... So They Loaded Up The Truck and Moved To... Terrell!?!

Although this image is from the remake, those of you who grew up in the late 60's and early 70's will remember the Clampetts well! The reruns would be on the TV virtually every day during my childhood and of course the opening credits played with the scene of the family moving to "Beverly; Hills... that is...". That is exactly what I feel like right now as we're in the countdown till the big move next week. We finally have the closing dates for ours and the house we're buying nailed down (sort of) and are scheduling the move date. So, what am I up to?

This of course... well duh! Yup, less than a month before we head back to school. We teachers have less time than that. So yes indeed: we are walking the tightrope of prepping for school (both for ourselves and the kids) while moving to a new home. It's a little stressful....

 

This time is a little different than the previous 7 in that my son Josh is headed to middle schools (grades 7 and 8 here). I taught that age group for much of my career so I'm well aware of all the issues, so that part isn't so bad. Besides, I'm just down the street at the high school and he'll be in a school staff by my former colleagues. I do have to get ready for a one issue though. Perversely; from a technology standpoint, our school district is much better prepared to deal grades 5 and 6 as they issue those kids the Dell Latitude 2100.

True: it's not the most advanced notebook ever with it's 10" screen and Atom processor, but it was rugged and came with 2Gb of RAM. No I'm not joking. That 2Gb is FAR superior than the 1Gb they put in the ThinkPad X200 that they bought for the high school and don't get me started on the 512Mb that was spec'd for the X61 of the middle school machines!!! It's so bad that the majority of the students don't check out school machines any more, preferring to BYOT (Bring Your Own Technology), or the most prevalent solution, use a smartphone. You can imagine what that does for efficiency when they have to actually have to do something productive; oh like type a paper.... 

 

You're probably thinking: "surely your son has a notebook computer", and of course, he does and has had since he was 4 or 5. In fact, he's now on his 5th or 6th generation of notebooks, having started with an A22p and most recently using a T500. Which gets me to my story. If you're the least bit familiar with that 15.1", 6+ pound machine you'll understand that it's a wonderful "workhorse" computer eminently suitable for the combo school work-Minecraft job it had been doing..... while sitting immobile on his desk. However, the concept of having a slightly built 12-year old packing it to and from school daily in a backpack probably isn't an ideal solution. At first I considered moving him to a smaller-lighter-slightly derelict T400 I have sitting around, but really; it isn't that much smaller and lighter. "What to do", says the propellerheaded dad?

The obvious solution is to buy another computer, right? You guys know me too well! In this case, there's more to it than my losing battle with TAS (Technology Acquisition Syndrome), but hey; we all have our little issues, right? Anyway; lets look at the decision matrix. Starting with the fact that school desks are NOT any bigger than when you and I went to school with nothing more than paper and pencils. Despite what the politicians would like you to believe, they are not building the schools any different than they used to. Sure, they add projectors, some Ethernet jacks and a WiFi AP in each room, but the rooms themselves are the same. As in the same size, with the same sized desks in there, with more students by the way (but that's another issue altogether). So you have a desk surface with the same size that they used to have, but the students are expected to have a notebook computer AND paper and pencil on there as well! Which gets us back to the original issue with the model of computer. If you compare the actual difference between the T500 and T400 side-by-side, there's not that much to give between them. Sure the T400 feels lighter, but the reality is that even the "S" model isn't that much better. Solution? You're lookin' at it..... The X-Series of ThinkPad! These machines were designed from the ground up to be "sub-notebooks" meaning between 3 and 4 pounds of carry weight, and a footprint based on a 12" screen. I kind of already knew this as my experience with them go back to the original X20 way back in my IT days in Chicago. In fact, I've owned every model between the X2x, X3x, X4x, X6x, and up to the X30x that have been my personal machine before the current X1. However, my detour through the X300/301/X1 had left me in the bigger screened branch of the line and have forgotten about the 12" machines since the demise of my daughter's X61. At this time, I'm not going to regale you with the process of deciding between relatively recent 12" models, but will simply say that I ended up at a working X220 at $59, but missing parts.

