IT'S DATA TIME!!!

This morning while I was at work, UPS dropped off the last parts to my file server.....2, 2 Terabyte hard drives! So I was more than a little excited to get home. Of course, they look like any 3.5" hard drives, but good grief! Just the idea of it is a little mind boggling. In the end, I went $100 over budget, but I think it'll be worth it.

The price of 2Tb drives dropped to around $150 to 170 a few weeks ago, so I began to agonize. My original plan was to buy 2, 1Tb drives, mirror then and "call it a day" as my boss would say. But the more I thought about it, the more I reconsidered my original plan. 1Tb costs around $70-80 and the 1.5Tb drives were about $90-120, so the jump to the 2Tb drives just wasn't that much more for double the capacity when the various retailers dropped the Hitachi drive to $150. And since I'd plan to mirror for the best fault-tolerance, I wanted as much as I could get.

So in the end, the file server will cost just under $400 of which $300 was for the drives alone. But in the end, I'm pretty happy that I'll have all the capacity I'll want or need for some time. It's really hard to believe when I think back to the first PC that I built myself had a 120Mb drive in it!

I am; OH SO READY FOR THE DEATH OF SNEAKER-NET!!!

Last Things First

I really want to write about building the File Server first since I'm in the middle of planning and working on gathering parts, so I can discuss the process....in terms of how I would go about putting this together. As I've talked about before, we, like most families in this digital age have a need for storage; "digital closets" where we put our digital shoeboxes of images, videos and music. What I had before, was an extra drive in my desktop workstation where I kept back-ups of indeterminant and inconsistent ages, not ot mention the fact that when something new needed to be save or something old needed to be retrieved... the bane of my existence (sneaker-net) came into play! We all know what a pain in the neck that is!

So, what I really need (as unglamorous as it is), is a stable running file server with some sort of fault-tolerance. This sort of thing can be had in a wide assortment of types and sizes:

• The simplest of course would be disks attached to any workstation either directly or via some sort of inteface card eg. RAID adapter.
• Then there's the Network Attached Storage option (NAS), which are simple and generally inexpensive. You can buy either a "turn-key" solution that ranges from $200-500 (normal consumer models depending on capacity), or BYOD (Bring your own drive) types that run $125-200 where you then buy one or more drives to create your own file server.
• There is of course the most complex solution; the FILE SERVER, that can be run on a wide variety of software (Windows to Linux).

Let's run through a quick pluses and minuses of each solution then:

• An attachment to an existing workstation is the simplest of cheapest with the obvious advantages. However, the disadvantages are that you have single point of failure, and that failure probably coming sooner rather than later since it would have to remain "spun up" at all times. Very little flexibility since the operating system would need to be optimized for workstation use vs. as a file server, meaning that it wouldn't be as simple to set up security and services in terms of the various users etc.
• The NAS all-in-one setups are simple and easy to work with. They quite often come with packaged back-up software and the BYOD versions can be built to be as big as your budget. These things are small compared to an actual computer, really not much larger than most external HDDs. My main complaint with them is that they typically run a proprietary version of Linux as well as file system; meaning NOT FAT/FAT32 or NTFS, so if you have a controller go down then you can't just attach the drive(s) to a machine and get to the files! Also, many of the companies that sell them are random American or Asian resellers that are just contracting the hardware and will often disappear, never to be heard from again!
• Why would you want to build an actual FILE SERVER though? They represent another computer (quite often large and heavy), and unless you are conversant in the use of headless machines controlled through the network, then you have another monitor and keyboard (if you don't want to buy a KVM). On top of that, if you end up buying server software, such as MS Server03, that's another added expense.

Since I've decided to go with the last option, let me just "cut to the chase" and explain my rationale. First of foremost, I can build the thing (with the exception of the storage drives and case) FOR FREE! ...and you guys know that I'm all about FREE so let me explain this:

• I saw on the ThinkPad Forum that someone was trying to sell some old desktop equipment which included a P4 era Tyan Micro-ATX Mobo that was designed for server use (2 built-in ethernet ports), along with some P4 and Celeron processors. This board also has onboard video which also eliminated the need to have a card for that. I had some parts that the guy could use and so worked a swap for the basis of the file server....NO COST!
  
