Patience Will Win The Day

It's not the most popular of positions, but my stance on doing things technology-wise is to be patient and plan. Now, that doesn't mean that I don't do anything "spur of the moment". Buying that Minolta Rokkor-X 50mm lens is a good example. But really, even that thing is part of a greater picture of something I've been wanting to do for some time, but waited till the opportune moment.

I guess you could characterize me as a pouncing cat, waiting for it's prey. Lucky for me, that didn't equate to be an errant rabbit or squirrel!

Not too long ago, I wrote about finding a Drobo Mini at an excellent price. However, not only was the price good, but this one was pre-populated with 4 Western Digital 320Gb drives and a 256Gb Crucial M4 mSATA SSD. This item actually created an entire series of sub-moves within the original deal. Although, I have yet to sell off those 4 drives which I think are too small, but the SSD has already been installed into my ThinkPad X1, upgrading it from a 160Gb Intel 320. It also frees up the 2.5" drive bay for me to put in a 7mm drive for purely storage purposes. I've also put in some of my random stack of SATA drives in that Mini to both upgrade it's storage (one of the replacements is a 500Gb), but that frees up the WD 320Gb for sale. My plan was to slowly replace the installed drives (3 320Gb, 1 500Gb) with 1Tb Hitachi drives which I think are the best combination of price and reliability. Note the WAS.....

Then this happened. You've probably noted that the label on this drive is a little odd. Basically, all the current high capacity (1.5Tb & 2Tb) 2.5" drives have a little bulge on their covers. This necessitates that the label have a cut-out to accommodate it. This trend started with the 1.5Tb drives of which, this is one, then on to the current king of capacity, the 2Tb Samsung/Seagate drives. Well....actually, that's not completely accurate, in that most of the 1.5Tb drives which are 12.5mm in thickness don't have to have the bulge; only the ones that conform to the standard 9mm drive height. In fact, it's a bit more complex than that: there are 3 drive heights for the 2.5" (often called laptop) drives. The 9mm being the most common and therefore considered "standard", the 7mm as extra-thin (which perversely is "standard" for SSDs), and the 12.5mm which are considered non-standard as very few notebook computers have a drive bay that will accommodated a drive of that thickness. Generally, these are made to go into those external "portable" external drives that you see out there. If you see one that's 1.5-2Tb in capacity (and it's not a Seagate or Samsung), then chances are good that it's of that thickness. So there!

Why am I going on and on about this minutia regarding 2.5" drives, you ask? Well, these little bits of information mean something and can impact your purchasing decisions. Obviously, I'd like to outfit my Drobo Mini with as big of drives as I can for as little money as possible. Also, you throw in there, my little personal bias against using Seagate drives as a rule. This leaves out the current capacity champ of 2Tb. But, what about the 1.5Tb non-Seagate drives on the market? Well..... the majority of them are like the Toshiba you see above; 750Gb at the standard thickness, and 12.5mm (which does not fit the Drobo Mini) at the 1.5Tb capacity! The only exception being the VERY difficult to find Hitachi Travelstar 5K1500. I had resigned myself to using the 1Tb Hitachi which are common and can typically be found at about $50 a-pop, when my routine of checking ads bore fruit!. On Thursday, I came across an eBay listing for a Hitachi, 3.5" "Desktop". I wasn't very surprised by this since I actually have 2 of those things in my main workstation, but I decided to open the link anyway and look at it. Yes, the description was for the 3.5" "DeskStar", but the photos were of the 2.5" TravelStar! So I messaged the seller immediately and when he replied that the description was wrong, but the photos were right; I bought the thing at the $45 after-shipping price IMMEDIATELY!!!

So yeah...... this is what I was doing..... inside that is, since it'd have been a little weird for me to do this at work!

