My Electronic "Comfort Zone"

Today is literally the "last day of summer" for me. Tomorrow, I go back to work (not that today's teacher really has the summer off like they used to). So, it's appropriate that I'm "going home"..... in an electronic sense anyway...... 

Some of you might remember several years ago when I moved to the first of ThinkPad's real designer machines, the X300. They were super-thin (almost as thin as the MacBook Air of that era), but unlike the "MBA" had all the normal features plus the philosophy of the traditional ThinkPads: everything from screen latches, to every port under the sun and even squeezed in an optical drive that others were abandoning. This of course led to the X301, and then.....

..... the X1 (1st Generation), which is really a black MacBook Air that runs Windows. They went so far as to even put a rubber cover over the headphone jack and one of the USB ports. There were no access panels on the bottom, and the battery wasn't interchangeable. An "Ultra-Book" right in line with Intel's spec for that design philosophy. I used it for close to 2 years and just never became comfortable with it. Sure, most people who saw it, love it. But, in the end; it wasn't me!

So, today.... on the last day of summer (appropriately), I switch back to a traditional ThinkPad. It's a T430s. Yes, I'm aware that it's almost as thin as the X1 and that it's only the Ivy Bridge update to the Sandy Bridge generation processor (not even a full "tick-tock" of Intel's clock), and yes it has a "Chiclet" keyboard as well. But it's attitude is all "old school" ThinkPad! There's not a cover to be seen anywhere, it's thin, but it's about as squared-off as the the 765 above! AND..... there are LATCHES for the screen. The last ones of the line. None of the successors of the "Xx40", or "Xx50" line have them. Under the skin, it's very much like the X1. So much so, that it's OS is sitting on the 512Gb mSATA SSD that came out of the X1. It'll even get the 600Gb Intel 320 SSD as it's storage drive as well. The optical drive is back in an honest-to-goodness UltraBay. I'll probably pick up a 3-Cell battery to go in there in case I need more runtime, and an HDD adapter as well..... just in case 1.1Tb of SSD storage isn't enough!

And because it's a full-fledged working ThinkPad, there are Docks for it! I have the middle one; the Mini Dock Plus Series 3. 

Appropriately enough, I traded my Apple Watch for the T430s. Why "appropriately"? The same reason that the T430s is me and the X1 isn't. I'm not a coolest gadget guy. I use things as a tool, first and foremost. I just need them to make me more efficient. It's not that I'm too "old school" to use a smartwatch..... 

...... but this (the original Pebble) is my smartwatch. The simplest, might be the cheapest on the market. Why? Because it does everything I want it to do and nothing more and because of that, it has the longest run-time between charge of them all. 

I also appreciate the company. They keep improving their product instead of trying to make you buy a new one! Although they've come out with several since the original, when I charged it up last night when I made the deal for the T430s, that they had completely new software for it.... which improved it..... free of charge! Hopefully, you didn't miss that I was able to trade the Apple Watch for the ThinkPad! That's straight up 1 for 1. I had previously traded an old Core 2 Duo generation MacBook that I had trouble selling for that watch. So I tried out the watch throughout the summer and was ready to move on.....

The main reason I was ready to give up the Apple Watch? (other than the fact that I did't use 10% of the features). I'm about to give up my iPhone. Long story, but the short version is that it's going to my wife to replace her's. Does this mean that I'm about to buy myself a really cool new phone? One of those Samsungs that have the wrap-around screen? Ah.....No.

I went into my office closet and dusted off my wife's old Motorola Atrix HD from before we got the iPhones 2 years ago. That mean that this phone is something like 3-4 years old!?! Yup! I looked at it and it does pretty much everything that I need it a phone to do. It's that simple. 

If you've gotten the impression that this whole post has been about me getting back into the electronic version of my comfort zone, you'd be right. Although, I'm not exactly Mark Zuckerberg, this picture is completely appropriate for me. My favorite season is Fall, when I can wear my favorite closes.... jeans and sweats! The "last day of summer" is very symbolic of that for us teachers when we go back and get ready for the "fall semester". This year, it's going to be even more comfortable than most!

Smart-Watch This!

So......yeah...... I got an Apple Watch last night..... OK; I didn't buy one. I didn't need it. However, when something falls into your lap..... Here's what happened. I've been trying to sell off my "reconstructed" MacBook. I took a liquid killed MacBook, married the screen to a good base with missing parts and there you go. It still had a dead battery, and I had some bad luck with it, like when I met a buyer about a week ago, and it wouldn't fire up. Turns out that the Starbuck's plugs were out, but he got scared off and I was stuck with this thing that I neither wanted nor needed. Then, this weekend, a guy contacted me to see if I wanted to trade the MacBook for his Apple Watch. I neither wanted nor needed one, but here it was....

You see, I have this. Actually, have had for around a year now and love it! It does pretty much everything I want and last for something like 4 days on a charge, which is very close to what my iPhone 5S does (I'm not a heavy user). And if I switch back to Android (which I'm contemplating), it will work just fine with that as well. 

Then, what's all this nonsense with the Apple Watch? Caught up in the hoopla? Want the latest "cool gadget"? Ah.....no, none of those things. Sure, I'd like to see what a more "complete" iteration of the smartwatch can do for me. And I'm thinking that the tight integration with my iPhone will make both more useful. But the bottom line is this: It's worth around $200 and I was having trouble selling the MacBook (it was a Mid-2009 Core 2 Duo CPU) at $165. So, if it turns out that I don't think it's worth keeping, I'll bet that I can sell it for something close to the market price. So, that's it? a simple business calculation?

No, not completely. Today, is the day of the wearable. These things have hit the sweetspot in terms of function, desirability and price. I usually know this when my wife tells me she wants some sort of gadget. Earlier this month, for Mother's Day, she asked for a Fitbit. This tells me everything I need to know. Just like 12 years ago when she asked for an iPod. I knew it was time.

I will say that in her case, it was more about monitoring health, than communications (like me). She's had trouble sleeping and wanted to keep an eye on that as well as her pulse-oxygen, so it's "a thing". I must say, that it's a pretty cool concept. We'll see how it plays out. Whether it's just a fad or a lifestyle change.

For me; as of today, I'm wearing a Space Grey, Sport model. We'll see whether it'll be a nicer looking Pebble or I'll actually end up learning to use the additional capabilities. Actually, my biggest concern isn't whether I'm going to use the capabilities, but it's more whether I'm going to be OK with a need to recharge in less than half the wear-time? Stay tuned..... Only time will tell.....
 

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. 

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!