Old Desk

I recently upgraded my office desk from an old O’Sullivan Diplomat corner desk (sorry about the really tiny picture… there aren’t any hi-res images to be found) to this more “grown up” looking executive desk. The O’Sullivan I purchased at Staples back in 2003 for $99. The corner desk was great in my old apartment that had a rather large office (20′x12′). But in my new office, that Tara and I share, it was just a bit large, especially with Tara’s easel, her desk, a large bookcase, etc.

New Desk

The new desk is a Sauder Heritage Hill Executive Desk that Tara and I found at Office Depot a while back, and finally ended up purchasing a couple weeks ago since it was on sale for $239 (normally $299+). The only odd thing is that you can’t pick it up yourself (maybe so their employees aren’t having to heft around 150lb boxes?), so it had to be delivered (which we got for free, as it was a special… but make sure to check if you can get free delivery). Turns out the freight company only does our area on Fridays, and they didn’t call to schedule a delivery until late Thursday afternoon, when the truck had already been loaded, so we had to wait another week before it was delivered (which, was actually a good thing, since we got a chance to quickly scrape the ceiling (remove the popcorn), retexture it, paint, replace the carpet, and molding, and all and all, make the office look like the rest of the house (it was the only room we hadn’t done the ceiling, or painted yet).

So, desk arrives (all 150lbs, in a rather small box considering the size of the desk), and they put the box in the office. After making what we thought was enough room to assemble it, we were grossly mistaken. When you put one of these together, have a good 10′x10, area to work. Also, you might want to open the box from the bottom. The first piece you need is pretty much on the bottom. But, anyway, take everything out, and make sure you keep track of what ended up where.

You’ll notice, which neither the Office Depot display model, nor the one on the Sauder webpage has, is the top does have a cable passthrough hole, and the top middle drawer is a keyboard tray. Those were my biggest complaints when we bought it, and apparently I wasn’t the only one, since Sauder has fixed those issues since the display model was installed at Office Depot. The other issue, the color of the hardware, was also fixed by them including Bronze and Brass hardware. We used the Bronze.

Total assembly time was about an hour and a half. Even though they say not to use a drill for screws, I used my trusty Bosch PS-20, and it made very quick work of some of the tedious work (like, screwing the end/trim onto the top). Just make sure to set the torque on the driver pretty low. You want snug. Much tighter than that, and you risk stripping out the particle board.

All and all, it went together without a hitch. It looks very nice for flat-pack furniture, and it really makes the office look nice. And it still offers plenty of desk space, while not being as huge as the L-desk. And the top is melamine and should hold up to more of a beating than normal laminated particle board. But, the jury is out on that one. If I have any issues with it, I’ll be sure to post back on this with an update.

All and all, I’d say an easy 4.5 out of 5. While I prefer real wood, one would have cost easily twice as much, and may have been an issue getting into the office (only a 29.5″ door).

Link to Office Depot page: here.
Link to page on Sauder website: here.

Fiskars Momentum Reel Mower

Putting it together was a snap (though, taking it out of the box was a bit confusing), and I checked the blade alignment as per the Fiskars website/manual. After seeing it was good, I took it for a spin on the front and back yard.

Now, first, let me say my lawns are pretty flat (though, they do have a few bumps here and there). So, I did a couple passes on my front lawn, and was, honestly, underwhelmed. Thinking that maybe it was just the front lawn, since it’s not very big, I went into the back, and did (it’s much longer and straighter). Using it is pretty easy, and it cuts pretty well. The real advantage, is it’s really quiet. I actually got to hear and look at a couple birds playing in the tree. But, there are two issues that I’m not sure I care for, and they may very well be deal breakers.

1. The “mulch” is rather long compared to my gas mower
2. It misses a lot of grass (many missed tall pieces)

Now, these two issues are very much related. The reel mower has no “suction” that picks up the grass and cuts it. My lawn has a lot of “lazy” grass. That is, grass that lays down rather than sticks up straight. The reel mower completely misses these pieces. This could be due to the weather this year being very wet until recently. I’m not sure.

So, am I going to keep the mower? I don’t know. I’ve got 30 days to return it to Lowes if I don’t like it. And I think I’m going to take out the gas mower (with a newly sharpened blade) and go back over the lawn with it to get all the missed pieces. Then give the lawn another week or so to grow, then try the reel mower again. See how it does. I really like it being so quiet, and not using gas… but at this point, I’m not convinced it does a good enough job.

