Elitepad gets a refresh...back to Windows 8

One of my least-known computers is an HP Elitepad 900 I purchased around 5-6 years ago. This is a Windows 8 tablet, which is a pretty unusual beast; MS had not invented the Surface at that stage. The Elitepad is a business tablet, which for its spec was relatively expensive, but it is designed to be solid and serviceable, with the chassis made out of metal and held together by magnets rather than being glued together as most cheap domestic tablets would be.

The design of the Elitepad for business security intentions of the design is such that it has very few ports on the tablet itself. Basically all the bits on it are the home button, power button, rotation lock switch, headphone port, camera, volume up/down buttons, microSD slot (under a cover) and dock connector. Various accessories including the charger can be plugged into the dock connector. I purchased mine with an expansion jacket, which encloses the tablet and has space inside for an optional second battery (not installed) and connects to the Elitepad's dock connector. The jacket adds its own dock connector as well as an SD card slot, HDMI port and two USB ports. The system comes with 2 GB of RAM and has a 64 GB SSD installed.

Inside, the Elitepad has an Atom Z2760 processor, and it comes with the full version of Windows 8 installed (not Windows RT). At the time I purchased it, Windows 8.1 became available and I was able to download the update from HP and install it off a pen drive. The charging adapter supplied with it provides 9 volts at approx 1 amp. This model was available with an optional SIM slot for direct connection to a cellular data network, but I chose to purchase the Wifi version.

The most use I ever had with the tablet in the past was when I was studying a few years ago and used it instead of a laptop (I actually didn't own a laptop until quite recently). I got a Logitech bluetooth keyboard and MS Wedge Touch mouse to use with it, and a third party stand for it to sit on an angle like a regular screen. I installed a few different apps on it and used it at several tertiary instutions whilst I was studying.

Recently I hauled it out of the cupboard to use as an e-book reader and found it still has 95% of its battery life remaining, according to the wear level reading using software to check the onboard battery. Because of this I intend to use it as much as possible with the Kindle app. However, after uninstalling some software, I could not get Kindle to run on it, and eventually ended up recovering it. If you haven't done a device or computer recovery before, OEM manufacturers will set up a special partition on the HDD (64 GB SSD in this case) for the reinstallation of Windows. You simply follow a few on screen prompts and leave the tablet running for a while until the recovery is complete. Prior to that I had checked if I had a chance of putting Lubuntu on it; but I discovered from a support article that it will only boot a pen drive that has Windows 8 installed.

The recovery worked as expected but it took a very long time to get it to install Windows 8.1 with the first step being more than 150 updates to Windows 8 and then several failed upgrade attempts, after which to my surprise after leaving it sitting on the charger for a few days I was presented with a Windows 8.1 installation prompt. So it looks like it is going to work well. But I will want to get  a second charger for it because of the ill considered HP design decision that it can only be charged via the proprietary docking port. As the charger will have to come from the US it will not be cheap.

Using a Raspberry Pi as a livestream player [1]

When I wrote the first post of this series I fully expected using my former Windows 10 PC as a home theater PC would work out. That didn't last long and the Windows 10 part was soon moved to another computer so the Mini-ITX system could be reinstalled with Lubuntu for the specific role that it was needed for. That hasn't worked out either, in both cases the older low-spec hardware is the issue, not specifically because it is low-spec but because it is older. The AMD E350, while good for desktop use, is not recent enough to be able to decode modern video codecs fast enough to be able to give good video playback on Youtube and other live streams.

So as the updates to that post attest, I had moved to using the Antec chassis system with Lubuntu, but that has not worked out after about a month of use. The only reasonably cheap solution, therefore, is to move to using a Raspberry Pi for this application. Although my one and only Pi is being used at my desk for a particular application where it gets its internet connection off my phone's mobile data, I can use an old laptop for that particular purpose in the meantime while I use the Pi for the bedside PC application (for night prayer/intercession use), until I can get another Pi.

The model 3 B Pi is just slightly too underspec to keep up with all livestreams. It actually still does work very well with Youtube on 240p or lower, but at higher rates tends to drop out a little. That is OK for now, and far better than the E350. The Pi 4 which has just been released is available with 2 GB of onboard RAM at $85 for the board ($105 with 4 GB of RAM) and is much faster than the 3 B and has many enhancements such as dual mini-HDMI ports, USB C power , etc. To that price you have to add a case and power supply, which can be done in stages as funds permit. There is no real hurry on that as I can get by for now with the 3 B, which is currently powered off a spare Ipad power adapter. I could continue a similar arrangement with the Pi 4 and save on the cost of a power adapter, but it will be a toss up whether to go with 2 GB or 4 GB of RAM, and also which distro to run on it if I want to use Firefox, which is apparently unavailable for Raspbian.

So the Antec chassis will go back to being my Windows 10 PC, which in turn can be moved out of a bulky spare desktop chassis again.

Using a Windows 10 computer as a media player

UPDATE 19-10-7: Due to cost the Win10PC was put into an old obsolete chassis and parked in a corner of the room so it can be used when needed but it will not sit on my desk and will hardly ever be used. This was accomplished using an identical spare G-E350 WIN8 mainboard and the boot disk removed from the Mini-ITX chassis and it works fine. The Mini-ITX chassis was then set up with Lubuntu using the 500 GB HDD that was in it for a data disk for Win10PC.  x11vnc has been installed to enable remote control for maintenance purposes and with Kodi it works a lot better than when it was running Windows 10.

UPDATE 19-10-6: Whilst this computer will do for now I am looking at replacing it when I have the resources with a new Raspberry Pi (the new RPI 4B has a significant performance improvement over the 3B that I already have) or NUC running Linux just because it is getting a bit long in the tooth with performance issues, but in reality most of these issues are related to Windows 10's excessive resource demands on it. The other option being to put the Windows 10 computer into another chassis and release this chassis for the spare board of the same type and run that on Linux so I will consider the options for that.

UPDATE 19-10-3: After the heap finally managed to update itself to Windows 10 release 1903 (a whole drama and story in itself, which has taken months of failing to install the update, and me deciding I just could not be bothered troubleshooting, then finally it managed to install itself successfully last night), Kodi started having playback problems only with videos, every few seconds the audio would drop out momentarily. The solution I found that worked was to go into Settings, Player Settings, Videos, change the rendering method to DXVA and turn off DXVA hardware acceleration.

Back in December 2014 I got an Antec Mini-ITX chassis to use with a Gigabyte GA-E350 WIN8 board that I had purchased. I actually had two of these boards (the other one is stored as a spare). Given it's almost five years I'll elaborate that I originally got these boards, which were very cheap since they were designed for low power compact computers needing a power supply of less than 50 watts and have an integrated AMD E350 CPU. These photos were taken at the time I built the system and are missing from the article that is on the blog and I need to put them back in it sometime.

The bare chassis looking through the grille on one side which is for cooling, through the I/O plate on the back.

