Category: hardware

my new (working) HP Mini

The replacement for my DOA HP Mini PC arrived today. I originally ordered the PC on June 30, and had hoped to set it up over the July 4 weekend, but now I guess I’m setting it up this weekend. (It does, at least, boot up, so that’s good.)

I think there’s going to be some bureaucratic back and forth on it, in terms of the warranty and registration. My HP account now shows the old broken PC under my name, but not the new one. And the serial number on the new one is not recognized. I had the same problem with the serial # on the previous PC. I get the feeling that HP has some weird cobbled-together system, where the serial # on a new PC doesn’t show in their online systems until a few days (or weeks) after it has shipped. So I think I’ll let it sit, then come back and check again in a week or so.

I may also need to straighten out the three-year extended warranty that I bought with the PC. I never got an email acknowledgement about that, and I don’t know if it’ll automatically attach itself to the new PC, or what. So I’m going to give that a week or so too, then follow up.

Here are some random notes about the basic setup and features on it:

  • It works fine with the IOGear KVM that I bought for it.
  • It appears to have an internal speaker, so I don’t need to worry about hooking up external speakers yet. The internal speaker is obviously not very good, but it’s enough so that I can hear basic audio for now.
  • I bought an external DVD burner to use with it, but haven’t tried it out yet.
  • From the specs, I wasn’t sure if it had Bluetooth or not. It does. So I might pair my AirPods with it, at some point.
  • I also wasn’t sure if it had WiFi or not; it does. I’m planning on sticking with a wired connection, but it’s good to know I can use WiFi if I have to.
  • The initial setup wasn’t too bad. It’s been a while since I’ve set up a PC from scratch. It’s definitely smoother than it used to be. Windows pulled over most of my preferences, settings, and even some installed software from my old desktop. So there’s less stuff to configure and install than there used to be.
  • It came with something called HP Wolf Security, which is probably useless, but I guess I’ll leave it installed. I think it might be a subscription thing that expires after a year. I’ll worry about it then, I guess.
  • I’m starting with OneDrive set to download files on-demand, so my 400 GB worth of files are all still in the cloud and the 1 TB drive is mostly empty. I’ve been slowly getting more comfortable with relying on the cloud; I used to have my desktop PC set to keep all of my files local, so I could back them up. But I turned that setting off a while ago, and have been clicking the “free up space” option on some folders here and there, when I start to run low on disk space. So I guess now I’m just going to let that go entirely and trust the cloud. (Maybe I should shop around for some service that backs up OneDrive to somewhere else…)

Overall, I got a bunch of the basics done today, in the background, while I was working from home. I’ll try to get some of the harder stuff done tomorrow.

I’m not sure when I’m going to switch over and consider it my “main machine.” I guess the most critical piece of software I have now that isn’t largely cloud-based is Quicken. So there’s going to have to be a point where I stop using Quicken on my old PC and start using it on my new one.

And I also need to figure out what I’m going to do with my music library. I still have 100 GB worth of MP3 files on my old PC. It’s all basically synced up to Apple Music at this point, so I could just install Apple Music on the new PC and trust that my library is safe in Apple’s hands.

DOA new PC

The new PC I ordered earlier this week arrived yesterday. I was pretty enthusiastic about getting to spend the three-day weekend getting it all set up. (Yes, I know, I’m a nerd.) But, alas, it arrived DOA.

When I hooked it up, it emitted a series of beeps that, according to this article, means that the computer could not detect its CPU. (Which is of course very bad…) I initially tried to contact tech support, but the support page wouldn’t recognize my serial number. I tried figuring out if there was a different way to get through to support, but there really isn’t.

So I eventually gave up and called order support and arranged to return it. I’ve got that all arranged now, but of course everything is closed today, so I can’t drop it off until tomorrow. And they won’t ship the replacement PC out until they get the broken one back, so it’ll be another week, I’d guess, before I can try this again.