The 35 Year Reunion: Camera Style

Roughly 35 years ago, Yashica (which is actually the Yashima Seiki Company founded in Nagano, Japan in 1949), introduced the Contax RTS; it turned the photographic world on it's ear. Not only was it a tour de force of industrial design with none other than F.A. Porsche handling the ergonomic and styling aspect, but the ultimate coup, which as the collaboration of Carl Zeiss for the optical end of this amazing product. It was the ultimate marriage of Japanese electronic know-how with German optical and design engineering. As a 15 year-old aspiring photographer, the feeling it gave as indescribable! I remember being in a camera store the first time I saw one "in the flesh" and not even asking to "see" it. Merely standing there and staring at it on the glass shelf was enough.

Around that same time (1974), Minolta, which had started cooperating with the other German optical giant, Leitz, introduced the XE-7. This camera would be the basis of which Leitz/Leica would create the R3 SLR camera which it sold into the 80's.

For me, it was pretty much like having Farrah Fawcett, in your class, but you're not being in her class! They were absolutely the most beautiful cameras of their time. Sure the Nikon F2 and Canon F1 were amazing and to be lusted after, but where as those were 4-Wheel drive military vehicles, these were Ferraris and Porsches. 

So, 35 years or so later, even the most stunning girls turn into twice divorced middle-agers with some mileage on them. Virtually the entire Contax line ended up struggling with a covering that didn't wear very well! And what I came across a few months ago was the "little sister" of that Prom Queen. The Contax 139 Quartz. Same genes, same looks, more compact body. Actually what happened was this: of course I've always wanted to add an RTS into my collection of old film cameras, and to that end, I'd periodically look at them on eBay and other places.

What I came across was this; the Contax 139 Winder, complete with the little vinyl case for just a few dollars. Obviously, you can imagine what happened: I bought it, then proceeded to find a Contax 139. For around $15, I picked up a condition "untested", but of course, ugly (skin blight) Contax 139. After new batteries, it turned out that the camera worked fine. It felt great, but a quick survey of Contax/Zeiss lenses showed that they were still ridiculously expensive (at least for me)! So, for the last several months, the 139 has adorned my office bookcase lens-less, while my digital life went on with computers and digital cameras.

Then last weekend happened. If you've been following this blog, you're already aware that I found a Minolta MC Rokkor-X 50mm/f1.4 lens for around $10 bucks at the computer flea side-walk sale. You may ask yourself; what does that have to do with the Contax 139!?! Well, it started me down into the analog photography rabbit-trail.... that's what! First came, the search for a suitable Minolta body for that lens, and of course, this awakened the distant memory of my high school crush on the XE-7. While in pursuit of that, I realized that maybe I should chase down an Adaptall 2 mount for my Tamron lenses. Then, while doing that, it occurred to me that maybe I should go ahead and pick up an Adaptall mount for the Contax as well. A trip to the KEH Cameras website netted me both of those at a very reasonable $11-12 apiece. On Thursday, they arrived on my doorstep while I was away for a school function. But that night, for the very first time, I was able to handle my Contax the right way, complete with a lens attached! Wow!!! It was an epiphany. The sound of it even got my 8 year-old daughters attention, who wanted to know what "that was"! I think I'm going to take her out with me to shoot some photos with it, this weekend. 

This afternoon, the XE-7 is going to be delivered, and for the first time, after a 35 year wait; I'm going to take that girl out for a dance.

 

Hope Springs Eternal..... At the April Flea Market

Even though the Dallas 1st Saturday Computer Flea Market no longer looks like this (times 10) and is reduced to one section of the area under Woodall Rogers Freeway, I still like to go every now and then. The fact is, you never know what you will find there!

This time, checking a "junk vendor's" tables turned this up. Yup; it's a MInolta MC Rokkor-X, 50mm/f1.4! One of the Holy Grails of old glass. Yes; I'm aware that it's not one of the uber-rare f1.2 lenses, but I'm not sure what I'd do if I came across one of those! Back to the f1.4. For those who care about such things, this chunk of glass is well know for not just being fast, but ultra-sharp as well. Of course, being from a "dead" system makes it all the more mythological, however with the current crop of short back-spacing mirrorless cameras, virtually ALL lenses of this type have become highly sought after and the prices have gone up accordingly. What do I want with it since I have the Nikkor version, "chipped" for my current Nikon DSLR system? Uhhhh......a week of carrying it around Disney World has caused me to consider down-sizing. NO; this is not the same as my long-running series of wanting a smaller/lighter secondary camera to go with the main D300. I'm considering completely changing out of the big heavy Nikon system all-together. This will become a separate post (possibly a series) by itself. Anyway; to cut to the chase, I got this lens for $15 total including a ThinkPad power adapter!
Anything else interesting at the Flea Market? 

