Technology

Technology

Dead Hard Drive and My Process

Ramen Junkie 0Comment

So, I have been pretty sure for a while that the main Hard Drive in my desktop was going out.  It’s probably the oldest drive I own and occasionally it got feisty during reboots.  For a variety of reasons, I kept putting off replacing it.

… and putting it off…. and putting it off…

Then I went down to my office one day, the wife and kids were heading out for the weekend, I had grand plans to waste away my weekend on Overwatch and Battlefield 1.  Those plans came to an abrupt halt because I was greeted with a GRUB error.  My first assumption was that, as has happened before, Windows 10 did an update and screwed things up again.  A good while back I encountered  similar problem and after some troubleshooting I found that my Linux partition had been wiped out.  I reinstalled Ubuntu there and everything booted just fine.  Windows 10 had just done and update and after some searching online there were sporadic reports of similar issues.  After some troubleshooting trying to use a Windows disk to do a Master Boot Record fix and then trying to reinstall Ubuntu again, it became apparent that instead, the drive had failed.

This complicates things a bit.  I pulled out my SpinRite disc and threw it in the drive, hoping it would find and correct the error.  It instead threw out an error partway through the scan.  It’s an older disc, I’m honestly not sure if it’s compatible with the newer set up.  Instead I tried a copy of Norton Ghost to clone the drive to a spare 1TB drive I had in the cabinet.  It looked promising as well, though it also listed that it would take nearly 50 hours to finish.

I guess that meant no Battlefield but Overwatch runs fine on the laptop so a weekend of Overwatch and Netflix it would be.

Unfortunately, the clone crapped out as well after about an hour.

The final solution was to simply reinstall Windows 10, on a new drive.  I never use Ubuntu on the desktop so I opted not to bother reinstalling it.  I downloaded the official Windows 10 recover ISO and ran through the install.  During the install I skipped over entering the CD Key, Windows 10 is supposed to activate itself based on account credentials and hardware on the same machine, time to test that concept out.  The install finishes up and Windows 10 loads up just fine.  It’s even activated as promised in all of the Windows 10 feature lists.

The next task involves getting things back up and running order.

In recent years I’ve pushed a lot of my data off onto either my NAS or into Cloud accessible storage.  This makes this whole task much much easier.  I keep very little irrecoverable data on any one machine these days.  There are a few folders that I will need to recover from the old drive, but nothing super important, and I should be able to simply hook the drive up using a USB drive bay and do normal recovery operations to get to my data.

More interesting through, I ended up saving a ton of time and bandwidth with the games I had on the machine.  At one point I had nearly all of my 1000 Steam Games downloaded and installed, all of my GOG galaxy games and all of my Origin games installed.  These games are spread across several drives of varying size in this machine.  Once I reinstalled Steam, I set up Steam to use each of these drives and it simply detected all of the downloaded games, automatically.  The same happened with GOG Galaxy.  I didn’t see a way to make Origin to reattach to it’s old data so I just dumped that folder and redownloaded things as needed.

Honestly, ultimately this whole debacle has been a bit of a godsend.  I now have a fresh clean Windows 10 install, not one from my Windows 7 upgraded to Windows 10.  I also have a slightly nicer and faster drive as the main drive, which helps performance a bit.  It also gave me an excuse to purge out a lot of cruft I wasn’t really using.  I’ve shifted a lot of my computer use to my laptop, the desktop is primarily used for gaming, so it doesn’t really need anything else installed that doesn’t serve that purpose.

Devices (Phones and Tablets)

Sometimes it Just Takes a Reset to Clean up Your Phone

Ramen Junkie 0Comment

wp_ss_20161101_0007I’m not sure what it is about mobile operating systems, they just don’t always clean up after themselves and seem to be awful about eating up their limited space sometimes.  I can only assume that there is some sort of glitch and a large batch of updates or temporary files don’t get deleted properly.  In Windows or Linux on “real” computer, It’s the sort of thing that I’d easily track down and delete on my own.  Mobile operating systems tend to be locked down way more preventing users from poking around in the system files, or anywhere beyond the basic documents folders really.

A while ago, my wife kept having issues with her Kindle Fire tablet filling up with space.  Even after cleaning off Photos and Videos, which she had quite a few of, there still was never quite enough space.  It’s only 8gig to start with, which isn’t much, so choices for apps and such have to be carefully weighed.  Eventually in frustration I did a factory reset and voila, problem solved.  The “System” block went from close to 6 gig down to somewhere around 3-4 gig, considerably more manageable to be sure.