 The partly assembled system. The board is installed and screwed in place and the internal cables (mainly front panel USB / switch / LED) are just loose waiting to be plugged into the board. You certainly need the low profile cooler on this board because a full size one would have trouble fitting inside.

 The system assembled and running, with the display showing a setup screen. The extra cables that weren't in the previous picture are for the hard drives.

 On the back of the chassis under a blank panel is the mounting plate for the 2.5" hard disks (there is room for two of them). You can see one is installed here with the power cable hanging loose in the 2nd mounting position. Behind the HDD is the bottom of the motherboard. The mounting plate is detachable because the disks sit on the inside of it and there are insulating pieces supplied to prevent the HDDs from shorting out on the metal mount plate.

Looking inside the complete system installing Windows. The cables have been tied back in place ready for the lid to be put on. The power input cable, which is for 19VDC from an external power supply that is supplied with the system, can be seen upper right. There is a small power supply board inside the chassis that generates the usual voltages (+/-12V +/-5V +3.3V etc) at up to 60 watts for the system with the usual ATX power connector.

Anyway if you followed this blog you'd know that this system has ended up as my one and only Windows computer and now has 10 Home running on it, and until recently was hardly ever used. But now I want to get some use out of it so I've been setting it up as a media player computer for bedside use, which means mostly playing music or playing videos with the screen turned off. The main issue with an older system like this one is the CPU won't have the codecs built in for playing a lot of video which means it can't handle the higher resolution or high bit rate videos well, since video playback on most operating system these days depends on the CPU doing hardware decoding, a key reason why I upgraded a Sandy Bridge system last year because it had trouble playing back WEBM videos. In this case for the use this system is being put to, that isn't a problem, and Youtube videos that stutter can be changed to a lower bit rate in the browser.

So what software do we want to use compared to what we can use in Linux? Kodi is available on Windows and it worked fine this time. I had trouble with it on a previous Windows installation where there was no sound. Windows Media Player has been out of Windows for so long that I have almost forgotten what it was like, and the alternative app built into 10 is nowhere near as good as Kodi. The other main application needed is a sync tool to sync the video and music libraries from another computer. Since I use NFS for my day to day networking stuff in Linux and MS doesn't make their NFS networking stuff available to Home Editions I had to set up a Samba share on the mediapc and network using the built in SMB/CIFS support for Windows. Karen's Replicator is the ideal program for syncing. I used to use this to back up my Windows computers back in the day and it does everything needed to get a full mirror that also replicates deletions on the source.

Backup software / recap

About eight years ago I thought I was building a really special PC with a Intel DG41RQ mainboard, Celeron E3300 CPU and 2 GB of RAM. The article series started here: https://enzedtech.blogspot.com/2010/10/rebuilding-my-pc-1.html

Unfortunately I outgrew that computer pretty quickly because it could only take 4 GB of RAM in total and therefore became pretty slow with later versions of Windows. However it would work fairly well under Linux. I often wondered why I bought a LGA775 system that was right at the end of that generation of CPU, and it looks like cost was an issue. The Celeron E3300 did support hardware virtualisation though (that was something that would have been useful if the computer had enough RAM, as 4 GB was barely enough just for Windows).

These days I try to do a better job but at times there can still be a price/performance tradeoff to consider, the main reason why I have a serverpc that only has 16 GB of RAM in it because the board only has two memory slots. Well we could put 16 GB DIMMs into the two slots but would have to throw away the existing RAM. Most of the time I try to buy something with four slots, and that's why the computer this is being written on has 32 GB in it.

Now to focus on good free backup software for Windows. I may have written about this before but that particular post isn't easy to find. I get asked this question from time to time so here is an answer. The two best free packages in my view are NCH FileFort and Cobian Backup. FileFort is a commercial package that has a free edition for home use, while Cobian is just free. I used to use Cobian to backup my systems when everything was running Windows, but of course now I don't have a need for it.

FileFort is perhaps a little more user friendly than Cobian however whereas Cobian will simply stop reporting error messages if there are too many, FileFort's problem is it will stop running if there are too many errors. This is annoying because you should be able to just check the errors later (they may happen for reasons like being in use as not all software packages can handle this well). Cobian also has the ability to use VSS which means it can copy in use files. So Cobian is probably the better of the two, however FileFort is probably more up to date (Cobian does work with Win10 so it's OK for a few more years, anyhow).

General update

Since last time I have been doing a lot of setup stuff with various computers.

Win10PC is gradually getting set up, the only stuff I really need it for is a handful of things like downloading gigabytes of maps or whatever, scanning, ripping DVDs and bulk Irfanview stuff so it isn't moving along very fast but it is what will get used when I want to view charts with the keyboard as the screen is set up vertically for that, and having VNC running on it means I can do just about everything from over here at my desk without having to change seats. At the moment I still have to get the scanner and printer hooked up to it (well probably only the scanner because the printer can go onto mainpc). Unfortunately the storage spaces thingy doesn't actually work the way the RAID mirroring used to work (it only works with full disks, not partitions) so RAID won't be possible but I can move the home drive to the second disk and that is how I will set it up. There won't actually be anything on it that matters anyhow because of the limited tasks it is used for.

serverpc is going very well after getting its disk capacity boosted last week as I had to restore the home volume after backing it up as that was the easiest way to restore it without having to leave one of the old disks inside it, putting the backup disk into the removable drive bay is easier. I took the opportunity to dump all the config files especially as some of them didn't get backed up properly and wouldn't restore, which hasn't really been a big problem for restoring. The main task at the moment is to get all the backups of the other computers working again as with the reinstallations they all need stuff put back on them to make the backups over the network function correctly.

mediapc has also been reinstalled. I had put Xubuntu on it because it has better stuff for working with phones and things, but the biggest issue is with Cosmic, maybe because it is a beta or maybe not, that I just could not get it to hibernate. In the past it didn't matter if it could hibernate or not, but with the different uses I am putting this computer to, I need to be able to save the session and come back to it. On Ubuntu hibernation is disabled by default and even when it was supposedly enabled and the hibernate button was present and did something when you clicked it, the computer was actually turning off instead of hibernating. So I decided the simple answer was to put Debian 9.5 on it, but I failed to notice that the second screen would turn itself off (just a little side effect of having a TV as a screen and it has a no signal turnoff timer that can't be disabled) and then the logon greeter (the Linux name for the logon screen, which in MS parlance is called the Winlogon) tried to come up on the TV because it was still detectable (soft off and hard off are different because in soft off the display can still be detected). So after a lot of installation attempts that were seemly failing I just moved the mouse accidentally at the end of yet another attempt and the mouse comes back onto the active display and there is the greeter. So I was able to install 9.5 out of the box after all. I configured the spare SSD partitition as /tmp and lost some stuff I had downloaded onto it, but I will be able to download that stuff again.

bedroompc is working well with the network cable in place to be used for VNC and other non-internet networking (so grsync can run real fast) so that it can work well for internet connectivity via a tethered phone when the normal internet I have is off. I have used it quite a lot for this purpose, but still have a lot of data left at the the moment.

pc4 (for want of a better name) has Buster Alpha 3 running on it and I synced down the entire copy of my media library from bedroompc while I was reinstalling mediapc, this happened very fast over the cable. So I played media on it while I was working on mediapc with the various install issues that had that meant what should have been a simple install took about three days to complete.

