Technology

Devices (Phones and Tablets)

FitBit

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A new phone wasn’t my only unexpected purchase on Black Friday, I also picked up a FitBit.  I’ve been interested in the FitBit for a while now, I just never could bring myself to drop the money on one.  It’s not even that it’s too expensive, I have just had better things to blow my cash on.  I got roped into going to Walmart on Thanksgiving by my family, semi against my will.  While wandering around waiting for some arbitrary time of day when people could start grabbing and buying the stacks of goods sitting around the store, I noticed they had FitBits for $70, which is $30 less than normal.  I also had extra money in my personal budget so I decided I’d pick one up.  Thankfully, my Walmart is tiny and, while busy, it’s nowhere near the mob the larger stores get.

Semi Ironicly, over the summer there was a bundle for $150 that included a Lumia 635 and a FitBit.  I ALMOST ordered it.  At this point, I’ve saved $40 not ordering it.  I never would have expected a better deal but hey, patience works out.

Using the FitBit has spurred me to pick up my previous two Fitness tracking apps, Endomondo and MyFitnessPal.  Endomondo tracks workouts pretty well and MyFitnessPal is good for tracking food intake.  What’s best is they all three sync together sublimely.  Fitbit pulls the activity just by wearing it and pumps it into Endomondo automatically anytime it thinks you’ve done a workout”.  MyFitnessPro pushes food data to and from Fitbit while also pulling Calories burned from Endomondo.

None of it is a perfect exact measurement, calories burned are subjective to effort and whatnot and I’m sure there are some false steps in the Fitbit.  The food measurements and logging aren’t exact with MyFitnessPal either, I often forget to log drinks for example.  I’ve compensated for this a bit by lowering my “goal” for MyFitnessPal.  I want to stick to around 2000 calories but I have it set for closer to 1600.

It’s not meant to be exact though.  Just tracking things helps give an awareness of just how much is eaten, which helps more than anything.  Knowing I’m “500 calories from my desired max” after lunch, even with the buffer and exercise, reminds me I don’t need that afternoon snack or that soda while I’m out at lunch.

The Fitbit itself is just a glorified Pedometer.  It’s the peripheral apps and syncing that make it worthwhile.  The automatic workout tracking and syncing makes my whole process simpler for example.  It has a sleep tracking mechanism, which is neat as well, though I haven’t slept enough nights to have any good insights.  It also “gamifies” the workout experience with achievements and badges and cool graphs and charts and numbers.

The real purpose of all of this is more motivation to continue than anything.  It’s working pretty well so far, hell I have already looked into the matching scale, which is surprisingly cheap.  I figure I need to make sure I stick with this a bit first since most of the time I get motivated to better my fitness I end up stopping after a month or so.

Devices (Phones and Tablets)

Goodbye Lumia 520, Hello Lumia 635

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nokia_lumia_635_blanco_libreI’ve been in Phone Hell the last week or so.  It all started with Blizzcon.  At kind of the last minute, I decided to get the virtual ticket for Blizzcon.  Unfortunately, there is no support fro the live streams on Windows phone, so I swapped my SIM card into my old Galaxy S3, problem solved (solved-ish, Blizz still had capacity issues).  Later I swapped my SIM card back since my S3 has audio issues on phone calls.  This was when my problems started…

For no explainable reason, my Lumia 520 stopped keeping powered.  It could be fully charged or even on the charger, laying on my desk and it would just randomly power off.  It happened constantly making the phone unreliable and unusable.  When this happened it also wouldn’t easily turn back on, I often had to open the phone and remove the battery.  Other times, simply pressing power would fix it.  i ordered a fresh battery which solved nothing.  I did a factory reset which fixed nothing.  Eventually I did a check and the phone is still under warranty, so off to Microsoft it went.

This left me stranded on my GS3, which isn’t a bad phone and I do like Android, except it’s damaged and the audio doesn’t work for calls.  This means I have to try to get my wife (whom 99% of my calls are to/from) to call my work phone, which is “ok” to do but possibly frowned upon if done too much.  Also getting her to remember this and juggle two phone numbers for me (for texting vs calling) is kind of a nightmare.

On Black Friday, I found that the Lumia 635, which is the spiritual successor tot he 520 was on sale for $40.  I went ahead and bit the bullet and just ordered one.  I don’t know if they will even actually fix my 520 yet an this GS3 is simply not usable.

Honestly just needing a new phone wasn’t my only reason for ordering the 635, it really wasn’t even a huge factor.  The 635 has a slightly better processor, possibly a mildly better camera (the 520 has an AWFUL camera), and it has the new “sensor core” technology which gives more functionality to some apps.  It was kind of a no brainer upgrade really.  Migrating to it was also an extremely painless experience.

