Category: Featured

Review: Blu Dash 4.5

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I don’t normally do cell phone reviews. But, when I was looking, the Blu line of products seems to be underreviewed. Many of the news sources that mention Blu seem to be merely quoting their press release. Few reviews of the actual product.

Blu, which is a Miami based company, has been in business since 2009 and makes a variety of phones whose specifications are on par with those made by the better known manufacturers, but whose prices are well below. The company sells phones primarily in Latin America. In the U.S., you’ll find them on online retailers such as Amazon and Newegg.

The Blu Dash 4.5 runs near stock 4.2 Jellybean. It has 4GB of internal storage, and 512mb of RAM. It has, as the name suggests, a 4.5″ TFT LCD screen with 480×854 resolution. The processor is a Mediatek Quad-Core 1.2 Ghz. It comes with a screen protector, charger, and case.

It comes in 2 variants. 850/1900 and 850/2100, HSPA+ 21Mbps.

So, those are the specs. The design is fairly standard. It has three hardware buttons…Back, Menu, and Home. The oddest thing about it is the fact that the charging port is on the top, next to the headphone jack.

For a budget phone, it is great. The phone isn’t as powerful as some, and that shows, but for most functions, it is more than adequate. As I write this, I’ve only used it over a weekend, and I plan to give it a few more days.

So far, it has performed all of the functions I would normally do with a phone. I rarely watch video on my phone, but aside from some issues with audio sync at resolutions higher than the screen resolution, it did it all.

Each year, the phones get bigger, the screen resolution gets higher, the processor gets faster, and so on. There are phones with higher specifications, even ones from Blu, but from the looks of it, these are value products.

There is one more aspect of the phone…reception. This is the hardest one. I’m a Verizon customer primarily. I bought a T-Mobile prepaid SIM for testing. T-Mobile uses the 1900MHz spectrum for its GSM service, and is moving its HSPA+ to this frequency. Its HSPA+ network is mostly on the 1700MHz band, which the phone doesn’t support. But since New York City, where I live has mostly been moved, I’ve gotten consistent service at 3G speeds. But, lacking another phone to compare it to, I may not be able to best evaluate this.

Will follow up after more time with the phone.

 

Why CDN.net Intrigues Me

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CDN.net logo

CDN.net is the latest pay per use CDN I’ve been using. Pay Per Use is the best option if you want to manage your costs.

We were with CDN77 for a while, which offered a flat rate $49/tb service. But the level of service was not one that I was thrilled with. I felt as if they didn’t understand my questions and weren’t interested in working with me.

CDN.net is actually one of two fairly new pay per use CDNs based on the OnApp federated CDN. It essentially uses spare capacity on various servers to offer CDN services. The other is CDNify, which uses a flat rate $49/tb service fee.

CDN.net is more of a marketplace. You can pick your CDN locations out of their available options and customize the package. When I started with them, you needed a free trial to see their pricing, but they’ve recently changed that. Their pricing is a variable rate, based on location. So, you can route your data through Salt Lake City at less than 2 cents a GB, or through Chelyabinsk for 1 dollar a GB.

Your rate is locked in until you update your package…which means if the price goes down in one price, and up in another, you have a hard decision to make. I’m sorry to any Chelyabinsk readers, but you’ll have to wait an extra second or two to be served. I’m not paying that rate.

I like the idea of this choice, but sometimes the results are surprising compared to where statistics report my users are. Analytics suggests that many of my users are in the Eastern United States, but I’m running more data through Dallas than New York. But it is never that simple.

But no one is writing about CDN.net or CDNify. No reviews that I could find. Only early startup announcements.

So, I set up a test for both. I had no problem with performance between the two. But, they are using the same backend. CDNify had some report issues in their free trial, but they fixed that quickly after I advised.

CDN.net, which I ultimately settled on, has answered all of my questions…although they do not seem to respond on weekends. One of their people even invited me to chat.

CDNs are necessary to reduce load from your own server and speed loading of static assets. CDN.net is still new, and there are more things I hope they do in the future. They also believe that they can offer lower prices as they grow their user base, as the cost would be spread out.

In terms of services, I would like to see improvements to their reporting mechanisms, but they have made changes, so I’ll see what happens.

You can go for a free trial here.