• Seeing that I now had a M-ATX mobo, I now had the option to use a small case that doesn't take a lot of room. I actually have an old EMachine M-ATX case that I could have used, but I really hate the look of EMachines in general so found a Cooler Master mesh-front micro case that was $38 with free shipping from Buy.com so went with that.
  
• I have an the optical drive from an old machine so don't need that, as well as RAM from the same machine so, again, NO COST!
• Then a Craig's List ad appeared posting a PCI card that would allow me to do RAID with an onboard SATA controller. It was $50 on Newegg, but cost me $20 cash, so now I'm up to an outlay of $58.
• Also from CL came a recert. Dynex (Best Buy house brand) 400w power supply for $10 and I'm now at $68 spent.
  
• I've had an old copy of legitimate copy of MS Server2000 for years in a box that I can use so that's NO COST as well.
  
• Now, if I can score 2 SATA drives for $230 or less, then I will have met my goal of building a file server for less than $300 TOTAL OUTLAY! This shouldn't be too difficult since 1TB HDDs commonly sell for less than $70 and 1.5TB HDDs quite often will sell for around $100!

There's an accumulation of reasons why I decided to go with a "full-blown" file server vs. a simpler solution. Firstly, I wanted the most fault-tolerance I could get for my money...including the ability to simply connect the drives to any functioning Windows type machine and get at the files if necessary. Secondly, my situation gave me the ability to spend very little on the hardware while giving me the greatest flexibility in control. For an outlay of less than $300, I should be able to do a machine with a separate OS drive (allowing me to do a rebuild without disturbing the storage) and 2 1.5TB storage HDDs set up in a mirrored RAID array, giving me a decent amount of "peace of mind".

So there you have it. I just have to accumulate enough money to buy the drives and build the thing. Then the fun starts and we'll see how much running Server2000 that I remember!

Nuts and Bolts

I'm in the process....the unglamorous process of upgrading my main workstation and storage solution. I say "upgrade" as if I previously had some sort of plan or system in place, but actually, it was only an extra 160Gb HDD in my desktop. And as all digital packrats and photographer know; there's never enough storage.

And so it started. In the beginning it was a quest for more storage....and since (at that point) storage meant my desktop machine where most photo editing was done, it involved that as well. It was time for that as well. It was already obsolete 4 years ago when I built it based on the AMD Athlon XP 2500+ "Barton" CPU, 512Mb of RAM and 2 160Gb/7200rpm hard drives. For me, that was a pretty nice unit. Four year and 2 MS Service Packs later, even the mid-term RAM upgrade (to 1.5Gb) wasn't enough.

My brother encouraged me to go with a simple NAS, but in the end I decided to build 2 brand new machines instead of rebuilding 1!

Ultimately, that will mean; 1 full-blown digital media "workstation" and 1 full-blown "file server" with mirrored storage drives that would give me enough room and security! Budget? As little as possible, which would eventually mean >$500 for the whole desktop rig and >$300 for the file server.

Tall order? Stay tuned and see how it was done!

What The Cell?!?

What else can be said about cellphones that hasn't been said over and over? Am I about to trumpet the virtues of the iPhone, rant about students randomly calling their parents from school on their "against policy" phones, or talk about my wife's need to upgrade to a "dumb-phone" with a keyboard since she texts regularly now?

No, nothing so exciting, just plain laziness. In my house, I'm the fetcher. Josh is the fetcher in training, but he's only good for small pieces of trash and papers off the printers at this point. So anything else is really up to me. This was especially significant the last 2 summers, since Camille has had back surgery both of them. In general, its not bad with the exception of the cellphone issue! We've not had a landline for a number of years now and are quite happy with simply having our individual cellphones. However, there is a fly in the ointment. I hate running across the house to get/find it!