And of course mainpc just toodled along like usual but I am still finishing off setup having reinstalled it not so long ago. I will set up the spare SSD partition as /tmp on both this computer and serverpc. So that's coming to the end of the productive window of today, when I will soon break for tea and then move onto other things for the evening. 

Windows sucks part 139 [2]

So I am changing my Windows 10 box from being inside a desktop chassis into the Antec Mini-ITX chassis with a Gigabyte GA-E350 WIN8 mainboard and as I have no real need of this computer chassis for any other purpose for the foreseeable future this is going back to being what the Windows 10 computer is going to run in, as it was some months ago. The location where it is at is about two metres from the scanner but that is the only device that will need a longer cable and there are not going to be any issues running the scanner's cable or any other cables. As is currently the case the computer will have its own speakers and screen. At present that desktop chassis, which is a mini tower Inwin chassis (smaller than the other three computers on this desk which have Inwin mid tower chassis), will remain connected to the two KVMs and therefore the two main keyboards and mice that I have on my dual stacked keyboard slides under the desk, but the Antec will not be connected to these KVMs, which means it will have its own independent keyboard and mouse, and instead it will be remote controlled using TightVNC server on the Windows 10 computer and Remmina on mainpc as the VNC client. VNC is needed because MS has omitted Remote Desktop from Windows 10 home edition. I have discovered that VNC can be connected as soon as Windows 10 is up to the lock screen so I can log the computer in remotely and there is almost no need to actually sit physically in front of the computer at all.

Another configuration issue is whether I can use a RAID-1 array in the Windows 10 Home computer as I have used in the past when Enterprise or Pro was the operating system of choice. It turns out the old mirrored option in Disk Management has been deprecated in Home edition, but is still available in Pro or Ent. However, MS is migrating to Storage Spaces to achieve the same thing as the mirrored option, and Storage Spaces is available on Home edition. Essentially I will create a 128 GB system partition onto one of the disks and the rest of the disk will be available for the storage pool. The second disk will also be in the storage pool and they will be mirrored. The existing home folder path will be moved into the storage pool by using a NTFS junction on the system volume in my profile path. This is basically the only supported way that you can move your home drive to another partition or disk because MS still won't support changing the registry key path that points to C:\Users. It is a limitation that you end up having to put in a junction for every user but is OK where there is only one user on the computer.

I looked back at my notes and saw I moved the Windows 10 computer last November or about 8 months ago from the mini tower to the Antec and then only five months ago I moved it from the Antec to the mini tower and now it goes back to the Antec which I have no further use for in the foreseeable future. I did enjoy building that Antec as a mini ITX chassis and did seriously look into upgrading it with a new Asrock board. However the only type of board that would be worthwhile is one that has a built in CPU because they are optimised for very low power and for various reasons the NUC won out as the preferred option and I got one of them instead. I have two of these Gigabyte E350 boards in case the one in the Antec chassis blows up so I can keep using the Windows computer with them. Many mini ITX boards these days are just small ATX boards that use a lot of power and aren't suitable for the likes of the Antec chassis which has only a 90 watt power supply so the upgrade route is one I have decided not to follow. Neither do I now have any need of any type of portable computer or server that I could use the Antec for so I am just sticking it with this Windows 10 home computer. 

Last time I changed formats I was able to use CloneZilla to move the Windows 10 installation between disks, unfortunately that was not possible this time. Although I have changed the Windows 10 computer 3 times, the first time I changed from Windows 10 enterprise on a no-longer-valid volume license to Windows 10 home and the second time I used Clonezilla to move the disk. This third time Clonezilla was not only unable to move the disk to another physical disk, it also somehow corrupted the existing disk so that it would not even boot and the main data partition was unreadable. It did not matter as there was no data on it that needed to be backed up so it just means a little more work setting it up from scratch. But that in itself is not much as I do not need to reinstall the camera download software, really it is just some multimedia software and the scanner software that I have to put back on it.

I wrote recently about the Vodem problems and how I would overcome them. Using the wireless bridge over a network cable has worked successfully but the issue is it will work on the whole of my network and I want to be able to limit to just one computer at a time to control how much data is going to be sucked off the cellular connection. So the alternative option is to add a wireless capability to one of the desktops to enable it to be used with the tethered phone or I can use the NUC with its built in wireless, but the NUC will need to have a cable connected to it so that I can remote to it with VNC at the same time as it is connecting to the phone.

I have completed moving things around and plugging things back in and now it is just the job of finishing the setup of everything and some of this is happening around other changes in the home environment so that is how things are going together at present.

Windows sucks part 139

Well I have written numerous times about how bad Windows is but Microsoft just keeps on proving me correct over and over. Windows 10 is probably the worst version of Windows ever released, and that's even without taking into account MS trying to force everyone to convert to it. I didn't get my edition of Windows 10 as a free upgrade, I purchased a retail edition and paid full price for it (well, a discounted wholesale price but still fully valid). And it's just so so obvious how MS has turned it into a big advertising and money grabbing platform and that is a huge shift from Windows 7 and even 8/8.1.

Now while Linux has its moments and is not totally perfect, compared to what MS has done with a huge paid team, the Linux community with its completely open source development process and hundreds or thousands of unpaid volumteers and a handful of paid developers has moved many mountains to produce something that in my view is every bit as good as Windows, in fact for many uses better, and all completely free of charge. And that is why it is the case that pretty soon, all four computers on my desk will be running Linux.

In the last year or so I went from having a brand new computer with 8 GB of RAM dedicated to Windows 10, to having the Antec E350 dedicated to Windows 10, to another desktop chassis with an E350 motherboard dedicated to Windows 10, and now Win10PC is about to go back onto that Antec E350  again and it will be the 5th computer and the only one that is not connected to the KVMs and actually sitting on this desk because I can remote control it via VNC from mainpc. So the computer will soon be off to one side and mounted under the side table that the musical keyboard sits on. It will still be used for a few things like software that I can't be bothered trying to replace at the moment like Irfanview that is hard to run under WINE. 

But we are getting so so so close to the point now that I could almost run Windows in a virtual machine because all of the hardware reasons I needed a Windows computer have largely fallen by the wayside.The single issue that has most torpedoed my faith in Windows 10 in the last few months has been over USB connection issues. I have several digital cameras and phones that I try to connect to the Windows 10 computer to upload music or download photos. The problem with downloading in particular is endless and nonsensical interruptions and error messages that we just never used to see in Windows 7. So the latest indignity was trying to download photos from my Galaxy J2 and the messages about data being in the wrong format or the device attached to the system has stopped functioning and so forth. When it was my EOS M100 camera it woud keep interrupting downloads especially large videos that would never complete, they would stop after 5 minutes.

