Category: Hardware

If it’s not software, it’s hardware

Categories
Hardware

It’s 2008 And I Can’t Find A Keyboard

I’ve complained before about the lack of good keyboards on the market. Why is it that in 2008 I can’t find one worth spending money on? This drives me absolutely nuts that I can’t find what I’m looking for:

  • Cross Platform – Yes Virginia, I want it to work with any computer I hook it up to, no questions asked.
  • Rechargable – I am tired of AA batteries dying when I’m in the middle of something. Let me be green and recharge my devices.
  • KVM Friendly – Like most professionals, I use a KVM switch. I would like my keyboard/mouse combo to be KVM friendly. I’m crazy.
  • Comfortable – This really is why I’m so selfish. Most newer keyboards are much more comfortable than the Logitech Cordless Navigator Duo (circa 2002) that I have. I know that. I want something more comfortable. Not to mention my wrist pad is falling apart (glued together too many times) and it’s becoming squeaky and annoying.

Is this really outlandish? I think not, but maybe I’ve completely lost it. Every keyboard I’ve found doesn’t seem to meet all those requirements. In particular the use of bluetooth to be cordless seems to have made them very KVM unfriendly.

My current mouse massively sucks. I have a cordless one but gave up on it eating batteries. My corded one is a $15 Logitech Wheel mouse (one of the earlier optical ones Logitech came up with). The most basic laser mouse of all. What annoys me is that it’s tracking lately has become sub par and it sometimes skips just enough to be really irritating. My keyboard is showing the early signs of falling apart. It’s even starting to squeak when I type.

The MX 5500 and MX 5000 look nice, but that bluetooth hookup is notorious for being flaky with KVM switches. My setup adds cross platform so that’s too much money to find out it doesn’t work. The MX 3200 fixes that problem but it’s not rechargeable. I know I’m going to hate that. Then you have the Wave which will annoy me since I hate stupid keyboard designs. It’s not rechargeable either. I like my keyboards to bare at least a faint resemblance to the Model M.

Microsoft has two candidates, the Wireless Entertainment Desktop 8000 and 7000. Both Bluetooth. Both us that stupid Microsoft mouse design (the gold standard is the Logitech MX Revolution in my humble opinion). Not to mention they aren’t cheap either.

As a result, it’s 2008, and I hope my current keyboard and mouse hold out a little longer until someone can deliver a keyboard/mouse combo that doesn’t suck.

It’s 2008, and I can’t find a keyboard (and mouse). I’ve got 2 old Apple Extended Keyboard II’s, which are fantastic keyboards. I’m somewhat tempted to find and ADB->USB adapter and take those for a spin. Go retro.

Categories
Hardware

EnergyGuide For Computers And Servers

Energy Star Energy GuideMost appliances sold in the US are now required to ship with the infamous EnergyGuide Label. That yellow label is most associated with major appliances, but it could be utilized beyond that. It’s a pretty simple idea in principle. The label makes it very clear how much power the device consumes, and based on average usage how much it will cost the consumer to operate on a yearly basis.

Perhaps it’s about time to adopt a similar convention for computers, servers, displays, printers, and networking equipment. Doing so would have several benefits:

  • Make consumers aware of the variety in efficiency – Different products consume different amounts of power. Being able to easily compare isn’t a bad thing.
  • Encourage manufacturers to be more competitive – While things such as processors have become more efficient (Pentium D consumption:performance ratio was worse than say the Core 2 Duo), computer manufacturers aren’t really pressed to adopt the most power efficient technologies since they may increase component costs.
  • Weed out poor power supplies and power bricks – A poorly kept secret is that power supplies and those power bricks we all have under our desk aren’t the most efficient devices out there. There are however some newer ones that have improved greatly like 80 PLUS certified power supplies. By making power consumption more visible, the really cheap power supplies become a negative in computing rather than a silent component.
  • Lower costs for businesses – It’s no secret businesses (like google) are trying to lower costs in their data centers. By making power consumption more obvious, it would be easier for them to make better choices to reduce their power costs and get the most out of their budget.

