The last piece to the post PC blog is forthcoming. Stay tuned!
Geargambler.blogspot.com
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
My Journey into the post PC Era: Storage
In the 'Baseline' blog, I lay out the configuration of my home computer. So you can reference that for more details. To be brief, the storage (hard drives) in my home computer were redundant (RAID1), 250GB capacity usable. I had about 100GB in use.
I needed to set up some kind of solution that I could access that data from my home network, or better yet, the internets.
I'll start by talking about my NetGear n900 home router. It has a USB port on it so that I can plug an external hard drive in there. I have an external Antec USB SATA drive enclosure, with an old 120GB drive in there. I plugged that into the USB port on the n900 and accessed the router. I changed some settings - the UI is pretty easy to use - and I was off and running. Not only was I able to access the drive via my old computer by mapping a drive, but I was also able to access the data from the internets via FTP. The router acts as an FTP server. NICE!
I took the 100GB that I needed and transferred it from my computer to the Antec. I now needed a way to access that data from my iPad or iPhone. I did some research and found that an app called iFTP. for 99 cents, I downloaded it to try it out. It worked like a charm. It did exactly what I needed it to do! I was able to take a file from my email, open it in iFTP, and upload it to the site. I was also able to download a file from the the site and put it on my local device. I now had a way to backup my photos!
The one thing that I did not have at this point was redundancy. The drive attached to my router was just a single drive. Ideally, I would like to find a chassis that would house my two 250GB drives that came out of my home computer in a RAID1 configuration. The problem I encountered is that those drives are PATA. All the external enclosures that support RAID1 were SATA. Looks like I was going to need to take the plunge and buy a SATA enclosure and some drives. The reviews lead me to NewEgg where I found a Vantec chassis that supported RAID1 and up to 2TB drives. I grabbed some OLD 80 GB drives that were laying around for a proof of concept. It turns out I needed to format both drives first, individually, via the Antec enclosure. Then install the two 80GB drives into the chassis. Then reset the chassis and at that point, it was RAID1. I plugged it into the router, and was able to access it from my iPad, iPhone and home computer. I put a movie out there from my home computer - encoded for my apple TV. I downloaded it to my iPad. This is the interesting part! The Video app on the iPad could not find the movie. So I did the only thing that I could and save it to my photo library. i went to my photo library and there was the movie! The iPad thinks it was a movie that I took with the camera on the iPad. I was able to play it back just as if I took the vid with my iPad or iPhone.
I learned how to bring a movie from the FTP server to my iPad or iPhone, and the proof of concept for the Vantec chassis was successful. On to ordering the hard drives!
Might as well go big right? I found a good price on Seagate barracuda 2TB drives via TigerDirect. I didn't need killer performance from these drives. The USB 2.0 interface was going to be the bottleneck anyway. That saved me some money. A few days later, they arrived. I formatted each one individually - by the way - this formatting was an overnight process. 2TB is a LOT of space. Once the drives were ready I installed them in the chassis, plugged the chassis into the router and turned it on. I quick trip through the router's configuration (called ReadyShare by the way) and the chassis was ready to be used. I dumped my 100GB of data onto the chassis and there it was! My redundant solution, available on my home network, and the internet. I spent the next few days cleaning things up via iFTP from my iPhone and iPad.
This next piece of info isn't really important, but I thought it would be nice to include it. I had a VERY old Maxtor external USB drive that had bricked (Read: no worky no more). Because of it's age, I thought it MUST be PATA and not SATA. I cracked open the enclosure. I did it surgically, but it was still pretty destructive. The drive was enclosed in a metal cage that I convinced to open. Sure enough, I was able to remove the drive and it was PATA!!! I filed the bricked drive into my pile of eWaste. Then I grabbed one of the two 250GB PATA drives that came out of my old computer and plugged that in. Plugged in the power cord, and USB to my father's laptop to test it and sure enough, I was able to get to all of my data on that drive. You know, just in case. So now I have two 250 PATA HDDs, a PATA external USB interface, a SATA encosure via the Antec, and my Vantec chassis plugged into my router with 1863 GB available.
Storage solution: Complete.
I needed to set up some kind of solution that I could access that data from my home network, or better yet, the internets.