We're all familiar with this drill. Phone rings, and your spouse looks at you helplessly since she's laid up from back surgery, you run across the house trying in vain to get to the phone before it goes to voicemail, you can't find it or you drop it while trying to get the darned thing open and it....goes to VM! Or better yet, you are talking and have to go into another room since the kids are being loud and the signal is lost or voice quality goes into the Darth Vader mode since you don't have enough bars in enough places.

I used to have a solution to this issue, back in the dark pre-GSM days when I had this cradle that I put my phone in, then it sent the signal to a 2-line Semiens deskphone system that distributed to all of the handsets strewn throughout the house. The cellphone stayed in it's cradle where it got charged and stayed put in a place where it got a good signal. Unfortunately, those cradles have gone the way of the DoDo; so what to do?

Recently I ran across a system called "Link-to-Cell" put out by Panasonic implemented in a DECT 6.0 expandable phone system. Unfortunately, the retail on a 2 handset system was around $120 (well beyond "Frugal" guidelines for phone items). So I kept looking on eBay regularly and sure enough, they sold for less there, but still in the around $50 range. I couldn't pull the trigger on it, but was able to wait out an auction for a set that didn't sell. I contacted the buyer and "low and behold" he offered it to me for $30 including shipping! I jumped all over that and PayPaled the payment.

Yesterday, it arrived and I've been playing with it ever since. It's really very simple. You connect it to up to two Bluetooth enabled cellphones and the little box sends the signal to the wireless handsets in the house. The phone connects when you go into the room, you put the phone down whereever it gets good signal and you're done! From there you just use the normal-phone looking handsets just like a regular phone.

Frugal Propellerhead Car Buying (AKA I hate new car dealerships)!

Yeah, I know; it's kind of an oxy-moron, but it was time. Our old Civic had soldiered on for 10 years of abuse and neglect. And at nearly 125,000+ miles, it was still running well, but on borrowed time before things would start to break....even on a Honda. So you do what any good frugal propellerhead would do; clean it up, invest a minimal amount to fix a few details and sell it in mid-August when parents are out frantically looking around for a car for the new driver in the family.

Sure enough, within 24hrs of putting in an ad on our school districts online employee flea market, it was sold for $4000. Not bad for a 10 year old car with it share of dings and rough spots. Now came the fun part; the dreaded "new" car shopping. We had decided that the current low price of gas is an anomaly so we were targeting a replacement with gas mileage better than a 1999 Honda Civic! It got a real world 28 city and 35 or so highway! So we were either going to have to look at "penalty boxes" or hybrids. Since we were also targeting something that was a little more roomy on the inside, the answer was obviously going to be hybrids.

I know, I know: for those who have known me for a while, this is quite a different beast (and I use the term loosely) than the Audi 90, and BMW M5 of my single days! Anyway, this led us to the hybrid version of the face-lifted Ford Fusion. I may be going soft in my daddy-of-two-middle-ages, but I can't abide ugly cars. The first version of the Fusion was for salesmen and grannies and as for the Toyota Prius..... let's just leave those to the "more liberal-than-thou" need to be seen in my suppository-shape trendy-green-car crowd! We thought the Honda Civic was going to be too small so we homed in on the Fusion. However, after crunching the numbers, it turned out that we didn't love the extra room all THAT much, so off the see the Civic hybrid.

With Mr. Opportunity knocking, we got to experience the never-fail-to-gag experience of a new car lot and the ever lovely day spent with car sale people. Let me tell ya; those guys will make you want to go out and hug a lawyer! Although we knew what to expect, it was still a little bit of a shock to the system (like jumping right into a less-than-warm pool). Remember; we keep our cars 10 years and replace them 5 years apart, so it's been a while. At Rusty Wallace we experience everything from rude behavior, to musical offices, to the "bait-and-switch". The annoying thing about all this was that we went in prepared! We knew their invoice price, we had loan % information, we knew what we wanted and didn't want, we knew that they had a week to sell the car(s) before they automatically became non-current, year-old models (we targeted '09 that they had in inventory). This is late August remember, and new car models hit in September industry-wide.