If I plug these devices into mainpc I can get the stuff straight off them, not only is it a lot faster to download but there are no silly errors. There is still however one puzzle that is the Nexus 5X that I have not been able to get to connect to anything however. About the best I can possibly hope for is that it might be possible to download a few files at a time using Bluetooth. So that is where I stand at the moment with the Windows 10 computer, that its boot disk will soon be ghosted back onto the Antec with its laptop hard drives and become something that really only gets switched on quite occasionally.

At the same time as having all this trouble with the Windows box I have been having a lot of trouble with my Vodem, which has been a backup device I have used during internet outages and at times when I needed to work around the filtering on the internet connection I have. Working around isn't something I actually do a lot of and normally it is only happening when I need to use FTP as its port is blocked by filtering. The only time I use FTP these days is to maintain the NZ Rail Maps website at nzrailmaps.nz, which has an update backlog at present but is a low maintenance site in general. The vodem has basically stopped working properly. I don't know why this is but when I took the SIM out of it and put that SIM into a spare phone there was no limitation on internet access. I have concluded therefore for being able to use this as a backup internet connection which is hopefully not too often but as I have a large data allowance on my mobile plan, is not too much of a struggle for occasional use. This will have to be achieved by tethering to the phone that has the SIM in it, and in practice either I use a plug in wireless adapter on a computer or a wireless bridge to connect to this new wireless network. Linux has this great advantage over Windows that there won't be heaps of things running in the background that will suck up all your data when running on a metered connection that in this case looks like just another wireless network.

New bits for "old" computers [3]

So since writing last my main achievement has been to complete the Windows 10 PC, and put it in its little corner, along with building the sliding shelf for the scanner to sit on directly above. This means I now have what I needed the most, a scanner that is much easier to access because the shelf it sits on is much lower down, making it easier to lift the lid all the way up, and on a sliding shelf it can be pulled out when needed and slid away when not in use.

If you ever end up wanting to make a sliding shelf with drawer runners (such as a sliding keyboard shelf) the trick which makes them easiest to set up prior to installation is to attach each rail to right angle brackets and then screw the horizontal end of each pair of brackets onto a cross piece made of wood. You then attach the cross piece to the desk, or in this case, using another set of right angle brackets, to the vertical sides of the cabinet the shelf sits inside. The key that makes it really easy is to fully set up the runners with the brackets onto the cross pieces and get the whole thing working before you finally mount it to the desk or cabinet or whatever. So you can get all the runners and rails properly aligned and running smoothly whilst it is still sitting on your work bench. This is far easier than trying to align everything under the desk, which in fact is near lethal if you have to lie on your back and try to hold everything in place while you put in the screws. In fact I near brained myself more than once trying to do this with a previous shelf because it kept falling out because I needed four hands instead of two. Because of having used this system this time the shelf works much better than the last scanner shelf I made, which although it was easy to install at just above floor level, with the side of the desk on one side and a couple of vertical posts on the other, never did work smoothly because of misalignment.

The stack in an old cabinet (which, in fact, used to be a set of drawers bolted underneath the same side of this very desk, not sitting on the floor as now) that has the computer at the bottom and the scanner on top. Look closely and you can see the R/A brackets that attach to the drawer runners, the cross piece of wood, and the brackets attaching the cross piece to the cabinet. Right at the top is another sliding shelf, in this case carrying the MS multimedia keyboard that is permanently plugged in to this computer. For serious work I have a four way KVM plugged into all of the computers that lets me share my main keyboard and mouse with any one of them. Each computer has its own displays - they don't share any.

The next step is to set up the "server". This is another pile of work that only starts with assembling the new chassis. Along the way I have only just realised I need a 2.5" to 3.5" drive bay adapter for the SSD because this time around one wasn't shipped in the package. So temporarily the drive is mounted with one single screw into the side of a 3.5" bay. 

The chassis with the board installed. The board looks tiny inside the mid tower chassis. The bay swung out at right will hold the two HDDs that make up the RAID-1 array. The big bright blue cable is the USB3 backplane bracket adapter that lets me use the onboard USB3 connector for something. However the days are gone when I had one computer with about 12 USB ports on it (I have a 4 port PCIe x1 adapter card as well) because I had only one or two computers and a large number of USB devices. This was the case when my main PC was running Windows because everything had to plug into it: the scanner, the printer, and all the different camera cables and the keyboard, mouse and display USB hub. For various reasons partly because of having boards with more USB ports on them and partly having more computers, six or eight on the back is enough.

So the assembly of the server continues. There are a few more parts to go into the chassis and then it can be powered up and Debian installed. I need that HDD adapter and the extra RAM to finish it, but it will be closer to completion. The shelf it attaches to is a bit of work to adapt as it has to be lowered and new brackets bolted to the side of the desk to hold it in place.

One thing that is annoying about modern SATA cables is the trend for them all to have retaining clips fitted. These only work on the motherboard connectors which have a shroud fitted that the clip locks into, because the HDD has no such shroud. I have found them annoying on MBs because the clip can be hard to release which puts strain on the connector. In the process of taking this board out of the last chassis the strain on the SATA connectors has been too much in my opinion; they aren't particularly solidly attached to the board and could break off if they get flexed too much. So all the SATA cables in this chassis are going to have the retention clips taken off one end. If the HDD can get by without these clips so can the MB.

New bits for "old" computers [2]

The next step in redoing things with computers 3 and 4 has been to strip out the Inwin mini tower chassis and put the mini ITX board (GA-E350) into it for the Windows computer. When I switched the disks over, with the same type of board as the Antec chassis, Windows didn't notice any hardware change. It seems it can only detect a different type of board, not a different serial number of the same board. 

The next job was to transfer Windows itself from the 2.5" laptop HDD which is what the Antec chassis takes, to a regular 3.5" desktop disk. After trying various solutions, the best one I have encountered is Clonezilla, which is a full bootable image tool based on Debian. Simply download the ISO image, flash it to a pen drive, and boot the computer from it. No real tweaking was needed, it was simply configured to clone all of the partitions on the source disk, to the target disk.

Once again on rebooting, this time on the 3.5" disk, Windows 10 came up as expected, with no activation issues, and everything of course right there just as it was before. The irony being this Windows 10 PC is back in the same mini tower chassis albeit with a much lower power motherboard than was the case before, and the last time it was in this chassis was as Windows 10 Enterprise with a volume license key, instead of being the home retail edition as it now is with a license key I have purchased. 

So the next step is to reassemble that chassis and then move it to its new location under the desk on the right hand side, ready to go as the occasionally used Windows 10 computer in the household. The server is the next job. Right now all I have is a bare chassis, which has the fittings attached to the base, but it needs to be cleaned inside and out before I start installing stuff into it. It will have 1 TB of disk in RAID-1 for data, a 128 GB SSD for OS and swap, and 16 GB of RAM which will let it run Qgis VMs well for mapping testing.

