Archive for the ‘hardware’ Category

Going to college and you need a computer, The class of 2014

Thursday, August 14th, 2014

So your back in college and you need a computer. So what to buy well it’s always a tough choice, but you don’t need to go into the thousands for a PC these days. the lower end laptop will do the job for most things, and the way to go here is low end.

  • Keyboards: if your buying a laptop be sure to try it out and type on it, and type a paragraph on it, cause if it’s a bad keyboard your stuck with it for 3-4 years.
  • Memory, go for as much memory as you can, Memory is not hard disk space, we’re looking here at on-board memory, it will be quoted like 4096MB which is more than enough if your running windows 7 or Windows 8, also make sure you can expand it.
  • Hard drive space: Don’t worry about hard drive space 160GB will be enough for most people, if your into music and video, you can always get an external USB drive.
  • USB 3.0 is now fairly standard on systems, its the Blue USB port
  • Network port, at the extreme lower end and extreme higher end, Network ports are being removed, the sales rep will say “you can use wireless” and he/she is correct, but wired is going to be always their, and as anyone who has been at a conference with too few WiFi access points will WiFi is nice but can sometimes not be dependable.
  • Screen size, remember the bigger the screen the more its going to cost to replace it if some one sits on it, of if it falls off the bed/desk or what ever!, a 17inch screen is going around €200 for a replacement, and its not an easy job.
  • Processor, while window 7 was light work, windows 8 will be a bit harder on a machine, look for 4 cores or above, and stay away from 2 cores
  • Touch Screen, try and get one of these, windows 8 will be a lot easier with a touch screen.

The next thing is software:

  • Office software, well Microsoft office is the standard, but you can use open office or libre office, once you have made sure that you save everything as Microsoft file format and it will work fine.
  • Photo-shop is a standard but GIMP gives you all the functionality that most people need, it’s also open source.
  • The Zotero plug-in for Mozilla FireFox, is great for citations.
  • LYX is great for producing papers and Theseus, and is much better at handling documentation than word.
  • If your a publisher look at scribus, its open source desktop publishing system, you could always pay for quark.

Here is a few reviews and tables about CPU’s:

What proccessors are out their: https://kb.wisc.edu/showroom/page.php?id=4927

This is a comparasion of tests against cost of processor: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html

Happy shopping, and don’t spend too much!

 

Googles Data Centers

Monday, October 22nd, 2012

So if your wondering what is inside Google’s Data centers, please see below. There’s a bit of PR and “saving the world” but it dose give an insite in to a data center.

http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/

The college Laptop/back to school Laptop

Wednesday, October 3rd, 2012

So your back in college and you need a computer. So what to buy well it’s always a tough choice, but you don’t need to go into the thousands for a PC these days. the lower end laptop will do the job for most things, and the way to go here is low end.

  • Keyboards: if your buying a laptop be sure to try it out and type on it, and type a paragraph on it, cause if it’s a bad keyboard your stuck with it for 3-4 years.
  • Memory, go for as much memory as you can, Memory is not hard disk space, we’re looking here at on-board memory, it will be quoted like 4096MB which is More than enough if your running windows 7, also make sure you can expand it.
  • Hard drive space: Don’t worry about hard drive space 160GB will be enough for most people, if your into music and video, you can always get an external USB drive. USB if you can come across USB 3.0 on a system, then that’s a plus.
  • Screen size, rember the bigger the screen the more its going to cost to replace it if some one sits on it, of if it falls off the bed/desk or what ever!, a 17inch screen is going around €200 for a replacment, and its not an easy job.

The next thing is software:

  • Office software, well Microsoft office is the standard, but you can use open office or libre office, once you have made sure that you save everything as Microsoft file format and it will work fine.
  • Photo-shop is a standard but GIMP gives you all the functionality that most people need, it’s also open source.
  • The Zotero plug-in for Mozilla FireFox, is great for citations.
  • LYX is great for producing papers and Theseus, and is much better at handling documentation than word.
  • If your a publisher look at scribus, its open source desktop publishing system, you could always pay for quark.