One of the reasons I decided to buy a new PC direct from HP is that a lot of the other options I looked at seemed a bit iffy. (Third party sellers on Amazon and eBay, mostly.) I thought I’d be less likely to get a dud if I bought direct from one of the big PC makers. And I thought support would be smoother too. Oh well.

So now I guess I’m mostly going to be watching Wimbledon this weekend. And maybe doing some reading. So that’s not so bad.

I ordered a new PC

After going around in circles for a while (see yesterday’s post), I actually made a decision and ordered a new PC this morning. It’s an “HP Elite Mini 800 G9”, ordered direct from HP. Total cost was just under $1000.

The MSRP on it is nearly $3500, so it looks like I saved almost $2500. But of course $3500 is a pretty ridiculous price for a mini PC, even if it’s a pretty good one. I don’t really understand the pricing on any of this stuff anymore.

My initial thought was to get a refurbished PC, and spend around $500. But then I decided that I could afford to get a new one, if I could keep the cost around $1000. If I’m lucky, I’ll be able to keep this one as long as I’ve kept my current PC (almost ten years). And if that’s the case, then it might be the last desktop PC I ever buy! It’s weird thinking about that, but it’s possible.

I also ordered a couple of accessories from Amazon: An HDMI to DVI cable, so I can use it with my old monitor, and an HDMI KVM, so I can have both my old and new PCs hooked up at the same time. I almost made a mistake on the KVM. I was going to buy a DVI KVM, thinking that I needed DVI input for my old desktop. In that case, I’d use the HDMI/DVI cable to connect the new PC to the KVM. But then I realized that my old desktop PC actually has an HDMI output port! So I can instead hook both the old and new PCs to the KVM via HDMI, then use the HDMI/DVI cable to go from the KVM to the monitor. Overall, that should be easier to manage (I think), and should leave me in a good place if I decide to replace my monitor. (The monitor, by the way, is even older than the PC; I think I bought it in 2010. So I probably should replace it.)

I’m hopeful that things will work out OK with the KVM. I knew a fair bit about KVMs back around, say, 2000-2010. But I haven’t used one in 15 years. My knowledge on a lot of this hardware stuff is out of date.

I’m hopeful that the new PC shows up before the end of the week. If it does, then I can set it up over the three-day July 4th weekend.

going down a mini PC rabbit hole

All the talk about the end of support for Windows 10 has got me looking at new PCs. My current PC is a Dell XPS 8900, bought from Costco in 2016.

I ruminated about this in a blog post from about a month ago, and I still haven’t quite decided what to do.

Part of me really doesn’t want to give up on my ten-year-old Dell. It still works! I replaced the hard drive with an SSD quite some time ago, so that’s not an issue. It’s got a CD/DVD drive, which I like. And I have no particular problems with Windows 10 that would be solved by upgrading to Windows 11.

I’ve gone back and forth with a lot of ideas:

  • Simple: replace my Windows 10 tower PC with a new Windows 11 tower PC.
  • Complex (and probably a bad idea): Keep using my current PC, but wipe the hard drive and install Ubuntu on it. Move away from Windows, and become a “Linux person”.
  • Kicking the can down the road: Keep using my current PC, and keep using Windows 10. Pay for security updates from either MS or a third party.
  • Get a Mac Mini, and gradually transition to using that as my primary desktop PC. Eventually, wipe and recycle the Dell.
  • Get a new mini PC, running Windows 11. Move my stuff over to that. Wipe and recycle the Dell. Remain a “Windows person” but stop being a “tower PC” person.

So it’s that mini PC track I’ve been on this weekend. I’ve learned a few things. First: new PCs, even mini PCs, are often very expensive these days. I’m looking at stuff from Dell and HP, and it’s $2000 or $3000, if I want 32 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD. I don’t know if that’s tariffs or what.

So I’m looking at refurbished stuff. There seems to be a pretty big ecosystem around selling and buying refurbished Mini PCs. I guess they’re mostly units that were used by large companies, and were dumped at end of lease. And it seems like a lot of the ones being sold on Amazon and eBay are not just refurbished, but have also had the original parts (SSD and RAM) replaced. So there’s a lot of stuff out there that looks pretty good, on paper, but might be a little iffy, and it’s hard to compare one guy’s mini PC to another guy’s, even if they appear to be the same model. I guess I should just “spin the wheel” and pick one. For my purposes, anything with enough RAM and a 1 TB SSD should be fine.