Windows 10 downgrade

When I started using Linux I did not know how successful a changeover to it could be. I set up a new computer at the beginning of this year to have Windows 10 on and deemed it worthwhile to have a PC in a space wasting tower case with new hardware to run Windows 10 on because I expected to keep using Windows 10 a lot.

Now it's nearly a year later and I hardly use Windows 10 at all. The most I need to use it for is printing, scanning and downloading photos from my cameras and using IrfanView to edit the camera's images. This is not something I will even turn the computer on once a week for these days. Until very recently I thought I would still need it for graphics editing but having learned Gimp on my Debian desktop in the last month I won't need to use Paint.net at all. I still have some documents I edit in Word but that doesn't need much resources. 

So as I have an old slow AMD E350 mini-ITX in a small chassis available I have decided this will be my Windows 10 computer, and the Home edition (which I am buying a license for) will serve just fine for this purpose. Even though everyone knows MS just forces updates to Windows 10 on you at the drop of a hat, the testing on this older computer shows it will run 10 and the display will work well. I don't need much hardware support for it except for the screen and USB ports, and with the screen I have connected to, the default Windows drivers work well enough. It has 8 USB ports which should be enough as the screen it connects to has another 4 port hub on it. The tower has had a lot of extra USB ports added by me (I think there are 4-6 on the back of the motherboard and a USB 4 port card and a couple of 2 port brackets to connect to the motherboard connectors as well as the two on the front panel and a 2 port USB hub on the monitor) and I don't expect to have such a need of these ports as has been the case when it was used with Windows. There were three or four camera/phone USB cables connected and I don't know if I will keep these all plugged in at once as I have with the tower which is less accessible.

This means I can reclaim that nearly new tower computer for Debian and that's what I working on at the moment. I should get the Windows 10 license I have ordered in a day or two and then I can start setting up the E350 on Windows 10 with the stuff it needs. The tower is going to be a lot better running Debian 10 with a lot of stuff because it has an Intel graphics chipset instead of an older Radeon chipset that there aren't any drivers for any more (either in Windows or Linux) that redraws the screen really slowly. The tower also has room to add more disks in future (it already has two inside) and a removable drive bay like all my computers. There won't be much in the way of local resources on it but should I get into audio recording with some of the great software available on Linux it is possible that it could be used that way. I am planning to evaluate Ardour and a couple of other serious audio packages on it just to see how good they are, as well as Qgis. Mostly it will be testing Debian 10 which is a development release.

More useful Linux software

Obviously one thing you need with an operating system platform is software that will run on it. Every platform has stuff that is produced cross-platform and stuff that is only for its platform, and we constantly have the issue that something we want to run is not available on the platform we use most of the time. It's for this reason many of us using a less well supported platform like Linux desktop or macOS need to keep a computer or at the least a virtualisation software platform running Windows to be able to use some of the software for that platform that we haven't found or can't get an equivalent replacement for. After one year of using Linux I am still using Windows for the automated download of photos from my cameras, scanning and printing software for those two hardware devices, IrfanView for photo editing, MS Office for some functions I haven't got around to seeing if it is possible in OpenOffice, Paint.net because the Linux equivalent Pinta is much less stable, and a few other less used capabilities like DVD ripping, iTunes, syncing another Google drive for personal files (rather than the maps on MainPC), etc. I am sure with a lot of hard work I could eliminate the need for any Windows computer for all these things but it only cost about $300 to build that new computer from scratch although I will have to buy a Win10 license for it someday. A VM would have trouble running some of those HW dependent software apps. This computer only needs one screen and can be used if I need a third screen for some other function I am doing on mainPC to which it is networked.

As the comment about Paint.net reveals sometimes what looks like and should be a direct replacement is not of good quality. Unfortunately there is a lot of software on Linux that doesn't live up to its promise, whether because development has been abandoned or inadequately resourced. I don't want to knock a lot of software or say it is the open source model that causes this because that would be patently untrue, however it remains an issue that lack of widespread adoption of Linux desktop means we are really grandparenting off the massive adoption of Linux server or using software that has a Linux port from some other platform or is natively developed for Linux desktop and then ported to other platforms. Qgis is an example of some very good software that starts on Linux and has been ported to Unix, Windows and macOS and I started using it on Windows and then switched to using it on Linux. I'm happy to say the experience on Linux was at least as good as Windows, only the issue that the packages install folder can't easily be configured (maybe there is a way around this I don't know about yet) precluding multiple installations has been a concern, this is the price you pay for being able to upgrade to a new edition painlessly and automatically by just typing a command into a terminal window. The build from source option I have employed to have two versions running on my Debian desktop hasn't been too difficult. Qgis has the great benefit of being well supported and stable despite the at times appearance of slow evolution and resolution of issues. Much of the graphics and video editing software I have tested on Linux tends to be unstable and more often than not this is a consequence of poor design in that the programmers have not anticipated and coded for possible error situations in a way that allows the software to recover, so it just crashes instead.

The aim of this post today is to write about some more software tools for the Linux platform that I have adopted recently. As a result of becoming a webmaster recently for nzrailmaps.nz I had to find software that would allow me to edit and maintain my site. With no custom site builder integrated at trainnweb.org it's back to using a desktop graphical editor or a specialised text editor GUI and separate FTP software to sync updates to the web server. I spent a lot of time looking for and trying several GUI editors before finding Seamonkey for Windows, which for some reason is not available as .deb packages for Linux and is hard to install for that platform, examining and rejecting it due to its apparent lack of CSS support and a few other issues like clunky design. Because these days due to the rise of free web host sites like Google Sites and many others which have sitebuilders integrated into them there is not much call for basic GUI web editors these days and not many people writing them. I came to the conclusion it was far easier to use a specialised text editor with HTML / CSS templates built into it, of which there are a great many more produced due to the fact they can work with a whole lot of different coding languages and environments. Editing HTML in a text editor is not very hard and it's something I have plenty of experience with. So Bluefish is the editor of choice, very stable and useful. The FTP software for now is FileZilla, something I remember from Windows, and quite suitable for a small site, you have to manually browse to each directory and select the files to upload, though it does have a capability to highlight which directories or files have been updated. 

Another type of software I am experimenting with is seeing if there is a better email client than Thunderbird. Really the only realistic alternative out there that is not tied to some other package like (for example) the Seamonkey browser is Evolution, which is interesting as it is rare for non-MS software platforms to support Exchange (there is only a proprietary Exchange plugin available for Thunderbird). I have installed Evolution on MainPC and set it up to access a few lower priority or soon-to-close email accounts for now. As it has been noted in the past that Outlook has issues with Imap support it will be interesting to see if Evolution is significantly better in this regard and also how it handles Google calendars etc. Evolution used to be cross-platform but is now Linux-only. It was started by Ximian/Novell and is now commercially developed by RedHat and is obviously beneficial to their wider interest of commercial deployment of Linux for corporate environments, but still has an open source free variant that can be downloaded and installed automatically by apt.