So there you are; got em' over a barrel time. It was even a rainy Monday for Pete-sakes! So, what the friendly folks at the dealership subjected us to was 3 hours of run-around that went nowhere. The worse part was that they kept using tactics like trying to get us to sign these bogus "offer-sheets" to rope you into a "Bull Stuff" deal and just repeatedly insulting our intelligence. So we walked. On the way out of the lot though, a funny thing happened, there on the Used Car side was an '08 Civic Hybrid that was $8000 less than the new version! So after lunch we went back to look at it. Amazingly, the salesman was cordial, low-pressure and easy to work with, so we worked on a deal with him that evening for 3 more hours. In the end, it didn't work out, since his sales manager was cut out of the same clothe as the one over on the new car side of the lot, but it wasn't half bad. It didn't work out, because the sale manager wanted to play hardball and was unwilling to meet us half-way (or even a quarter-way for that matter), but I'd definitely recommend that salesman to anyone.

For those of you who know my wife, you know that, that wasn't the end of it. She had Civic Hybrid on the brain now and spent several hours that night scouring the Internet for every single one between Ft. Worth and Durant, Oklahoma! My girl's a bulldog when she finds a bone to worry on! The next morning, we're off to Lewisville (an hour away) with a list of cars to look at and that's after talking to 2 other car dealerships before I leave (including the one in Oklahoma). To make a long story short, we find what I'm looking for a the first place, buy the car the next day and have a great experience with a small specialty dealer that mostly operates on the Internet.

Do I love it.... the jury's out, but it's growing on me in it's own funky way. It's put together nicely, like every other Honda I've ever owned. It's not huge with room to spare like the Fusion, but it's big enough. The gas mileage is "as advertised", we've been getting between 38 and 40 in the city and got almost 52mpg on our trip to Arkansas last weekend! That'll work!!! Hopefully, the price of gas will stay reasonable at least until we've replaced the truck in 4 more years, but if not, this car will definitely help take a little bit of the sting out of the price of gas.

The Unsung Hero Accessories

I have a lot of equipment..... OK, that's a bit of an understatement, but everything is relative you know! Since I switched from film, I've cut down. I really have! It's gone from 2 bodies-plus motor drives (and sometimes with a digital camera along as well), 10-12 lenses, flash, filters and of course, film. At the moment, I'm down to one body (no need for seperate color and B&W film bodies), 1 to 4 lenses, and 1 or 2 flashes. It's awesome!

However, there's still the issue of hauling it around, and the whole bag/case issue is an easily overlooked piece of equipment. Well; I don't really mean "overlooked", but more like, not well thought out. The vast majority of amateur photographers typically just go over to the accessories aisle of Wal-Mart or Best Buy and pick up the (relatively) inexpensive shoulder bag that the manufacturer sells as the "Kit" for their camera. This "Kit" usually consist of a small shoulder bag that has a few small compartments and one large one, a filter, a cleaning pen, and a small tripod that probably won't be useful for even the smallest DSLR. On top of that, these "Kits" cost somewhere in the $80-100 range! So lets look at what you get for the money.

Let's start with what's inside. No, let's look at what's outside first! So, what's the big deal, it's a pretty generic black camera bag with a nice manufacturer's logo on it? Actually; no, not so much...that's not a logo, that's a neon sign advertising the contents and it has the added benefit of being an invitation to be stolen. One sure side-effect of carrying a "shoulder" style bag is that you'll regularly take it off of your shoulder and set it down since the are always slipping off of there anyway! The next issue is that the majority of them are not big enough for a serious photographer who is adding equipment and needs to carry it, but never fear, the manufacturer will have much bigger versions of the same bag that cost 2 to 3 times as much (with the their logo emblazoned on it as well). As for what's it come's with, you can buy better quality versions of those items (the ones that you really need or would use) for less so let's just move on.