Initial Set Up

After receiving the phone, I have been pretty impressed with moving to it from my old phone.  The initial couple of screens are some “Welcome to Windows Phone” screens, but after putting in  my Microsoft account, the phone automatically downloaded all my data and settings including setting up and downloading all my apps.  It even synced my old Alarm settings, which seems trivial but it’s still pretty impressive.

The biggest hassle, aside from waiting for the downloads, was rearranging the home screen.  I spent a lot of time fiddling with my 520 home screen getting it just right, and now it seems I may have to do it again.

This was hindered a bit by needing some system updates.  Oddly, out of the box, the phone was “up to date”.  I knew this wasn’t the case because the newer versions of Windows Phone 8.1 add support for folders on the home screen, which wasn’t active on this phone.  I had to re-enable the “Preview for Developers” app which tells Microsoft you are a WP dev and want/need the latest updates.  In reality, it’s just a secret backdoor end around designed by Microsoft to get around the slow carrier updates.  Technically I’ve made a simple app with the Touch Developer App, so I’m kind of sort of not really a “WP Developer”.  Several system updates later, my folder functionality was restored and the home screen was in an acceptable state.

The Phone Itself

The Phone itself is pretty decent.  It’s a bit larger and has a different feel from the 520, but it still feels pretty solid.  I imagine part of this is that it’s definitely heavier than the 520.  The back feels possibly a bit cheaper, it’s definitely more plastickey than the 520.  Not necessarily cheap, just not quite as nice.  The back also fits on a lot more solidly than the 520, which seems like a good thing, but my (probably mistaken) belief has been that the looser back on the 520 actually protects the phone from drop damage since the back flies off if dropped dissipating the falling energy.

WP_20141202_07_55_33_ProA few quick tests shots with the camera siggest it’s definitely better than the 520 camera.  If/when I get my 520 back I may do some side by sides, for now I just have one sample from the 635.  Still no flash, still no front facing camera.  I don’t really need either since I find the flash tends to wash everything out and make too many hard shadows, especially with a phone camera, and I don’t really do selfies or video calls so no need for a front camera.  Oddly, there is an app pre loaded called Limia Selfie, not so useful without a front facing camera.

There also isn’t a hardware camera button, which I know is a big complaint but it seems to be policy going forward on Windows Phones.  I honestly never really used the hardware button on my 520, so I don’t really care that it’s gone.  I can see where it was convenient though.

Wrap Up

I don’t have much else to say about the phone just yet.  I have not used it too much, though it seems to be about the same as the 520 experience.  I am having some configuration issues with getting my email working but I also haven’t really looked into that much yet.  I also can’t find the Pinterest App at all, which I know I had on my 520, but seems non existent in the store and my app history.

Synology NAS

Synology Phase 02 – The Drive

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4TB WD RedSo I’ve been sitting on my Synology NAS for not quite a month now.  I had already stuck a spare 250gb drive in it just for the sake of using the thing some and getting to play around with some of the software.  I’ll touch on the software more in a future post, though the short is, I’m pretty impressed with everything except the Surveillance Station.

I was going to wait a bit longer to pick up the drives but “fake” using it really had me wanting to REALLY use it.

To really use a NAS, especially as a RAID, you can’t just put any drive into the enclosure, RAID drives are designed to withstand a much more frequent number of reads to help keep them alive for longer periods.  They are designed to be more robust in general since chances are the user will really be relying on them for potentially sensitive data (say, a business keeping business records).  My only apprehension about this is that I replace an awful lot of drives in the servers at work, especially the HUGE arrays that serve video.  On the other hand, these are machines that are pushing content to hundreds or thousands of people at once so the usage on these drives is probably pretty astronomical.  It’s not really apples to apples.

I’ve had a bit of an internal debate on which drives to get, and it generally comes down to price, reliability, and size.  Price is a factor f the other two points, more expensive tends to be better.  Size is a mater of needs, so that really just leaves reliability.  Everything I have seen, and I mean EVERYTHING from recommendations on Amazon to 4chan threads on /g/ to Reddit search results and posts and random message boards says, “Western Digital Reds”.  My only apprehension on the Reds is that Newegg’s reviews section is riddled with people complaining of failures.  Everything on New Egg goes counter to what I see elsewhere on WD Red drives.  I almost went with another brand but I decided to go with the WD Red drives.

I also almost cut down to 3TB drives.  They are $50-$60 cheaper and do I REALLY need 4TB.  I had to remind myself that yes, I really need the 4TB and the reality is, for the long haul, I SHOULD be buying 6TB drives, which is the largest this unit will support (I think).

So then there is the matter of the drive swap itself.  This didn’t quite work out as smoothly as expected, though if I had been putting two drives in instead of just trying to transition to one larger drive things would have gone better.  I had already been using one drive and had set up several things on this drive.  I inserted the new drive in the empty bay and then set both drives up as a mirrored array.  Wait a few minutes for the sync to happen, then remove the small older drive.