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Lightweight Server Monitoring

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Collectd Architecture Schematic

I recently began a move of the Gadget Wisdom and related sites to a new server. The purpose of this was laying the infrastructure for a major upgrade.

One of the major pushes was upgrading monitoring features. Some of the software being used was no longer being maintained, and replacements had to be found.

Nagios and Munin are two of the most popular tools used by IT specialists for infrastructure monitoring. There are good reasons that I opted for something more lightweight though. There are dozens of monitoring tools, and it is quite overwhelming to choose one. These are two that I have been happy with so far.

One of the first ones I installed is collectd. Collectd is a tool that stores performance data. It is plugin based, which means it can be used to pipe into a variety of different pieces of software. So, it is incredibly extensible, which leaves room for future data gathering and future output. It is also incredibly lightweight, which has its advantages.

To output the data into graphs, I’m using a simple front-end called Jarmon for now. Jarmon downloads the files generated by collectd, and renders them on the client side.

The second is a monitoring tool called monit. Monit monitors various services to ensure they are up, and can take action if they go down, such as sending an alert, restarting a service, executing a script, etc. One of the most fun things about having alerts is reading them…and in many cases, knowing I don’t have to do anything, because I told monit to do it for me.

There will be more to come on this, but what do you use in similar situations?

Thinking about RAID vs Backup

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Six hard disk drives with cases opened showing...

The cost of storage hit a low the last time it was time for a storage upgrade. Then prices shot through the roof after a flood in Thailand closed factories.

This shut down all of my hard drives purchases for over two years. When I emerged from my cocoon, Samsung was gone as a Hard Drive manufacturer…and I had bought many Samsung OEM hard drives.

The purpose of RAID in a redundant system is to protect against hardware failure. You have different levels of RAID for this, RAID 1 for just a straight mirror, and RAID 5 and 6, which involve a minimum of 3-4 drives to accomplish.

RAID is important if you care about uptime. If you can afford to be down for a bit, backups are a better choice.

What is being stored, in this case, consists of several categories: Video, Music, Documents, Configuration Files. There is no point in storing complete drive images. The OS can be reinstalled, and it probably will be better off and cleaner running after it is. The OS drive on all of the systems I’ve built or refurbed in the last two years is an SSD, which is a common practice nowadays.

I had been mulling this after reading an article on another hardware refresh by Adam Williamson. He hadn’t refreshed in seven and a half years and used a separate NAS and server. So, why refresh after only two and a half years? Partly it was due to mistakes.

I’d been using WD Green drives. These had several limitations. They park the head after only 8 seconds of inactivity, which increased the load cycle count. The WD Red Drive is designed for 24/7 operation in network attached storage, with a longer warranty, and I now have two 3TB drives. The only other alternative in WD’s stable was a Black drive, their performance drive. It might be time to consider a Seagate, the main competitor, as well.

The warranty situation in hard drives now continues to drop. Five years, down to thee, and down to two years. So there is less protection from the manufacturer and less inclination to create quality products. That was why we were buying OEM over Consumer Drives over the last few years.

Back to the subject at hand…why not a RAID? It is simply a matter of cost vs. benefit. This is terabytes of video data, mostly a DVD archive I intend to create by backing up my DVD collection to MKV. If it were lost, the original copies aren’t going anywhere. But, more importantly, cloud backup is impractical.

Using Amazon S3, for example, at a rate of 9.5 cents a GB, that is just under $100 a month per TB. Amazon Glacier, which is their long-term backup option, is 1 cent a GB, or roughly $10 a TB. But once you take video out of the equation, or sharply reduce it, budgeting $5 a month for important data is a reasonable amount, and still gets you a lot of storage options to work with.

So, to ensure redundancy, there is a second drive in the system, and backups will be done to it. From there, the backups of everything but the video store will be sent up to the cloud. As I’ve mostly given up buying DVDs(due to Blu-Ray), the collection should be fairly static.

Back to Adam Williamson, he had a great idea of having the other computers on the network back up their data to the server, independently isolated by each machine having a separate user account on the server. Not quite there yet, but sounds good. I have other plans to download data from my cloud service providers(Google, Dropbox, etc., and maintain a local backup, but that is a longer-term project. I’m reasonably certain in the interim, Google has a better backup system then I do.