I'll start by talking about my NetGear n900 home router. It has a USB port on it so that I can plug an external hard drive in there. I have an external Antec USB SATA drive enclosure, with an old 120GB drive in there. I plugged that into the USB port on the n900 and accessed the router. I changed some settings - the UI is pretty easy to use - and I was off and running. Not only was I able to access the drive via my old computer by mapping a drive, but I was also able to access the data from the internets via FTP. The router acts as an FTP server. NICE!
I took the 100GB that I needed and transferred it from my computer to the Antec. I now needed a way to access that data from my iPad or iPhone. I did some research and found that an app called iFTP. for 99 cents, I downloaded it to try it out. It worked like a charm. It did exactly what I needed it to do! I was able to take a file from my email, open it in iFTP, and upload it to the site. I was also able to download a file from the the site and put it on my local device. I now had a way to backup my photos!
The one thing that I did not have at this point was redundancy. The drive attached to my router was just a single drive. Ideally, I would like to find a chassis that would house my two 250GB drives that came out of my home computer in a RAID1 configuration. The problem I encountered is that those drives are PATA. All the external enclosures that support RAID1 were SATA. Looks like I was going to need to take the plunge and buy a SATA enclosure and some drives. The reviews lead me to NewEgg where I found a Vantec chassis that supported RAID1 and up to 2TB drives. I grabbed some OLD 80 GB drives that were laying around for a proof of concept. It turns out I needed to format both drives first, individually, via the Antec enclosure. Then install the two 80GB drives into the chassis. Then reset the chassis and at that point, it was RAID1. I plugged it into the router, and was able to access it from my iPad, iPhone and home computer. I put a movie out there from my home computer - encoded for my apple TV. I downloaded it to my iPad. This is the interesting part! The Video app on the iPad could not find the movie. So I did the only thing that I could and save it to my photo library. i went to my photo library and there was the movie! The iPad thinks it was a movie that I took with the camera on the iPad. I was able to play it back just as if I took the vid with my iPad or iPhone.
I learned how to bring a movie from the FTP server to my iPad or iPhone, and the proof of concept for the Vantec chassis was successful. On to ordering the hard drives!
Might as well go big right? I found a good price on Seagate barracuda 2TB drives via TigerDirect. I didn't need killer performance from these drives. The USB 2.0 interface was going to be the bottleneck anyway. That saved me some money. A few days later, they arrived. I formatted each one individually - by the way - this formatting was an overnight process. 2TB is a LOT of space. Once the drives were ready I installed them in the chassis, plugged the chassis into the router and turned it on. I quick trip through the router's configuration (called ReadyShare by the way) and the chassis was ready to be used. I dumped my 100GB of data onto the chassis and there it was! My redundant solution, available on my home network, and the internet. I spent the next few days cleaning things up via iFTP from my iPhone and iPad.
This next piece of info isn't really important, but I thought it would be nice to include it. I had a VERY old Maxtor external USB drive that had bricked (Read: no worky no more). Because of it's age, I thought it MUST be PATA and not SATA. I cracked open the enclosure. I did it surgically, but it was still pretty destructive. The drive was enclosed in a metal cage that I convinced to open. Sure enough, I was able to remove the drive and it was PATA!!! I filed the bricked drive into my pile of eWaste. Then I grabbed one of the two 250GB PATA drives that came out of my old computer and plugged that in. Plugged in the power cord, and USB to my father's laptop to test it and sure enough, I was able to get to all of my data on that drive. You know, just in case. So now I have two 250 PATA HDDs, a PATA external USB interface, a SATA encosure via the Antec, and my Vantec chassis plugged into my router with 1863 GB available.
Storage solution: Complete.
Friday, May 18, 2012
My Journey into the Post PC Era: iTunes
When I shut down my computer, I immediately realized that all my music was still on that computer's hard drive, and I could only use iTunes to put it onto my iPad / iPod. I also came to realize that my backups were stored in iTunes as well, including my photos. I needed to address these three issues if I was to keep my computer shut down, and never use it again.
Music:
I have a pretty significant collection of music on my computer. I was managing it manually because I didn't really 'trust' iTunes. I was about to take a pretty big leap of faith in that aspect. Apple announced iTunes match a while back, but I never paid it any mind. It didn't appeal to or interest me because I did not have a need for it. All my music was already on my PC, managed by myself, and the storage on my PC was running in a RAID1 configuration (redundant).