Happy shopping, and don’t spend too much!

We got to make the tubes bigger

Friday, September 14th, 2012

Ireland’s great broadband project, to empower the poor misfortunates out in the “sticks” that’s country to you or me, Is happening again, with another minister for communications present.It provides a great photo op for some nice people in the leafy suburbs of Dublin to give their country cousins cake, in this case let them eat 30Mbs.

So how are we going to eat 30Mbs? Or more to the point how are we going to make the 30Mbs cake:

we we could use:

LTE (telecommunication)

LTE Advanced – the successor to LTE

WiMAX – a competitor to LTE

HSPA+ -an enhancement of the 3GPP HSPA standard

 

and that’s just the wireless options

Or we could just learn from the South Koreans http://gigaom.com/broadband/south-korea-europe-rule-planet-broadband/ where they have a rate of over 17Mbs and have been at the top of the broadband charts for years, you should think about that when you connection fails or that movie that your are trying to download slows to a snails pace. So what do the Koreans use to make there broadband fast? well they use VDSL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSL), it runs over standard copper lines.

On the wireless side we should be also looking to Korea cause they have 100% wireless broadband in the country also (http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57477593-94/south-korea-hits-100-mark-in-wireless-broadband/)

So why bother,well it seems to be a case of get with it or get out of it, looking at how Korea uses its technology in education, could be a simple justification for using broadband getting us to these high levels of Internet speeds, for example south Korea are moving away from paper based exams to electronic based exams, Sick children do not miss out on class, cause they can watch their teacher from their bed using IP TV (http://www.advancedtechnologykorea.com/8000).

But back to Ireland, so how are we going to do it, well if  you look at table 2 on the national broadband plan (http://www.dcenr.gov.ie/Communications/Communications+Policy/Next+Generation+Broadband/), you can see DSL flat lining after 2010, so it looks like nothing has happend there, and mobile has grown in a big way up to about 600k on a par with DSL at about 800k, so it looks like we’re going to have to go 50% wireless 50% fixed line…..but we want speed, and the only way to get speed is with Fibre, accross the pond Google are showing us the way with their Fibre role out in Kansas http://googlefiberblog.blogspot.ie/2012/09/building-180-fiberhoodsconstruction.html I think there may be a lesson here, Google haven’t used wireless, they are using Fiber, and the simple reason is that it’s faster, less complicated, and standardised, after all is been with us since 1966, so maybe it might be time to replace the phone cables throught out the country with optical cables!

 

 

Whats my new ultra book going to have?!

Friday, June 1st, 2012

Your next laptop, so Intel were at a little conference in Computex in Taipei, where the talk about there specks to the manufacturers, so the manufacturers know what to put around Intel’s chips. So looking at their ultra books, aka a mac book air look alike, there looking at some serious battery specks, and will be pushing 8 hours. It will have thunderbolt or USB 3.  Their also looking Windows 8 with touchscreens, so we are going to be treated to a number of technologies, and a step change in ultra-book/laptop technologies. so if anyone can wait to buy a laptop, now would be a good time to wait, it will probably take a year or so before these hit the main stream and have got through maturity stage of their product life cycle curve.

More info on

http://www.engadget.com/2012/05/31/intel-to-show-third-gen-ultrabooks-requires-usb-3-or-thunderbolt/

LVM and USB drives

Monday, May 14th, 2012

I was in a computer store in San Francisco last week and a guy that ran an Architecture shop was in there trying to buy a NAS drive system, the poor guy never heard about LVM partitioning, so the sales man as per usual was just sealing the deal, but not giving him the full picture, I suppose being a sales man he was trying to have the “Quick sale” and not worry about the long term implications about selling such devices, and the best way to configure these devices. So as the sale was being made, I had a look at the box, and said to the guy to make sure to put LVM partitions on there, he and the sales man turned around a looked at me blank and said “whats LVM”, so I dindn’t want to get in to a explnation in to LVM, but I said google it, but I also said I give him a few links, so here they are below. So why is LVM so handy, Well picture the situation, you have disk that is full, or filling up and you need to make it bigger or worse you have a system that is configured to work with that disk set up an having to change the set up is going to be a serious problem, in terms of downtime and confiuration, I you use LVM partitions when setting up the disk in the first place you can add a disk to the filling up disk and make it look like on big disk that is really comprised off two or more physical disks.

