The Surprising Summer.....Tech-wise

Summer's basically over, but it went in a direction that I never really considered. Although much of it was taken up by moving my wife's teaching stuff around several times, it turned out that she was so preoccupied by it all that it left me free with quite a bit of "me time". 

It started out with a project for which I received unexpected help. As I've talked about before, my Hootoo Tripmate Nano, has revolutionized travel for the our little family, giving us the ability to share files anywhere and everywhere. Although, we didn't travel a lot this summer, what little we did allowed me to execute a "proof of concept" which was mostly in the form of serving up movies to the children via the Tripmate to their iPads while we traveled. This turned out to be the best $20 I've spent in a long time. However, this was going to require me to "rip" much of our library of DVDs into a relatively universal format. For me, that's MP4, which can basically be read by just about anything. While the "new" Ivy-Bridge based computer made short work of this little chore, by handling both parts in about 20-30 minutes; it's still 20 to 30 minutes! Enter my brother-in-law. While I has hip-deep in alligators (that's ripping my movies), they showed up from Austria for their 3 year (or there abouts) missionary furlough. While dealing with all the various pre-teen cousins running around was a pain at times, I found that he'd been doing the same thing, but was further along than I was! On top of which, he was carrying all of his ripped movies around with him on an external drive. Awesome! So, we combined forces, traded movies and ripped more. So now I'm up to somewhere between 300 and 400Gb of them in an external drive! At somewhere around 1Gb per film on MP4, that's around 300 movies! That gives me a pretty good start on this project in a pretty short amount of time.

In the meantime, everyone that I've shown the HooToo Nano to has been astounded by it's size, low cost and possibilities. Another unexpected find was that it draws a fairly low amount of power. It started with me trying to use some USB car-chargers that weren't powerful enough to charge our old Motorola smartphones or new iPhones. The Tripmate was fine with them, then, my wife realized that the "emergency battery" that was packaged free with her old Motorola Atrix HD phone was micro-USB, so incompatible with her iPhone, so it was evicted from it's previous residence in her car. After it bit of examination, it occurred to me that the Tripmate's power input was also micro-USB, so a short experiment later showed that this little battery (about the size of our iPhone 5s) would power it for around 3 and a half hours! Can you so walking-personal-cloud!!! Another "proof-of-concept" test ensued with me carrying it around with me running errands while the daughter watched movies on her iPad pretty much confirmed it.

This left me with a problem. Close to 400Gb of data that needed to be portable on a regular basis! While looking at buying externally attachable storage, I realized that I'd been hoarding a couple of 500Gb 2.5" drives for some time. While one was a Seagate Momentus XT, hybrid drive, and thus wouldn't have been put to best use as attached storage, the other was a Hitachi 5K500, 5400rpm drive that would be perfect for the job. A quick trip to MicroCenter netted me a cheap (Inland) USB 3.0 case. 

Subsequently, I found a much nicer aluminum case by Orico for $12; so now I'm set. Not too long thereafter, a repair job came along that allowed me to sell off the hybrid drive, so I'll probably take the proceeds from that and pick up a 1Tb drive as well. 

 
 Around that time, I got a little storage crazy, picking up a 7200rpm, 2Tb, Hitachi DeskStar (7K3000) that will ultimately go into the server's RAID array, and first one, then another 160Gb Intel SSD. None of these drives cost more than $55, and the average (after shipping) comes out at less than $50! 

One will go into a revived MacBook that was dead from a soft drink spill.....

.....and the other went into my most recent acquisition; a ThinkPad T400 that was picked up for about $45, complete with port replicator. It's destined to replace my son's current T61 as soon as I find another right arrow key. Anything else?

Well..... actually, I've saved the best and biggest for last! One of my former students came to me for help getting a notebook computer capable of doing CAD and other computing tasks necessary for an engineering major. After looking a several machines from different manufacturers, we settled on the Dell Precision M6x00 series. He had $1300 to work with, which translated to a top-spec'd M6600, the newer (year old) mid-spec-d M6700, or current model, but lowest spec'd M6800. The difference is largely in the spec and the processor generation of Sandy Bridge vs. Ivy Bridge vs. Haswell. I'm not going to get into the nitty-gritty details, but we decided on the M6700. What did $1300 buy? As I said earlier, a middle-spec'd machine, meaning that it has an i7 (vs. i5) quad core CPU capable of running 8 threads, the nVidia K3000 "Kepler" GPU, 8Gb of RAM, and 750Gb HDD. With the money left over, I upgraded his RAM to high speed Crucial 16Gb of RAM in 2 modules, and a Crucial mSATA 240Gb SSD allowing him to use the 750Gb Western Digital "Black" mechanical HDD as storage, PLUS still leaving him another open drive bay for even more storage should he need it. That's not even taking into account the ability to install a drive module in place of the optical drive should he feel a need to do that! He came back and asked for a dock, so I'm in the process of finding that as well. It's quite a machine! Aaaand???