Since my current PC and monitor are so old, I’m thinking a bit about the extra complications I’m going to have when I switch to a new PC.

  • My monitor has one DVI port and one old analog VGA port. Any new PC is going to have either DisplayPort or HDMI out, so I’m going to need a DP/HDMI to DVI cable.
  • These mini PCs generally only have headphone ports for audio output. Audio is yet another rabbit hole here. I think the default setup now is to route the audio through the HDMI output, with the video, then have a soundbar under your monitor. But of course that won’t work for me. I may need to buy USB speakers.
  • If I want to keep using a CD/DVD drive, I’m going to need to buy an external USB one.
  • I actually have two 1 TB drives in my current PC: the SSD that I use as the main boot drive, and the original hard drive, which I now use for File History backups. I also have a 2 TB external USB drive that I use for backups (via Bvckup Pro). I’ll keep using the 2TB external, but I’ll need to think about whether or not I want to set up a second external drive for the File History backups.
  • And, if I’m going to keep both PCs going for awhile, I might want to get a KVM, so I can switch between them. The “M” part of that gets a little complicated. Do I want to get a DVI KVM? Am I going to keep the old DVI monitor for long, or should I punt and just get a new HDMI monitor?

As usual, I’m really spinning my wheels on all this stuff. I’m also starting to consider that maybe my end-state will be a mini PC running Windows 11, and a Mac Mini, stacked on top of each other, both connected to a KVM.

mixed feelings about Microsoft

I’ve been having a lot of mixed feelings about Microsoft lately, and I feel like I need to blog about this, so I can get some stuff straight in my head.

Overall, my feelings about Microsoft have gone back and forth, over the years. At one point, I thought of Bill Gates as being pretty darn evil. After his retirement, and his reinvention as a philanthropist, I softened up on him a bit. I never liked Steve Ballmer. And I liked Satya Nadella quite a lot, in the beginning, and even read his book, but I’m starting to have mixed feelings about him. So that’s the CEOs.

As for operating systems, I tolerated MS-DOS and Windows 3.1, and knew I had to learn and use them, but never much liked them. When Windows 95 came out, I was actually kind of excited about it, enrolled in the preview program, and installed it on my home machine, from floppy disks. My enthusiasm for later Windows versions has varied. I do mostly like Windows 10, which is what I’m running on my home desktop PC right now.

And as a programmer, I’ve also gone back and forth. I liked classic ASP when that was released. And I liked ASP.NET, and .NET in general, when that came out. I’ve been an enthusiastic .NET developer since 2002.

Microsoft Build was this week, and I (as usual) registered for the online component of the conference, and tried to watch some of the content. Honestly, I couldn’t find much of interest to me. They’re really pushing AI, and, while I’m not entirely against it, I’m also just not as enthusiastic about it as they’d probably want me to be.

Watching this week’s Windows Weekly reminded me of some of the issues I have with Microsoft right now. First, MS is having issues with employees protesting during events, mostly around Israel/Palestine, and I don’t think they’re handing that well. (And here’s something from Brian Eno about the issue.) Second, I don’t think the layoffs they did recently were necessary, or handled well. Third, they had Elon Musk on stage during the Build keynote. (I don’t think I need to say why that’s bad…) Overall, they’re doing what I guess I should expect a giant tech company to do, but, well, I was hoping for better.

So, where does that leave me? Well, I still need to use Microsoft products for work, and a big part of my job is supporting our relationship with Microsoft, so I still need to be invested in the ecosystem. I registered for the AZ-204 exam today, for the end of June. (I blogged about that recently here.) I still have a lot of studying to do, to prepare for that. So, in general, I’m still going to keep learning and trying to keep up with this stuff. I can’t give it up and switch to Linux.