This is where there was some hang up.  Removing the small drive caused the NAS to believe a drive had failed.  i didn’t want to leave it like this and I don’t have a second 4TB drive to stick in there yet.  Unfortunately, there also is no way to break a 2 disk array back down into a single disk configuration.  This mean that as far as the NAS was concerned, there was a 250gb drive involved, which was the max size it would let me use.

I ended up having to dump all the files off to a separate storage and reinitialize the array with the single 4TB drive, then re copy and reconfigure everything.  Not a horrible pain but kind of annoying.

Synology NAS

Synology Phase 01 – The Box

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IMGP2353

 

I finally got something I’ve wanted for a while, a sexy new NAS box.  Unfortunately, I don’t have drives for it yet.  I went ahead and ordered the box because in helps discourage me from accidentally spending the money I’ve been saving if it’s not there to spend.  I plan to stick a pair of 4tb WD Red drives in it with a mirrored RAID.

I’ve wanted a dedicated NAS for a while.  I have a lot of data.  Like, a “fuckton” of it.  I’ve been a digital packrat since I’ve been using computers and it shows.  I’m honestly not sure if 4tb will be enough.  A general run down of some of the data I’m dealing with.

225gb of Family Photos from the past ten+ years.

129gb of music files

22gb of “Personal Files” from writings to web projects to drawings etc

226gb of Program and game install files from Bundles and such

37gb of ISO files, a lot of Linux distros, some backups of my discs

256gb of Videography projects from the past 8 years

A Plus a whole mess of other files from saved image files to ebooks

      to news articles saved to PDF

I also have a massive CD wallet of old files I’d like to start sorting through

I want to rip all of my DVDs to some digital video format for safekeeping

      and private video streaming

Currently most of the data is crammed across a couple of machines, though most of it is in what I generally refer to as the “Family PC” in the basement.  I really want to get the data off of this machine, and off any machine that is actually used by anyone.  One, the machine itself is over 5 years old now.  The drive isn’t but this is starting to reach a point of potential failure.  I went through one drive failure and lost some data, I’m not doing it again.  Two, I want it off a machine people use due to malware issues.  It’s not been a problem recently but on more than one occasion I have found that the kids went and downloaded some hack client for Runescape or Minecraft and gummed up the machine a bit.  It’s never been anything irreversible but the potential is there.

Mostly it’s the data loss potential, which is why I want a RAID.  I have know about and been aware of RAID for a long time now but never really appreciated it until I was replacing drives at work.  Every server we have is at least a Mirrored RAID, the larger ones have a pair of mirrored striped raids with redundant servers.  Redundancy on redundancy, and redundancy is good.  Which is why Next year when my current storage tier runs out I’ll probably also sign up for Office 365, because it will give me a Terabyte of online storage to backup my photos and video files too, the real important and hard to replace stuff.

As for the Synology itself, I looked at quite a few models of NAS before settling for the ds213j.  A friend of mine has a Synology and loves it.  In fact everything I found online suggested the Synology was the best NAS you could get.  I looked into some Buffalo drives and while they were half the price they lacked almost any features besides being a network drive.  The Synology has a lot of nice features including the ability to run web and email servers as well as stream video and music.  If it works, I may dump the Linux box I’ve been using as a web dev server, for power savings.

I also looked into building a FreeNAS box, which would be more powerful and have even more features, except the minimal cost for the FreeNAs box would have been as much as the Synology and the 2x4tb drives, and that was not putting any drives in the FreeNAS.  Honestly the FreeNAS is still really appealing and maybe in a few years I’ll build one, but I really need a solid solution now, I’ve been putting off the NAS for too long.

So after settling on the Synology it was down to which model.  Partially for cost, partially because I don’t feel like I need more, I went with a two bay device.  Honestly after looking at this device construction and design wise there isn’t much reason the larger devices should cost more than like 20-50 dollars more than a 2 bay system but they do, and I don’t care to drop $700 on one of these, I can build a FreeNAS box for that.  So which 2 bay model?  I went with the 213j, the 13 designates this as the 2013 model, the 2 is the 2 bay model.  The 214se version has half the RAM and a smaller processor, I want to be able to stream video off this thing so less power is not better.

Anyway, it may be a month or more before I manage to put some drives in it but you can be sure I’ll come back to discussing this device at that time.

Devices (Phones and Tablets)

Lumia 520 – Updated Notes and Thoughts

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wp_ss_20140913_0001  One issue plaguing the “review” industry is the new factor rush to be first.  This isn’t really a review, but more a few notes and thoughts on my Lumia 520 Windows Phone after using it for a month or so.