I had a similar experience on my Windows Phone recently as well.  It kept filling up despite my effort to prune more and more apps.  Eventually it stopped taking screen shots and it had tons of weird freeze ups.  Once again, in desperation, I did a reset.  Now it’s floating around 5 gig of space used (of 8 gig) and I’ve reloaded most of the apps I had previously needed to prune.

It also runs much more smoothly.

This isn’t a process to be taken lightly however.  In my case, I keep most of my data backed up through One Drive or Amazon to my NAS, and Apps can easily be redownloaded (often automatically).  Probably the biggest hurdle I had with my phone was dealing with my 2 Factor Authentication App.  It doesn’t back up or sync since that would be a security issue, and I have a ton of services running through it.  In many cases I simply changed the 2 Factor Auth to run through SMS instead of the App, in others it was easiest just to temporarily disable it.

This all needed to be done before hand.  Many services won’t let you easily disable or change your 2 factor settings without the current codes, for good reason.  If you wipe out your authenticator, you’ll have no way to get those codes.  I had to deal with this first hand after the SD card I was using crapped out on me, taking my authenticator with it.  In at least one case I had to call into support and talk to a person to recover my account.

My suggestion, from doing this some in the past with other devices, start making a list of Apps you want to reinstall.  Then remove them.  This lets you actively track if there is anything like an Authenticator that may need to be dealt with.  After you can’t uninstall anymore apps, start checking whats left, photo galleries, Email, SMS, Call logs, checking for loose ends as you go.

It can be a pain but doing a factory refresh on an ailing space strained device can really help out to clear the cruft that seems to build up around the edges.

Windows

Skype Preview, now with Skype Bots!

Ramen Junkie 0Comment

As part of the recent Windows 10 Anniversary update, Skype was updated to Skype Preview.  Part of the preview is the new Skype Bots system.  Bots are the new Apps, which are the new Websites, or something…  Everyone is doing Bots these days.  These early bots are about what you might expect, simple interactions that may or may not be useful.  I did some testing with some of the bots.

There is also an If This Then That Bot, which I’m not going into detail on here.  I think it would be better served with it’s own separate write up.

Big News Bot

Bing News BotSimple enough, enter a topic, it returns 3 news stories related to the topic.  It seems to be pretty good about returning newer stories as well, though in some cases a bit repetitive.  I did a test search for the following…

Halt and Catch Fire, because I’ve been watching the show.  I got 3 results, all behind the scenes write ups, but all different angles on it.  They clearly invited people by to build up buzz for Season 3

Gene Wilder, because he passed away today.  It’s possibly the biggest story of the day.   I got 3 stories returned, all about his passing.

Pana, IL, because it’s where I live.  We don’t get a lot of news around here relating to the town, but it did return a story that was in the news recently.  As well as a couple of others that were more just “area news”.

Taylor Swift, because she’s in the gossipy news a lot.  I received three stories about her reporting for Jury Duty.  This topic and the Gene Wilder results kind of give an idea of the sameness problem.  I don’t really need the same story three times.  There isn’t any obvious sources listed wither so it’s not as if you can choose your preferred source.  Clicking a headline is a blind shot for where you’re going.

Honestly, I’m not sure how useful this really is.  Chances are you’re looking for news on a topic because you already know what the news is, ala Gene Wilder dying.  Otherwise, you’ve probably seen it already on some social media.

Bing Image Bot

Similar to the News Bot except it returns 3 images.  I did a test search for Cats.  It doesn’t even return the images, just links to the images.  You’d be way better off just going to images.bing.com and getting all the results, in a nice visual grid.

Trivia Master

Trivia MasterMoving on to some of the game bots.  Trivia Master is just as it sounds.  You tell it to start, it asks ten trivia questions on a topic, then gives a score.  The answers are multiple choice, so you don’t have to worry about spelling or exact wording.

It’s alright, but kind of a one trick horse that’s old as the hills.  The individual scoring flies by too fast as well, meaning you’ll have to keep scrolling back up to see if you were correct or not.  This problem is compounded by all of the wasted space in each of the message boxes.  It would make for a better party game or maybe some sort of back and forth with another Skype friend.

Candy Escape

Candy Escape 02Probably the most complex bot that I tried out was Candy Escape, a game that is reminiscent of the old Interactive Fiction games (ie ZORK).  You must solve puzzles and escape the candy prison.  You are the Walking Meat imprisoned by Candy.  It’s mostly pre-definined choices based, though not entirely.  For example, I was asked “What is the password”, which was just typed out with no choices offered.

