Fortysomething Geek

This is suppose to be a super-charged Raspberry PI. It is billed as a "A Supercomputer For Everyone."
It comes in 16 and 64 core configuration. The 16 core hits 13 GHz and 26 gigaflops performance. It is a dual core ARM A9 SoC with either a 16 or 64 core "co-processor" RISC chips. You can also cluster these little babies. I was going to build a little Debian/Ubuntu mini box with this. However, for now, I think I rather go with an INTEL NUC.

I'm pretty much glad I didn't lose my money on this but I've lost my enthusiasm. For the time being, this is going ino the drawer. After being stood up for close to a year, you can see why I'm not so enthusiastic any more.




Links:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/09/99-raspberry-pi-sized-supercomputer-touted-in-kickstarter-project/

You know a product is good is when you go out and buy it again. If I like something, I'll go out and get a second copy. One for the office and one for the home.

The two things I like right now is the Motorola Atrix LapDock (my review here) and Logitech 811/810 keyboard (review here).



I couldn't resist. The Atrix 4G Lapdock is a must have accessory for the tinkering gadget guy like myself. It is also cheap if you know where to look. They won't last long and I figure by next year, the inventory will dry up on these. Here, I have three monitors connected to my laptop. Two of those external monitors are the Lapdocks using a simple HDMI converter. I know for a fact I'll find continual use for these.

Over the past 9 or so months, I've been accumulating various USB 3.0 sticks. I usually get them on discount at Frys, NewEgg, or Amazon. I usually have a discount alert tracker and if it falls under my threshold, I usually pick a few up. For 16Gb, I target 10ドル-15. For 32Gb, I target 20ドル-30. And for 64Gb, my price threshold is 50ドル.

I did splurge on a SanDisk Extreme Flash 64Gb for 75ドル; thinking a name brand made a difference. It turns out, that particular has problems of four distinct different PCs with USB 3.0.

So, today, I am going to give you some of my thoughts on some of the various USB 3.0 sticks you see that often pop up on sale.

I use these sticks for all sorts of uses. Namely, shuttling VM files via sneakernet. They also make good portable installers where I load them up with app installers or portable programs that run off USB. Lastly, they can be used as bootable operating systems and rescue/recovery systems.

Glancing at the picture below, I'll highlight some of the different sticks I've purchased.

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Today I am going to give a quick review of the Logitech Bluetooth Easy-Switch Keyboard also known as the K811 keyboard. If you ever wanted the same illuminated glowing feature of the Macbook for your desktop, this is the keyboard to get. It retails for 99ドル but can be had for 60ドル-80 when shopped aggressively.

This is a pretty slick keyboard. It is roughly the same size as the Apple wireless bluetooth keyboard.

Design wise, it is plastic with an real aluminum front plate finish. The aluminum is a nice touch and not some faux painted plastic. The black on silver is reminiscent of the current Macbook island keyboards.
It is pretty slim as well.

What makes this keyboard so great are:
- USB charging. No more replacing AA batteries. It uses standard micro-USB.


- 3 device Bluetooth pairing. I love this feature. With a switch of a key-press, you can toggle this between computers and devices. I have this paired with my iMac, 13" Macbook and iPad. It takes less than a second to switch over between the devices. I simply love this! This alone makes me want to replace all my keyboards at my various locations. It is so convenient to switch between my iPad and iMac at any given time.

- backlight keyboard. The thing glows at night! This alone is one of the key selling feature.



Overall, I dig this keyboard. The incurve keys are evenly space with some good tactile feel. It feels like a Macbook keyboard and is much better than Apple's own.

Here is a comparison picture to see how this would fit in with your Apple gear. I think they should have make it more subdued without the logo and black bar on top. Otherwise, it is a very handsome design.




And a few pictures at night where this device really shines.



Late night work on the iPad is a pleasure with this keyboard!


Link: http://www.logitech.com/en-us/product/illuminated-keyboard-for-mac-ipad-iphone

I just got a Motorola LapDock 100 in. These were discontinued and I didn't do my research too well. Apparently, the original Atrix Lapdock is the one to get with the larger screen and ease-of-hack to convert them into portable monitors. There is very little documentation and mix-messages on the newer Lapdock 100.