As long as there is a lot of software for Linux, which I have no reason to doubt, it will continue to be a very useful desktop platform, but I can't see that Windows desktop disappearing any time soon. Although some Windows software has been ported to Linux using the mono adaption of .NET, I have generally felt that it is not as good as native software, although this could just be a perception. I have found both Pinta and FlickrDownloadr which are built on Mono, to be not very stable or well developed pieces of software, but this could be just a perception rather than a limitation of the platform.

Qgis map development

So as announced on my maps blog I am working to wind the maps project up by the end of this year and I am writing a series of articles that will be published in this timeframe. They will cover the Otago Central Railway but I am working concurrently on updating several different sections of the maps.

As far as general map editing goes with aerial photos I have to use a Windows based edition of Qgis because of there being problems with the Linux edition not being able to load all the aerial photos at once. The Qgis team claims this is a Linux limitation, which I doubt. It may be a limitation of whatever cross platform development system they are using.

I have been using my Windows 10 PC to do this but it has been very slow work and unfortunately I have come to the conclusion this is because the computer's screens are off to one side and I have to work sideways and this slows me down. I can't afford to have this time loss when drawing maps so I am updating a Windows 7 VirtualBox on my main computer so that I can do the maps on this one, it can be given the same 8 GB of memory that the physical computer has. 

The version of Qgis installed on this computer will be 2.99.0-9 (the Windows version number for an earlier development master that doesn't have the major issues that some of the more recent development masters have). There are quite a few advantages to using a VM on my mainpc as all of the other resources needed to do the maps are local to it and they can all be loaded on the mainpc while the Win7 VM is running in just another application window. This is how I do some work already with other VMs running older or different versions of Qgis on different Xubuntu releases.

One issue of both VMs and a physical Windows 10 computer is accessing the map data over the network from MainPC. I helped speed things up on the Win10 computer by putting all the aerial photos into a local drive instead of having them loaded over the network as well. I will set up the Win7 VM with a separate virtual disk for this specific purpose. Of course MainPC's disk space is all being used up with the demands of this project. It has 2 TB of disk space and scary as it would seem that is three quarters used up as of now. Once this project is completed I expect I can recover space by deleting some of the resources like aerial photos as it will be a major expense to add bigger disks as not only would the two disks in the computer have to be replaced but also the two removable backup disks as well. The other option is to move all the music and videos to the mediapc as they are essentially being duplicated on this computer.

The Win7 vbox took a bit of work to set up and make work with two virtual screens and copying the aerial photos across and loading them. It took quite a lot longer to load them than I expected but once it was up and running it has been very easy to do the maps on this computer so it is working well.

MS releases locked down Windows 10 S

Win 10 S is the Windows 10 version of Windows RT. Windows RT was a limited version of Windows 8 designed for the ARM platform that could only run apps from the Windows Store, not full desktop applications that were hardcoded to the Win32 API in regular editions of Windows.

The idea of Win 10 S has not been well received by parts of the developer community who accuse MS of locking down Windows and turning it into a less open platform.

To which the obvious reply is to take a closer look at supporting Linux as the platform of choice in years to come.

• https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/03/tim-sweeney-to-microsoft-universal-windows-platform-can-should-must-and-will-die/

Windows 10 Store apps for everyday things

Last time I wrote about becoming a broadbandless household for a while. Since then I have set up the Nanobridge permanently, in that it is located in a different room of the house, and is cabled back to the main network switch in a very neat and tidy way. This involved a lot of work to put its cable through a wall and the back of the kitchen cabinets. The bonus was being able to aim it properly and get a much stronger, and therefore faster, signal.

For my data plan I got a Vodem set up with a tablet share SIM onto a Windows 10 computer that isn't used for anything else much except playing music videos. The Vodem plugs into a USB port on this computer and I decided to install the Windows 10 apps for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. As compared with the ideas I have had about running Instagram in an Android emulator under Windows, the native app for Windows 10 works very well but doesn't allow posting. Since RemixOS has its share of issues and I haven't been much bothered with attempting to get it working properly, I have just stuck with reading Instagram on the PC and doing posting with a phone or tablet - because you can compose a post in advance using Google Docs and then paste it on the phone or tablet - instead of having to type it on the handheld.

So on Windows 10 everything looks really good on this computer. The best thing about plugging in a Vodem is that everything that uses network traffic in the background on the computer stops when it is connected. So it doesn't suck up my data. Windows 10 is clever enough to realise I don't have a lot of data to play with on a cellular connection. Actually I burned through my phone data allocation without realising it the first time I tethered one of my computers to my phone because Google Drive was running and I didn't know it was going to download a whole lot of stuff onto my computer. So that was 5 GB gone in just a few minutes. The answer to that on Wifi (which is what a tether looks like to a computer, which can't tell the connection is different from regular Wifi) is to set the Wifi connection as a metered network. That works in a similar way to limit unnecessary traffic on the connection.

RemixOS android emulation

Well about a week ago I was writing about my experiences with Android x86. That particular OS runs reasonably well in a VM on Linux, but on my Windows computer I couldn't achieve anything with it because apparently of the hardware virtualisation limit. So then I upgraded the computer to one that does full virtualisation and I tried again. But I also tried a different Android package - I tried RemixOS, which is far superior to Android x86, being a lot more refined in many aspects.

There are three ways you can run RemixOS:

• In a virtual machine
• As a native install (hard disk or pen drive)
• As an emulator (Remix OS Player)

The native install as a pen drive has been the least successful method so far - giving me the Android startup messages, but then stopping at a black screen with just a mouse pointer visible. In a virtual machine (Virtualbox) on Windows 10, I have only got the Guest mode to work so far (no data saved) while the Resident mode throws error messages and never reaches the home screen. The Player experience has been similar to the virtual machine Guest mode, except that data does persist. Both experiences to date are far superior to Android x86. 

RemixOS isn't just another basic emulation of Android on a desktop - it has adopted some well known GUI elements like a desktop, a taskbar and a start menu as its shell. The result is something that is far easier to use than Android x86. 

That said, Remix is pretty new and there are still a few glitches. Right now with Instagram, I can browse my newsfeed, but can't post anything - selecting an image crashes it. So the Remix people still have a few things to fix on what is actually version 1.0 of their player. The VM run with Resident Mode working is something I am still tweaking to see if I can get that working properly as well, but I would expect it wouldn't be better than the player, so I am going to focus on the player and that means talking to the Remix people about any fixes they can create to address the crashes.

Windows 10, yay :)

One year after ditching Windows 10 I have bitten the bullet and put together a new system to run it. It becomes more difficult as time goes on, for various reasons, to buck the shift to Win10, but having had to take this challenging step, it still won't be the main computer that I do most of my work on everyday. And having made that decision to have it as the operating system for the token Windows computer in the household, the question has then naturally been whether to keep running it on a crippled low-spec system or to find something better. 

