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!

The Portable Workstation

Going back to the beginning, my very first laptop computer that is, I've always had a bit of an obsession with "ultra-portability" and the concept of the portable/mobile workstation. I'll define that here as being a computer and peripherals having the capability of doing jobs that are generally considered to be within the province of full-sized desktop computers. I'll have to say that I was able to get started in good style with the IBM ThinkPad 701c (sometimes known as the butterfly). As machine so small that a full-sized keyboard was too large for, and had to be able to fold and unfold into!

As cool and interesting as that machine was though, it wasn't really the whole story. I took the concept to another level by finding the IBM 5183 Portable Printer along with the Logitech Scanman II to pair with it. This gave me be the capability of pretty much doing anything I wanted, anywhere I wanted, without even an electrical outlet. If you're unfamiliar with the computer, it's really smaller than what the image would indicate. That screen is only 10.4"! So this whole rig pretty much fit in a regular sized computer bag and weighed no more than just a more normal sized laptop by itself. I was hooked!

In the years after that, my portable machines grew as they progressed from legendary 600, then on to the the "T" Series. I was happy with these machines, but often would lament the lack of extreme portability that the "Butterfly" had given me. Then one day the ThinkPad folks dropped the X300 bomb on us! When the price for them finally came back down to earth, I bought a nice used one several years ago. 

 

This became the core of my "next-gen" portable workstation. It paired nicely with Canon LIDE scanner that I had at the time and I even dabbled in the Pentax Portajet thermal printer (the world's smallest printer). The idea received it's most significant use and "proof-of-concept" when tragically my mother-in-law passed away due a car accident during the holidays one year. I had the whole rig with me at the time since we were vacationing with my in-laws and I was scanning some family photos for them. That scanner got quite a workout putting together a memorial from old photographs for the funeral.

Around that time, I added another element to my little bag of tricks by adapting the recently acquired Android ThinkPad Tablet to work as a secondary screen to the laptop (which had been upgraded to the X301). This gave me a portable multi-monitor setup like I was used to at home. 

The 3rd generation of my portable workstation came about when the X3xx machines gave way to the X1. On one hand, I gave up having a built-in optical drive (which I haven't missed at all), but on the other, I gained a much nicer (and larger at 14.1" vs. 13.3") screen (the X3xx machines had notoriously bad panels), but at a resolution (1366 x 768) much kinder to my aging eyes. Although it's a 2nd gen (Ivy Bridge) Core processor, and has other upgrades such as USB 3.0 as well; it's most important function is as the "core" (forgive the pun) to the new version of portable "eco-system" if you will.

Recently, I was to again add the ability to print on the move with the HP OfficeJet H470 printer. I actually gave about $30 (after shipping) for 2, H470s and 1, H460, along with power supplies for all three as well as 2 batteries. One of the H470s has an unresolved issue, but the other one works as does the H460 that I'll probably sell to defray the cost of the whole thing. A Bluetooth wireless module ($10) is on it's way from China to allow me to go fully wireless printing. 

 

 

Of course there are other smaller items such as the Bluetooth travel mouse, the nVidia Shield tablet and the Wacom Bamboo pen digitizer that gives me other capabilites as well.

 

Those things are great, but the biggest change in this generation has to be the ability to bring massive storage to the portable realm. About a year ago, I picked up the Lenovo F800 "Multi-Drive". Essentially an access point, attached to a lithium-iom "power station", combined with a 1Tb hard drive, it gives me the ability to have a wireless NAS wherever I go. As if that wasn't enough, I picked up a Drobo Mini last summer and populated it with 4 laptop sized (2.5") drives (2, 1.5Tb & 2, 1Tb), giving me the capability to carry 5Tb of USB 3.0 attachable storage with me anywhere. This weekend, I put the 600Gb Intel 320 SSD from my wife's old laptop into the other bay of the X1. This combined with the mSATA, 480Gb SSD, gives me a total of around 1Tb of "onboard" storage, and 6Tb of either attached or wireless storage. If you'd have told me that I'd be able to do this affortably even 2 years ago; I'd have said that it was "crazy talk"!

That's a lot of cool portable stuff right!?! ....but there's more! Oh, I don't own any of it, but ..... one day..... What is it? It's the ThinkPad "Stack". What's the pieces in the Stack? One is a lithium-ion power station, another is a Bluetooth speaker, then you a portable access point, and of course, the last (so far) is a portable HDD. Each is about the size of one of those portable drives you can buy anywhere, but the cool thing about this is that they're all the same footprint and can connect to each other without wires or cables! OK; it doesn't do anything that I can't already do, but it does it in a much nicer way! I can be a little OCD.