On the home front, I’ve been thinking about what I should do about my ten-year old Windows 10 desktop PC. It’s still my main machine, and it still works fine. With Windows 10 reaching end of support in October, I need to do something, but I can’t decide what to do. I might decide to subscribe to a third-party update service for Windows 10. That’s probably a little risky, but might be my best choice.

I’ve also been playing around with the idea of switching the machine over to Linux. That’s probably a horrible idea, but I kind of want to do it. There’s a campaign going on to encourage switching from Win 10 to Linux, and that’s what put the idea into my head. I would really still need to run Windows, though, so I’d have to figure out if I could make do with using my Lenovo ThinkPad for all my Windows stuff, or if I could dual-boot the desktop machine, or run Windows in a VM, or something. Regardless, I would just be complicating things and making life harder for myself. (Which doesn’t usually stop me from doing something stupid, but…)

My other thought was getting a Mac Mini and trying to gradually move my home stuff off Windows and onto Mac. That’s a lot more doable. (I already have a MacBook and use it for a lot of stuff.)

Well, this post has been a mess, and I don’t think I’ve decided on anything. But maybe I’ve moved forward a bit with my thinking. I going to leave it there, and try not to worry about it too much right now.

Kindle Colorsoft

When the new Kindles were announced this week, I pretty much jumped right in and ordered a Kindle Colorsoft. I used to be a lot more cautious/frugal about ordering new bits of hardware, but I seem to have decided that “you only live once”, as the kids say, so now I have a fancy new color Kindle on its way to me. It should be here on Nov 4. I traded in my old Kindle Paperwhite, so the total cost after trade-in discount is around $233. I got the Paperwhite in 2018, so I was due for a new Kindle.

Of course, I also bought a Kobo Libra Colour just a few months ago. So now I’ll have two color e-readers to choose from. Part of me feels ashamed for my flagrant consumerism here. I feel like I should have held out and waited for the new Kindles, instead of buying the Kobo. Or decided to stick with the Kobo and give up on the Kindle. But, eh… you only live once.

I’m using the Kobo to read my Wheel of Time books right now, despite having bought them through Amazon. Once I get the Kindle, I’ll probably switch back to it, and see if the screen is as good as (or better than) the Kobo. (The Kobo screen is definitely better than my 2018 Paperwhite, but that’s to be expected.)

If I like the new Kindle better than the Kobo, then I guess the Kobo will become a secondary device. I’m pretty sure I’ll hold on to it, either way.

thoughts on the Kobo Libra Colour

I got my Kobo Libra Colour in the mail on Friday, and started setting it up and playing around with it over the weekend. I didn’t get to play with it as much as I would have liked though, since I was sick and didn’t have much energy. Still, I wanted to write up some initial thoughts.

Overall, I like the device. But I’m not sure if it’s good enough to pull me away from my Kindle and the Amazon Kindle ecosystem. I think I’ll probably keep using my Kindle as my primary E-Reader, and maybe use the Kobo as a secondary device for certain kinds of books and documents. I’m really not sure how it’ll settle out.

To get into the specifics, let’s start with the obvious stuff that makes it different from the Kindle. First, color: The color screen is nice, though obviously it doesn’t compare to, say, an iPad. It’s nice to see book covers in color, but it’s not necessary and it doesn’t add much value, really.

I thought the color screen might make the device usable for reading comics, but my experiments with that aren’t encouraging. The device is too small for normal-size American comics to look good on it. It’s about the right size for manga, but I didn’t have much luck with that. I had a couple of DRM-free manga volumes that I thought I’d try, but they didn’t work well. I might try that again with different files, but I’m not in a rush to do that.

The second main feature would be the stylus. You can use the stylus to take notes, with the built-in notebook app, or to highlight passages in books and mark them up. I tried the notebook app, and I don’t think I’m going to get much use out of it. I think I’ve gotten to the point where using a pen just isn’t that comfortable for me anymore, whether it’s a “real” pen and paper, or a stylus and tablet. And I think both the device size and the texture of the screen make using the stylus a bit harder than using a regular pen and paper, for me. I did get a little kick out of how much it reminded me of my old Newton though!