The real problem is that it’s tough to go to a manufacturer’s website or a store and tell what this device will cost you to operate, and compare to another device. That doesn’t really seem necessary. It should be easy to tell.

I think such a label should include the following:

  • Estimated Yearly Electric Use – in kWh for 24×7 power consumption pattern, additionally 8×5 for desktop computers, non-networked printers, displays. For 8×5 should also show the estimated yearly electric use in standby for the remainder of the time. That’s 1 number for servers, network equipment (which operate 24×7), maximum of 3 for everything else.
  • Estimated Yearly Operating Cost – in $ based on the above kWh data.
  • Standby Power Consumption Use – How many watts the device uses when in standby. This is really to see how close it comes to meeting the one watt initiative.
  • Standby Activation Modes – Several badges indicating how standby is initiated. Including: idle timeout, user initiated, timer, auto-wake (comes out of standby when device is needed). These let the consumer know how the device can minimize power consumption.
  • Upgradable Power Supply – Is the power supply connected to the device using an industry standard so that it could be replaced/upgraded during the device’s lifetime?

The data should be made available by easily removable signage attached to the device on shipping, made available on request in stores, and available on the manufacturers website linked from the product page.

By making power consumption more obvious, it would be easier to make a decision based on TCO (total cost of ownership) that accounted for power consumption. The bigger advantage is that it would encourage manufacturers to consider power consumption as a potential way to sell a product, and that means improving power supplies and standby consumption.

It seems like an easy way to spur some innovation and allow for better decisions by consumers. Considering the cost of power is expected to rise, and the need for IT is rising, it seems like a decent proposal. Making the most of the watts available requires knowing consumption. That way keeping servers and desktops powered on is as efficient as possible.

Image from FTC

Categories
Apple Hardware Open Source

Bestselling Laptops

Mark Pilgrim has a great picture of the top laptops on Amazon.com right now. What I found interesting is that the first Windows laptop is #6 (and no it’s not running an Intel), The #1 and #2 goes to Mac OS X and Linux.

  1. Apple Macbook 13″ (2.4GHz)
  2. Asus Eee 4G 7″ (900MHz)
  3. Asus Eee 4G Surf 7″ (800MHz)
  4. Apple Macbook 13″ (2.4GHz)
  5. Apple Macbook 13″ (2GHz)
  6. HP Pavilion DV2740SE 14.1″ (2Ghz AMD Turion 64 X 2)

Taking a look at the competition it’s pretty clear why. The Times They Are A-Changin’.

That new 9″ Asus Eee looks pretty nice. What would be ideal is if they made the 7″ with a higher resolution and kept the price the same. 9″ is a little large for this class of mobile computing.

Categories
Hardware

Cheap Tiny PC’s

Paul Stamatiou has a great blog post on the DIY $200 PC. Premise is that for $200 (or possibly less depend on your requirements) you could put together a little PC for some purpose. The core of this being affordable is the new-ish Intel D201GLY2 Motherboard/Processor combo.

The only problem I see with it is the board surprisingly uses an SiS964 Southbridge, which for the moment doesn’t seem to be well supported under Linux from what I can tell. That could make use a little more complicated, though I can see that changing relatively quick. I wouldn’t run a modern version of Windows on something like that, not to mention Windows would cost about as much as the hardware. It is a Celeron, but it’s 64bit.

This means for approximately $200 you can put together a very low power, quiet (could even be fanless) computer/device/server/appliance for whatever purpose you wish. A little work and it would make a great file server. Add a better NIC and you’d have a great firewall. Hook it up with some WiFi and it can easily get on a network from anywhere. There’s a ton of possibilities here. It could be a lot of fun to build something out of it. I’m not sure using something like MythTV will work to well, at least now.

Very cool stuff. I’m interested what people will do with it.