 

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/40702/how-to-manage-and-use-lvm-logical-volume-management-in-ubuntu/

and

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/LVM-HOWTO/#initdisks

 

Making a Nest

Saturday, April 14th, 2012

I’ve been researching thermostats, and the market was starting to make me get annoyed, the thermostats on the market seem to be very basic, and then they are expensive, for what appears to be a clock with a relay attached, which is very analogue technology, Some of them have a magic BOOST button, which sounds like its been taken off a “hot rod car” but from what I understand its actually a bypass on the timer for 30 minutes or so.

Then I was have a little read on the web and along comes nest. This company was set up a group of apple engineers, so hence the shininess of the device, but basically is a device that has, wireless, proximity sensor and it usises this to understand how hot and how often you need heat, and also when you are in. So it actually turns on the heat when you actually need heat, when you are in the house, so we shall be doing a little more investigation and I can see a Nest being bought.

 

Using old phone booths

Wednesday, April 11th, 2012

In New York they are doing something with the old phone booths, there seems to be a good idea taking shape, This is transforming all the phone booths in to Tablet notice boards, that can give you information on what, where and where to get etc. Maybe now that some of our phone companies could talk a idea from new york and put this in motion in Ireland. so rather then ringing some one, your could look something up But that brings up the question do we need phone booths at all, if we all have mobiles! Or could we use the phone booths as a sensor technology to get an better understanding of street traffic, noise levels, after all they are a hardwired link to a exchange, in almost every street and city in the world.

You can read the link here

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/city_new_phone_booths_VFGNinvlcNX30nlD7ibKDK#.T4GweFOovlY.link

 

Paper and printing in the Dail (Parliament)… just how far could you go?

Tuesday, February 28th, 2012

Reading the Irish times it seems we have a member of parliament that managed to use 434 ink cartridges in two years, that is pretty substantial ink use, and just to put numbers into the real world

So looking in to this, I took a pretty standard A4 Pinter and looked at the A4 cartridge and how much it could print a HP Laser-jet 4200 (http://www.printerworks.com/DataSheets/laserjet4200_4300.html) it manages on the big cartridges 18000 sheets, which is pretty good.

So that’s 434 ink cartridges multiply by 18000 to give us number of sheets printed 7812000 sheets, now taking the standard A4 sheet length of .297m

Then we multiply 7812000 by .297m gives us 2320164m of paper used, so 2320 Km of paper, that’s enough to get to Poznan in Poland for the European soccer championships which is 1900 Km from dublin! and you could do nearly 400Km of touring!

Tablets, and deal hunting

Monday, December 5th, 2011

I’m looking at Android devices, as there seems to be too much “lock in” on apple and amazon devices.

Talking to Harvey Norman today Monday 5th of December I’ve came across the following:
€449
Toshiba at100 (sold as the Toshiba Thrive in the US)
http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/tablets/toshiba-at100-1003950/review
The Toshiba, Has got a SDXC card, memory card and has mini USB and replaceable battery, Its also got proper USB ports and a proper HDMI port.

€399
Acer icona
http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/26/acer-iconia-tab-a500-review/
3.5mm headphone jack, a mini-HDMI port.dedicated power jack (Means having to have another charger!) and a pair of USB slots: one micro-USB to transfer data to the tablet, and one full-size USB port which connects with both your storage drives and keyboards, just connect this to a usb hub and you be grand.

More reviews are here:

http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow/story/266915/the-best-android-tablets/

http://www.techradar.com/news/mobile-computing/tablets/13-best-android-tablets-in-the-world-905504