Category: hardware

A busy week

It’s been a busy week, starting with my follow-up visit to my doctor, where I found out I have a hernia. So a lot of my energy this week has been spent just thinking about that and planning for the surgery that I’m likely going to need.

And, at work, we’re in the last stretch of our upgrade from Dynamics AX 2012 RTM to R3. This is a really big update for us, as we have a lot of custom code, so there was a lot of work to do. The final upgrade is scheduled for this weekend, so I’ll have to work on Sunday. And the first week after the upgrade is liable to be a doozy, as various stuff we didn’t catch in testing shakes out.

Meanwhile, the RMA process for my MacBook’s SSD is plodding along. I got the RMA # and the UPS return label this week. I need to print out the label and package up the drive this weekend. I’ve been without my MacBook this week. and have been using my ThinkPad a lot, which is actually a pretty good experience, except that I keep wanting to use Emacs key bindings for a few things, like Ctrl-A and Ctrl-E for beginning of line and end of line. As soon as I get used to using ‘home’ and ‘end’, I’ll probably get the MacBook back up and running, and I’ll have to re-learn the Emacs key bindings.

And I’ve got my TiVo Bolt set up now. I dropped by the cable company office after work yesterday and picked up a CableCARD. I got it installed easy enough, but it took two calls to Optimum support to get it working. I think that “support tech roulette” gave me a clueless rep on the first go-round, and a more experienced one on the second. But both reps were polite and patient. Then it took me a couple of hours to set up the channels and my recordings. I’ve discovered that the channel line-up is a little different when you’re using a CableCARD than when you’re using a box. So I’m going to have to get used to some new channel numbers. The recordings seem to be working out OK too. I’ve got last night’s Daily Show, Nightly Show, and Late Show all on there, ready to watch. But I’ve also just figured out that I needed to re-run the guided setup to get the TiVo to fully recognize the channels that didn’t show up the first time around. Hopefully, that’s the last thing I’ll have to do, and it’ll be nice and stable now, with all the right channels and a fully-populated guide.

hard drives and health

I’m trying to get myself back on a “normal” diet today, after my clear liquid diet over the weekend. I’m not sure it helped anything, but I assume my doctor knows what he’s doing. It turns out that not eating any food for 72 hours really takes a lot out of you. I went into work this morning, but gave up on it and went home around noon. I’ve since had a sandwich and a nap, and I think I’m feeling a bit better.

Meanwhile, I called Samsung to see about replacing my failed SSD drive, under their warranty. My first call to them was a failure, as the rep said he’d email a form to me, but didn’t. The second call got me as far as getting the form, which I filled out and emailed back. So now let’s see if the support rep does anything with it. What he should do is issue an RMA # and send me a prepaid UPS label. I’m not sure how long their RMA process will take, overall. I’ve been trying to decide if I should put the original drive back in the MacBook and use it until I get the replacement. If I had more energy right now, I’d probably do that, but a second nap is sounding pretty good.

Out of commission

My MacBook hard drive, a Samsung 840 EVO, seems to be good and dead. I had hoped that it was just the file system that had gotten messed up, and reformatting it would allow me to use it again, but that didn’t work. It’s less than a year old, so I’m hopeful I can get a replacement from Samsung. But their support line is only open Monday to Friday, so I’m not going to be able to deal with that today.

I had a plan all mapped out to reformat the drive, install OS X, migrate my data from my backup drive, re-install a bunch of applications, and so on and so forth, but I’m not getting that done today.

And I had also been planning to drive out to my local Cablevision store to pick up a CableCARD for my new TiVo Bolt, which should be arriving next week. But, after visiting my doctor yesterday, I’ve found out that my little stomach problem might be a bigger deal than I thought it was. He’s got me on a clear liquid diet for the weekend. So I don’t really have the energy to get in the car and drive anywhere.

So I’ve got the MacBook disassembled on the kitchen table, and I’m using my ThinkPad instead, for now. The rest of the weekend will, I think, involve lots of comic book reading and napping, with occasional breaks to consume Jell-O, ginger ale, and mushroom broth.