It’s not without it’s quirky bugs though.  Early on I retrieved a rope from a skeleton after examining it.  Later, upon a second examination, the rope was gone from the image shown, but there was still an option to take it.  I also seemed to get stuck in a loop and the game’s hint wasn’t helpful at all.  I needed to escape from two guards, but my only option was to tell them to leave, which they refused to do, or to remove the crown, which just gave me the option to put the crown back on during my next choice, which brought me back where I started.

PC Hardware

On My New Acer Aspire E15

Ramen Junkie 0Comment

Acer Aspire E15 So, right up front I want to say, I’m not trying to sell this as the most amazing machine ever or anything.  I mostly just want to give some thoughts and sort of initial impressions.  I’ve been previously using an HP 311 Netbook as my laptop.  I would argue, at the time, that it definitely was “The best Netbook”.  It’s like 5-6 years old now, it runs like complete crap despite my best efforts.  I’ve replaced the battery and power cord on it 3-4 times, it has all sort of flakey issues with the trackpad and keyboard that start to crop up after it runs for a bit, it’s just, definitely showing its age.  I’ve updated it recently with an Acer Aspire E15.

I’ve been trying and working towards a replacement laptop for a few years now.  I’m awful about saving up large chunks of money given my other hobbies and saving for a laptop is quite a chunk of change.  It also doesn’t help that I keep within my own personal spending budget, and a lot of any “extra income” over the years went to household needs and outfitting everyone else in the family with laptops.

My other problem was trying to decide just what I wanted.  Ideally I wanted something nicer, say, closer to $1000 or so than $500, but saving to that point is kind of a huge hurdle.  I wanted something capable of running games all right, I don’t need or want “highest settings perfect framerate” but I wanted something that would run smoothly for the games I like to play.  These sort of requirements presented a few issues.  Most of the more expensive laptops push form over function, so they would probably work all right for my needs but the higher price mostly means I’m paying for “fancy” looking.  Anything that’s a “Gaming” laptop in that price range is probably overkill for what I want and would be a 40 lb slab of computer.

I also have lost track of “what makes a computer good” several years ago.  Mostly because computing power really plateaued for general use a few years ago.  There’s not a huge difference in computers now than 3-4 years ago aside from power consumption, which is kind of minimal.  In the old days it was simple, more mhz, more ghz means it’s better.  The only real “requirement” I had for processor power was i5 or i7, no i3.  I wanted a decent chunk of RAM, say 8GB+ and some sort of discrete GPU.   Just having some sort of GPU vs “Intel Integrated Graphics” would meet my gaming needs.

Acer Aspire E15I also decided that at some point I needed to stop waffling on what I wanted and just pick something.  I did some searching around on Amazon, filtering specs and such to get less and less selection.  I had kind of been hoping to find a Lenovo Thinkpad but none of them in my price range meet my Graphical desires and they are all brickish.  The brick part wasn’t such a turn off as the integrated graphics.

I eventually settled on the Acer Aspire E15.  It’s a relatively new release (seems to be 2016), it met my desire on specs, it looked fairly nice design wise, it has a ten-key pad.  It was also within my current budget at around $550 dollars.  I did some checking online for reviews and chatter on Reddit and it seemed to be a pretty well liked machine.

I ended up finding it for a $100 less on NewEgg as well, with a 1TB 5200 drive instead of a 256GB SSD.  Now I had a choice to make, way more storage, at a much slower speed, or keep the nice quick SSD.  I even considered ordering the 1TB version and buying an SSD to put in it, essentially giving me a free 1TB drive to use for, whatever.  In the end, I opted for the SSD, for more money.  Having the extra 1TB drive is actually less useful to me than it sounds, I have something like 8-10 TB easily already going in the house across several machines, and I wanted the performance boost of the 256GB SSD.  Also, the hassle of figuring out the best way to install the OS onto the SSD, while not hard, was more trouble than I cared to bother with.  The whole point of upgrading is performance boost over my old laptop.  The most frustrating part of my desktop is I’m still using shitty 5200 RPM drives in it, and it’s the main bottleneck for sure.