This..... What is it? That is a Sony Vaio PCG-N505VX of 2003/4 (there-abouts). Yes, that'd be a smoking hot PII/333 running with 128Mb of RAM on a 6Gb PATA hard drive. It's also one of the thinest notebook computers ever made....still. The case is completely of magnesium. It was complete including the floppy drive, power adapter AND dock. The only thing it didn't come with was the optional PCMCIA external CD-ROM drive. Yes; it does indeed power up, although there's no OS on it. What are my intentions for it? Mostly just to let it sit there and look at it for now, but I might get around to putting some version of Linux on it like Puppy. It was $10. It was a pretty nice morning!

Storage In The Modern World and A Bit of Luck!

Some of you who've been reading my ramblings for a while might think that I have a storage obsession..... and I might. However, as anyone who has ever worked professionally in the IT world will tell you. That's actually the norm. We get paid to be prepared for and to recover from disasters of digital/ Binary proportions! See what I did there.....

Although I haven't worked in that world for over 10 years now, those principles are ingrained into my thinking. So, backing up and storage capacity is always on my mind. Right now, I'm in the process of taking my file server from 3 drives and 6 terabytes of HDD space to 4 drives and 8Tb. Some might consider that excessive, but really not so much when you consider that each of the 2 HTPCs have at least 500Gb as a scratch disk for temp storage and my desktop workstation has 4Tb by itself. .....and that's not counting any of their relatively small SSD boot drives. My rough rule of thumb is always to have at least as much as the combined capacities of all of our home computers' storage space in the file server that functions as backup AND media server.

What I had done in the past when using Microsoft's Windows Home Server was to simply trust in it's built-in redundancy schemes and call it a day. Well.....first of all, I've decided to move away from M$ now that WHS is a dead product and secondly decided to move to a more sophisticated (read secure) backup/redundancy set up. I think I've previously discussed migrating to NAS4Free before, so I'm not going to get into that here other than to say that in order to fully implement ZFS in an efficient manner I needed a 4th, 2Tb drive which will allow me to still have 6Tb of storage while losing only one drive's capacity to parity. I'll do a detailed "build-up/rebuild" post on the retooled Spectre when it's up. So, that's it? That's all I'm going to talk about this morning? A rebuild that hasn't even happeded yet?

Oh NO!!! Not by a long-shot! I'm going to talk about this: the Drobo Mini.

As you can see by this image, it's external storage.... with a twist! So; it has 4 bays, "so what"? Ah....let me start from the beginning and tell you a little story. 

Much like House with Wilson, many of my little ideas come from conversations with someone else. This last summer while my "location video" producing brother-in-law was here with his family, we discussed all things computer but as part of our little project to rip our DVD movies to digital files, he made mention of the fact that he had many external hard drives that he's collected and used them as necessary to store the many gigabytes of video files for his job. And that they are just kind of a necessity of his work-world. My question to him was that; "aren't they too slow" at USB 2.0 speed? His reply was, that it was pretty much the best he could do since Firewire was dead and that Thunderbolt was too difficult to find AND too expensive. Holy Interfaces Batman! That sounds like a challenge!

After consulting the Bat-Computer, I came across the Drobo line of storage. Yes; that which is most beloved of professional photographers and Mac-o-philes the world over.Of course, being of the "great unwashed" (PC users), I knew squat about them, but I did learn that they were pretty much "desktop" devices "Rats! Foiled by the Riddler"! Wait-a-minute; according to the bat-computer (that's Google to you, Bat-brain), there was a portable version that had hit the market in 2012.