MacBook crash

The hard drive on my MacBook got messed up last night, somehow. It’s pretty much unusable at this point. Disk Repair won’t fix it, and I haven’t had any luck copying files off of it. I don’t have a recent backup, just the old drive from when I replaced the original drive with an SSD, back in December. I can boot from that drive, and see the files on the SSD, but I can’t do much with them.

I’m not sure what caused the problem, but I have a feeling that it might have something to do with removing Trim Enabler, and running “trimforce enable” on the drive, which I did a few days ago. The drive has been running reliably with TRIM enabled via Trim Enabler since December, and I don’t see why enabling TRIM with an OS command vs a third-party utility would be an issue, but maybe it is.

I’m a little embarrassed and mad at myself for not having a more recent backup. But, the way I work now, it’s actually not that big a deal. Most of the stuff I need from the Mac is in Evernote or Dropbox. I really don’t create any irreplaceable files that don’t wind up in the cloud one way or another. So I’ve been thinking through things, and I’m going to have to reinstall a bunch of applications, and re-download a bunch of Doctor Who audio files, but there’s really nothing that’s going to have been irrevocably lost. Still, I’ve had “backup my MacBook” on my to-do list since January, and I just never got around to doing it.

HiFiBerry DAC and Volumio setup

My HiFiBerry DAC arrived from Switzerland yesterday. (Amazing how fast something can get from Switzerland to NJ for only $11.) I took my Raspberry Pi out of the old case, plugged the DAC into it (and screwed everything together) and put the whole thing into the new case. Getting Volumio to use the DAC was easy; it’s just a selection from a drop-down menu under the settings page.

The new case is a nifty little snap-together thing made out of transparent plastic. (A small part of it cracked off while I was putting it together, but it’s fine.) I’m not hearing a huge difference in sound quality compared to using the headphone jack on the Pi, but I think I can detect some difference. (It might just be my imagination though.) Keep in mind that I don’t have a terribly high-end setup, so “your mileage may vary” as the saying goes. Also, I haven’t tried any lossless files yet, just regular MP3s and AACs.

And I got a 128GB USB thumb drive from Amazon, which is now plugged into the Pi, in place of the 32GB drive I was previously using. I’m going through my music collection alphabetically, and copying selected stuff over to it. I’ve done A through H now, and still have plenty of space left.

So I think I may have hit on a good working setup for this thing now. It’s relatively convenient to use, sounds good, and doesn’t take up much space, make any noise, or use much power.

Fun with the Raspberry Pi

I ordered a Raspberry Pi kit earlier this week, and it showed up in the mail yesterday. I ordered this kit from Amazon. It’s a nicely-packaged kit, with the Pi, a case, a power supply, a wifi dongle, an SD card, and a few other things.

The SD card comes with the standard NOOBS image on it already. My intention was to wipe that out and install Volumio, but I thought I’d give the standard setup a try, just to see how it worked. To do that, I had to hook the Pi up to a USB keyboard and mouse, and an HDMI monitor. My normal computer monitor doesn’t have HDMI, so I had to use my TV instead. That was a little awkward, since I don’t have a good surface for the mouse close enough to the TV, but I managed. The standard setup is quite easy, and doesn’t require an internet connection. Basically, it just allows you to set a few parameters, then it installs Raspbian Linux onto the SD card. From there, you can use the command line or start a GUI shell. I messed around with that for a while, then unhooked everything, so I could get Volumio installed.

To do that, I had to download the Volumio install image, and write it to the MicroSD card. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to do that, since I don’t have a MicroSD slot on my PC, but I managed to find a MicroSD to SD adapter in my pile of random memory cards, and used that to get the MicroSD card into my PC. From there, I followed the simple instructions on Volumio’s site, cross-referencing this useful blog post. You can set up Volumio without hooking up a monitor or keyboard. You just need to plug the Pi into a wired Ethernet connection to get the initial setup done. So I did that, and got it set up through the browser interface at volumio.local. I set up my wifi card, then unplugged the Ethernet cable, rebooted, and all was well. To test it, I copied a Paul McCartney album to a USB thumb drive and plugged it in. I also plugged headphones into the audio out jack. Volumio had no trouble seeing the USB drive, and the audio played through the headphones, no problem. The audio quality coming out of the standard output jack isn’t great though. (I also plugged it in to my receiver, to try that out, and it sounds OK there, but still not great.)