Well, I'll find out in a few days if the LapDock 100 is as easy to improvise as the original Atrix Lapdock.

If you are not tuned-in on what these do, let me explain. A few years ago Motorola made these expensive (think 500ドル) add-on phone accessories that turned their Atrix phones into netbooks. It was way ahead of its time and flopped and these have been in the discount bins. They have micro-usb and micro-hdmi connectors. And with the original Atrix lapdock, you can buy some adapter cables and turned them into dummy portable monitors with attached keyboard/trackpads. Many people have connected Android sticks and Raspberry PIs into pseudo ARM laptops. I just want to use them as a portable extra monitor with keyboard/mouse for the bench.





Unlike the original Atrix dock, the Lapdock 100 has a universal cable with Micro USB male and Micro HDMI-D male. There are some confusion whether or not they are locked to newer Motorola phones with some sort of authentication. I will find out shortly once my adapter converter cables come in.

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Lenovo K5923 Multi-gesture Wireless Touchpad.


I'll preface and tell you right now, I like my Apple Magic Touchpad. In fact, I love the glass trackpads on the Macbooks. They're the only input devices that I choose over the original IBM track point or even the Microsoft ergonomic trackball. I could use nothing but those glass trackpad.

So when I saw a Lenovo multi-gestured touchpad, I decided I had to have one for my Thinkpad. Boy was I completely wrong. So here is my scathing review to save you the time and money from buying this thing.

They normally retail for 69ドル but can be had for 49ドル or even as low as 29ドル. Trust me, I would never buy this POS for 70ドル.


Looks.

First of all, it is matte satin black which is cool with me. It matches the Darth Vader, murdered out black Thinkpad. However, the build quality is crap. It feels flimsy. Even though my Thinkpad is made by the same company, this trackpad is nowhere up to "Thinkpad" build quality you expect from Lenovo.



It is definitely no where as nice as the Apple Magic aluminum finished glass trackpad. It is like comparing a Jaguar to a Kia. Side by side, you can tell which is a premium device and what is cheap.
Now, I know where and how auto journalists complain about fit-n-finish regarding plastic materials when they review cars. This has the same cheap kind of plastic you find in a Hertz rental car's dashboard.

Fit and finish is pretty important considering you will be actually touching this thing on a day-to-day basis.

Dongle. I hate dongles. Why can't manufactures stick with bluetooth. Logitech uses dongles too but at least you can tuck and hide the dongle inside their mouses/trackpads/keyboards when not in use. I'm pretty certain I will lose that dongle someday.

Operations.

Boy was I confused. Nothing was working for me. I kept on muting my volume by accident.
I googled and googled for drivers or some sort of way to set gestures. Nothing was working for me.
So I decided to read the manual. This is the first device in years that I ever had to open up the user's manual. New DSLR camera? RAID? Switch. Nope. I never read the manual for any of those devices. This one, I had to pull out the manual to figure out it had no drivers or control settings under Window's control panel. The front box advertised it was Windows 8 out of the box and you would figure there would be some sort of control-panel setting to illustrate the type of gestures it supports.
In this regards, windows is pretty lame not to have it in the control panel. Hit the search bar and type in "gestures, mult-gesture,trackpad" and none of the help files come up. I can easily see how normal consumers would get flustered with this.

One other problem. My OS of choice is Ubuntu/Mint on my Thinkpad and OSX on my Macs. This touchpad works as a dumb mouse in Mac OSX. So forget about using it with a Macintosh running 10.8 Mountain Lion.
Only Ubuntu supports 2 finger zoom gestures and scrolling. I downloaded some 3rd party, open source stuff like Ginn,utouch, synclient, and Touch-Egg. Still no real progress. In fact, I was getting carpal tunnel. There was so much lag and un-responsiveness, my hands started to hurt. I stopped wasting my time to get this thing to work with Linux and decided to ONLY use this under Windows 8.

I understood I bought a Windows 8 device. OK, that is fine with me. I'll give up using this device under Linux for the time being.



Once in Windows 8, it was no different. The gestures still lagged. Movement and actions stuttered. The zooms was no where as smooth as I am used to on my Macs. There were lots of accidental presses and I either logged myself or changed my volumes/mute. It was very frustrating to use as I would always reach out to use another mouse or my laptop's internal trackpad.