Even better, it would allow you to intermix drives of all different capacities and makes, all while keeping a RAID scheme going giving.....TA-DA..... DATA REDUNDANCY!!! Oh; it gets better! There's a bay to take a mSATA SSD to allow caching acceleration, has BOTH USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt pass-through interfaces! All built into a 7" x 7" carbon-fiber reinforced "soft-touch" case with 2 whisper-quiet cooling fans and the smallest power brick-ette you ever saw. What's not to like?!? .......uhhh.....the $649 "List Price" (yikes)!!! Even the $399 Amazon price is pretty stiff, since remember; you have to provide your own drives!

Yeah; this is about what I felt like. For a tech-head like me, it's pretty much like the 16 year old who saw, fell in love with, then went to the Porsche car lot and looked at the price sticker. That price is all well and good for a professional who's writing this off as a business expense and is expecting to make money with it, for an "enthusiast" like me, it amounts to taking a Saturday afternoon and going by the Ferrari and Aston Martin dealers to look at the new models! 

Then, this happened! On occasion, you can still find really good deals on eBay! On Tuesday; St. Patrick's Day, just randomly surfing, I came across not just a Drobo Mini on eBay at a decent price (about $150 at the time), but it was fully populated with 4 Western Digital Blue 320Gb drives AND a Crucial M4 256Gb mSATA SSD! OK, so after I slowed down the heavy breathing, I decided to just keep an eye on it "just in case" it didn't go into an astronomical price-point that I couldn't justify. I got home yesterday afternoon and it was at about $190. At that point, I put my eBay strategy into play; which is deciding what it was worth to me, the max that I was going to be willing to pay for it and setting that as a limit. The amount was $250. Here's my rationale (such as it is for something I don't need to have): 

• At worse, I can sell it for at least that and get my money back since they sell for well over that amount on a regular basis. Know you product!
• The amount was reasonable given it's price at that point and since "that point" was within 45 minutes of the end time (which as an awkward weekday, before the evening so most folks are still at or trying to get home from work). 
• I could completely "walk away" without a blink of an eye since I really didn't "need it", and I can afford it right now since I'm doing a series of computer jobs that would pay for it.
• It was fully populated meaning that I can put it to use immediately without paying one more dime to buy any drives, although I have several sitting around right here. Further more, this would allow me to buy bigger ones (2Tb) over time and replace them and the Drobo is set up for me to replace them "on the fly" and restore the data on the ones that were in use since that's one of it's major selling point/features.
• And for some reason that guy put a 256Gb mSATA SSD in there as the "accelerator" which was completely unnecessary since the firmware sets a 64Gb cache limit! Again; do your research and know your product. Therefore, I at some future date can pick up a 64Gb drive for that purpose, and move the 256Gb one to my ThinkPad X1 with has an empty mSATA socket to up the storage capacity of that machine which I was planning on doing anyway! 
• In the final calculation, I had to figure about $70-90 on the plus side for the mSATA that I'll end up using in my ThinkPad. I could if I was so motivated, sell the 4, 320Gb drives for at least $15 each. That total would be around $130.

In the end, I bid $237, which was below my "cut-off", and won it at $225 (free shipping). If I deduct the other amounts which was the drives in it that I'm going to retask or replace, that will put the "bare" Drobo Mini at less than $100. At the end of the day; if I find that it's not useful or I just want to get my money back out of it, the transaction should turn a profit. Will I do that? Doubtful: I'm certain I'll be able to use it as a semi-portable storage solution that has built-in redundancy and is upgradeable. And in the today's digital world; is there's no such thing as having too much storage!?!

Frugal Propellerhead Goes to Disney World

So; at long last; the Frugal Propellerhead meets the Disney Experience.... Oh, I don't mean the go to Disneyland for the day type of experience. That's more like a really, nicely done Six Flags. Nooooo..... I mean the full blown go to Disney World for a week immersion! It's no secret among my friends that I've never been a Disney kind of a guy. In fact, I'm famously anti-Disney. Just not a big believer in the sugar-coated perfect world structured for the upper-middle-class. Don't believe me? Go there and watch the people (and their behaviors), then compare that to the your last trip to the various Six Flags of the world. See..... But no, this is not a post on the sociological aspects of modern America and Disney's role in it, it's a post about our trip and how technology was part of it, as is the purpose of this Blog.

