Tralfaz

Category: Technology

For general technology related items

  • The new king of Streaming – Spotify

    The new king of Streaming – Spotify

    Throughout 2015 and into 2016, I was evaluating the streaming music services, Spotify, Google Play, Amazon, and Apple. The result of that initial evaluation was that the then new Apple Music plan was the winner. The combination of all my music collection in their cloud, plus the access to their enormous library, and arguably at the time, the best streaming over wifi at home and on cellular data. I ended up keeping Apple, and ditching Spotify, when

    Fast forward to today, late 2017. I dropped my Spotify account in early 2016 due to a stretch of unemployment, and grooved on Apple. But lately, I am souring on the Apple ecosystem. Not enough to ditch my Mac and my iPhone, but having experienced iTunes on windows (that is truly a trying experience) I knew I needed an alternative for general use. (more…)

  • The Drobo Saga Continues

    The Drobo Saga Continues

    The Drobo Saga continues

    The last episode was about the arrival of the new Drobo 5Dt, and a couple of NAS optimized disks. The installation was trivial, moving the disk pack from the original Drobo to the new Drobo was easy-peasy, and after about 2 hours of “rebuilding”, I added the first of the new drives.

    A 4 TB WD red series, “NASware” drive. This caused a “rebuilding” event, but it took less than an hour to subsume it. The next two drives replaced the old drives in the pack, a 1 TB Seagate Barracuda, and a 2TB WD “Green” drive (optimized for DVR’s and low energy solutions). (more…)

  • Arrival: New Drobo

    Arrival: New Drobo

    New Drobo

    A few weeks ago, I noticed that my trusty, long in the tooth Drobo external direct attached storage device was getting flakey. Long time to spin up, unreliable connection, and using the FW800 (IEEE1394b) to Thunderbolt interface was iffy at best.

    system failureAdd to that the fact that it was definitely slowing down, its transfer speed not even able to keep up with streaming a standard definition rip of a classic cartoon (The Jetsons for those who are interested), it had been relegated to “near line” storage. But even that had become worryingly unreliable. Not “lost data” unreliable, but “when I plug it in, it doesn’t mount” unreliable. It did work as expected when plugged into a USB port, but it is a pre-USB3.0 device, so that is painfully slow.

    Apparently, the upgrade to OS-X 10.13, or “High Sierra” put a higher bar on attached devices, and the thunderbolt to FW interface was squiffy at best, and very unpredictable.

    Having bought this in the last decade, and using it for both near line storage and system backups, it has served me well, but it was time to retire it.

    Yesterday, hot off the press from Amazon, arrived the replacement Drobo 5Dt, which has significant upgrades from the ancient Drobo Gen2 unit that I have. First is support for much larger drives. When I bought the unit, 1TB drives were common, and 1.5 or 2 TB drives were coming onto the market. Right now it has three 2TB drives, and one 1TB drive, for a total of 7TB, or 4.66TB usable space (for the parity and recovery capability.) The new Drobo has 5 bays, and supports much larger drives, which I will systematically replace the lower capacity drives to improve the performance. Lastly, it has an mSATA port to add a small-ish SSD to act as a cache, and boost for the data transfer. Populated with a 128GB SSD by default, it certainly helps the responsiveness of the unit.

    Upgrading is dead simple. There is a quick guide to follow, but it is simple. Upgrade the firmware in the old Drobo. Plug in the new Drobo without any drives, and update the firmware. Power both off, and move the drives to the new Drobo, and power on. It will “Rebuild” the disk pack, but is perfectly usable while this is happening. In fact, to test this, I fired up VLC and pointed it at my Jetson’s directory and started watching episodes. Perfect. (The original unit, with firewire-t-thunderbolt adaptor couldn’t serve data fast enough to have smooth video playback.)

    I will admit that I was tempted to just create a new blank disk pack, and move files over, but the thought of 3TB of data being moved by the glacial USB 2.0 interface was a non-starter.

    I have added one new 4TB drive (a WD NASware Red drive), and will replace two more drives with them after the rebuilding is complete, that will bump the total usable space to about 8TB, a comfortable cushion.

    It does take (an estimated) 7 hours to rebuild the pack (on the move, and the replacement of a drive), but that is not a huge deal. So it takes a week or so to get to normal, replacing 2 of the original drives. I can deal with that.

    So far, great experience.