I haven’t tried a Kindle Scribe, so I can’t compare it to that. I’ve occasionally thought about getting a Scribe, and that’s still in the back of my mind as a possibility, but I’d say I’m a little less enthusiastic about trying it now.

The stylus cost $70, so I should probably return it, but I’m probably going to hang onto it. Maybe I’ll find a good use case for it at some point.

So I think I’ve figured out that the two main features that set it apart from my Kindle Paperwhite aren’t compelling enough to get me to switch away from the Kindle.

There are a bunch of other interesting features on the device that aren’t specific to the Libra Colour, but to Kobo in general, and I think some of those are quite interesting and maybe useful. I’ve had a chance to set up a few of those and try them out, so I’ll go through some of them here.

  1. Google Drive and Dropbox integration: I set up the Google Drive integration. (I assume the Dropbox support is similar.) This feature let’s you take books from your cloud storage account, and copy them down to the device from there. So it’s mostly just another way of getting books onto the device. It works well, though copying books over USB is more convenient for me, really.
  2. OverDrive integration: This is a really nice feature. OverDrive is integrated right into the device OS, so you can borrow library books directly from the device. Mind you, it’s not really difficult to borrow books via the OverDrive web site and send them to my Kindle, but this does make it a little easier. When I mentioned above that I might find myself using the Kobo as a secondary device for certain use cases, this it the one I’m most likely to use it for, I think: borrowing and reading library books.
  3. Pocket integration: This is interesting. I’d prefer Instapaper integration, since that’s my read-it-later service of choice, but I do have a free Pocket account, so maybe I’ll try it out and see how it works. The Kobo might be a better device than my iPad for reading, say, a long New Yorker article. (It is possible to send articles to the Kindle with Instapaper, but it’s a bit of a hack.)

So that’s it for the oddball features. The most important thing, of course, is how well it works as a reading device. I’ve only done a little bit of reading on it so far. I copied the Wheel of Time book that I’m currently reading over to it, and read part of a chapter. It worked well. I could increase the font size to something that worked for me. The display is bright enough, clear enough, and easy on the eyes. I’m not sure that it’s better than the Kindle, but it might be.

There are a couple of things that I have on the Kindle that I will probably miss (to some extent) on the Kobo. The first would be Goodreads integration. That’s not really a big deal, but it’s nice. The second would be the X-Ray feature on the Kindle. That’s really a hit-or-miss feature, but when it works, it’s nice. Especially on the Wheel of Time books, it’s nice to be able to use it to look up a character name. It is really hit-or-miss though. I often find myself going to an external reference. (I’ve been getting a lot of use out of the WoT Compendium iOS app lately.)

One more topic I should really cover is how it works with Calibre. I haven’t spent enough time on that yet though. I’ve made sure that Calibre recognizes it and lets me copy books down, but nothing more than that. I may come back to that in a later blog post.

So overall, this thing was an unnecessary expenditure, and I probably won’t get much use out of it. I don’t know, though. I get so much use out of the Kindle that it makes sense to try an alternative and see how it works for me. And my vision is so screwed up at this point that it’s worth experimenting to find the device that works best for me and my old broken eyes.

Kobo Libra Colour

I got kinda curious about Kobo earlier this year, after buying an ebook bundle of Kobo books. I’m perfectly happy with my Kindle, but I’m always curious about other hardware and software, whether it’s computers or phones or tablets or whatever. I couldn’t really talk myself into buying a Kobo back then, but Kobo has just released two color e-readers, and that was enough to get me to break down and buy one, just for the novelty of trying out an e-reader with color.

I got the higher-end one, the Kobo Libra Colour. And I also got the stylus for it, and a case, so I’m spending around $350 on it, which is a lot for something I don’t need and might not get much use out of, but, well, I can afford it. I get a lot of use out of my Kindle, so if I find that I like the Kobo more than the Kindle, then it was worth spending the money.