If you haven't read my old stuff before or I haven't made my point: here's the deal. These are ABSOLUTELY, the notebook computers to target!!! Let's start with that it was $59..... less than $80 after shipping. It was missing the A/C adapter, hard drive, drive bay cover, but had the critical battery! It was missing everything I had and mostly didn't want and had the one relatively expensive piece to replace. The X220 is the "Sandy-bridge" i5/2520m core version of these machines and is only 2 generations off of being current. Additionally, the 4Gb of RAM it did have was in the form of 1 module, giving me the ability to simply put in another to max it out to 8Gb (which I did immediately). The missing hard drive was going to get pulled and replaced with a 120Gb Intel 330 SSD out of his old machine anyway. Oh yeah, least I forget that I had to spend $1.96 to buy a drive-bay cover. Woe is me! Need I say that I have a drawer full of ThinkPad A/C adapters and that he'll be able to go anywhere in the house without having to move one. And since his and my schools have both been equipped with ThinkPads for years, there'll be A/C adapters everywhere! This might very well be the slickest upgrade I've done in years!

 Now that I'm feeling good about myself..... 

 

The Frugal Propellerhead Family's Great 2014 Computer Upgrade

The great 2014 technology (mostly computers) upgrade is now over. WOW, it was a crazy and fast ride..... kinda like the Texas Giant roller coaster! 

Many of you will remember the late spring when I moved my desktop workstation to an Ivy Bridge "Core" system built in the ginormous Cooler Master Cosmos II case. At the time, we were a Core 2 Duo family. The workstation was a "Yorkfield" Core 2 Quad, myself and daughter on ThinkPad X301/X61 running low/ultra-low voltage C2D, wife and son on ThinkPad T61s running regular mobile C2D. 

Around that time, I came across a ThinkPad T500 locally that was too cheap to pass up (sub-$100), so it began. While these machines are "Montevina" platform running Intel's Penryn processors and thus NOT the later Westfield, "Core" processors, there's not a huge difference in routine performance. Especially when you load them with plenty of RAM and run the OS on an SSD. The whole thing really gained momentum a few weeks ago when I picked up a cheap T400 on Goodwill's auction site (yes there is such a thing). It had some issues such as a couple of broken USB ports, but at $42, I wasn't going to complain! 

For those who aren't aware, the T400 is the 14.1" version of the T500 (15.4" LCD) with universally integrated Intel graphics vs. the switchable ATI Radeon HD 3650 GPU and higher end panels that can be optioned. Around the same time, while MacBook Air shopping on Craigslist (not for myself), I spotted a T500 for $75 complete with the Advanced MiniDock. Yes, I did say $75! That's just stupid cheap! So, I picked it up last weekend on my great Metroplex swing through Arlington, Kennedale, Bedford and Dallas (more on this later). 

And of course, right in the middle of this mash-up came the X1 that replaced my X301. So, are you wondering how I can afford to do this on a teacher's salary? After all, we're talking $1000+ retail on every one of these machines with the X1 over $2000! 

Ahhh.... that's the money question if you'll pardon the pun. First of all; know your market. Secondly; know your products. And thirdly, be ever watchful and ready to strike when the opportunity arises. So, let's start at the beginning:

• I know that working computers can always be sold, it's just a matter of what it is, which governs how much it can be sold for. Pretty much any laptop running a recent OS can sell for about $100.... give or take. In this case-in-point, the T61 machines sold for between $125 and $150, which is exactly what I sold my son's machine for. While the Z61t (daughter's laptop) being older and slower, with a bad battery sold for the $100 that I asked. So, that gives me $250 to upgrade. The other half of the market is that the newer T400/500 can and do often appear for under $100 if one is patient.
• The Montevina platformed T400/500 are in a number of ways significantly faster and better machines than the T61 that they replaced, while at the same time take the same drives, batteries, A/C adapters, docks etc. However, they use a faster bus, run the next gen "Penryn" Core 2 Duo processors, and uses the DDR3 memory that I want standardize our home machines onto. This RAM come in a higher density per module and are thus cheaper to buy. Whatever the cost is for a size (1Gb, 2Gb, 4Gb) memory I can buy in DDR2 is close to the next size up in DDR3. I also know that in my 8 year old daughter and 11 year old son's computing world, the spec of these machines is more than enough for their needs. After all, we're talking YouTube and Minecraft. So, even the Intel integrated GPU version of these machines is plenty. 
• Now that I had a known target and money in hand from selling their old computers, I was ready to catch the $42 (about $70 after shipping) T400 on Goodwill and the $75 T500 on Craigslist. All-in-all, I spent less than $150 for an complete upgrade, netting me a +$100, in the exchange. Where did that $100 go? Into upgrades of course! The T500 that Josh got received an Intel 160Gb SSD over the 64Gb SSD that was in the T61. The T61 went away with a 160Gb mechanical hard drive that was originally in that machine, so the SSD is sitting in my drive box awaiting future use. The 64Gb SSD in Katie's machine went into her T400. She doesn't need a lot of storage, but I'm afraid that Minecraft and other 11 year old games will be too much for his old SSD. That 160Gb upgrade cost $55, so I'm actually still on the plus side of the ledger! Even the Advanced MiniDock that was included with the T500 came into play as we can now move his speaker plug from the unfortunate front position to the rear.