I did some research and found out how iTunes match works. When you turn it on (and pay the yearly fee), iTunes analyzes your library. If it finds any songs that it offers in the cloud, it makes them available to you for download, and permanently adds them to your purchase history. If there are songs that iTunes does not recognize, it will upload them. Once your music is in the iCloud, you can download it, stream it, delete it from your device and download it again if you want. I decided to take the plunge.
My library is about 60GB. The first thing I did was turn my old computer back on. I told iTunes to find all the media on my computer and add it to my library. This took some time, but eventually completed. The next thing I did was turn on iTunes Match. This took WAY more time. I think it finished eventually two days later. The duration could be attributed a bit to the wonderful windows update that installed and rebooted my PC in the middle of the night. Then there was a power outage that also caused the PC to reboot. iTunes recovered gracefully, and eventually finished. At that point, all my music was... well, out there! I opened the Music app on my iPhone and something interesting happened. Genius came to life! I've been using Pandora pretty regularly. Genius allowed me to pick genres, and the neat part is that this is all my music! I'm still learning more about this, but its pretty neat. Music was now taken care of.
Backups:
Syncing my iPhone and iPad to my local computer meant that I didn't need to backup to my free 5GB of iCloud storage. This storage is used up by photo stream and if you want to backup your device to iCloud. I decided to turn on the backup to my iCloud storage. What I found was that it took a few GB! This wasn't going to work. It did make me wonder where all the space was being taken up. Further digging revealed that 1.5GB of the 2.1GB was just my pictures! I turned off camera roll, and the resulting backup was about 650MB. This will work! The same held true for both devices.
This presented a problem - I needed a way to back up all of my photos. I'll cover this in my next blog about the storage.
The backups are kind of neat. When your device is charging and locked - the backup happens. I don't have to tell it to do anything. I like that. Every now and then I check the storage and backup (iCloud in settings) and see when the last backup happened. It makes me happy to see it there, and I didn't have to do anything.
The last part is the updates. Apple introduced over the air updates in iOS5. Plug into power, go to settings, click update and it does it. No problem!
The only thing I didn't try yet is to restore from the backup that is already out there. I guess I'll cross that bridge when I come to it!
Music:
I have a pretty significant collection of music on my computer. I was managing it manually because I didn't really 'trust' iTunes. I was about to take a pretty big leap of faith in that aspect. Apple announced iTunes match a while back, but I never paid it any mind. It didn't appeal to or interest me because I did not have a need for it. All my music was already on my PC, managed by myself, and the storage on my PC was running in a RAID1 configuration (redundant).
I did some research and found out how iTunes match works. When you turn it on (and pay the yearly fee), iTunes analyzes your library. If it finds any songs that it offers in the cloud, it makes them available to you for download, and permanently adds them to your purchase history. If there are songs that iTunes does not recognize, it will upload them. Once your music is in the iCloud, you can download it, stream it, delete it from your device and download it again if you want. I decided to take the plunge.
My library is about 60GB. The first thing I did was turn my old computer back on. I told iTunes to find all the media on my computer and add it to my library. This took some time, but eventually completed. The next thing I did was turn on iTunes Match. This took WAY more time. I think it finished eventually two days later. The duration could be attributed a bit to the wonderful windows update that installed and rebooted my PC in the middle of the night. Then there was a power outage that also caused the PC to reboot. iTunes recovered gracefully, and eventually finished. At that point, all my music was... well, out there! I opened the Music app on my iPhone and something interesting happened. Genius came to life! I've been using Pandora pretty regularly. Genius allowed me to pick genres, and the neat part is that this is all my music! I'm still learning more about this, but its pretty neat. Music was now taken care of.
Backups:
Syncing my iPhone and iPad to my local computer meant that I didn't need to backup to my free 5GB of iCloud storage. This storage is used up by photo stream and if you want to backup your device to iCloud. I decided to turn on the backup to my iCloud storage. What I found was that it took a few GB! This wasn't going to work. It did make me wonder where all the space was being taken up. Further digging revealed that 1.5GB of the 2.1GB was just my pictures! I turned off camera roll, and the resulting backup was about 650MB. This will work! The same held true for both devices.
This presented a problem - I needed a way to back up all of my photos. I'll cover this in my next blog about the storage.