OK, so what's a better course of action on bag's/cases then? Well...... that's a little complex, so bear with me on this. There's really 2 distinctly different sets of requirements (of which only one apply to you). The first is "Field Use" bag, basically meaning the bag that just carries what you need when you are out and about taking pictures; could be a day out with the family, vacation destination, kids' activity/ball games, etc. In this case, the bag needs to have just enough size and compartments (DO NOT count ones that are under each other) to carry only the stuff you need while shooting pictures! I'm a big proponent of sling-style bags for this....why? First of all, they stay on the back and out of the way when not needed, but easily slides around to the front when necessary. I use a Tamrac Velocity 8x. There are of course, a range of sizes, so you just need to find what'll fit you and your equipment. Mine carries my D200 (with or w/o grip) with the 18-200mm lens mounted, any combination of 2 medium sized lenses or flashes and the various other necessities such as extra batteries, memory cards, lens pen, etc. It also has a hide-away waist belt if you need more security on the move and Tamrac's S.A.S./M.A.S. mounting points in case you need to attach other stuff to the outside. It's easy to carry, doesn't hold enough to get overly heavy as well as small enough on the back where I'm not knocking over stuff when I turn around!

The other bag/case requirement is "Transport". I arrived at this issue when I started looking at the issues posed by my needs for our Alaska trip this summer. I'm sure, most everyone is aware of the increasing restrictions imposed by the airlines and TSA on size and weight for carry-on luggage. So, unless you're a woman, and can get away with a "purse" along with a "carry-on", then you are pretty much down to one item. And with the needs of the modern world of a notebook computer, along with the needs of a digital photographer's equipment, you have 2 (or more) sets of equipment which NEEDS (really, I'm sure I don't need to tell anyone why you don't want to hand either your laptop or camera over to "checked" luggage) be hand carried. So....what to do..... 2 equipment sets....one bag. If you want to try and cram your DSLR and lenses into a computer bag or your laptop into a camera bag....well... good luck with that!

Your other option is to look for a bag designed to hold both. Yes Virginia, they make those. Furthermore, I had other requirements. One, it needed to be a backpack style bag, if you've tried to get through big crowded airports with something big and heavy (remember-camera-lenses-flash-laptop-in one bag) from one shoulder, again; good luck with that. Secondly, it needed a compartment to store other "can't risk lost through airline luggage" items such as important meds, contacts/glasses, extra underwear (you never know), book, iPod, whatever. If you've ever had a piece of luggage even temporarily "lost", you understand this need. And for those who have had luggage lost and didn't have those important items with you..... You were an idiot and now you know why I have this requirement. Also, after arriving at my destination and I unload that stuff and have a long "day-trip", then that compartment carries things like snacks and that extra windbreaker, cap or whatever. For this, I did a ton of research and it was resolved by old "standbye", Tamrac, although most of the big outfits (Lowe, Kata) have something that does something similar. I bought the Tamrac Adventure 9 which is the right size for me (see pics).

No, I'm not stuck on Tamrac, I did the research (online) and found what was in my budget and fit my needs, then added those factors to my long-standing experience with Tamrac going back to shuoulder bags that held my film SLR rigs. To added onto this, I've NEVER bought a Tamrac bag new, they've come from eBay (of course), photo swap meet, and Amazon (bet some of you didn't know you can get used stuff there). None of them cost me more than $50! I am the Frugal Propellerhead after all. The other thing; the vast majority of thieves out there have no idea what Tamrac (or Lowe, or Kata) is, so they really aren't sure that they are going to score a nice DSLR or a bunch of diapers, lotions and candy bars!

It's not cool like a "new" flash, and won't make your BP go up like openning up the box to pull out a camera, lens or laptop, but the right bag will ABSOLUTELY repay your investment (both monetary and time) for years to comes.