That's a lot! But there's a "capper". I'm not certain how I came across it because I wasn't looking for them, but I got caught up in "smartwatches". Most of you know that I'm a teacher who teaches high level classes. This doesn't afford me a lot of time to sit and contemplate my navel. So when those times occur that I'm actually waiting for a call I need to answer (such as from the doctor's office), or a text, I routinely miss it because, my phone is turned down. After watching the Sony smartwatches for a couple of years, I had decided I like the concept, but not so much the execution. Actually, I didn't want them to do more, but LESS! Then I saw the Pebble, and fell in love with it. They run about $150 or so new, which I just didn't feel I wanted to pay. I found one listed on eBay that was here in DFW for what looked like it was going to be a decent (sub-$100) price. Just as I was waiting to bid on it, my wife started talking to me and I missed it! It sold for about $82, which I was more than willing to pay. Then, just as I was getting aggravated with myself for missing the opportunity, I found another one for a $100 "Buy It Now" with a "Best Offer" option. I offered $80, the guy counted at $85 which I accepted! It was in Houston, and he got it mailed up here over the weekend at no charge. Frankly, I was happy to pay the $3 difference for not having to drive to Arlington which would have eaten up more than $3 worth of gas! So there you have it. It was a very exciting summer where technology was concerned, and virtually none of it planned!

HooToo 2.... The Device That's Changed My Life!

Let me just say; tablets on car trips are AWESOME! Did we just let the kids turn them on and use them the whole time? No. We did other things as well; like read books..... actual physical books, but when it was time for a little change of pace?

 

Let me back up and start from the beginning. Remember when I wrote about the HooToo Tripmate Nano I bought for $20 from Newegg, 'cus I wanted to try out "cloud" concepts in my classroom? After using it, almost on a daily basis, I became more and more sold that this device was going to be solid and useable in a variety of situations. You know how during family get-togethers, everyone hurries to get there and then there are seemingly endless hours of boredom sitting around and contemplating your navel? You remember all those trips hither and yon during the summer where there are hours sitting in the car dozing or looking out the window hoping you see something interesting? Yup, that time was fast approaching. So I started playing around with the HooToo, powering it from various sources of electricity, ranging from cellphone adapters, to car-plugs and misc. other sources. I quickly learned that this thing draws so little power that can use darned near any USB (5v) source. I tried every single car-style plug I had and they all powered it fine. So on our trip to Caddo Lake State Park which ended up taking about 3 and a half hours when all was said-and-done, it allowed the kids to watch whatever I had on the "stick".

This was my other "revelation". Admittedly not huge, but a revelation none-the-less. I had started out using the HooToo with a USB flash drive because that's what my classroom use files were on. Of course, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files don't take up lots of room, however, video files DO. I knew that people often bought software to "rip" DVDs into files that could be read on other devices, but I didn't want to go out and buy something I wasn't even sure was going to work. What to do? Why.... YouTube is the answer of course! A few videos later I came found a solution. Download a couple of free pieces of software: DVD Decrypter, and the well-known Handbrake, and even a software-phobe like me could take his own DVDs, strip out the encription, and rip the resulting file down to a size that was small enough to be truly portable. Now, it's not as easy as all that. You do have to "play" with it a little and see where the balance is "for you", between small file size and image quality, but it's not too bad at all. In the follow week or so after I figured it out, I "ripped" something like 60 of the DVDs in our collection! This is where my newly upgraded Ivy Bridge computer came into play. I was able to do it in half the time that my older machine would have taken. The typical movie ranged from a little under 1Gb to some that were just a little over. All in all, I was able to do the first batch of 20 and they were just a bit over 15Gb. I realized that at the rate I was going, the 32Gb stick that I had previously thought of as huge would be out of space pretty soon. Lucky for me though, we went to Costco about that time and they were running a sale on the Sandisk Cruzer Ultra 64Gb flash drive for $35. So, another 40 DVDs got ripped and put on it. 

 

In the ensuing weeks, I tried everything. We connected to it from 2, 3 and 4 tablets/phones while watching the same or different movies, starting, stopping, skipping back and forth without issue. I even got my hands on my wife's old Motorola Atrix cellphone "emergency" battery that they gave her with that phone. Even that thing powered the HooToo Tripmate. It didn't just work: this slim little device that's only about 600mah at most, last somewhere between 3 and 4 hours.... after having been charged up 2 years ago and left to sit in the car the entire time since! Today, I tried to charge up the solar battery/charger my wife bought me 5 years ago to see if it would run it! Stay tuned on that.....

 

This started me really thinking. I could pick up one of the bigger external charging batteries and become my own little walking cloud! I could just put a piece of Velcro on the Tripmate and attach it to the battery and thus have 6, 8 plus hours of serving whatever files, wherever I wanted. After a little research, I found that the bigger versions of these batteries can charge multiple devices including tablets and cost somewhere between $50 and $100. Which brought this to mind.

The new version of the HooToo; the TripMate Elite just hit the market. And at around $60 on Amazon and carrying it's own built in battery, why don't I just upgrade? If it sounds like I'm a little "over-the-top" on this, it's because I am! I don't remember the last time I was this excited about a product. And I've gotta say; everyone who I've shown it to was just as amazed as I am!