Studio711.com – Ben Martens

I’ve been happily using Mint.com to track my finances for the last three and a half years. One feature they offer is the ability to download all of your transactions. I did that, popped it into Excel, and found some interesting stats. Note that these are for 2012-2014.

• Our two most popular merchants are Amazon (544 transactions) and Safeway (521.) Home Depot (238) is next on the list. This means that we are spending money at Amazon or Safeway an average of once every two days. By the way, our favorite butcher is #14 on the list!
• Since one of our grocery stores is #2 on the most popular merchant list, it’s no surprise that the biggest spending category (by count) is groceries with 818. Restaurants (332), home improvement (300) and gas (280) round out the top four.
• What are our most visited restaurants?
  Chipotle (31), Dairy Queen (25), Whidbey Coffee (17), Five Guys (14), Red Robin (14), Papa Murphy’s (13), Brown Bag Cafe (11), Fiesta Mexicana (10), Factory Donuts (7), Mod Pizza (7), Qdoba (7), Sushi Zone (7), Cafe Veloce (6), Jimmy John’s (6)
  This list is a little bit skewed because sometimes another party will pay and then we’ll give them cash, but it’s a good rough idea of where we like to eat.
• One third of the money we spent ran through a credit card. We average around 1.5% cash back so that adds up pretty quickly. I recommend the American Express Blue Cash card and the Amazon Visa for places that don’t take American Express. (This only works if you don’t carry a balance on your credit cards.)

If you don’t have an idea what your spending would look like in a similar study, I encourage you to at least sign up for Mint and let it start tracking your spending. Knowing where your money is going is the first step towards making important decisions that could dramatically affect your life.

P.S. It might sound a bit crazy that we go to the grocery store every two days. It turns out that going there is a great activity with Elijah. He enjoys it and we can either walk or drive because it’s less than a mile down the street. It also gets us out of the house so Tyla can have some quiet time to herself.

Our church is using some ancient computers. It was about 5 years past the time when they should have been update so I volunteered for the project. While the details of the project probably aren’t interesting, if you’re in the market for a new computer, you might be interested in what I picked out.

The main office computer is the most heavily used. It runs our financial software and is the hub for just about anyone who needs a computer at church. It’s also going to act as the network file server. For this computer, I chose a Dell XPS 8700 for $699.99 plus tax. The key specs are a Core i7-4790 processor and 8GB of memory. Dell doesn’t ship them with an SSD (that seems insane to me) so I picked up a Samsung 840 256GB SSD for $216. There are cheaper ones out there but these Samsungs are great. The end result is a nice machine for right around $1000 after tax. This would be good if you’re planning some slightly heavier than normal use of a computer and/or you want it to last an extra year or two before it feels old.

The second computer goes in the school and 99% of the time, it’s just acting as a sign in computer. The teachers will also use it for some basic web browsing every once in a while. For this computer I got a Dell Inspiron 3647 for for 399.99 plus tax. This one came with a Core I3-4150 processor and 4 GB of memory. I left the old fashioned 1TB 7200rpm hard drive in there. It will be good enough. And that’s the key for this machine: it is more than capable of doing basic web browsing, Office documents, etc. If that’s all you need, this is an excellent deal. Note that neither price includes a monitor. I’m just reusing what is already there.

They are two very different machines for very different purposes. If you’re in the market and want some advice, I’m always happy to help. The biggest thing I’ll say is that an SSD is the most important piece of equipment you can get in your new computer. I won’t ever buy another computer without one. Unfortunately they aren’t always included when you buy from a place like Dell. I’m sure that will change soon with rapidly plummeting SSD prices, but never fear, you can generally add your own in later. Just make sure you factor that into the price.

I said I wouldn’t go into the details of the new setup, but there’s one key piece you probably already guessed: all of the computers on the property will be running CrashPlan for offsite backup!

As I rebuilt the server a while ago, I started thinking back to all the computers that I’ve ever own. Here’s my attempt to list them out along with estimated prices. This should be good for a laugh in 20 years. Aside from the first computer, none of these prices include monitors. This list only includes computers that I purchased new, not used ones I bought or was given.