Consolidation of Stuff

For the last week or so, I've been in the process of consolidating stuff. Which is the not so glamorous task of taking all the various parts and cast-offs and making use of them. This part of being a Propellerhead is not only less than fun, but often down-right laborious. Unfortunately it's something that has to be done and can be financially rewarding as well.

The crux of the matter is that, if you dabble in technology and upgrade on a regular basis, there's aways going to be leftovers. Much like the edible variety that clutters up your refrigerator, it's generally not anyone's first choice for dinner, but it's there, it's free and you'll feel much better about yourself if you go ahead and eat it instead of throwing it out. And as a result of my upgrading this last spring and most of the summer, there's quite a collection of various items that needed to be gotten rid of.

They run the gamut from various camera gear to computer parts, and even a DVD/Home Networking deadend that I got involved with a couple of years ago. Actually it all started when we decided to buy a new car to replace our 10 year old Honda Civic, so that had to be sold off first. That got the ball rolling and I've been at it ever since. Luckily the car sold relatively quickly and we were off and running. This is were eBay and/or Craig's List make their appearance. A few years ago, when we decided to move home from Chicago, I decided that it was time to get rid of some of my stuff that was on the edge of or fallen over the edge of obsolescence. There was the collection of 200+ Laserdiscs and about the same number of Betas as well as the decks to play them. DVD was really being to take hold, but there were still a number of die-hards that hung onto the perceived technical superiority of the uncompressed laserdisc video. So I took the more interesting of my collection and put them on eBay, then found a local place that gave me $5 a-pop for the rest (about 150) which as a great price. Pretty much everything else got sold on eBay as well. I just turn it into a virtual garage sale, which I took advantage of again when we moved to Dallas from Lubbock.

At any rate, I finally got off my hunkas and sold my flashes that had been rendered obsolete, by upgrade, the last of the D70 accessories and some tripod parts that I'd picked up for free since it was broken. This is something that I learned years ago (and it never fails to amaze my wife who just shakes her head); is that I will typically sell items on eBay for more than I originally paid for it. This is mostly due to the fact that I believe strongly (supported by experience) that anything on eBay will eventually reappear and if a buyer is persistent and patient enough, can be had for lower than the typical selling price. You just have to be disciplined enough to let the item go when it gets over what you know to be the price for a "good or great deal". I even sold off my technological dead end, a D-Link "networked" DVD Player that allows you to connect it to one or more computers across a home network. Sounds really cool....pain in the neck to use though. So I took about a $20 bath on it after a couple of years and sold it the other day.

Then it was on to the other accummulated stuff. Amoung the piles of laptop parts were 2 ThinkPads that needed to be put to use. One was an old machine that my brother had used as a electronic media computer in his A/V system which he sent me when he upgraded, and the other was my sister-in-law's old laptop that died and I replaced (with my wife's old machine) last year. The A/V machine required me to do some reconfiguring my cabinet so it would have a slide-out shelf to sit on. The other one though has sucked up most of my attention span over the last 2 days since it was one of those things where it was exhibiting an "intermittent" problem....meaning, sometimes it boots, but most of the time it doesn't. After seeking my brother's thought on it last night, I took his recommendation to pull the CPU and reapply the paste between it and the cooling fan. Made sense to me since that machine is almost 10 years old and has gone through 2 hard drives. However, it was a no go. Now, back to the drawing board for a first computer for daughter. Who is now quite insistent about having a computer now that she's seen me working on it and keeps asking when I'll be finished!

So, there's that to do and then to move on to computer #3 when I get done! There's a really interesting project waiting for me, in the form of my other brother-in-law's old PowerBook G4 Titanium with a broken screen hinge, bad optical drive and generally ugly cosmetics.

All these projects are the unfortunately ugly underside of the technology treadmill. For me the hunt and kill (finding great deals on eBay and CL) is much more fun, but then there has to be the occasional bouts of housekeeping where I clean out, and try to fix up old stuff to be "retasked".