I want to start off actually by saying, I’m still mostly happy with the phone.  For $50, it’s a really great “replacement” phone for that cracked screen whatever that has a broken speaker making calls impossible to hear.  Windows Phone OS itself is really great too.  I like the interface and the colors.  If I were going out and picking up a nicer phone I’d be really inclined to go for the Lumia 1020, which has a kick ass camera and Windows Phone under the hood.

I wanted to start with this because the rest of the tone of this list will come off as pretty negative since the phone is flawed.  It’s also $50, so it’s easy to forgive the flaws and understand WHY they are flaws.  It’s a cheap and underpowered device.

The Camera Sucks

This is probably my biggest annoyance with the Lumia 520.  If I really need to take Photos on a trip or something, I’ll be carrying my DSLR with it’s 14mp goodness, but I’ve gotten used to being able to use my Cell Phone in a pinch.  The 520 really doesn’t do the job at all though, even in a pinch.  Low light performance is abysmal and it’s slow.

The focus is also really flakey.  I take a lot of photos of small things up close (toys) and it’s frustrating to point the phone, tap to focus, only to end up with the background in focus and not the object I’m trying to photograph.  The auto focus action will bring the closer object into focus briefly as it runs through it’s mechanics though, which makes the whole business even more frustrating because it means that it COULD focus on what I want, it’s just choosing not to.

The end result photos tend to be a little hazy as well.  I’m a little worried that the lens may have been scuffed up some causing issues as well.  The iPhone I carry for work has a completely useless camera since the scuffed lens makes everything uselessly hazy.

It’s Crazy Durable

IMGP2063 I’ve heard a few mentions here and there that Nokia makes durable phones.  The 520 doesn’t seem to be any exception.  I’ve dropped it more than once on hard surfaces and its done just fine.  It explodes into a phone, back and battery, but it’s still not damaged.

I actually think this may be somewhat related to the back design.  The back is curved and wraps around with it’s edges actually on the front face, so it completely protects the phone and is fairly durable itself.  It also pops off pretty easily, so an impact will jar the back off dissipating the energy of the impact instead of damaging the phone.

Storage is/was Too Little

wp_ss_20140913_0003 I have fixed this issue by putting a 32gb microSD card into the phone but I’ve been fighting against storage issues from the start.  Base storage is 8GB.  I want to say the system takes up half of that.  I have not been keeping music or podcasts or audiobooks on the phone either.

I’ve had to uninstall some apps just to keep up with the storage needed to use the phone.  My personal opinion is that these things should ship with at least 16gb as a standard, maybe even 32gb.  Memory really isn’t that expensive, especially if a company is buying it in bulk for manufacturing.  The 32gb card I bought is a nice Sandisk class 10 and it was only $15.  That was on sale admittedly but it also includes all the overhead of Amazon and Sandisk and packaging and putting it in SD card form.

Memory is cheap.  These companies (not just Nokia/Microsoft) need to get with the program here.

The Windows Phone Store Could Be Better

wp_ss_20140913_0004 This is, unfortunately, a problem that will last beyond the Lumia520 if I upgrade to a nicer Windows Phone.  There was a recent news article about how the Windows Phone store is full of scam apps.  I’ve already listed the apps I’m missing and that list is still pretty much the same.

I also kind of hate that I can’t buy an app and opt to not install it immediately.  This came up as part of my storage issues.  Asphalt 5, a racing series I’d played on Android, was on sale but i didn’t have enough space to install it.  When I tried ot buy it just to add it to my account for later use, the phone just told me I didn’t have enough storage and refused to let me purchase it.

I could probably have done it through a website somewhere but that is an extra needlessly inconvenient step.

The Hardware is Underpowered

IMGP2064 This is definitely more a Lumia520 issue than a Windows Phone Issue.  It’s a problem that has become increasingly worse, possibly attributed to the system updates that I’ve done since picking up the phone.

I see a lot of “Loading…..” and “Resuming….” screens.  I get a lot of times where an app fails to load so I get the Loading… screen and it dumps back to the homescreen.  Sometimes this even happens with the home screen, so I’ll be in say, Baconit (Reddit Reader) and hit back to the home screen only to end up back in Baconit.

It’s worse when Baconit then has the same issue and now I end up in some other app I had open previously.

It’s more than a little irritating at times.

I still like the phone and the OS.  It’s a cheap phone, so some issues are to be expected, but the performance of this cheap phone is way better than I’ve experience on a cheap Android phone or tablet.  A lot fo this is helped by solid hardware, something cheap Android devices seem to not have.  Nokia for a long while has been THE Windows phone Brand, and now they are owned by Microsoft, the Windows company.  They have also been making cell phones for ages, I loved the hell out of my old Nokia candy bar phones.  They have been around long enough to know what they are doing unlike a lot fo these newer cheap Chinese companies.

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