That something better is a new Gigabyte GA-H110-S2H Skylake motherboard with the low-end Intel H110 chipset, a low-end Pentium G 4400 dual core CPU, and 8 GB of DDR-4 RAM. I have put into it one of the existing NVidia NV210SL low cost dual head graphics cards that I had for my computers; and although it uses a low spec chipset it is still capable of having 32 GB of RAM installed. So having mentioned previously that there was this problem with a computer called a DG41RQ that I built about five years ago, I obviously wanted to be sure this computer wasn't going to have the same limitations as that lemon. The pair of GA-E350s that I bought have been limited as well, but I had more of an appreciation of their restrictions at the time when I purchased them. They have achieved a lot considering they were just put together to give me a basic system I could use as a remote access client and some other low demand stuff at work. Unfortunately it has turned out that they don't support virtualisation properly and that has always been an important issue. There is no way in the last 10 years I would have bought a system that didn't support virtualisation because these days most hypervisors of any sort (including software based systems like VirtualBox and VMWare, as well as baremetal hypervisors like Hyper-V) require it installed especially for 64 bit clients. There is also the issue that AMD has dropped support for the video chipset in the E350s - having phased the chipset out of production they stopped making new drivers as quickly as they could.

So with this new system I expect it will be good for 10 years because I don't like forking out for new hardware when there are plenty of better things to spend money on and having three computers on my desk, when they all have relatively high specs, is hard enough to justify. Because the Intel H110 chipset and the Pentium G CPUs may be considered somewhat low spec (and certainly low in cost) but in actuality have heaps of performance, especially with 8 GB or more of RAM installed. It's running Windows 10, which is more efficient with hardware resources than some of its predecessors. And it won't be running a lot of intensive demanding software because those kinds of tasks happen on my main PC with its 24 GB of RAM. The choice of the H110 chipset and Pentium G are based on my contention that the pricing for a lot of computer hardware such as Core i3, i5 or i7 CPUs is outrageously high for the extra performance they supposedly bring, and lots of people are conned into paying for these models of CPU that they will never use the extra power of. 

The Win10 edition is Pro, and that is what I will use for the long term. Installation was quite pain free, and it is the latest release version, so it hasn't had to put in many updates so far. It will take me a few days to set everything up on it and transfer the data from the old Win8.1 installation. But it looks good already.

Linux So Far [3]

Well the household still has 3 PCs - but they are all in the same room now. The idea is that I can drive the display in the lounge off a bedroom PC using VGA over Cat5 adapters and a wireless keyboard / mouse, and this means I can cap the number of the computers in the house at three while making maximum use of them all the time. That has benefits to me in the bedroom where I do most of my computing, as it means I can go back to having the two best computers both running Xubuntu (one for general work and one just for video playback) and just a small lower powered computer doing the occasional Windows tasks (scanner and cameras, DVD ripping, some image editing and stuff like that).

Bluetooth is one of the features in Xubuntu that is nicely implemented. I bought this dodgy USB bluetooth adapter a couple of weeks ago called a Bluemate 4. The problem was that the (Windows) software runs in evaluation mode and doesn't actually come with a license. Apparently the answer to this problem is to buy the Bluemate 5 which does come with a license and sells for the same price. As it turns out when I took the adapter out of the Windows computer and put it into a Xubuntu PC, the built in bluetooth in Xubuntu worked straight out of the box and lets me do file transfers to my tablet, which is all I really wanted it for, just fine. Kudos to the retailer (Ascent) for giving me a credit on the price of it as well. It sort of makes up for that Dick Smith gift card being dishonoured at the beginning of this year when they went into receivership.

So putting Xubuntu back on the Ivy Bridge (B75) computer was as usual really fast once it could be booted - sometimes the boot gets hung up, or you have to try UEFI boot, or the regular boot, just whatever works. And that computer will be hooked up to the little TV I have in that room, and it will also be connected on its VGA output from the 2 head $50 video card it has, to the display in the lounge, which at the moment is an old one that only has VGA inputs.  But sound could still be an issue and I have to figure out whether to get a converter that also puts sound down the same cable.

The tricky question is where to put the satellite set top box when it gets installed in a week or two. In the bedroom where I do the most watching, or in the lounge where it is nicer to sit on the couch? If it has only HDMI output, can it be adapted to VGA easily?

UPDATE: Well the latest solution has been a lot more radical and that was to move the computer desk out of the bedroom and into the living room. I found the idea of linking between rooms with cable to be relatively impractical and also the satellite box will be in the living room so it makes sense to bring everything together in one place. Still waiting on the satellite TV company to arrange the install and will be chasing them up this week to see where it has got to.

Is Apple abandoning the professional creative marketplace?

The idea that Apple might seek to abandon the professional market segment altogether having decided to focus on the consumer marketplace has gained ground with the focus of their recent product updates becoming clearer. In fact this trend has been obvious for some time with a growing range of pro/business equipment being dropped over the last decade.

I have more than a passing interest in this segment of the IT marketplace due to the interface of my musical interests with education and church scenarios over many years. Due to the previous efforts made by Apple to support professional music production, Apple hardware is very prevalent in many educational settings particularly classroom music suites, and also in church settings where these days contemporary worship environments are making major use of their products.

The trend is obvious however that Apple has been losing interest in the professional end of the marketplace for some considerable time. In one sense this is welcome as it has been blindingly obvious for some time that the snobbery and elitism that seems to be inherent in the choice of Apple hardware by default (and the willingness to fork out large sums of money for the nice bells and whistles unquestioningly) has, unfortunately, carried over to Christian circles where the self serving aspects of Apple's business model are something we should be more willing to challenge, and it is most regrettable that I have had people in church circles attempt to paint Apple gear as inherently superior and better than anything else out there.

The main interest Apple has these days is making a lot of money and the trends in hardware have seen Apple gear not only become more expensive over time, but sacrifice serviceability as well. Witness that it is now virtually impossible to make any user upgrades to the Macbook laptops, while the Mac Pro is frozen in time to 2013 in hardware spec and lacks internal expansion capabilities; and that the newer versions of the Imac are basically impossible for anyone other than the repair centre to open up for service as they are similar to a tablet in design and manufacture. All of this serviceability sacrificed in the name of superior visual elegance in the form of thinner, lighter product means they are very expensive to repair and once out of warranty may in fact be considered almost throwaway due to the high costs of servicing.

Leaving that aside it is now time to focus on viable alternatives. These are of course Windows and Linux. By and large it appears the mainstream commercial focus has shifted to Windows, but MS's attempts since Windows 10 to maximise revenue by virtually taking over the control of the computer from the end user (witness the default update settings which are to MS's convenience rather than user's, which cannot be turned off in the Home editions and which in the Pro and higher editions are deliberately hidden from the Start Menu user interface) have alienated many expert users such as myself, which is why almost all my computers now run Xubuntu. However there is a growing base of commercial creative software being produced and in schools the Windows alternative to the likes of GarageBand and even Logic has been achieved with packages like Mixcraft and a lot more besides. Adobe shifted its focus to Windows some years ago and has a very good range of software now available for the platform, and a lot of worship presentation packages are well supported on both platforms.

