Monday, June 28, 2010

New House Pictures!

Alright!  As promised, here are new house pictures.  We’ve had about 3 months with the house so far and things are moving quickly.  Quite a few of these pictures are already outdated, but if I keep waiting for everything to be perfect, I’ll never get this done.  I think it’s cool to see the evolution of the different rooms and you get a better feel of the work we’ve done. 

Kitchen

The first project was the kitchen.  Having the keys to the house for only a few hours, Alison, her aunt and I started work on painting the kitchen.  Looking at the original pictures makes me cringe now.  All that wood color….ugh.  Well we brightened everything up very well with 2 coats of primer and 2 coats of white paint.  From the original picture, you can see the washer and dryer hookups which were flipped around so those could be in the garage.  Those things are noisy and they fit perfectly in the garage far away where they won’t bother us.  The new refrigerator is nice with ice and water in the doors.  We then painted the walls blue.  The last pic is already outdated because we’ve removed part of the cabinets and tiled the wall between the cabinets and the counter top.

Living Room

The living room is challenging because it’s pretty small.  Our couch only fits well in one spot, facing the kitchen.  We’ve added some little tables behind the couch to push it away from the wall.  The TV was kind of pushed in the corner, until it was replaced with a bigger, more elaborate TV center which pushes it out of the corner a little better.  It is finally mounted on the wall, cables nicely behind the wall. 

Sunroom / Dining Room

Our sunroom is one of the nicest rooms we have, with its big windows and nice view of the yard and all the trees we have around us.  It doubles as our dining room.  There is also a little sitting area just through the door with a nice view.  When there is company the chairs can be pulled into the living room for extra seating.

Bedroom

Not much special about the bedroom.  I complained about the lack of doors to the bathroom a lot when showing the initial pictures, but with so much to do it’s been pushed to the bottom of the list.  It sounds like such a huge project and the spare bathroom has been working fine for us so far.  It’s one of the few rooms lucky enough to get some paint.  I like the white color, but Alison wants something more colorful.  Anything is better than the tan that’s everywhere else. 

Den / Computer Room

Finally, my favorite room (of course) is the computer room.  It has presented great challenges to my setup, which are overcome as I get new furniture and computer hardware.  I was originally forced to put my desk in front of the window.  There is only one outlet in the back (pic #1) and only half of it works.  I could fix it probably, but I’m so lazy.  That’s not enough for my setup, so I had to start off on the other side of the room.  I set it up just as it was before we left the apartment with the two monitors taking up basically the whole desk.  The room is pretty large and with only our two desks in it, it was very empty.  So off I went to finally get the large desk I’ve always wanted.  I got an ikea galant desk with a few extensions.  Putting my old desk drawers by it lets it fill up the entire wall side of the back of the room, and it’s long enough to reach the other power outlet so I can run power along the entire desk discretely.  I could finally split up the computers, which were originally 90 degrees apart, but now the gaming computer is in the corner.

New additions to the setup, thanks to tax returns are a 16gb wifi ipad and a like-new 30” Cinema display off of craigslist.  The 30” is awesome and actually makes my old monitor look small.  Games are amazing with it.  Text is a little small.  I wanted the 30” because I’m not a fan of multiple monitor setups, and it would give me the most desktop space.  I could sell the 23” to make up some of the cost, but they look so good together right now!  The third picture is a photoshop of the color I want to paint the room sometime. 

My setup acts as two workstations in one.  Typically, the power-hungry gaming computer stays off, and I use the black workstation.  While it appears to be a hackintosh desktop, the black computer is the NAS file server, and the display comes from the macbook pro laptop running to its left.  This setup is great because it’s whisper quiet, wakes quickly from sleep, and still usable for almost everything I do.  To the far left are the routers for U-Verse and the internal network.  The black monitor is also an HDTV with U-verse setup on it.  The iPad is great to pick up and use around the house so I don’t have to unplug the laptop very often.

When I plan on spending more time in the computer room or playing some games, I can turn on the silver desktop and take advantage of the great screens with more screen space than I know what to deal with.  The black station can run aim or web browsing while I play games, or I can watch TV off to the side while I use the other one.  The oldest part of my setup is my awesome lava lamp on the right.  Probably one of the things I’ve owned for the longest amount of time, the lava lamp is on a timer and comes on automatically and is always fun to watch and relax.  My desk backlighting is along the back wall between the black and silver stations.  I had to get some extension cables and move the silver desktop from the corner because I kept kicking it.  I’ve moved the small black table away from under the desk and moved the computer there.  It’s currently torn apart while I install a blu ray disc drive.

Alison gets my old desk, and the tiny one she had was sold.  She likes the bigger desk and I really like my new setup as well.  I just need some more posters and art up, as well as some bookcases and other little peices of furniture to fill up the space and make it look really nice.