But what about this? OK, I'll admit it. It was a "one-off", one of those ridiculous deals that sometimes still happen on eBay. I got it at $305, so about $330 after the rather high shipping, but still a very low price. I'm selling my X301, complete with it's 160Gb Intel SSD, and 8Gb of RAM for $300 while including my spare no longer needed batteries. If I wasn't selling to my friend who's been lusting after it for a long time, I'd price the machine (downgraded to 4Gb of RAM and 128Gb SSD) for about $375-400 which is completely doable. I'm doing this because, he and I have been friends for a LONG time. And, it's where my personal ThinkPads go to live out their retirement (T23, T42p, X41, X300 and now X301). 

Before I close out of this long post, I'll go back and explain what I was doing last Saturday.... instead of writing blog posts. Besides the T500, I also went out to pick up a iPad Mini 2 (aka Mini Retina) for my wife to go into her fleet. Yes, for those who are counting, that's 6 iPads that we own and 7 that are used on a regular basis including the iPad 2 that her school provides! I promise, I'm going to write a post just on our little brood of these things soon! Oh, I also stopped by and visited with one of my favorite YouTube video makers who goes by iBookGuy. It was a great visit and will make its way into a future post as well. In any case; now you know how the great upgrade of 2014 came about to be and how it was done, at a pretty low cost.

 

 

The "X" Factor

I admit it: I have a weakness for "Halo" products..... who doesn't? Over the course of the last few months, I began to think about a replacement for my X301 that has been my personal laptop for the last couple of years. No, it's not too old for what I do with it, but there are certain aspects of it that have called attention to themselves in a negative way. More and more of my external devices are USB 3.0. Even the Penryn generation of Intel's Core 2 Duo line is showing it's age, but especially so with the ULV or Ultra-low voltage sub-group that the X301 uses. It's screen is getting increasingly less tolerable due to the combination of, not the greatest panel, high resolution (1440 x 900 on 13.3") and my inexhorably aging eyes! So, for the last month, I began the process of evaluating candidates for replacement.

First to come under consideration was the thin "S" version of the T4x0 series, but I ended up discarding when I came across my ultimate target. But actually the main competition was the MacBook Air. WHAT you say? TRAITOR! A Mac-In-Trash! Have I taken leave of my senses? Let's all take a deep breath....... that's it...... in... out..... Let's start with; what do I do with my personal laptop? It's on a browser almost 100% of the time, so the OS is irrelevent. We are increasingly a "platform-agnostic" home, with iPhone and iPads pretty much all over the place. We actually are owners of 5 (count-em, 5) iPads, but that a story for another time. We even have one of the "White" MacBooks around here as a learning tool for my wife now that she's in a "Mac-centric" school district and working on an iMac on a daily basis. Back to my original train of thought. I'm about "thin-and-light", and while Apple may not have invented the concept (actually IBM did), they might have perfected it! I don't care if you're a "die-hard" PC guy, you have to admit that the MBA (MacBook Air) is a tour d' force of industrial design, so much so that Lenovo had to emulate it. This summer, my missionary brother/sister-in-laws were here and when they are home for their furough, they take the opportunity to update their hardware since everything computer is cheaper here than in Austria. This time, he bought his wife a current 13" MBA, so I was able to get a firsthand look at it. It's just a really nice computer and would handle anything that I need for my laptop to do. Did I buy it? No..... and not because it's not a great computer. Believe me, I was close to going Mac! What kept me from turning to the Dark Side?