• 1998 – Gateway Pentium 2 350 with a 10GB hard drive and a tape backup.
  • I bought this when I was heading off to college. I don’t remember the exact price but it was somewhere between $2000 and $2500 which was pretty much all the money I had left. It lasted me all the way through college though.
• 2002 – Dell P4 2.4GHz with 512MB RAM and an 80GB hard drive. $900
• 2006 – Dell Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHz with 2GB RAM and a 250GB hard drive. $1200
  • This one is still in use 8 years later! It’s running Windows Media Center 24/7. It can record 4 HD video streams and serve them simultaneously to the three XBox360s around the house. One wall of the case is a cardboard beer box, but this thing still runs like a champ.
• 2010 – Core i7 860 2.8GHz quad core with 8 GB RAM. $1000
  • This was the first computer that I built on my own. It became my file server and is the machine that had the CPU and motherboard replaced earlier this month.
• 2011 – Lenovo Thinkpad Edge $700
  • I can’t find any info about this, but it was the first laptop we bought for Tyla after we got married.
• 2012 – Core i7 3770 3.4GHz quad core with 16GB RAM. $1400
  • While I retrofitted the 2006 and 2010 computers with SSDs, this was the first one that started life with an SSD in it.
• 2013 – HP Pavilion Touchsmart 15-b154nr AMD A8-4555M quad core 1.6GHZ and 6 GB of RAM. $550
  • Though I had used many laptops from work, this was the first one I ever paid for. We got it for Tyla when her previous laptop died a surprisingly early death.

This last desktop computer from 2012 is still plenty fast and I would be very hard pressed to find any excuse to update it. Maybe once we start seeing 8 core CPUs then I’ll make the jump.

Our current laptop (the HP), on the other hand, has been a pretty big disappointment. It’s my fault for being cheap. I bought the most inexpensive laptop with a touchscreen that I could find and yikes, it’s not great. The biggest flaw is the 5400 rpm hard drive that you can’t replace without tearing apart the entire machine. If I could just put an SSD into it, it would probably be fine, but I’m not very confident that I’d ever get the machine physically back in one piece after installing it. We’re trying to eek out two years with it but hopefully it will be replaced soon and I will not be going cheap.

It’s fun to look back at the performance/price ratio even in just 16 years. Moore’s Law is alive and well!

[UPDATE] Changed Murphy’s to Moore’s. Thanks Jim. Although accidentally typing Murphy’s makes it a true statement as well.

I wrote previously about my two failed hard drives. The story, unfortunately, didn’t end there. A few days later, I started getting some goofy boot up behaviors that pointed to a bad BIOS. It would get stuck at “Loading operating system.” This was a transient thing that I had seen before but now it was consistent. I tried to update the BIOS and that said it succeeded but after that it never got past the logo screen for the motherboard. Oops. I tried pulling the CMOS battery to reset the BIOS but nothing I tried got me past that logo. I decided it was time to replace the motherboard even though it was only four years old.

The CPU was an LGA1156 socket and unfortunately they don’t make motherboards for that anymore. I had to buy a new CPU too. I really didn’t need any additional power in that server box, but I did upgrade a little. Here’s what I got:

• MSI Z87-G41 PC Mate LGA1150 Motherboard $90 after rebate
• Intel Core i5-4590 $179

The swap went pretty quickly and easily with no problems. It booted right up and I didn’t have to reinstall Windows or anything. I did have to reactivate it but a quick phone to a robot call took care of that.

I kind of suspect that the second hard drive failure was more of a motherboard failure than a drive failure. I’ll run some thorough SpinRite tests on it before putting it to use again.

P.S. Happy Birthday Dad!

I came home the other night and found out that I had a dead hard drive on my main file server. D’oh! That machine carries every one of our photos since we got a digital camera and a ton of the print photos from early in our childhood. It’s irreplaceable!

But, of course, I have multiple levels of backup so I knew my data was safe. It’s just a matter of getting it back to a healthy condition.

I decided to just let the drive sit there and wait for a replacement to arrive from Amazon. (4TB for $142!) Each file is stored on two physical drives so once I put the new drive in, it would automatically copy the files back onto the drive and I’d be all set.