What about off-site then? I still have the old 1TB Green Drives. They can be run through diagnostics, loaded up as a backup, and sent off to a relative’s house…I’ve added a hard drive dock through an E-SATA port to support this.

So in the end, RAID wasn’t necessary for me, but some redundancy was. It may be for you. Comments?

More to come…

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Chrome OS without Google

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English: Main logo and icon for the open sourc...

I have spent a good deal of time with Chrome OS and the Chromebook. The one troubling thing about it is not that it is an operating system in a web browser. You know that going in. It is Google.

Recent events have made all of us a bit wary about Google Services, while still using them. When Google recently launched Google Keep, a decent service in its own right, no one trusted it. Before the Reader debacle, the Google enthusiasts would try it. Now, many are afraid to love a new service.

GigaOm picked up on a feature request for the Chromium OS, the Open-Source version of ChromeOS. The feature would establish an API to allow for extensions to integrate into the file manager, allowing cloud services other than Google Drive to act as ‘drives’ inside the file manager.

Elsewhere, in the Chromium Project, there is a reference to using Chromium without a Google login, but so far, even on the open-source project, you need Google. But, one can ask…if you are going to do Chrome without Google…what’s the point? You might as well run a full-fledged OS.

Years ago, computer design was based on ‘dumb terminals’ and powerful servers. Today’s computers are significantly more powerful than those ‘powerful’ servers. But the truth is that many of us now would rather be able to access identical experiences on multiple devices. But, products like Owncloud prove that while we may wish these things, we want more control and certainty about them. We want control.

Will be looking to see more in this direction. Free services versus Paid Services vs Self-Hosted services. Would welcome your thoughts on this, and what areas you think are worth exploring.

 

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Running Personal Services on a Low End VPS

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For those of us who like to tinker with client/server software for personal or household, there are many good options. You can use a Raspberry Pi as a server, for example. You can use an old computer.

Both of these would have services running out of your home or business. But, as we are an increasingly mobile society, you might not have good upstream bandwidth, or your ISP may block ports into your home. So, that is where a low-end VPS offering comes in.

ChicagoVPS.netWe chose ChicagoVPS, which offers a $12/year 128mb VPS, with 10GB of storage space and 100GB of monthly bandwidth. That is more than enough for personal use. They offer three locations: Chicago, Buffalo, or LA. There are similar services averaging around $12-15 a year.

This is not the sort of service where you expect a lot of reliability. The service has had some hiccups,  but as long as you backup and take adequate steps you should on any service, there shouldn’t be any problem.

On a 128mb instance, I have Tiny Tiny RSS running, as well as ZNC, and a few other random services that I only use for my own personal interests.

What do you think? Do you have any other recommendations for a tiny VPS? Do you have alternative providers you recommend for cheap VPS services?

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Reader Refugees – The Death of Google Reader

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English: Screenshot application of google read...

It has been a long two weeks since Google announced the death of Google Reader. This left many people scrambling for new solutions as the clock countdowns to its shutdown on July 1st, 2013.

 

There are many alternatives out there of various types. Feedly, for example, has been working on a Reader alternative that uses the same API. The service is also working to offer more Reader like features to welcome the over half a million Reader Refugees. They seem very determined to be the new Reader, and are even welcoming those interested in their API-compatibility to enable their applications to keep working.

 

For me, however, this was too fancy. Most of us who are interested in replacing Reader emphasize text. We want the experience of a newspaper, not a magazine. Most Readers use the traditional Inbox style of receiving, akin to email programs. The information is the most important part.

 

For this, I skipped over TheOldReader, which was designed to mimic the original Google Reader design, and went straight to two open source projects.

 

Newsblur

newsblur

 

 

 

 

Newsblur is the brainchild of Samuel Clay. In addition to the standard Inbox display, it allows you to view the original site in context, or the feed version. It also offers options for sharing a feed of what you find most interesting with others, and teaching the application what you find interesting, so it will highlight that. Newsblur offers a public API for people to build on, and the entire codebase is open source.

 

There is an Android app, and Clay is looking for an Android developer, but complaints of crashes, as it is an open-source project, were quickly cleaned up by a volunteer. There is also an iOS app.

 

The exciting thing is that with the renewed interest, Clay is ramping up. A new host for the service, more robust infrastructure, and more.