The only real things I could do in Windows 8 did not impress me. I could swipe tiles, get into desktop, etc. But where is the real stuff like rotating images? Using Bing's maps, the zoom was horrific. I had to fix the accidental scrolls with another mouse.

Most of the gestures are either swipes (multi-fingers). There are no 3,4 finger pinch. There are no differentiation from using an index finger or thumb. How dumb is that!
Page forward? App reveal? Volume? Lock Screen? Page Up and Down? I could already do this with my keyboard! What about switching workspace? Or better yet, switching between open programs?
Maybe the Logitech trackpad will fare better. So far, my impressions of multi-gesturing trackpads under Windows or even Linux is not so good.

Now back to the manual. Compare this.



To this on OSX. This is how you learn to use gestures. The system preference has video examples of all the cool tricks you can do.




Compared to the Magic Trackpad.

Simply, there is no comparison. Everything works pretty fantastical out of the box with the Magic Trackpad under OSX. The gestures are so smooth and damn intuitive. They change your way of using a computer. The Lenovo trackpad just gives me carpal tunnel.

Here is my conclusion: Do not even waste 20ドル on this. I'm going to try and tweak Ubuntu a bit more to get gestures. At least Chrome, Gimp, and LibreOffice allows me to zoom.

Two week Update:

So this is what I've ended up using with this trackpad. My trusty Microsoft trackball for everything and trackpad for zooming. I didn't feel like throwing it away, so I'll try to keep it around and see if I end up liking it later on.

A few months ago, I reviewed the portable Seagate Go-Flex Thunderbolt adaper, the STAE121. Today, I am going to give a short review of the desktop version designed for the Backup Plus Desktop external drives from Seagate. The model is STAE129.



This dock/adapter is designed specifically for the Seagate external Backup Plus drives. I have about a dozen or so of these USB2/USB 3.0 drives in 3TB and 4TB configurations. They contained 7200 rpm Barracuda XT drives that are often way cheaper than buying internal versions. If you shop carefully, 3TB can be had for 100ドル-120 whereas the 4TB can go for 150ドル-180. I pretty much stock up when they go on sale.

The STAE129 is a pricey affair at 150ドル without thunderbolt cables (you can get cheap ones here). Since I had a shelf full of these external Seagate drives, I figure, why not. I'll give this a spin. More importantly, my 2012 27" iMac does not have USB 3.0. So this review will be based off a 27" Thunderbolt model iMac along with a brand new freshly HFS+ formatted 4TB Seagate drive. I will also compare USB 3.0 from my Macbook.

So here, I have a 4TB drive, STAE129 Thunderbolt adapter, The USB 3.0 base that comes with the 4TB Seagate Backup plus, and the STAE121 2.5 portable Thunderbolt adapter for comparison.





You can use the dock with 3.5" bare drives if you are creative. However, I wouldn't recommend it.



Someone should make a 3.5" sliding cradle so you can use standard drives. 2.5" SSDs work fine (as I will show later). The power supply interchanges with the USB 3.0 base.

The main issue I have with the dock is the flimsy plastic pins that connect to the Backup Plus enclosures. They make a worrisome snapping sound when you dislodge the enclosures.
I was hoping to freely move my enclosures from USB 3 to Thunderbolt but I have to be extremely careful removing enclosures. There is a great likelihood you can easily snap them off.




After a few tries, it was best to gently dislodge from the front first.




Unlike the STAE121/128, the Desktop Thunderbolt adapter comes with two Thunderbolt ports for daisy chaining. Here I have 3 Thunderbolt daisy chained: Drobo 5D, STAE129, and the portable STAE121 at the end.




Installation:
In order to use this drive, you need to install some drivers for both Mac and Windows. There is a USB stick supplied in the packaging. I opted to download the latest ones from Seagate's website.

The driver is only needed on the Mac if you wish to use 2TB with Thunderbolt which was the case with me. If you have data on an existing drive, I suggest you back it up. The Thunderbolt enclosure prompted me to re-format the drive before using.


Performance:

So how does it perform? Well that depends on what you are using it with. If you are planning to use 2.5" SSDs, you are simply better off using the portable 2.5" Adapter. I tried a Samsung 830 SSD on both and the speeds were comparable.