Linux is a bit of a dark horse when it comes to the pro-creative market segment but is steadily gaining ground - my views must be tempered with the reality that I have not actually been involved in production activities at any level except for worship multimedia presentation. Hence I am reliant on the knowledge that the operating system's customisability to an extent virtually impossible with Windows or macOS giving the ability to ensure high stability and reliability is what attracts growing support from segments of the music community and in fact there are two particular distros that are now produced, AVLinux and KXStudio, that are aimed squarely at the needs of musical creatives. It is a verifiable fact that Linux is now extensively used in motion picture production studios as the OS of choice for the big commercial hardware vendors like IBM and HP who produce the hardware of choice for movie production. This started with graphics rendering and Linux is steadily making inroads into other areas like video editing. One big advantage for Linux is its overall compatibility with Unix which was the previous market leader for the high end hardware needed at this level of production. meaning a lot of the software used has been readily ported over.

The biggest advantage Linux has is its ability to run on virtually the same hardware as PCs, something Apple has missed with their reversion to hardware lockdown since the clone Macs were discontinued in the mid 1990s. Since there is not that much difference between macOS and Windows it will be relatively easy for Apple to exit the desktop marketplace and switch its entire focus to laptops and handheld devices. It only remains therefore for its professional segment fans to find something else that will meet their requirements for the future. I think that future is very likely to be in Linux/x86.

Linux So Far [2]

Obviously a bugbear of any platform is that the software you want to run isn't always available for the platform and these days it is not unusual to have several computers running multiple platforms if you are a power user. I have had to maintain at least one Windows computer since I switched to Linux, but there is no way I would ever go back to solely Windows because there is so much good software available for Linux now that I have discovered it. Because there are technical limitations with virtualisation, having a physical computer box running Windows is essential rather than a VM, or the other way around.

As a result of identifying the preference to downsize the household to three computers instead of the five that it had up until very recently, it has been determined that the Intel DB75EN is the best hardware to be running the Windows computer on, rather than AMD E350 and this also enables one computer to be eliminated in the household. Recently also I have removed the second computer from the living room as longer term the expectation is a single small form factor HTPC will be the sole requirement there.

The DB75EN will be running Windows 8.1 indefinitely and will have the scanner and camera software installed as well as an Android emulator to enable it to be used with Instagram, and at this stage the Windows versions of Kodi and VLC will be installed along with a media library. It can also run Cobian Backup for all the backups that I do. I will be looking at which computer can run video editing software. After testing BlueStacks Android Emulator, I found it was difficult to use on my PC (which is a pretty powerful beast with 12 GB of RAM), so I uninstalled it and put Leapdroid on it, which has been much more useful with Instagram. However there have still been problems with all Instagram functionality being available so as far as I am concerned the use of the Android emulator to post Instagram content is severely limited and I will be going back to my original plan to buy an Android tablet instead.

The number of screens will be changed to two for each computer (the main PC had three up until this point, but there is no real need for the third one), and two of those screens will have a resolution of 1920x1080, the other two will be 1680x1050. The Xubuntu PC has the two screens side by side in landscape mode as usual; the Windows PC has the screens stacked vertically, with the lower screen at 1680x1050 being in a portrait orientation, and the upper screen at 1920x1080 being in the usual landscape orientation. The orientation of the lower screen works better in some situations such as editing documents or viewing Instagram content in a web browser because of the way some of these apps are optimised for vertical form factors such as a typical smart phone. With the second screen on this computer horizontal I have a choice of both form factors depending on need.

UPDATE: Well there have been problems with Kodi or VLC on Windows when playing Matroska format video files which are what I can produce with AviDemux when splitting DVD video files into tracks (can't save MP4). Basically at a certain point of playback (this varies for each video but is always the same location for a particular clip) the video would stop momentarily and then resume itself a few seconds later, the sound also skipped. After trying lots of tweaks I decided I could just install Kodi onto my main PC and reconnect the TV to it as a third screen (since it has a quad head video card). So Kodi works better on Linux without giving these problems. So now I have one computer with three screens and one computer with one screen and that is how it is going to stay for now.

Bits and Pieces

Old server or desktop chassis make great little tables to put stuff on next to your desk. So that I don't spill that drink on my keyboard while I am writing my assignments. It is another step along the way in getting everything set up in the house the way it needs to be. The living room is looking a lot better with things getting put in the right place and made tidy. This has been pushed along in a big way this week because I have started my studies for this semester and need to have everything set up for this. The bedroom is also getting a makeover as an alternate study location and I am making a keyboard slide to go under the desk there. It will also need a 2nd computer running Windows to work with the scanner so I have fitted a screen mount post to the side of the desk. That means both the bedroom and the living room will have two PCs each. I have a couple of old USB KVMs to mount under each desk to switch the keyboard and mouse (but not the screen) between computers. Each computer has its own screen(s) rather than switching them through the KVM. This is because the KVM can only switch one screen, which is useless if you have more than one, and because these KVMs only have VGA connectors. I am using Logitech Mk270r wireless keyboard/mouse sets at both locations.

MS is apparently releasing Windows 10 for the Nokia Lumia 635 Real Soon Now. Vodafone in other parts of the world has released it to their customers, but I suppose little old NZ will be last in line as usual. It will be interesting to see if Cortana is still vapourware for NZ or whether MS have pulled their finger out and got it out the door this time. I'm not too bothered as I am not going to use my Lumia unless there is a much wider range of apps released for it. Win10 is supposed to cater for this by allowing Android apps to be released for Phone, although only if they are recompiled under the Win10 platform. MS should have gone the whole way and embedded the Android APIs but I suppose there would still be a problem of where to source apps, so I suppose this makes more sense.

I have found that Ubiquiti 802.11n Unifi access points can give faster speeds than the wireless router that Vodafone supplied me with. So a UAP is installed in the right place to beam a signal out to the sleepout and also provide the wireless for the house, in place of the Netcomm router, which is reduced to being a gigabit switch and DHCP server. The computer in the sleepout uses a Edimax 802.11ac USB wireless adapter. Although the access point isn't working on 802.11ac, it doesn't really matter because the line speed on my home broadband connection is only a maximum of 50 Mbps which is well within its capabilities.

Vodafone have at last brought the cost of tablet share down to zero in a special promotion lasting until the end of July. I have been pretty tightfisted about this but I just don't see why I should have to pay $10/month extra for the tablet share plan when I can tether the tablet to my phone for no extra cost. The tablet share SIM will go into a Vodem for my tablet as it doesn't have a sim slot of its own.

The "main" PC is getting a memory upgrade. As running a lot of open browser tabs gobbles up the memory, I am getting another 8 GB for it, which will take it up to 20 GB. I will have to also resize the partitions on the SSD to bring the swap partition up to 40 GB to match. The computer's motherboard was specially selected by me because it is capable of addressing 32 GB with four DIMM slots.