I’ll post back updates after I know more.

Having had several “electric screwdrivers” in my life, I’d never been all that happy with them. Usually their battery only lasted for a couple tasks, they didn’t have much torque, they were uncomfortable to use, etc.

I’ve always been forced to turn to my power drill when it came to a real task, but it’s heavy, and often seems TOO powerful, as I’ve broken many a screw with it.

However, when I first saw ads a few years ago for the Skil iXO2, I started looking again, as it seemed some energy was flowing from manufacturers other than Black & Decker, and other cheap tool makers. Researching the Ixo2 revealed that Skil was the “consumer” brand of Bosch, and that I should look at the PS20-2 that had just come out. The big advantage over the iXO2 was the torque settings, replaceable Li-Ion battery, and overall robustness (really, the iXO2 would be fine for odds and ends around the house, or even for me at work when doing rack mount installs). So, I “ran” over to my local hardware “big box” store (Jerry’s Home Improvement), and found it for $90, which was $30 off at the time. After feeling the weight, and looking at the features, I picked it up, and honestly, it’s been one of the few “impulse buys” I’ve never regretted in the least.

I initially used it for odds and ends tasks, and it always worked great. But it REALLY came into it’s own when my wife and I installed hardwood flooring. When we installed hardwood, we had to rip up the particle board that was under the carpet, and replace it with 3/4″ plywood. While the PS20 didn’t help with ripping up the particle board (a horrible task given the thousands of staples Tara largely removed on her own during the day), it helped a great deal when we installed the plywood. Installing it required screwing it down around the perimeter every 6″, and 12″ in the field. So, all told, a 4′ x 8′ sheet of plywood took about 44 screws around the perimeter, and 24 in the field, so about 68 1.5″ screws each. The PS20 basically would do 1.5-2 sheets per battery, and the other battery would charge in about the time it took to cut, and install the sheet(s) with the other battery. All and all, she probably used it for about 50 hours over about 10 days.

While they have replaced the 10.8v PS20-2 with the new 12v PS20-2A, I can say the 10.8v is extremely serviceable, and works great for any project I’ve worked on that requires a lot of “driving”. I used it quite a bit yesterday when I did the headlight replacement on my car.

Rating: 10 out of 10. It’s really, a perfect tool. I have no complaints at all.

Link to Product information: Bosch 10.8v Pocket Driver (PS20-2)

So, after much research, and a lot of doubting, I bit the bullet, and purchased a standard Drobo Gen 2 (FW800, and USB2 connectivity. Holds 4 3.5″ SATA drives). I couldn’t justify the price increase it would have cost to buy the Drobo S.

Along with the Drobo, I purchased 2 1.5TB WD “Green” drives. They’re 5900rpm drives, but they didn’t need to be really speedy since I wasn’t using them as primary storage for anything. They basically host movies and music for use around the house.

Once I received the Drobo, I popped the two drives in, and hooked it up to my server. Within a few minutes, everything was online, and it was up and working. At the time, my “server” was an old Powerbook G4, which seemed to have a flakey FW800 port (was seeing errors occasionally in the system.log with the FW800 cable supplied with the Drobo). Thinking it was the cable, I switched to a FW800 cable I had that had ferrites on both ends. This eliminated the errors (I have since tested the cable that came with the Drobo, and it works fine… just seems the FW800 port on the Powerbook was overly susceptible to EMI). I copied everything from my old enclosure to the Drobo, and it’s been working great since.

The unit is silent when the fan isn’t running. And when it is running, it’s not very loud at all (it’s a 120mm fan in the back). It seems to run during heavy access, and most likely is tied to the SMART temps reported by the drives. I’m sure if I had 4 drives installed, the fan would run more often, but the drives never heat up (touching the front of them with a knuckle never has them feel anything but room temp). But, as I said, I’m never heavily using them (not using them as video swap, or anything like that).

How does it perform?

Bonnie++ Results:

server.example.com 8G,,,26859,5,16138,2,,,42881,3,63.9,0,16,2302,18,+++++,+++,
2004,11,113,0,+++++,+++,48,0

So, I get about 27MB/sec write, and 43MB/sec read. And about 64 iops. While not great (the internal drives on my server get 59MB/sec write, and 110MB/sec read, and 212 iops), it again, isn’t about mass speed with this. I basically use it to server media to machines around the house.