So I ordered a DAC with RCA output jacks from HiFiBerry this morning. And a new case from them too, since the one from CanaKit isn’t going to work with the DAC on top of the Pi. I’m hopeful that this will give me acceptable sound quality. Between the kit from CanaKit, and the stuff from HiFiBerry, I’ve now spent more than $100 on this project, so I’m going to feel a little stupid if it doesn’t sound at least as good as a $100 CD player.

The next part of the project is going to be figuring out how I want to get my music collection hooked up to the Pi. The USB thumb drive I used for testing was formatted as FAT, so I’m glad to see that I don’t have to use an EXT4 formatted drive, or jump through any hoops to get the Pi to recognize a FAT drive. I had bookmarked a good writeup on dealing with different file systems on the Pi, but I don’t think I’ll need to worry about it. So I should be able to use either a USB thumb drive, or a USB hard drive for my music. The thumb drive would be easier, since I won’t have to worry about power. I have a 32GB thumb drive that I’m not using, but that’s not quite big enough for everything. A 64GB drive would only cost about $20 and would be big enough to fit my main MP3 collection. I also have several USB hard drives gathering dust in my apartment, including a small 120GB drive that would probably be perfect for this. I’m not sure if the Pi would provide enough power for it though, so that could be an issue. So I guess the next part of this project, while I’m waiting for the DAC to get here, will be to experiment with hard drives and thumb drives.

thinking about music

Listening to music used to be pretty simple. I’d turn on the stereo, put a record on the turntable, and that was it. It’s gotten a lot more complicated now, though, and I’ve been going back and forth on a few things, thinking about what kind of hardware, software, and services I use to consume music.

I could (and probably will) write a new post about how I’m listening to music on my iPhone right now, but this particular post is going to be about listening to music at home.

I have a fairly old, but still good, stereo setup: a receiver with a handful of standard RCA inputs, and a decent pair of speakers. I used to have a low-end DVD player hooked up to it, which I was using as a CD player, but that broke a while back. (I hooked that up after my original CD player broke.) And I used to have a turntable and a cassette player, but I got rid of those a long time ago. I have a mini-stereo cable hooked in to one of the RCA inputs, and I plug that into my iPhone when I want to listen to, say, Slacker on my stereo. But I currently have no way to listen to CDs on it, or to stream music from my Mac or PC to it. I can also listen to music via my Roku, Apple TV, or PS3 (using various services), but I need to have the TV turned on to use any of those, and I don’t really like to have to leave the TV on while I’m listening to music. It generates a fair bit of heat, and a little noise. (If there was a way for the TV to pass the audio out without having the screen on, that might work, but my TV doesn’t do that.) And I can use the PS3 to listen to regular audio CDs of course, but that’s serious overkill, given the amount of noise and heat produced by the TV and PS3 combined.

So I’d been halfheartedly looking for a new CD player to hook up to the stereo. Well, it turns out, nowadays, that it isn’t as easy to find a small, simple, CD player with regular RCA outputs as it used to be. One limiting factor for me is that I don’t have that much room, so I need a small one. (I actually have my Dad’s old 5 CD changer, and that would work fine, but I just can’t fit it on my shelf.)

So now I’ve been thinking that I’m really a bit behind the times, and I should instead come up with a good way to pipe my digital music collection through my stereo.

First, I started thinking about consolidating the two iTunes libraries that I currently have. I have separate libraries on my Mac and my PC, with significant overlap. But there’s a lot of stuff I ripped to the Mac and never copied to the PC, and vice versa. So, first, I’m looking at ways to merge my iTunes libraries. I looked at a few programs, and SuperSync looks like it would be the best option for me. If it works as advertised, I should be able to install it on my Mac and on my PC, and consolidate the libraries over my network, without pulling over all the duplicates.