Tablet Upgrade Time

My digital lifestyle has never really gotten tablet-centric. As much as I wanted to love them, I ended up being the lone holdout in our household. Yes, I would carry my ThinkPad "Slate", Android tablet around on occasion, but more times, than not, I wouldn't use it and even took to avoiding toting it altogether since it was so big and heavy. It turns out that getting the larger (10") class of tablet was a mistake for me. That made it too close to the "ultrabook" class of laptops that I was already using. 

 

At the time that I picked up the tablet, I was using the ThinkPad X300, and over the 3+ years since, I've gone on to the X301, followed by the X1. All of these machines are on, or close to the cutting edge in terms of "thin and light" for notebook computers...... which unfortunately, put the rather "heavy-weight" 10.1" ThinkPad Tablet too close in carry-load. And obviously, one of the very cool features of that tablet; that of the keyboard/folio, became a non-entity since it push the size and weight squarely into the notebook range! Don't get me wrong: the tablet was a very nice example of it's type and it's large IPS display made it and excellent reader and media display. ......But....... there was just not enough of a differentiation between it and my notebooks of choice!

Interestingly, it was the exact opposite usage model of my wife, who's notebook is a ThinkPad T500 with a 15" screen. This machine weighs between 5 and 6 pounds (maybe a little more since it has the extended 9-cell battery) making the difference between it and her iPad Air marked! For her, carrying around the laptop isn't an option, but the iPA really a none issue especially since she quite commonly lugs around a good sized bag with all manner of school teacher stuff in it. So it became pretty obvious to me that downsizing was going to a good answer for my tablet woes.

Now..... if I were a rich man..... (I'll save you the musical quote), I'd buy myself the Sony Xperia Z3 tablet and be done with it. It has a truly excellent (although, non-OLED) display and really nice metal construction giving it a nice thin profile and cutting the weight. It also has the ability to connect to and stream PS4 games from that console. Pretty cool if you own the console.

Think, somewhere between an iPad Air and Mini in size with similar feel. It's NICE!!! Somewhere between $450 and $500 worth of nice. Again, iPad Air comparisons are appropriate, but it runs Android. Yeah right..... now back to the real world of Frugal Propellerheads!

So, that's where this..... the nVidia Shield Tablet: he "poor man's" super-tablet comes into the picture. We can start with the list price being $300. That's not peanuts, but it's $200 less than the Sony for pretty much the same capabilities AND has a few tricks up it's sleeve. OK, I'll put you out of your misery and go ahead an tell you that I gave $185 for mine off of eBay. The seller stated that he was having trouble with WiFi connection, so I took the chance that he either had bad location on his access point location or didn't know what he was doing. I don't have any idea which is was, but I can say, I've had no issues with it at all. Is it the strongest at pulling in a signal? No, but neither is it terrible. I have to switch from one AP to the other when I move to opposite ends of my house, but I have to do with with most of my other devices as well. So yeah..... that's right...... $185!!! That's a pretty good deal in my book for arguably the #2 Android tablet on the market today after the Nexus 9! 

 

I did say "some tricks up it's sleeve" didn't I? A couple of posts ago, I talked about nVidia's Shield concept of being able to stream games. Over the course of the last 3 years, they've grown the concept and fleshed out the product line to include original Shield Portable running the Tegra 4, followed by the Shield Tablet the next year running the K1 processor and this year has seen the release of the Shield Console with the X1. All optimized for gaming with customized GPUs. So, not only do you have a device good at Android games, but the ability to play PC games from your gaming computer, but nVidia's Grid streaming service as well. That's a lot of capability. When you throw in Android emulation apps..... this device is literally "a game changer" (no pun intended)!

Most of you know that I'm not much of a gamer, but the fact is; I'm a sucker for interesting (cool) technology! And this family of products is definitely cool! Plus it's price-point makes it darn near irresistible! I do have another rationale in that I'm the sponsor of our school's computer club. Gaming and gamers are a big part of that. Shouldn't I be fully up to date on that part of the computing world!?!

Propellerhead Gear: Winter 2014

It's done...... that which will become known as the Great Rebuild of Winter 2013-14 is finally finished! Here I sit drinking coffee when I should be at work and contemplating my existence, while listening to the sounds of a happy hard drive working to back up a computer. It's the completed "Spectre" backing up the rebuilt "Blackbird". Last night, I finally figured out what was wrong with the HighPoint Caching RAID controller, and got it up and running. Let me just say this about HighPoint: great concepts, good hardware..... terrible instructions and support!