Categories
Apple Hardware

Apple’s Early Announcement

So yesterday Apple announced the new 8-core Mac Pro and Xserve. Both beautiful machines anyone would love to own. What’s peculiar is the timing of the announcement. Only a week before MacWorld 2008. Right in the middle of CES. Why would Apple make a product announcement before it’s yearly big expo? During a period where tech news is in excess?

I predict some big announcements next week. Apple make these releases early for three reasons:

  1. So that there are 2 less things stealing the thunder from next weeks announcements.
  2. To show the industry that it can steal attention from something as big as CES at by merely sending out a press release for an upgraded product.
  3. Appetizer.
Categories
Apple Hardware

New Home Server

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been in the process of setting up a new home server. The previous one was an old Beige G3 (266MHz) running Mac OS X 10.2 that was starting to show it’s age. The new system is a much more capable B&W G3 (400MHz) running Mac OS X 10.4. Despite only a slight increase in clock speed, the B&W G3 has much more modern hardware (USB, Firewire) not to mention more room for more storage. The opportunities are endless.

Decided to go with a multi-drive setup considering the extra bays. The system had a still usable 40GB Seagate Barracuda IV drive which would make a perfect system disk for OS/Software. Installed via a ACard ATA/66 controller it’s no speed daemon, but for the purpose it’s fine. For the data drive I decided to get a SIIG SATA card and a pair of Seagate SATA drives I found a good deal on at BestBuy. The drives were Seagate ST303204N1A1AS, which corresponds to 320GB. Inside the boxes as expected were (the newer and better) ST3320620AS, which is a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 with firmware 3.AAE (not the AAK people have had in the past). Perfect.

Next I wanted to replicate data across the drives on a cron. Initially I was thinking rsync, since as of 10.4, it’s resource-fork aware. It turns out that’s not really true. I ended up going back to SuperDuper to copy between the drives. It only copies changed files, and once a week will delete removed files (so if you accidentally delete something, there’s still a chance to recover, unless you do it at the wrong time). Not a bad solution IMHO. Still would prefer rsync more. Initial backup took less than 1/2 hour. Just a few minutes should be enough to keep the disks in sync. I briefly considered setting up RAID, but decided against it since RAID is not backup. It doesn’t protect against things like corruption.

Apple needs to kill off resource forks ASAP. They should have done so when moving to Mac OS X several years ago.

Next up, I tried putting a copy of TechTools Pro I no longer use on my Mac Mini since upgrading to Leopard on the system, but that resulted in some drive problems that I couldn’t resolve without uninstalling. They seem to know about the problem, but haven’t fixed it. You see the following error repeatedly in the system.log file until you reboot:

kernel[0]: IOATAController device blocking bus.

Drag.

Also updated mrtg, and this time compiled GD, libpng, libjpeg, etc. all by hand, rather than use fink. Last time I went with fink, which saved me a few keystrokes, but when fink no longer updated packages for 10.2, left me high and dry. This time I think I’ll avoid it when possible. I need to try getting RRDtool setup at some point, since it’s so much better.

I use a few PHP scripts for easy admin of the box, and decided PHP 4 wasn’t adequate since it’s pretty much discontinued. So I upgraded to PHP 5.2, and all seems good so far. I think Apache 1.3.33 will serve me just fine for the moment, so not upgrading that.

I might give setting up BIND a try, since local DNS would be pretty handy for easily accessing the server without modifying the host file on computers.

I also disabled things like spotlight, which have absolutely no purpose on this box.

On another note, glib for some reason won’t compile for me. No clue what’s going on. Overall it’s looking pretty good. Should be about ready for real use. Just want to make sure the backups work as expected.

Categories
Hardware

When Shipping Costs More Than The Product

Shipping is more than the costSo I needed a longer USB cable. Newegg.com to the rescue. Found a nice generic brand cable with good reviews (they tend to be every bit as good as the 24K gold, diamond encrusted name brand cables you can buy at certain electronics stores). The irony of it all is that the shipping is just a few cents shy of being more than the cable. Still cheaper than going to the store, but silly it costs so much.