Acer Aspire E5-575G-53VG Specs

  • Screen Size: 15.6 inches
  • Screen Resolution: 1920 x 1080 pixels
  • Processor: 2.3 GHz Core i5 6200U
  • RAM: 8 GB DDR4-SDRAM
  • Hard Drive: 256 GB flash_memory_solid_state
  • Graphics Coprocessor: NVIDIA GeForce 940MX (2GB)
  • Operating System: Windows 10
  • Item Weigh: 5.3 pounds

Acer Aspire E15So, onto the actual laptop on some initial impressions.  I’ve been using it for a few weeks now.  It is definitely a nice improvement over my old netbook.  I like having Windows again, though I still like Linux, I like the keyboard with its chicklet keys, I’m satisfied with the size and ports.  It’s even got a USB-C port, which I didn’t notice before buying it.

The 256GB drive is a little tight.  I mostly just need to keep myself more limited to things I’m actually going to use but I’ve installed World of Warcraft, Skyrim, Minecraft, Wildstar, Photoshop, Diablo 3, Office 2010, and a handful of developer apps and I’m already down below 100GB free.  It’s a bit too close for my comfort but I’ll learn to deal with it.  Also, everything runs nicely as expected, though the machine does start to get pretty hot after running Wildstar and Skyrim for a while.

It’s not a touch screen either.  Back when Windows 8 was the hot thing, I would have been all over a touch screen, Windows 10 took us back to a more traditional interface and so the touchscreen is less necessary.  It’s still something that’s kind of neat if it’s there, but it’s less required.

In general, it does seem like a pretty good all-around machine for the price point.  That said, you could probably drop down a bit in price if you don’t want something with a discrete GPU.

Devices (Phones and Tablets)

Pentax K-3

Ramen Junkie 0Comment

I’ve recently upgraded my DSLR and have had a bit to play around with it and get a feel for it. I went for an upgrade over my old Pentax K-7 to a Pentax K-3.

  • I already have lenses so I saved money by buying Body Only
  • I like my K-7, it just got worn out
  • The K3 has a build in flash unlike the K-3II, so when my wife uses it she doesn’t have to fight with an external flash
  • It’s not the newest K-1, which means it costs less, though is still nice

I mentioned my K-7 became “worn out”. I have no other way to describe it. I noticed around the end of last year it started taking extremely washed out photos when using the flash. I’m taking nothing but white screen if it was anything up close. I figured there was a sensor or something going bad and looked into several avenues to get suggestions on it to possibly get it repaired. This whole exercise ended up being completely futile. Every forum and even the camera shop I tried basically tried to give me photography advice or tell me how “using the flash isn’t a good idea”.

Yeah, I get that. I get all that exposure and shutter speed and f-stops and blah blah blah and no, the flash isn’t always great but not every photo needs a tripod and a set up, sometimes it’s just a photo of a moment and not a piece of art or some bull shit like that.

There is something wrong with the camera. Even when I tried to replicate the settings on a fresh photo of an older photo for comparison that there is obviously something wrong, I got nowhere. So I gave up and upgraded instead. chances are the repair would have been more than I wanted to pay anyway. The camera still sort of works, on a tripod, with freakishly long exposure times and things are still kind of yellow. The best suggestion I ever got was that it’s not stopping down properly.

This new camera works so much smoother and better. It also lacks several of the nitpicky problems that plagued my K-7 since day one. I always chocked those up to it being a pretty early model of DSLR in it’s class especially. It did real full HD video, it had higher mega pixels than comparable cameras at the time and it’s the only one (at the time) that was weather sealed. The K-7 was pretty nice, but mine had issues, and I have no idea how prolific they were, if at all. For one, it lost the date any time the battery was removed. Not a huge issue. More of an issue, it would over heat when recording video for more than around 20 minutes. I always chocked that up to new tech and the weather sealed body being poor for ventilation. Third, half the time when using the live view to take photos, it would snap, then show “Battery Depleted” even when full. I don’t use Live view a lot but sometimes it’s convenient for getting funny angles where I’m holding the camera over my head.

The K-3 has none of these problems. I’ve done all of these things and had zero issues. The video is the best part, I spend last weekend recording a ton of video for my wife’s home business and had no over heating at all, after hours or recording, some single segments being 10-15 minutes long. I’m seriously considering using it in place of my DVC80 Video Camera this year for a show I record each year. Upgrading to HD from SD would be really nice. My only issue is I wasn’t able to get Premier to accept the video, but that is probably a settings issue somewhere.

Anyway, not much directly to say about I otherwise, aside from it’s a nice upgrade from my K-3. The Dual memory card slots will be nice and the interface all around is more refined and easier to use. Here’s a few photos I’ve taken with it, just for kicks. Nothing amazing or anything.

Figma Indiana Jones

Saber Struggle

Sinister... Five?

« Previous Page — Next Page »