If you are "of a certain age", you'll remember the Japanese models of the 1970s. Superb quality, enough to put AMT, Revell, and Monogram to shame, but they were not for the faint of heart. Not very good instructions to say the least! This is what it's like to work with HighPoint products. You're going to have to figure it out yourself.

...But hey, I could be out there in this instead. I almost forgot; I'm home this fine Monday morning instead of at work, because we had yet another ice storm. Yup, high ground temperature, rapidly plunging temps and precip, makes great ice around these parts. Combine that with the modern inability to drive in inclement weather makes for an extra holiday. Well, not really. We'll have to make the day up later, but that'll be in June, so I worry about that later.

In the meantime, that which rarely happens, has come to pass. All of our "frontline" computers are "up-to-date". My son and daughter are on freshly loaded (within 3 months) machines. The son on his mother's hand-me-down 15.4" widescreen T61 and daughter on a Z61t which replaced the dead X61. Both of them have 64Gb SSDs in them, running Windows 7 SP1 and will be for the foreseeable future since they don't need much storage (especially now that the server is up). AND Windows 8 is the Vista of this age, so no OS upgrade anytime soon.

Can I just say that I'm reveling in the current state of my wife's bliss? You know.....Happy Wife, Happy Life!?! After her recent upgrade to the ThinkPad T500 which is the F35 "Lightning II" on our network, and last week's tablet upgrade from iPad2 to iPad Air. 

The whole thing went very well and is an excellent example of Craigslist at work. As soon as I was given a clearly defined edict to get an iPad Air, I had the parameters necessary to do my job. Although, it being an current Apple product, which meant that there wouldn't be any sort of "great deal" to be found, I could maximize my resources. I knew the 32Gb iPad Air (henceforth to be called the IPA), retails for $599 and even the most aggressive discounts would only bring it down to $560. Don't ya just love Apple? Early adopters/buyer's remorse folks, selling on CL typically price the 16Gb for somewhere over $400, usually around $450. However, after reading several reviews, it was apparent that the current prevailing wisdom is to bypass the 16Gb model since the newer apps have all blown-up due to graphics optimized for the Retina display. ....And since this was Momma's vs. a kid device, prudence would dictate buying the higher spec unit. While looking for the "new" unit for her, I went ahead and listed the old generation 1 iPad that the daughter had been using, on CL as well (Cascade works on tablets too) at the $150 that we paid for it. On Thursday, I found a new, still in plastic 32Gb, IPA for $530. When you factor in the $45 or so tax savings, plus the $30 savings from the lowest retail price; it's a rather substantial $75 off of store price and $115 off of "retail". Yeah, I jumped all over it! The following day, the 1G sold at $150 making the cost of upgrade $380!  

On my end of things (now that my wife is squared away), the Raptor, otherwise known as ThinkPad X301 is running great! The switch over to the Intel 320 (X18) hasn't just been seamless, it's been an upgrade with a the few glitches that I'd occasionally experience completely gone, and it running very smoothly. The Blackbird, of course you know about due to ealier posts. Plus, both HTPCs (Viking and Hawkeye) also got SSD upgrades and fresh OS reloads.

What brought on this bout of introspection? This. I ran across an ad for 2 HP "Blackbird" 002 cases. This machine came on the market around the time that I built my first version of the Blackbird. It was one of those thing that major manufacturers go through periodically just to show everyone that they didn't just build office machines and junk sold at Wal-Buy. It was pretty amazing, with high-end everything and even water-cooling to boot. Dell did something similar are that time in their XPS line. Of course, neither went anywhere in the market and therefore became "one-offs", but hey, that doesn't mean they weren't cool. I've occasionally thought I'd like to build in one of these cases, but at the $300 that the guy was wanting, it only reinforced that the frugal-way is the best way for me. As I sit here with my file server doing it's first full backup on the workstation; both machines together don't break the $1000 barrier!

 

Technological Carpe Diem

I'm a terrible person! I had an opportunity so I dump the "love of my life" for another......the X300 for an X301. This is what happened. I had a "contract" in hand for a "new" laptop from one of my old customers (repeat business is awesome). She had just emailed me "out of the blue", stating that she's ready for another computer. The ThinkPad R52 that I sold her 4-5 years ago has been great, but now ready for an updated machine since she's about to start a new degree program this summer. Her needs were the same as before ("Office" type apps, Internet, and a little light photo editing), but she just needed this machine to operate the newer OS (Windows 7, which is what she has at work) and an updated version of Office ....and she had a $300 budget. All that sounded very much like what I do on my X300 which these days sells in the $250 range on a regular basis. So I showed her my machine, which I had upgraded to 4Gb of RAM and a 128Gb SSD vs. the original 2Gb of RAM and 64Gb SSD. We agreed on $285, cleaned up, reloaded with Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, MS Office 2010 Professional, and ready to go.