  • Souring on the Apple Ecosystem

    Souring on the Apple Ecosystem

    Along the recent grumbling and the pending cancellation of my Apple Music subscription, a wider topic is how the Apple Ecosystem has become less an asset and more of a liability in the world of Apple. At one time, the bundling of great applications, like Garage Band, iPhoto, iTunes, and iMovie was a huge benefit for those who bought Mac computers. These applications just worked, were plenty useful, and very usable for even tyro computer users. Just compare early versions of iTunes, and the homeless-abortion that is the “Windows Media Player” and you got a pretty clear picture.

    Throughout the ’aughts, this was true, especially iPhoto, where when you got your first (or second, or third…) digital camera, you just plugged it in and like magic the iPhotos application would load, import your images, and give you ample opportunties to do minor tweaks, and management of your library. (more…)

  • Dying Drobo

    Dying Drobo

    My old Drobo, a second generation, 4 drive unit that I bought new in 2008 has been a faithful servant. It spent a lot of its time as the time machine backup and deep storage for music, photos, and videos. A couple of failed drives (easily replaced) and not a single byte of lost data in the 9 years that I have had this tethered to my Mac(s), it is hard for me to point out a fault. (more…)

  • Down with the Sickness

    Down with the Sickness

    Down with the sickness Album - DisturbedA few weeks ago, I regaled you with my quest for a replacement to the venerable Oregon Scientific indoor/outdoor temperature monitor. It had become somewhat unreliable (the radio exterior sensor would lose contact many times a day with the base station), and the replacement with a La Crosse unit that so far seems vastly superior in its reliability (of course, it has been less than a month compared to the 13 or so years I had the Oregon Scientific hanging).

    At that time, I did a little digging on more robust weather monitoring systems. Something that tracked humidity, barometric pressure, rainfall, temperature (and not impacted by radiative heat), wind direction and speed, in short a real weather station. (more…)

  • Goodbye to a Friend – Oregon Scientific Thermometer

    Goodbye to a Friend – Oregon Scientific Thermometer

    An old friend, an indoor/outdoor temperature monitoring station, made by Oregon Scientific. I am pretty sure I bought this while I lived in my first Condo in San Jose. An impulse buy on one of my trips to Fry’s Electronics, it has a head unit, and one remote sensor. The remote sensor communicates with the head unit via radio, and it worked quite well. (more…)

  • Tinkering part 2

    Tinkering part 2

    The last installment I mentioned how I branched out in my tinkering, and bought a basic FPGA board to play with. While the major makers (Alterra (now Intel) and Xilinx both have prototype boards, they are typically focused on the high end, and are quite expensive. I bought the Embedded Micro “Mojo” board, a modestly priced unit with a suitably powerful Xilinx Spartan6 FPGA.

    I did get the IDE working, it is a pretty simple Java application, however, it requires a pretty hefty development package from Xilinx, their ISE Design Suite tools. As that is supported only on Windows and Linux, it does force me to keep a functioning Windows system around. Following the instructions was pretty straightforward, and I had to apply for a webPACK license (free) to use the toolchain. Simple, but it was a monstrous download (about 7 gigabytes). (more…)

  • Tinkering – FPGA

    Tinkering – FPGA

    If you have been a long time follower, you might remember a flurry of activity in late 2015 and early 2016 when I was diving into tinkering with an Arduino board. At the time, I was building bits and pieces to make a remote weather station. (that was derailed by an unrelated life change, but I have slowly gotten back into it.)

    The Arduino is interesting as it is a pretty complete SOC, with memory, microcontroller, CPU, and a pretty robust set of digital and analog IO’s. Plenty of cool things you can do with it, and it is really simple to program. Ordinary C code, solid libraries, and third parties make a pretty complete set of sensors and widgets, with libraries to support them. (more…)

  • A decent “Free” PC

    A decent “Free” PC

    My mother inlaw has been in an assisted living community for a couple of years. As part of the move in, my brother inlaw got her this service called “Grandcare” that provides a touchscreen PC with a very customized user interface.

    The first PC that was sent to her room was a pretty large HP Envy 20 AIO touchscreen system. First manufactured in 2012, it has a HD resolution, 20″ touch screen display, and is licensed for Windows 8/8.1 (there is no sticker on it, the OEM code is in the BIOS ROM.) It has a 3.1 GHz Pentium G870 chip, which is a dual core, 4 thread processor with integrated Intel HD graphics. Just fine for this system. (more…)