Well, while I was waiting, the machine reported that a second drive had failed. It was the other one that I had purchased as the same time as the first drive so it’s not completely unreasonable that they failed together, but it still seemed unlikely. Looking through the SMART data on the drive, it looks like it got pretty hot in the case at one point so maybe that led to early demise (3 months after the 2 year warranty expired.) Now I had a mess on my hands and would be forced to pull out some backups.

I didn’t want to wait around so I drove to Best Buy and paid $40 extra for the same drive. Thankfully I was able to get the second failed drive to boot up again so the server was able to heal itself. When the new drive arrived from Amazon, I replaced that second drive because I just don’t trust it anymore. The machine now has four 4TB drives in it and all our files are safe.

I don’t know how you could read this site and not have heard me say it before, but BACK UP YOUR DATA! Hard drives only carry a one or two year warranty for a reason. Here’s the test for whether you are doing enough backups: if I walk into your house, take your computer and smash it with a sledgehammer, did you just lose photos, videos, documents, etc? If so, you’re not doing your backups correctly. Here’s the very quick and very economical solution: http://crashplan.com  Less than $200 will get you four years of worry free backups. Set it up once and forget about it until you need it.

If your computer is acting weird, slow or you suspect a virus, Windows 8 has two great new features that will help you get back to normal again.

1. “Refresh” will keep your documents and pictures, but you’ll have to reinstall most of the programs on your computer.
2. “Reset” will completely remove everything from your computer and put it back the way it was when you got it.

Both of these are just a few clicks away and they will guide you through the process. More information is available here: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/restore-refresh-reset-pc

If you’re an uber geek, you can create custom reset images so that when you reset your PC, it can reset with a bunch of your regular apps pre-installed.

So you need to share a big file or a bunch of files that add up to a lot. This problem has been around since time began and it’s often still easier to hand someone a physical piece of media like an SD card or a CD. But there are (free) ways to do it online and they aren’t terribly difficult. I can think of a dozen different ways to do it off the top of my head, but I’m going to pick one and yes, it’s a Microsoft solution. What did you expect?

1. You probably already have a Microsoft account (hotmail.com, live.com, outlook.com, etc), but if you don’t go sign up for one.
2. Visit OneDrive.com. You have a bunch of free space to store and share files.
3. Create a folder for your files that you want to share.
4. Upload the files into this folder.
5. Go back to that folder, select it and then click Share.
6. Choose “Get a link” from the left side. “View Only” should be selected by default on the right and that’s probably good.
7. Click Create link.
8. A link is generated and you can email that to the people you want to share it with. Anyone with that link will be able to get to the files you shared.

Cue the “The More You Know” music.

You may remember a previous post about a product called SpinRite. It’s a hard drive maintenance and recovery tool, and it’s handy to have it in my bag of tricks. It has always been slightly annoying to use though because it requires me to dedicate a machine to it while it’s running and it can easily take a day (or even a week) to run.

Last week I had cause to run it again and after futzing around for a long time trying to get it to run on a spare laptop (it wouldn’t see the USB drive that was connected to the laptop), I started to wonder if I could get it to run in a virtual machine on my main desktop. SpinRite uses very low level commands to access the drive and I didn’t think that would work inside a VM, but why not try anyway?

Sure enough, it did work! Here are the steps I did:

• Attach the USB hard drive dock to my desktop and insert the drive.
• Power up the drive and wait for Disk Manager to recognize it.
• Set the disk to Offline mode.
• Create a new VM in Hyper-V (I’m running Windows 8.)
• Use SpinRite.exe to create an ISO and set the VM to boot that ISO.

From that point, SpinRite could see the drive, and I didn’t care how long it took to run because it wasn’t blocking me from doing other work on the machine. Perfect! Theoretically I could even spin up multiple instances of the VM and point it to multiple drives to parallelize a big recovery job.

I’ve written a couple times before about my Power BI project at work. The head of our group gave a presentation at the Worldwide Partner Conference that provides a nice overview of our future roadmap. To view it, go the WPC keynote page, click on “The Cloud for Modern Business” and then skip ahead to the 21 minute mark when James Phillips comes on stage.