel-plugged outboard adapter between 12 and 19v. There's even an LVDS connector for driving LED/LCD panels. They were part of a spec designed to fit inside the all-in-ones. 

Appropriately enough, also for $24, I picked up an Intel Pentium G2030T. This 2.6Ghz dual core processor only draws 35w TDP making it very cool-running. This chip also has Intels HD Graphics with 6 execution units. It won't get any gaming done, but that won't be an issue for it's intended purpose. If I want/need more power, I can go all the way up to i7 from this board. 

When you add it all up, I will have spent about $200 total to update 2 of our 3 HTPCs. They'll all be from the "Core" generation of processors with attendant capabilities. I think we're pretty much set to go!