 

Newsblur can be installed by you as a standalone product, or you can pay for their hosted service, currently at $24/year.

 

Tiny Tiny RSS

tt-rss

Tiny Tiny RSS(TT-RSS) is another open-source project. Like Newsblur, it offers an API, a web interface, and an Android app. There are no hosted options for this, so you have to roll your own, which is what I did, using a Low-End VPS.

It can run on simple hardware, out of your home or on rented space.

Conclusion

 

The truth is, if you host your own solution, you can be reasonably sure it will continue to be there(as long as you keep paying the bills).

But there is something to be said for having someone else worry about it, as well as supporting the developer. So, even though I’ve settled into TT-RSS(and gave the developer the $2 for the Android app), I paid for a year of Newsblur so I could see how it develops. I never considered self-hosting of a Newsblur instance.

Next, I’ll spend a little time on where I’m hosting TT-RSS and why.

 

 

 

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Reflecting on Life with a Chromebook

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Acer Chromebook C7

A week ago, we announced a product review challenge. Spending time with a Chromebook to see if it could be our daily driver. Let’s review the conditions of our challenge. We’d use the device in lieu of our primary productivity machine. So, we’d still have our Android phone for what we used it for. So, it wasn’t the ‘only’ thing used.

Let’s go over a few areas…

Mail

Most mail services have a webmail option, so this isn’t an issue. We use Google Apps mail for our primary address anyway, which is browser based.

Social Networking

We’ve never been able to find a Twitter client we really liked anyway, so using web based ones wasn’t any better or worse. Facebook and Google Plus are web-based anyway, so no difference there.

Chat and IRC

There are no good Chrome extensions for IRC. But most IRC servers have a web client. Will do in a pinch. For chat, we tried a few options. The Chat by Google extension is nice, but only supports one account. We have two, a personal and a business account. So we tried Imo.im, Trillian, etc. Imo.im, nicely, supports desktop notifications.

Productivity

We usually use OpenOffice for simple word processing, but Google Docs is a fine option.

Connectivity

We found an SSH extension for connecting to our Linux box.

So, after all this, what is the conclusion?

We spend much of our day in a browser. This blog is run on an installation of WordPress. The interface is browser based. Our email is browser-based, although we have used email clients in the past. More and more things are based in the browser, so it is logical to have a computer that offers just a browser. And as a secondary system, that is fine. But we’re going back to a full Linux-based system for our daily use.

To that end, the Acer C7 Chromebook is a great secondary system. The touchpad was the only part of it that truly annoyed. But the solution there was to simply hook up an external mouse. After a week, we installed ChrUbuntu, a Ubuntu Linux fork designed for use on Chromebooks, and now dual-boot.

In order to install an alternate OS on a Chromebook, you have to place it into Developer Mode, which means you get an annoying splash screen every time you boot. It also doesn’t support a boot menu, so you have to change settings in a terminal window to switch OSes. But it does give the machine the ability to run full-fledged programs. And there are a few that, if ported to Chrome, might cause us to revisit this.

On a weekend trip, we opted to take the Asus Transformer, a 10 inch tablet with a keyboard dock, over the 11.6 inch Chromebook. So, a few native apps might change our mind.

What do you think? Leave a comment on the matter.

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Review: Xenyx 302USB

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71dvr0Ij1GL._AA1000_On a recent trip, we needed to reassess our recording priorities for an episode of the Android Buffet podcast. The podcast records every week, and we didn’t want to miss an episode.

With the increasing costs of baggage for air travel, it makes it hard to bring a large amount of equipment. That is where this little item comes into play.

The Xenyx 302USB is a USB powered mixer that is four inches by five inches, and fits in the palm of your hand. Not only is it USB powered, but it provides a USB audio interface to a computer.

This makes for a useful way to merge in sources, as Android Buffet is recorded live-to-tape….or mostly unedited. It makes it easier to merge in a microphone and a few sources on the fly, as there aren’t many of them.

Surpisingly, the Xenyx 302USB provides phantom power, which we have yet to test.

There were some complaints about hiss, but we didn’t experience any large amount of it. In the end, this item satisfies a simple need.. There are very few products this small that offer basic mixing at this level.

And for a list price of fifty dollars, it is certainly an addition to your portable recording arsenal. At home, you may want something better.

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