Snow Day: Downton Abbey, Engineers, and a Chest Cold

By Bobby Neal Winters
You may recall the Multimedia PC I built one piece at a time.  I made a big deal about it.  I didn’t make such a big deal out of the fact that it suddenly stopped working.  (I now believe the power supply went out, but the truth of that remains to be seen.)  It turns out that building a video recorder isn’t such a big need when you’ve got Netflix.
In any case, it went out and I wasn’t in any hurry to get it fixed until a friend who’d loaned me the second season of Downton Abbey on DVD--before we discovered it was on Netflix--wanted his discs back.  It was then I remembered they were stuck in the Multimedia PC which couldn’t be opened because it was broken and which couldn’t be fixed because I didn’t have the time.  The solution at that point was to buy my friend a replacement set of DVDs and to wait until I had time to fix my Multimedia PC.
Summer came and went.  The wind whipped in flipping the days on my calendar.  Children dressed first in Halloween costumes and then as pilgrims came by.  A large man in a red suit struggled down a chimney and a naked baby in a top hat crawled by.
Then we got a snow day and I finally had time to mess with the computer.
It actually took less than half an hour to get the DVD out. All I had to do was take the DVD-Drive out of one and put it into another.  I pressed a button and out it popped.  I walked around the house with the DVD on my finger saying “Donna Noble has been saved.”  (It’s an obscure Dr. Who reference, okay, and not particularly germane to the event, but its obscurity covers that.)
Anyway, on the heels of that victory, I thought I would try to fix the Multimedia PC.  If I get it started, I think I might put Debian Linux on it so it can talk to my little Raspberry Pis.  The symptom that the PC exhibits is that you press the button and it won’t come on.  To me that suggests the power supply.  The reason I think this isn’t so much because I know a lot but because that would be the easiest and cheapest thing to fix.
In order to test this hypothesis, I thought I ought to plug it in. (Hey, I got a PhD, folks. The brilliance just flows.) I needed a power cord for that. (That PhD just keeps giving and giving.) I’d used the Multimedia PCs cord on another computer, so I borrowed one from my coffee pot.
Yes, you read that correctly. A computer uses the same power cord as a coffee pot. This is because good engineers, like Scotty said, are always just a wee bit conservative.  Wee bit, hell, once they have something that works they never change it.
I am old enough to remember the first printers for PCs.  You needed a screw-driver to hook them to the back of your computer.  It never occurred to the engineers who designed them that there would be offices without screwdrivers.  
Seriously.
Eventually we got the aptly named thumbscrews and those were around for years until they were replaced by USB printers.  This is because, like the coffee pot power cord, they worked.
I am sitting now at my Itty-bitty Ubuntu box tapping out this article after having fought with a chest cold for several days.  I am exhausted but my mind is somehow clear.  I am being battered by images around me.  USB printers, USB hard drives, USB thumb drives, my Arduino connected to the USB port, and a USB chargeable flashlight.  
The future is becoming clear to me.  I see it all.
One day I will awake to perk my coffee to a USB coffee pot.

Multimedia Computer: Part 5

The first real (I don't count the PCjr) computer I bought twenty years ago had a CD-ROM drive.  It wasn't a 48X or a 32X or a 16X or even a 2X.  There was one speed and that was the speed it ran at.  There wasn't even a tray; there was a CD caddy which was a little case that you put your CD in and then slid it into the computer.  Since those days we've seen an increase in speed in the CD-ROMs, a switch to DVDs, and now a switch to blu rays.

In those early days, there was an idea that CDs were a better way in which to store your information.  This was because CDs are not affected by magnetic fields, so there wouldn't be a change of them being damaged in that way.  Well, as the old Indian said, only the rocks live forever and it is now known that CDs and their successor optical media aren't perfect.  This having been said, if you are going to have a computer, you need an optical drive.  DVD drives are now standard; Microsoft assumes you will have one if you are going to install its operating system.  If you are going to build a multimedia computer, then, it stands to reason that you will need a blu ray drive as that is the bleeding edge.  (It might be a significant insight that entertainment is leading the way in technology. Maybe that has always been so.)

I've chosen this particular blu ray drive. The first consideration for me was brand name.  Samsung is a name I trust.  It could be that they are famous for producing crappy optical drives, but I've not heard that.  The second consideration was price.  At $70 this was within my comfort zone.  For this I get at 48X CD drive, a 16X DVD drive, and a 12X BD drive.  It will also write DVDs and CDs for me, but not blu rays.  I don't think this last will be a handicap, and I do know one thing.  The blu ray drives will become less expensive after "the next big thing" comes along.

This raises the question, what is the next big thing?  Well, as I mentioned earlier, entertainment leads the way.  Entertainment seems to be pointing toward the Cloud, as it were.  The success of Instant Netflix and all of the other services that are trying to copy their model is leading me to say this. 

With something that is on a media, you have to have space to store it.  You if there is a format change, then you have to buy it again on the new format because your old player will break down and they don't let you fix stuff anymore.  The Cloud eliminates that.  While there will always be collectors and folks who like to hold it in their hands, what most people want is access.  With the Cloud, you can have access to your movies on something like instant Netflix.

We are already beginning to have the same sort of model with our photos.  You upload them to your favorite sights and they will store them for you and every once in a while insist that you buy something.  It is but a small step from there to charging a small monthly fee for the storage not only of photos, but other media as well.  Remember, the computer/information industry operates under a drug-dealer ethic.  Today we give you a free sample and once you are hooked you pay, pay, pay.

Amazon lets you buy access to electronic books and allows you to access them from different devices. Wouldn't it make sense if iTunes started doing something like that as well, rather than just allowing you to move your songs from computer to computer a limited number of times?

I don't know if they'll be a new format beyond blu ray.  Maybe there will.  But to me it looks like we will be moving to the Cloud.

Proceeding into new ground

This morning I installed Ubuntu Linux onto the old laptop that Lydia had been using. It was so easy to do as to be silly. Insert CD (prepared using instructions from here) and follow simple directions.

The laptop had been barely going for a while. There had been a virus issue that had been dealt with in a manner that left the machine without a sound card. I don't know why. After I installed Ubuntu, suddenly the sound card worked. I am amazed.

The truth is, though, I don't know what I am going to do with this now fully functional laptop other than to tell people "Hey, I've got an Ubuntu laptop!" I've got laptops running out my ears. The truth is that I just needed my fix. I am a junkie now, having made a couple of computers. It's in my blood.

My next project is beginning to form within me. Currently, I have a desktop computer with Windows Vista Ultimate addition hooked to the TV in the family room. I have used it to

1. Record and play TV;
2. Run Netflix;
3. Play DVDs.

It can do a lot of other things as well, but I can't do them there as it is in the family room and people would bug me. My idea is to build a linux-based media center computer. I had mentioned this earlier and a hang up there had been Linux not being able to Netflix, but I got around that by purchasing a Roku. The Roku handles Netflix and a number of other options well.

What I would need to make this would be

1. A blu-ray drive for about $80;
2. A huge hard drive to record movies on for about $80;
3. A small form factor case for about $70.
4. A micro-ATX motherboard for about $60.
5. A CPU to go with the motherboard for about $70;
6. And memory to match for about $60.

Surely I am forgetting something, but this totals to about $420. That is a bit on the pricey side at this point, but it is a start. I will think on this and do some shopping and see if I can do better.