...... Yes..... that's a power adapter..... just like the other 6, 7 or 8 that are scattered all over our house. Because, we're ThinkPad people! My wife, ThinkPad T500, my son, ThinkPad T400, my daughter, ThinkPad X61, myself ThinkPad Xxxx. OK, you get the idea. I'm not terribly OCD, I'm just lazy. I don't want to move my adapter around as I go from place to place in the house. Oh.... guess what's at work? Yeah; ThinkPad L420! However, the irony of it, is that this prosaic little device also led me to exclude... a ThinkPad. The X1 Carbon... because it's thinness caused it to have a special (different than all other TPs) adapter! And that led me to...

"So, you didn't want an X1 so you bought and X1"? No; I'm not ready for the coo coo farm. I can't have an X1c (for Carbon), but I could have an X1 (1st gen). Like I could afford a "Carbon" anyway, but that's beside the point. So, here's the scenario: I'm looking around for something updated, but thin and light, AND wouldn't cause me to change peripherals. Oh yeah, and that I could afford! There's always that! In my examining the X1c (longingly) and finding it not quite the right fit (like that gorgeous girl in your Agronomy class that you never forgot, but I digress), I came across the original X1 which was the replacement for the X301 for those not up on ThinkPadology. Yes, it's bigger and heavier (by a whole, half a pound) than my X301. But it has USB 3.0 and a 13.3" screen that's not only brighter but also of a lower resolution (1366 x 768) than the X301 as well. I'm not sure I'm a big fan of the Corning "Gorilla Glass", but I can live with it.

As you can see; there's no optical drive, but the one I bought came with an external DVD burner. It is also the higher spec'd version with the 160Gb Intel SSD vs. a mechanical drive, so it was probably about $2000 give or take 2 and a half years ago when it was bought. Yup, it still has around 6 months of warranty left on it.

I'll put you out of your misery now. I give a hair over $305 (plus $26 2-Day shipping), and it's literally "mint", as in I can't find a mark on it, or the Lacie drive or the 2 power adapters or the Lenovo backpack that came with it. I've never bought a used computer that looked this new! 

Are there things I don't like? Yes. It's too big physically for a machine with a 13.3" screen, not huge, mind you, just a little too big. The 13" MacBook Air is better. The screen is very nice, but the resolution is a little low and the jury is still out on the glossy Gorilla Glass. Kinda don't like the 6-row vs. the traditional 7-row keyboard. HATE that some idiot decided that the headphone jack needed to be behind a rubber door! It runs a bit hot, but what doesn't these day? It's that I'm not used to a full power CPU (an i5 2520M in this case). It only came with 4Gb of RAM in one socket (vs. 2 normally). Only one of the 3 USBs is 3.0 and one is behind that stupid rubber door. Did I mention I hate the rubber door!?!

What do I like/love? Well.... LOOK AT IT!!! What's not to love!?! The people who have seen it pretty much have the same reaction.... WOW, it's really THIN! Oh, it's NOT silver. I really don't like eye-catching silver. The only thing wrong with the MBA. If it came in black you might be seeing me driving around with an Apple sticker on my truck.... OK, not really..... just sayin'. Anything else? Oh yeah, there's plenty. It's fast (well, duh you say), no it's really fast compared to the X301, The keyboard is great! It might be the best keyboard of any ThinkPad I've used since the legendary 600, and that's a company known for it's keyboards! Did I mention that it's back-lit as well? Not new for the Mac crowd, but nice for us plebes. The display is really bright and the 1366 x 768 is very kind to my aged eyes. It'll also nice to have an SD card reader onboard for when I'm using any of the cameras that uses that card. USB 3.0 is awesome. It's not as fast as Thunderbolt, but I'm so amazed by how much faster it is than 2.0, that I don't really care right now. Oh.... I love that it was $305! Which, by the way is about half of what I would have paid for an equivalent MacBook Air. After selling my X301, the cost of this upgrade will hover right around $0.... even after the 8Gb RAM upgrade on it's way from Israel!

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!