Using Black Magic speed test, here is what I got with the Samsung 830 SSD.
307 MB/sec Write, 360MB/sec Read on both the Desktop STAE129 and portable 2.5 STAE121.






So for SSDs, just save your save the cash and buy the STAE121/128 portable Thunderbolt Adapters.

Now, if you are like me and have a bunch of external Backup Plus drives, this is the adapter to get. And the point of this review is to see how it would perform in the most typical scenario - using the 7200 rpm HDD external enclosures.


With the 4TB Desktop enclosure, I was getting 177/176 MB/sec Write and Reads as shown below.


I would say this is pretty good. In fact, it performs better than the internal 7200 rpm 1TB internal drive, ST31000528AS, that came with my 27" iMac. The internal drive benches at 108/57 MB/sec Write and Read.

The internal drive is running at SATA II/3 Gb/s instead of SATA III / 6 Gb/s

I thought the benchmarking off the boot drive with a full OS may have caused some slowdowns. But that is not really the case as I cloned the internal drive onto the Thunderbolt drive and booted off the external Thunderbolt.


As you can see below, a full Mountain Lion clone install and boot did little to impact the performance of the 4TB Thunderbolt drive.In fact, booting and running off the drive via Thunderbolt was a pleasure. I clocked the boot time from fresh power to login screen at 29 seconds. That is not bad for a 7200 rpm HDD drive.





As you can see from the screenshots below, the first one shows the internal drive running at 3 Gigabit versus the Thunderbolt running at a full SATA III 6 Gigabit.





So it seems the Thunderbolt controller is running at full optimal speed. I was worried it might be a handicap device running at SATA I or II. This isn't the case with Seagate.

So how does it compare to USB 3.0? As I mentioned earlier, one of the incentive for me to get this was the fact my 27" iMac does not have USB 3.0. However, my newer Macbook does have USB 3.0.



Running Blackmagic off my Macbook, the USB 3.0 posts some good numbers. It is slightly slower than the Thunderbolt adapter. However, I probably attribute it to a slower USB 3.0 controller chipset.



Hence, here lies the dilemma. Thunderbolt with standard platter hard drives are not a compelling sell over standard USB 3.0. The USB 3.0 connector comes free with practically every Backup Plus enclosures.There are advantages to Thunderbolt over USB 3.0. Most notably in smaller I/O operations. Booting off Thunderbolt and copying random files will be faster. In the case of boot time, it was 3X faster at 31 seconds versus 1 minute and 45 seconds for USB 3.0. Small I/O, random 4K seeks will suffer under USB 3.0. But for copying large files, E.G. movie rips and gigabyte files, it is a draw.


Now, if your computer doesn't have USB 3.0 as in the case of my 2012 27" iMac, it may be worthwhile to get this adapter. If you need proof, here is the exact same 4TB Backup Plus drive connected to the USB 2.0 ports of my iMac. 29 MB/sec Writes and 38 MB/sec Reads.

I think this last picture pretty much the reason for any pre-USB 3.0/Ivy Bridge Mac user who has Thunderbolt.

The Zagg Keys Flex keyboard may be one of the best keyboards for the iPad.


At the time of this writing, the Zagg has them on sale for 39ドル.99 from the regular 80ドル.

So what makes it so great? Answer: portability and flexibility.

I have a few iPad keyboards and they work great for the most part. Except, they tend to get bulky and negate the advantage of having a tablet. Next, when you get a different tablet, the keyboards are often form-fitting for a specific generation of devices. You end up buying a different one when you get a new tablet. Importantly, the bulk wears you down. You may not need a keyboard/case combo all the time. When you are watching Netflix, you definitely don't need a keyboard. Hence, many of keyboards tend to fall into my desk drawer.


The Zagg Flex keyboard is compact and there is a simple cover that is used as a kickstand. The kickstand can even carry the weight of some covers. I don't have to remove the existing cover to use the kickstand. As you can see below, it is smaller than even the Apple Bluetooth keyboard.


Now, I just leave the keyboard in my bag and use it whenever I want.


Like most tablet keyboards, this one uses micro USB for charging. There is a toggle for iOS/Android. I assume this is for the key mappings for certain functions like home and menu.


Overall, this is very flexible. I can easily use my 7" Galaxy tablet or various smart phones. Overall, I am happy with this purchase.