Second, I started thinking about ripping all of my CDs. I’ve ripped a number of them already, maybe 20-30% of the CDs I own, but I haven’t ripped everything. I’d say I have a couple of hundred CDs that I don’t have in my iTunes library. So I considered doing something vaguely fancy, like using dBpoweramp to rip them to FLAC, so I’d have lossless copies. Or maybe using EAC. But after thinking about it, I think I’d be fine just using iTunes, and ripping them using the higher-quality AAC settings, or maybe the Apple lossless format.

From there, I’m thinking about building a little box with a Raspberry Pi running Volumio or OSMC. I would just attach a USB hard drive to it with all my music files, and plug it into my receiver with the regular mini-stereo output on the Pi. (And if that doesn’t sound good enough, I could add a DAC with RCA outputs to the Pi.) So that would be small enough to fit on my shelf, use minimal power, make very little noise, and it should be controllable from my laptop and my phone, via a web interface.

I’m not sure how far I’m going to get with this plan. And there are a number of alternatives which might be simpler than my Raspberry Pi plan. But I had some fun today investigating software and hardware options for this. And I like the idea of messing around with a Pi and some open-source audio software. If I go that route, and it works well, maybe I can consider trying some other Raspberry Pi projects.

The Amiga’s 30th Anniversary

The Amiga 30th Anniversary Event at the Computer History
Museum in Mountain View this weekend looks like it should be really fun. Too bad I’m in NJ and not CA.

I get nostalgic about the Amiga once in a while. I keep thinking I should try the emulator from Amiga Forever, but I never get around to it. (There’s enough current technology that I don’t have time for; not much point in messing around with a 30-year-old dead OS. Heck, I’ve done almost nothing with the Windows 10 preview that’s installed on my laptop, and working with that would actually be useful.)

The Amiga 500 was my third computer. (The first was a TRS-80, and the second was a Commodore 64.) I bought it when I was in college. It was the first computer I owned that had a real OS, and multi-tasking, and all that good stuff. I could actually use it for some of my programming assignments! (Prior to that, they were all done on the school mainframe, or on shared Unix machines.) I remember that picking up a copy of the Lattice C compiler was a big deal for me. It wasn’t hugely expensive, but it was a significant purchase for a college student.

I wonder if I have printouts of any of my old programs around here somewhere. If so, it’s probably best to leave them buried. I’m sure the memories are better than the actual code!

Automatic car adapter, second gen

I bought an Automatic car adapter back in December. I thought I had written up a blog post about it, but I can’t find it now. So either I didn’t write it, or I spelled “Automatic” wrong in it, or something like that. Either way, it’s a somewhat useful little device that lets you track your car trips, gives you some feedback on your driving habits, and can show you the actual diagnostic codes when your “check engine” light comes on.

It connects to the iPhone via Bluetooth. The adapter I got worked fine for several months, but it started getting finicky lately. It frequently fails to connect to the iPhone. This, apparently, was a pretty common problem with the first-generation adapters. They came out with a second-generation adapter recently, which supposedly uses a more reliable form of Bluetooth, and also has some new features that the old adapter didn’t have. They didn’t offer much of an upgrade deal for existing owners: just the same $20 discount that you can get through any of their advertising deals (see sixcolors.com, for instance, which usually has a link for $20 off). Well, I really didn’t want to spend $80 on a new adapter, but I gave in today and ordered one. I’m hoping it will work reliably.

Hopefully, I can remember to write up a little review after I receive it and have a chance to use it for a while.

Windows 8.1: almost there

I’m almost done with my desktop machine rebuild. (See here, here, and here for previous posts.)

I had a lot of trouble with the SATA  IDE vs. AHCI issue I described in one of the earlier posts. I got the Windows 8 install done with SATA set to IDE mode in the BIOS, but I wanted to see if there was any way to switch it back to AHCI. I was hopeful that whatever bug prevented it from working in Windows 8 was fixed in 8.1, or in one of the many Windows updates that came down post-install.