So how does anyone (much less a Propellerhead) deal with this? 

 

It starts with these two indispensible items. Your Magicband from Disney and your smartphone. Android, IOS doesn't matter. Getting the Disney experience App does. If you are planning on getting the full experience of several days and stay "on property" (more on this later), the Magicband is pretty much mandatory.

Yeah, that's what all it does. It completely eliminates the need to carry a wallet...... plus it tracks everything you do (as well as facilitate it) for Disney. So, it's not for the paranoid amongst you. But frankly, it's a bit of genius and works well. My personal favorite thing about it? It's your room key so you don't have to make sure to give the kids "the card" when they come and go! If you stay at one of the Disney properties, it really is like a magic key that does everything. And if you intend on doing the multiple day thing, I'd highly recommend staying "on property" and taking full advantage of all the Disney conveniences such as the transportation, food service (which was very good), and even little things such as having your purchases sent to your resort for pick up. Loved it! 

As far as the App goes, it allows you to manage your experience the whole time....in real time! Meaning you can see when your next appointment is that you have booked a "FastPass" time, where it's located, while helping you find it through the map function using GPS. My wife, who's the planner, kept her App (and us) going all the time! You can even manage your eating reservations on it as well (also, more on that later). The downside of course that all you who've used Smartphone apps that are GPS intensive is that it eats battery charge like nobody's business!

Which leads to this thing..... What is it? It's what they are calling, a "power station" these days, and this one is the EC Technologies 2nd Gen Deluxe 22400mAh Ultra High Capacity "Power Station". It'd highly recommend it. Why?

If you can extrapolate by comparing it to either the iPad or the coffee cup; you can see that it's huge! Why this monstrocity!?! Well.... the 22400mAh requires no explanation. For a "power station" that number is huge (and apparently accurate) as well. We were able to use it virtually the entire week mostly recharging my wife's phone (and occasionally mine as well) without having to recharge it at all. The thing finally gave out the last 2 days of the trip. Oh yeah; it's CHEAP!!! $36.99 from Amazon. How is it so cheap? It has very few features on it at all, just the USB ports, charge indicator lights and a flashlight LED, plus it's not a well know company. I did do my research before buying it of course, and the reviews are excellent across the board. One reviewer even took it apart and found that it used top notch batteries and commented that it was cheap enough to even consider buying to take the individual cells out, but was too useful to do so! One caveate though; it's big and kinda heavy. So if you aren't carrying a decent sized pack (I was), then it will weigh you down with it's 15.36 oz weight!

 

If there were anything else that was indispensible, it was these 2 items. The top of course, was my ThinkPad X1 which happily greeted me at the beginning and end of each day. I used it for the normal stuff in the few minutes I had at thoses times and not much more needs to be said about it since I've written on it in past posts. The other item, I've touched on a little previously, but not in detail, so I'll talk more about it here. It's my Lenovo F-800 "Multi-Mode" Drive. Here's what it does: it's a 1Tb USB 3.0 external drive, WiFi access point (via the Ethernet port), WiFi streaming device (of media files stored in it's shared folder) either to computers logged on to it or Smartphones/Tablets running it's App.....oh yeah, it is also self-powered with it's internal battery as well as able to charge other devices as a charge station! We used almost all of those functions! On the roughly day and a half car trip, it served up movies to the children via their iPads in the back seat. No more cords! At Disney, I used it as a "dump station" for when I filled up the camera's memory cards (I carried 5). In some of the hotels, we used it as an Internet access point if the WiFi signal wasn't very strong. It's been so useful, it has replaced the HooToo Tripmate Nano which requires external power and found a permanent place in my technology bag! It's list price is $250, but I got mine on "special" directly from Lenovo for $100.

 

There was one other little thing..... we drove the hour or so East to Cape Canaveral to see the Kennedy Space Center. Let's just say that it was amazing and for someone like me (born in 1960) it fulfills one of my "bucket-list" items. The Atlantis exhibit was most impressive and brought back memories of the Challenger and Columbia which made me emotional.