The backups are kind of neat. When your device is charging and locked - the backup happens. I don't have to tell it to do anything. I like that. Every now and then I check the storage and backup (iCloud in settings) and see when the last backup happened. It makes me happy to see it there, and I didn't have to do anything.
The last part is the updates. Apple introduced over the air updates in iOS5. Plug into power, go to settings, click update and it does it. No problem!
The only thing I didn't try yet is to restore from the backup that is already out there. I guess I'll cross that bridge when I come to it!
My Journey into the Post PC Era: Monitor and Speakers
So in the last post, I mentioned that I now have this beautiful Acer H233H monitor sitting on my desk, not connected to anything. I also have the Logitech 2.1 powered speakers, with the sub woofer also sitting on the desk not hooked up.
I figured that my iPad had a decent CPU in it. Maybe I can put that in place. So unpacked my AV Adapter for the iPad. This is the one with the male dock connector on one side (plugs into the iPad), and female HDMI and dock connector on the other side. I plugged the adapter into the iPad, the sync cable hooked up to my 10w charger into the wall and the other side into the adapter. Then I took the HDMI cable that connected my monitor to the PC and plugged it into the AV cable. The Monitor came to life. This was pretty neat!
I could see a mirror of everything that was on the iPad screen. And since the iPad was plugged into power, the screen would dim, but never shut completely off (no need to unlock the iPad every so often).
At that point I grabbed my bluetooth apple keyboard. I paired it with the iPad and now it almost seems as if I have my computer back!
On to the speakers!
The Logitech 2.1 speakers have two 3.5mm jacks on the side of one of the speakers - the speaker with the volume and bass controls. One of the jacks is for headphones. The other jack has a music note above it. This is for your iPod / MP3 player. I took a male to male 3.5mm cable and plugged one end into the speaker. I took the other side and plugged it into the headphone jack of the iPad, launched Pandora, and I was instantly streaming music.
At this point I was pleased with the way the iPad so easily took the (physical) place of my old home computer.
One thing that was interesting is that when the monitor is mirroring the iPad, the black 'pillars' exist on either side of the monitor. The image on the monitor is definitely 'bigger' but the aspect ratio is the same as the iPad screen. It doesn't take up the entire monitor. This got me thinking. I opened up NetFlix, selected an episode of Man vs. Wild and hit the play button. The iPad screen went blank for a moment and a message came up that the video was playing on the TV. It sure was! Full screen, HD and all. This works with anything video related on the iPad. NICE!
Throughout all of this, My USB Keyboard and mouse were still sitting on the desk. I already mentioned that I am using the apple BT keyboard, so I wrapped up the USB keyboard and put that in the closet. The mouse is a different story. Turns out that there is really no way to use a mouse with the iPad. All my research suggests that is because apple doesn't want to hurt their MacBook sales. Makes sense, doesn't hurt my feelings. I could JailBrake the iPad and use a BT mouse - but for now thats not the direction I'm going. I'll just use the iPad touch screen / gestures for the time being.
I figured that my iPad had a decent CPU in it. Maybe I can put that in place. So unpacked my AV Adapter for the iPad. This is the one with the male dock connector on one side (plugs into the iPad), and female HDMI and dock connector on the other side. I plugged the adapter into the iPad, the sync cable hooked up to my 10w charger into the wall and the other side into the adapter. Then I took the HDMI cable that connected my monitor to the PC and plugged it into the AV cable. The Monitor came to life. This was pretty neat!
I could see a mirror of everything that was on the iPad screen. And since the iPad was plugged into power, the screen would dim, but never shut completely off (no need to unlock the iPad every so often).
At that point I grabbed my bluetooth apple keyboard. I paired it with the iPad and now it almost seems as if I have my computer back!
On to the speakers!
The Logitech 2.1 speakers have two 3.5mm jacks on the side of one of the speakers - the speaker with the volume and bass controls. One of the jacks is for headphones. The other jack has a music note above it. This is for your iPod / MP3 player. I took a male to male 3.5mm cable and plugged one end into the speaker. I took the other side and plugged it into the headphone jack of the iPad, launched Pandora, and I was instantly streaming music.
At this point I was pleased with the way the iPad so easily took the (physical) place of my old home computer.