Well, first, I found out that, once you’ve installed Windows 8 with the BIOS set to IDE mode, you can’t just switch it back, since Windows doesn’t detect the change automatically. So doing that just results in a boot failure. This blog post describes a way to deal with that; basically, boot into safe mode right after changing the BIOS and Windows will reconfigure itself. But, in my case, that didn’t help.

I also noticed that an optional update for NVIDIA SATA controller was available from Windows Update. I was hopeful that it would fix the problem, but installing that update causes Windows to crash on boot, so that’s no good either. I had to use system restore to remove that update and boot into Windows again. (Oh, and getting to system restore in Windows 8.1 is a bit of a challenge, but that’s another story.) I have a feeling that, maybe, some magic combination of installing that update, booting into safe mode, and switching back to AHCI mode might work, but I’m not sure it’s worth the effort. If I feel adventurous at some point, I might try the SATA driver found here. But I’ll want to make sure I have a restore point, a full backup, and ample spare time before messing with that.

I’m not sure how much of a performance penalty there is in running in IDE mode rather than AHCI. I searched for some info on that, but didn’t find anything definitive. The main performance advantage with AHCI would be related to Native Command Queuing (NCQ), which would increase performance on some drives in some scenarios. In my case, I’m not sure if it would be enough of a difference to bother with.

Regardless of all that, the machine seems much faster now than it did before all this. I imagine most of the performance bump is just due to the clean install, but some of it may be from Windows 8.1 being a bit faster than Windows 7 in some ways. So I’m mostly satisfied that all this work wasn’t for naught.

Oh, and just for yuks, I decided to run the Windows System Assessment Tool on the desktop PC, and on my ThinkPad, to see what the performance difference is between the new SSD in the ThinkPad vs. the old-fashioned drive in the desktop. And it’s a doozy!

Using the command “winsat disk -drive c”, I got the following numbers on the desktop:

> Run Time 00:00:15.75
> Disk  Random 16.0 Read                       0.86 MB/s          2.9
> Disk  Sequential 64.0 Read                   84.51 MB/s          6.3
> Disk  Sequential 64.0 Write                  68.13 MB/s          5.9
> Average Read Time with Sequential Writes     6.986 ms          5.3
> Latency: 95th Percentile                     121.125 ms          1.9
> Latency: Maximum                             475.244 ms          3.7
> Average Read Time with Random Writes         13.882 ms          3.6
> Total Run Time 00:01:07.41

And here are the numbers on the laptop:

> Run Time 00:00:00.63
> Disk  Random 16.0 Read                       411.49 MB/s          8.2
> Disk  Sequential 64.0 Read                   524.08 MB/s          8.1
> Disk  Sequential 64.0 Write                  375.03 MB/s          8.0
> Average Read Time with Sequential Writes     0.121 ms          8.8
> Latency: 95th Percentile                     0.302 ms          8.8
> Latency: Maximum                             0.981 ms          8.9
> Average Read Time with Random Writes         0.112 ms          8.9
> Total Run Time 00:00:06.86

So, yeah, that’s a big difference!

My big takeaway from all this messing around is that my desktop PC is definitely near the end of it’s useful life. I’m not going to want to upgrade it again, past Windows 8.1. So I think I’ll keep using it as-is for the foreseeable future, then, maybe in a year or so, consider a new machine. Maybe when Windows 10 comes out.

For the past 20 years or so, I’ve always had a Windows box at home as my main desktop computer, generally in a mid-tower case sitting on the floor next to my desk. But I’m starting to rethink that. Depending on what happens with Windows 10, and what happens in my professional life, I may switch over to a Mac Mini as my desktop machine, and just keep a Windows laptop for the stuff I really need Windows for. I’m definitely using my MacBook a lot more often than either my ThinkPad or desktop PC at this point. But I don’t really need to make a decision on that yet.