Is this a complaint? No not really, shipping isn’t free, I know that. And it’s not the sony screw incident, but it’s still odd.

Categories
Hardware In The News

Goodbye CompUSA

Man, even their going out of business sale sucks. There’s a store that just couldn’t get much right. Considering their high prices, even with the discounts it’s still often cheaper to buy elsewhere.

I still may visit one closer to the actual closing though. Perhaps at the last minute the discounts become worthwhile if there is still inventory.

Categories
Hardware Security

Improving Storage And Backups

I work on multiple computers (Mac/PC) and have various assets online including this blog and quite a bit of code lying around in svn, and just on the file system. My backup solutions so far have been pretty ad hoc but rather effective. Everything important is replicated somewhere else at varying frequencies. The downside is that it’s not very efficient and even partially manual. I’ve decided over the next several weeks I’m going to re-evaluate how I do all my data storage and backups. Here’s the list of goals:

  • Improve how data is organized and stored both primary storage and in backups. Organizing and clean up.
  • Make sure all data has at least 1 backup (I pretty much do this already and have for a long time).
  • Automate as much as possible.
  • Keep costs low. Backup more for less.
  • Use tertiary offsite backups for most critical data.
  • Maintain solid encryption practices where necessary for transmission and storage (already do this).
  • Decrease time to restore from backups.
  • Backup more often, so time between backups is minimal for frequently updated data.
  • Give myself room to grow.

At $0.15/GB Amazon’s S3 is very affordable for my needs. A dollar or so a month gets you a fair amount of storage considering most data doesn’t get touched that often (it’s data transfer that gets a little more costly). I’ve been using Amazon with a few backup scripts for a few months to see how it works and how I can best use it. I’m planning to ramp that up a little more. I also want to do more with incremental backups (perhaps use rsync more) to save time and disk.

Ironically I kick off this little project when reports indicated hard drive prices have been dropping (obvious right?). I’m not sure if would make sense to purchase additional storage, or if I can get by with just better utilizing what I already have.

I’m doing this for a few reasons. Considering the cost of storage, there’s no excuse to not have solid backups, or to even waste your time with data loss. I also want to improve my use of offsite backups for more important things to make sure that I keep costs low and keep backups fresh. Accident, fire, flood, theft, are always possibilities no matter how careful you are in life. The great thing about digital vs. paper is that it’s easier to have several copies.

I believe my practices are pretty good, and likely better than the vast majority of the population, but I think I can still do better. I think I can make better use of what I have and maybe for a slight cost add another layer of protection if necessary. I’ll post again with my findings.

Categories
Apple Hardware

Mac OS X Keyboard Mapping

Back in 2002, Logitech gave away 20,000 Cordless Navigator Duo Keyboard/Mouse sets in celebration of 30 million cordless devices sold. For some reason Mac OS X doesn’t seem to recognize some keyboards correctly such as this, and even my standard Dell 104 Key Keyboard at work. Not sure why this is, but maybe being behind a KVM switch has something to do with it.

For anyone else who runs across this problem (and me next time I upgrade my OS and completely forget this), here’s the fix. First setup your keyboard with the wizard as Mac OS X prompts you to (it asks for the key next to the left shift key, and the right shift key). Once that’s done, go into System Preferences and select “Keyboard & Mouse”. Under “Keyboard” press the “Modifier Keys” button. Then change the settings to match your keyboard. For me the Apple (Command) and Alt/Option were inverted. Control was fine.

Keyboard Mapping On Mac OS X

Easy enough right? Now my keys map perfectly.

The Logitech Cordless Navigator Duo is a really cool keyboard since it’s one of the few that actually put both sets (Mac/Win) of lettering on the keys. There is software for this keyboard but in my experience Keyboard/Mouse software is garbage and should be avoided at all costs. It’s also not yet available for Mac OS X 10.5