So what does this all mean? It means if you’re looking for a fast, high performance external RAID array, you should probably look more at something like the Promise NS4600, which does a real RAID5, or RAID10. 4 2TB drives, and you’d have a pretty sweet array that could be used for FCP scratch when doing HD video. But, the Drobo will work perfectly fine with these numbers for SD video (which is 25mbs, or about 3MB/sec).

I really like the Drobo. It works great, and I like the fact that in the next couple months, when it fills up, I can just buy another drive, plop it in, and I’ll suddenly have more space (space is calculated as the combined storage of all drives installed, minus the size of the largest drive). So, if I buy another 1.5TB, I’d get another 1.5TB. If I bought a 2TB, I’d only gain 1.5TB (because the 2TB would then become the “redundancy” drive).

Add to that the fact that I haven’t had to deal with the Drobo AT ALL since I set it up, and we have something that’s really quite serviceable, and extremely useful. I deal with IT related stuff every day, and I don’t really want to come home to my array having failed, and struggle to get it back online. Now, it could be the Drobo fails at some point, and because of it’s proprietary format, I can’t get it back online without the help of Drobo support, but, so far, it couldn’t be simpler.

The only downside that I can see, is when you format the array, you say how big it should be. This allows for future expansion of the volume. In my case, I told it to be 16TB (so I could expand it as much as possible). But, the OS always sees it as 16TB. I would think it would be possible for the Drobo software to override this size, and give the OS a real size. But, maybe at some point that will happen.

All and all, I’d give the Drobo a solid 9 out of 10. It’s a solid product, and it’s well worth the money simply for it’s simplicity, functionality, and diversity.

Links:
Drobo: http://www.drobo.com/products/drobo.php
Bonnie++ : http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/

Initial setup was quite easy, once I found a copy of “Remote Install” to run on my PowerMac G5. This utility is basically “NetBoot” in an extremely simple interface. It allows the Mini Server to netboot the install DVD. I then changed the HDs to be in a RAID1, and installed 10.6. That took a bit, but other than that, it was quite painless.

bonnie++ reports look like:
/usr/local/sbin/bonnie++ -d / -s 8G -u root:wheel -qfb
server.example.com,8G,,,58807,12,27984,5,,,110101,8,212.3,0,16,12352,59,+++++,+++,
8137,47,543,5,+++++,+++,231,3

Which, isn’t bad at all for dual 5200rpm drives. The machine shipped with two Hitachi HTS545050B9SA02.

Upgrading from the previous server (a Powerbook G4, 1.67ghz, 2GB of RAM, and a single 80GB HD) to this new machine was, to put it simply, breathtaking. The average load on this new machine is consistently less than 0.05, yet on the old PB, it was often upwards of 0.50. So, by that regard, about 10x the performance (realistically, probably more like 6-8x as fast). =) Also, there is a noticeable improvement in performance of the Drobo. I’m pretty sure the FW800 port on the Powerbook is flakey. Added bonus is the 64-bit nature of the new machine… which is really quite nice (really the main time I’ve encountered it is playing with bigint’s in PHP). Also means I can upgrade the ram to 8GB when the prices come down on DDR3 SO-DIMMs.

Add to that the fact that I can now run 10.6, and am not suck with the PPC OS’s, it’s great.

The only thing Apple could have done better? Remove the Mini-DVI port and add a second gig-E port. If they did that, I could probably start using these things at work rather than Xserves. =) Especially if I had an iSCSI SAN.

The machine is very quite. I can only hear the HD’s access occasionally. The fan is near silent. The Mini really is one of the greatest computers Apple has ever designed/made. Other than the dumb single RAM slot the PPC mini’s had, they all have been great machines. I still have a 1st Generation Mac Mini running strong (1.25ghz G4, 1GB RAM, single 80GB HD, 10.5.8 client) at work (it runs Intermapper to monitor various devices around the building. Works great).

Verdict: 9.0/10. Only changes would be the second gig-E port, and it would be sweet if you could buy without the OS (if this was for work, I wouldn’t need even MORE copies of 10.6 (already have spares)). I’d give it a full 10, but I can’t think of anything that’s perfect. =)

If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment.

*Image lifted from Apple website.