One thing that was interesting is that when the monitor is mirroring the iPad, the black 'pillars' exist on either side of the monitor. The image on the monitor is definitely 'bigger' but the aspect ratio is the same as the iPad screen. It doesn't take up the entire monitor. This got me thinking. I opened up NetFlix, selected an episode of Man vs. Wild and hit the play button. The iPad screen went blank for a moment and a message came up that the video was playing on the TV. It sure was! Full screen, HD and all. This works with anything video related on the iPad. NICE!
Throughout all of this, My USB Keyboard and mouse were still sitting on the desk. I already mentioned that I am using the apple BT keyboard, so I wrapped up the USB keyboard and put that in the closet. The mouse is a different story. Turns out that there is really no way to use a mouse with the iPad. All my research suggests that is because apple doesn't want to hurt their MacBook sales. Makes sense, doesn't hurt my feelings. I could JailBrake the iPad and use a BT mouse - but for now thats not the direction I'm going. I'll just use the iPad touch screen / gestures for the time being.
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
My journey into the Post PC Era: Shutting down the home PC
I figured that the best way to attack the process was to just dive right in. That being said, I shut down my home computer. I did exactly that. I shut it down, unplugged it and moved it into the closet. Then I put the keyboard and mouse right on top of it and shut the door.
The first thing that I learned was that My desk felt pretty empty without the Keyboard and mouse there. Also, the 23 inch monitor and fairly decent sound system / speakers were just taking up space.
The next thing that I realized was that all my storage was still sitting in my computer, which now lived in the closet.
That also made me realize that I used that home computer for iTunes, specifically for managing my music, movies and backups.
The final thing that surfaced was when I needed to print something. The USB cable for the printer was just dangling next to the desk, not connected to anything.
I found solutions for each one of these things. I'll outline them in separate blogs so that I can concentrate on each one:
1. Monitor / Speakers
2. iTunes
3. Storage
4. Printer
My journey into the Post PC Era: Baseline
I should talk a bit about my home setup.
My home computer is a dell optiplex tower with a good video card in the PCIe slot, capable of HDMI, DVI and VGA out. I am pretty sure that there is 512 MB ram on the video card. The computer itself is a single core pentium 4 processor with hyper threading turned on. The OS sees two logical CPU. There is 1GB RAM on the board, and I have a RAID controller plugged into the PCI slot. The controller has two Parallel ATA hard drives connected to it via the ribbon. The two 250GB drives are in a RAID1 (mirrored) configuration.
Attached to that computer, I have an H233H Acer monitor, and Logitec 2.1 speakers. I also have an Epson CX 7400 printer / scanner. Typical USB keyboard and Mouse.
For my home network I am using a cable modem and I pay for the highest bandwidth available. I use a motorola SB6120 (docsis 3.0) cable modem. Connected to that is a NetGear n900 Router. At the time of this post, it was the top of the line home router that NetGear offered. The router has 4 Gigabit ethernet ports, the connection to the cable modem is also at Gigabit speed. There are two wireless networks, 2 and 5 Ghz. There are also two USB ports on the Router. The technology used is called ReadyShare to make those USB ports usable for storage and a printer.
I also have a laptop that is issued by my place of employment. My friends also have a laptop if I need to use it.
My journey into the The Post PC Era: Introduction
In one of his keynote speeches, Mr Steve Jobs was presenting the the iPad. He mentioned a 'Post PC Era' where people would no longer have the need for a personal computer. He said that tablets and mobile devices will take the place of the home computer.
I remember when he said this, and it was a VERY powerful statement. I'm the proud owner of the iPad 2 and an iPhone 4 I have been using them increasingly more and more, and I found myself using my home computer less and less. There were some routine tasks that I still ran to the computer for, but for the most part I could leave my home PC turned off.
I had a guest at my house recently and I was talking about my struggle to justify upgrading to a more recent PC. They quickly replied with "let me know when you get rid of your old one, I'll take it". This sparked a crazy thought in my head. I thought to myself, I'll just sell my old PC and take it from there. The thought stuck. Days later I shut down my old tower and began the learning experience of what I needed to do to take the plunge into the 'Post PC Era'. The next few blogs will cover this step by step and tell you exactly what I did to accomplish this. It will cover the hurdles and learning experiences along the way. I'll get into as much detail as I possibly can, and even post part numbers if I am able.
To sum it up, my goal is to get by using my iPad and iPhone only. No more personal computer for me.
Stay Tuned!
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