Is there more to say? You bet, but that needs to be in another post where I'll discuss the various issues of photographing the Disney vacation!

Out of Chaos......

Ah yes..... the grinning Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park. That's what I feel like right now, or more accurately, I feel like the Sam Neill character watching the park's systems come apart around him! Let me start from the beginning..... sort of......

It's finished! Last night, the final upgrade piece for the "new" Blackbird went into place. The AMD Radeon HD 7850 graphics card. It replaced the last major component in my desktop workstation left over from the old Core 2 Quad Blackbird, the Radeon HD 7750.

The end of last week saw the 240Gb Sandisk boot drive replaced by a new Crucial 512Gb MX100. At the same time, the secondary drive changed over from the old 1Tb Hitachi DeskStar to 2, 1.5Tb Hitachi DeskStars, plus the old drive stayed in the machine as well. So the mechanical storage is at 4Tb on top of the 512Gb of SSD boot drive. Do we live in a wonderful time or what!?!

Last night, the final piece was installed. I replaced the Radeon HD 7750 with the 7850. The Windows experience index jumped from 6.9 to 7.5 with the "S" Spec i5 3450 processor being the item that kept it from maxing out at 7.9 across the board! The power/heat friendly 7750 moved over to my son's new gaming console sized machine.

So, what's all this about chaos? So far; this post sounds completely normal, right? Yeah..... that was the last thing to do before I start dismantling the office. The flooring people are coming tomorrow and I'm about to take every last bit of electronics OUT of the office....including everything in the "closet of doom"!

Networking Nirvana for $13.16

It has to start somewhere. For me, it started with this. My "Spring Cleaning" doesn't involve any cleaning per se, at least not yet anyway! It starts with cleaning up my network. As I've documented over time; I have a lot of devices. In today's world, it's not just the computers that need a network connection, it's the Blu-Ray player and the TV as well. A week or so ago while burning up 5 hours of time giving an English benchmarking test, I engaged myself in the mental exercise of how I could make my home network better and more streamlined. I found that I didn't like my "back-end" home setup.

Back when I got it, the D-Link DIR-615 was the most "N" wireless router I could afford. Although it's since been replaced, it's not really the slower N-150 that I didn't like. It was the built-in 10/100 Ethernet switch. After I picked up a dual-band N-300 router that feeds WiFi to my newer laptops, this box moved to the office to serve WiFi to the other corner of the house and to give me extra Ethernet connections to attach client computers that come in for work. Over time, I've grown dissatisfied with the slower speed of this switch as compared to the Gigabit Ethernet of my home network "backbone". I also found that I had to install another WiFi access point in the front of the house (right next to the N-300 AP) because none of our Apple devices (tablet or phones) could connect to the Dual-band running at the faster 5ghz wave length! This was an old D-Link DI-624 that I had sitting in a box; so now, there were 3 network devices in the living room! I had previously added a switch there to give me enough ports. 

This left me with a bit of a conundrum. I wanted a faster switch in the back of the house, a faster AP in the front of the house that the i-devices could connect to, and do it while cutting down the number of network devices. This is where an idea that I learned some time ago came into play. I don't remember when, but at some point in the past; I was looking for a switch, but found that they were more expensive than the ubiquitous all-in-one router/access point/switch that everybody buys. I resolved that by purchasing one of the latter and just turning off the DHCP function so it was simply a switch with a built-in access point..... which brings us back to the first image. That...... is a D-Link DIR-655 the high-end N-300 router that I couldn't afford back when I bought the DIR-615. It had/has all the bells and whistles including a 4-port Gigabit Ethernet switch! Now, several years down the road, I was able to pick it up on eBay for $13.16 after shipping. 

So, yeah...... Party Like A Vulcan/Do The Happy Dance!!! I have Gigabit and faster WiFi in the rear of the house, plus, now having moved the DIR-615 to the front where it's has replaced 2 boxes, and gives me faster (N-150) that the i-devices are happy to connect to. The ousted Gigabit switch from the front? It's moving to the network cabinet where it will give the backbone 4 more wired ports, thus allowing me to finally terminate my son and daughters rooms with Ethernet!