So, this is where the Frugal Propellerhead part comes into play. Now, that I knew I had $285 to work with, I needed to find a replacement for the X300. If you've read this blog for any amount of time, you've probably guessed that I've been researching for the possibility of this situation for some time now. First, I didn't just pull the selling price out of my hip pocket. I knew that the X300 routinely sell for somewhere between $200-300, and that's for a "stock" version with either 2 or 4Gb of RAM and a 64Gb SSD (the 128Gb wasn't available at the time it was introduced). So, an upgraded one like mine would be at the top of the range and that's not including Windows 7 OS much less MS Office. So I knew even if my buyer checked on the pricing, I'd keep my reputation as offering a good product at a good price intact. Secondly, I also knew that I could find X301s selling for between $250 and $350. Therefore, if I'm lucky, or good, then I should be able to buy my replacement for around my X300 selling price.

As it turns out; I was lucky AND good. Last week, I was watching a handful of the X301s on eBay of which I quickly narrowed field down to two likely targets. They both had 4Gb of RAM. One had a 128Gb SSD, but the other seemed to be nicer (it's usually hard to tell from eBay photographs). Besides, I had an almost new 128Gb SSD sitting in a drawer. As luck would have it, I missed on the first (128Gb SSD) which sold for about $230, but didn't feel too bad since the second one didn't appear to have many bidders and it ended at an awkward time of the afternoon on a weekday when most people would be at work. It was at something like $185 when I entered a max bid $235 and won it at $200 even! I'm betting that one of the issues was that the seller set the shipping at a rather high $30, but at $230 total, I didn't much care. I got the machine I wanted at a great price.I upgraded and made $55 in the process! The shocker was when I opened the box and found an almost pristine laptop. 

Why did I go through the trouble of all that work to upgrade to a machine that's basically just like the old one? Other than the fact that's it's newer, more powerful while running cooler; it takes DDR3 RAM. That means I can upgrade to 8Gb for less than half the cost of doing it with DDR2 that the X300 takes. Oh...... and I can't afford the X1 Carbon......yet.......

Which leads us to the history lesson. Other than my love for ThinkPads, I love ultra portables. Above you see a stack of them. Starting at the top, you have the PC110, then the 235, 240, the S30, the X301 and finally, the X1 on the bottom. Over the years you can see that they've basically taken the same volume and kind of Pizza-dough'd-it. Actually, only 3 of the 6 have been available here in North America, with the other 3 being "Japan Only" models, but you get the idea. 

I love undersized laptops. It goes back to the first one I ever owned; the great IBM ThinkPad 701 "Butterfly". You know a design is great when it receives a name.....and when it's immediately ensconced in the Museum of Modern Art! That was only the beginning of this obsession.

It was so bad, I even owned the weird "ugly duckling" twins, the ThinkPad 500, and 510c which were really not very good computers but they were fun .....and small.

Some years later when I was already in the mid-sized ThinkPad stage of my computing life with the T2x series, I acquired a 240e through a trade. It was cool, and small (compare it to the FDD that it's attached to), but seriously underpowered by that time.

However you can see by comparison to some of the other machines of that era, how small it really was.

Then came the "X" rated part of my ThinkPad life: beginning with the X20 (that you see depicted here attached to it's "Ultrabase") which was a work acquisition for departmental travel. Over time, I'd own most of the models in that series including the X21, X22, X30, and two X31s, the last of which is still sitting under my desk. In the more modern idiom, I currently have my daughter using an X61.

Of course, ThinkPads don't have a monopoly on ultra portable innovation. There's the amazing Fujitsu "U" Series that are smartphone sized, and Apple with the iconic Macbook "Air" which just beat the X300 to market. However, I'd have to say that probably the company that got there first, with the least (?) is Sony with the X505! This amazing computer came to market almost 5 years before the similar, was thinner than Air (can you say that?) by quite a bit, and essentially had no competitors in the market.

As for me though; I'm not quite ready to give up the admittedly, rarely used optical drive. This in combination with the "must haves" of the famous ThinkPad TrackPoint and other features such as high resolution display, and it's portability make the X301 the right Ultra Portable for me. Well, and a for profit trade-out doesn't hurt either!