Other

Lastly, some other random pictures include the deck in the back of the house which was been stained and now has a wonderful dark brown wood color.  Alison has been doing lots of landscape work and as long as the Texas sun doesn’t kill all the plants it will look great.  We pulled up an old monster truck tire and replaced it with a white birdbath and feeder that are attracting cool birds like cardinals and blue jays.  Alison’s parents brought some old furniture down from Cleveland and we have a classic theme going on in our guestroom featuring a queen size bed.  That combined with the queen pullout sofa bed makes a lot of room for guests to come down during quakecon.  :D And lastly, here’s some pics of the garage.  Featuring the new Jetta and the washer and dryer.  Plenty of room for the washer and dryer…why would you put these inside the kitchen?  But also why would you not have doors on the bathroom…

Phew!  Got that post out of the way.

Sunday, June 27, 2010

The Future of the AA Category

This website has always been about my life, my thoughts and my experiences.  It’s hard to separate different parts of your life and cut out some parts of it.  In my opinion, we shouldn’t have to.  Where I work and what I do for a living is a part of me and I’d like to continue sharing different things here.  But there are people out there who will take something the wrong way, and something bad will happen.  So as much as I hate to censor myself due to fear and intimidation, my job is important to me and therefore I am forced to come up with an alternative solution.

We’ve been getting notices at work a lot lately about staying off twitter and facebook and blogs and stuff.  I notice people find my site from a variety of different web searches.  A lot are interested in my post about rutorrent on the apple tv, others want to read my review of the linksys NAS 200.  The standby travel post is bringing a lot of visitors as well.  From there they can read my work posts and potentially get me in to trouble.  One of my YouTube videos was already traced back to me and had to be removed.  However, this blog is mine.  I write it for myself to look back upon later, and I don’t want to never write about stuff that happens to me at work.

Right now, about half my AA posts are now marked “Friends Only”, and the older half are closed for now.  While creating new entries with “Friends Only” access is a possibility, it really hurts the flow of the archive pages, and the company logo is still displayed.  I think I will be editing the template to automatically hide all AA posts, unless you are signed into my website as a user with enough privilege to read “Friends Only” posts.  The good parts of this plan is that I can still write about work without fear of google or idiots finding it, but the bad part is that updates to the site might be harder to follow for my friends.  Announcing AA Posts on twitter might be an option.  As always, being logged into my site makes commenting easier, lets you keep track of custom friends on my friends page, and will soon display work posts as well. 

Obey.

Friday, June 11, 2010

New iPad Awesomeness

First impressions are just like the apple store.  It’s amazing to browse the web like this.  It’s going to be awesome to have this around the house.  Still feels a little bit heavy but i can rest it on my leg when I sit on the couch so it’s not a big deal.  I got the WiFi only version because I don’t want to take it everywhere, I don’t need to take it everywhere, and I don’t want to pay for it.  Anywhere I want to use the iPad should have wifi too.  Apps look great.  My iPhone now looks so small…

I actually left with the intention of buying a 30” Cinema Display but I couldn’t bring myself to spend that kind of money.  I’ll keep my eye on craigslist for the display.  A good one pops up now and again and I can have both it and the ipad for the cost of a new display. 

A real post with updated house pictures comes soon.
First image is a play off this pic from a 2003 codexlan.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

FreeNAS Review

I promised in my last tech post that this entry would continue, and hopefully conclude, my journey towards the perfect Network Attached Storage (NAS) system.  The primary reason I want to use one is to stream TV Shows and Movies to my Samsung 40” LCD TV in my Living Room by means of my AppleTV.  It also serves as a backup location for my important files, and is now capable of performing server related tasks that were previously handled by the AppleTV.  This is my 4th attempt at a NAS solution for the Spitfire Network, the most expensive, the most capable, and finally…the most likely to survive.  For a quick NAS summary:

NAS Solution	Judgment	Cost
Eclipse (Gaming PC)	Too loud, power intensive, resource hog no redundancy
Apple Extreme Wireless Station + USB HDD	Ran drive continuously leading to failure no redundancy
Linksys NAS 200	Ridiculously Poor Performance, Noisy
Atom / FreeNAS	Best of all worlds but expensive, large footprint

I tried all the cheap alternatives to buckling down and forking over the cash for a decent NAS / Server but in the end the only lesson is one we should all be familiar with already - You get what you pay for.  In trying to be cheap, all I got in return was lost data (Apple Base Station) and unusable performance (Linksys + hosting files on my gaming pc).  Not that a FreeNAS solution has to be expensive however.  These days many people have a spare PC in their garage or something.  All it needs to be given new life as a FreeNAS server is:

x86 Processor
128 MB ram
32 MB disk space
Network card

The catch is that your hardware has to be supported by FreeBSD, but I’d be willing to bet that if it’s anything similar to a commercial computer, you are all set.  I looked into the option of buying a cheap, used PC for under $100 on craigslist but in the end I decided to build a new PC specifically for a few reasons:

1. I knew exactly what hardware it would have, with warranties.
2. By using an Atom chipset it has power consumption comparable to a netbook, which is preferable to a power hungry P4
3. The Atom D510MO chipset is fanless, making the entire computer almost silent
4. Gigabit Ethernet (up from 10/100 on the linksys nas)

I bought a nice looking glossy black case from Newegg, which was running a pretty nice deal on it as long as I signed up for spam, and sold the Linksys NAS for $5 profit.  I had the disk drives already from the linksys raid setup, so in the end I just had to buy the case, atom board/cpu combo, and 1 GB of RAM for it.  Not too much cost to expand its use greatly, but if you were starting from scratch it might be a big investment.  So give it a try with your old garage PC first.  I paired the computer with a 23” Samsung 2333HD Display, which is kind of a misnomer.  The actual NAS is capable of displaying a typical Unix/bsd console, but it’s really meant to run in a corner or a closet without a keyboard or monitor hooked up.  In fact, there is no GUI display included.  The monitor is really displaying video from my macbook pro, which makes the computer give the appearance of a hackintosh.  It’s also a nice 1080p HDTV.  The actual Atom computer runs without being plugged into the monitor, unless I’m debugging something.

So I spent all this money getting decent hardware, at least the software was free!  You’ll need to decide between a “full install” or “embedded” install.  The full install is like a typical OS installed onto your disk.  The embedded install is copied to a USB Flash Drive which is then booted off of, and it runs FreeNAS in a virtual disk created out of RAM.  The full install is easier to customize, but the embedded install is blistering fast and allows your hard drives to spin down when idle.  I went with the embedded because it’s very important to me for the idle disks to spin down.  This saves wear and tear, heat (remember it’s fanless), and power ($).  You can’t repartition the boot drive, so I had to add another flash drive to run my custom server apps like rssdler and python.  Running these apps off the main data HDDs would prevent them from spinning down (they’d never be idle).  Flash drives are cheap SSDs and it works great for NAS purposes.

After the initial console setup, you can unplug the monitor and control the system via a web interface on any other computer on the network.  This makes it very easy to choose services, set them up, add disks and shares… You really don’t have to be a pro to get it to work reliable and consistently.  I followed a tutorial, added my two hard drives as a redundant software RAID 1 array[Edit 11/30/10: This has changed, see: FreeNAS Update: Rsync and Unison], and added windows and apple file sharing in less than 20 minutes.  Performance was a ten-fold increase over my Linksys NAS, averaging about 40MB/s transfers which I’m guessing is limited by gigabit ethernet.  But don’t take my word for it, here’s some fancy looking pictures:

Linksys                        vs.                          FreeNAS

My Atom server blows away any of my previous NAS attempts, and I’m finally happy and able to not worry anymore about my hard disks crashing and taking all my stuff with them like the great hard drive crashes of 2003.  It’s far quieter and faster than the Linksys NAS, and I can run apps like rssdler off the server alone.  This means the AppleTV, which is already slow, doesn’t have to use its few resources on downloading for me anymore.  It uses waay less power than my gaming pc did when it stayed on to serve files, and adds the redundancy of two drives, protecting against hardware failure.  The loss of one hard drive wouldn’t make me lose any data.  The web interface is easy to use, and since it’s a mini-atx form factor, it’s got plenty of room for additional hard drive space so I can expand it over time.  The Linksys and many other NAS devices only support a maximum of two disks.  And did I mention how quiet it is?

The only disadvantages I could think of was the additional cost for having an additional computer.  If you have an old PC and could throw it in the closet or something, this disadvantage may not mean much for you.  Also, the mini-atx form factor eats up some desk space for me, but I want to keep it close to my other computers.  Again if you threw it in a closet you might not care.  I’m decent enough with Linux/Unix/bsd commands that I didn’t have any trouble setting it up, but if you’re a windows lover then buying a commercial NAS might be up your alley. 

So in summary, I am totally blown away by FreeNAS and all it’s capable of.  I tried everything else, but sometimes when you need the job done right you just have to do it yourself.  My next tech post will probably be about AT&T U-Verse, how it’s integrated into my new house, changed my network, and reacted to my experiments.

Check out the free software at: http://freenas.org/freenas

Thursday, April 08, 2010

How to Travel Standby

This post describes your travel day when going standby.

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