And I’m curious about the stylus. I can’t really see myself using the Kobo as a notebook on a regular basis, but it’ll be interesting to try it out and see how it works. The last time I regularly used a handheld/tablet/whatever with a stylus was probably my Palm i705, in 2002.

The new models are being released on April 30th, so I’m assuming mine will show up in early May. I’ll post some thoughts about it after I’ve received it and had a chance to play around with it a bit.

Fun with Kobo, Calibre, and Discworld

Following up on my previous post: I decided to fool around a bit again today with Calibre and the Discworld books from Kobo. This time, I installed Adobe Digital Editions, “downloaded” the books from the Kobo web site, brought them into ADE, then from there into Calibre. That actually worked. So I now have 39 Discworld books as DRM-free EPUB files that I can (hopefully) read on my Kindle. (I only loaded one of them to the Kindle, and it worked, so presumably the rest would too.)

I also decided to try loading some DRM’d books I’ve gotten from The University of Chicago Press into ADE and them Calibre. That worked too. Previously, for those, I’ve followed the instructions from UChicago, which was to download them directly to the Bluefire Reader app on my iPad. (That app is tied into Adobe’s DRM system.) I’ve discovered that I can take the files from Bluefire, save them to OneDrive, then strip the DRM with Calibre. So that’s cool, and it means I can finally read those books on my Kindle. (I have about a dozen unread books from them. Maybe this will actually get me to read some of them. Or not… I have over 600 books in my TBR pile on Goodreads right now.)

And, since this has gotten me thinking about e-readers and tablets and stuff, I decided to finally trade in my old 2015 Fire tablet. It only cost me $35 when I bought it, and it no longer powers on, but Amazon gave me $5 for it, plus 20% off a new Fire tablet. (That’s assuming they accept it. I guess they could reject it, but I already told them it doesn’t power on or hold a charge, so it should be fine.)

I don’t really intend on using that 20% off on a new Fire tablet, but I poked around a bit, just to see what they have. The Amazon Fire HD 8 Plus is on sale right now for $75. So I’d get another $15 off, bringing it down to $60. That’s not bad. Of course, I have no particular need for a Fire tablet, so I need to remember that.

I’m still kind of curious about picking up a Kobo Libre 2 maybe, but of course I don’t need that either. Still, e-readers and small tablets are a lot cheaper than, say, the Apple Vision Pro, so if I’m going to get tempted into buying gadgets I don’t need, I’m better off with e-readers and cheap tablets, right?

Beats Studio Pro

As mentioned in my previous post, I ordered a pair of Beats Studio Pros from Costco yesterday, and they arrived today. Setup was simple. They’re definitely more comfortable to wear than my Solo Pro headphones, so that’s nice. The sound quality is probably better too, though I haven’t spent any time comparing them. I listened to a bit of Mammoth WVH II, and it sounded pretty good.

The one weird/annoying thing is that they don’t automatically turn off when you fold them up, like the Solo Pros. You actually have to press the power button to turn them off and on. It’s funny — I’ve gotten so used to my AirPods turning off when I put them in the case, and the Solo Pros turning off when I fold them up, that having to actually use a power button seems weird.

An interesting feature that I haven’t tried yet is that you can use them wired, either with a USB-C cable or an old-fashioned 3.5 mm cable. At some point, I may try the USB-C audio with my MacBook, just to see how that works. And maybe I’ll try the 3.5 mm cable with my old stereo receiver, and see how they sound as “traditional” headphones.

Speaking of USB-C, these charge via USB-C rather than Lightning. I guess that’s OK, but it a little inconvenient for me, since all of my other Apple devices charge via Lightning, except for my MacBook Air. So, to charge these, the easiest thing for me to do will be to unplug the cable from my MacBook and plug it into the headphones. I guess, eventually, all the Apple stuff will use USB-C, but for now, it’s a little annoying to have to deal with both connectors.

They’re playing Christmas music outside again today, so I’ll probably try them with the Apple TV later, and watch a movie, so I can find out how well they work with that.