When "One For the Price of Two" is Both Good and Desirable!

Irrespective of your era, it never generally makes good economic sense to get two of anything, only use one and call it valuable and worthwhile.. unless you're talking about a niche matter in computing. Okay, so the headline is a bit of a con really. One for the price of two isn't good value, but where this pays back is in redundancy. Yes my friends, we're talking about RAID.

What's RAID?

Depending upon who you ask, and for no discernible reason, RAID is an acronym - Redundant Array of Independent Disks or Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. How there came to be two definitions is lost to the mists of time but I'm happy with either. For those who don't know anything of this it is a principle of sharing your data across two or more hard drives in order to either increase performance, provide more hard drive space or provide some level of protection against the scourge of reality - broken parts and wear and tear. In other words our nonsensical "value" is redundancy. This latter reason is why I've done this.

RAID is not.. I'll repeat that.. RAID IS NOT a get out of jail free card for those who choose not to perform data backups. It is not a substitute so don't be fooled.. keep doing those backups. If you value your data but don't do backups then shame on you, and people more cruel than I would say you deserve everything potentially coming to you.

There are different practical implementations of RAID, from RAID 0, 1, 5, 10.. We won't go into too much detail here but I've elected for RAID 1, which essentially means that I have two hard drives of equal capacity set up to function as a mirror or clone. Both drives contain exactly the same data, thus enabling a scenario whereby if one drive were to (re. will inevitably) suffer hardware failure no data is actually lost and I the user can continue happily, suffering only the anguish of knowing that the failed drive needs replacing ASAP as opposed to crying into his coffee over his lost data, particularly if he hasn't been doing backups. Once replaced the system will copy its data from the good drive to the new one and you're back to business as usual!

One caveat to my plan is that I'm running a 2Tb system but only have a 1Tb backup drive.. I trust you see the problem with this. To that end my next goal is to increase the size of the backup drive and that can only be done in this case by a new purchase.. alas no technological development that I know of allows you to simply nail or glue extra space onto a hard disk. This too however is a part of my near future rationale. It occurs to me that in times of fiscal strife the best way I could proceed is to replace my 1Tb external backup drive with a 4Tb drive - given that a 4Tb drive is "only" £20 or so more than a 2Tb drive makes justification quite simple.

Why 4Tb?

The least advisable and yet strangely popular RAID scheme is RAID 0, which combines your drives into one. In my case that would double the capacity of my drive space from 2Tb to 4Tb, but also compromise physical integrity in a very inadvisable direction. With RAID 0 your data is alternately written to both drives which means that you have your expected capacity increase and you gain an increase in read performance for your data. However since you're spreading your data over two drives you also double your chances of suffering mechanical failure since you now have two drives to worry about. Worse still if one goes t*ts up then you only have half of your data, and since that data is only every other bit then what remains intact is less use than a dolls head. This is why RAID 0 is pretty bad.. you don't get something for nothing. That said, if I was running out of space, absolutely needed the data space and had absolutely no chance of affording an upgrade for my hard drives then I could opt for a RAID 0 configuration to increase my working space to 4Tb and manage with regular backups to protect my data, until such time as I could afford to expand things.. hence a 4Tb external drive would cover me in this instance. Another route would be to use the 4Tb drive to store the excess work - at least that would only represent a single drive failure problem!?

Anyway at the end of the day it's all about protecting your data, assuming it matters to you. If it doesn't then forget everything I just described. As an aside, as I type the PC has already performed 21% of the task of synchronising the drive contents - yes it's doing it in the background as I write this.

Another advantage I experienced this morning going through the hassles of installing another hard drive is that it gave me another opportunity/excuse to indulge in cable management. I managed a slight but noticeable increase in quality.

Alas I have no before and after shots worthy for comparison so you'll have to take my word for it, but I think it looks quite tidy now - something to be revered in a system which relies on airflow to keep the volume of space within the chassis within a good operating temperature.

A Little More Room

Lately I've been putting myself through a gradual learning curve with DaVinci Resolve. I first encountered video editing using Shotcut, blissfully unaware that the world's leading colour grading company had released what is arguably the best free (with caveats) video editing workflow out there. No leaping in and out of Premiere Pro, between After Effects, Audition, etc.. for me. Here you have a complete, uninterrupted and active flow (meaning that you can work sequentially or jump from say tweaking the sound to extending a clip or importing something more - your project remains up to date and editable throughout) . Importing your work, cutting it, adding effects, colour grading (or course), sound mastering and exporting. In fact I dodged Adobe's bullet altogether, along with the increasingly loathsome subscription model. Between DaVinci, the Affinity suite and Artrage I'm doing quite well, if I say so myself. 

I said there was a caveat to the "free" status because not all the features are there to use.. Some are locked behind the paid version, and as you learn more you discover where those limitations lie. What is good is that there is nothing stopping you from using this package to achieve fabulous basic results and learn more than anyone's fair share of basic/intermediary level techniques and tricks. The price? £299 at time of writing.. Walking a line between products it's more expensive than the ridiculous value of Affinity but not as expensive as Adobe. Judging by its capability I'd say it's a fair price, and in context that's what it's all about. So far I'm loving it. It isn't without its capacity to fall over once in a while, but it certainly seems to be more stable than its competitor, if the anecdotal evidence from other users is to be believed.

What I did discover is that video editing is quite a hungry beast, and although where computer memory is concerned there is a real world law of diminishing returns on capacities above 16Gb I was tempted into buying myself a bit more space - enter two 16Gb sticks of Kingston Hyper X Fury RGB (RGB because reasons..). So Lain now has a bit more room to play and I have to say that 32Gb has quickly established itself as the new normal size for the playground. Affinity and Artrage have also benefitted from this. 

Homura Akemi and Madoka Kaname are optional, and aside from keeping the artist company have no technical impact upon the system performance whatsoever.

Comfort is Important!

Okay it's not to be overstated but you can't go wrong with a little proper support when you're spending time drawing, writing, etc.. these things should also never be underestimated.

Not so long ago it was quite easy to pick a chair - popping to Office World granted a wealth of seating to try out. Alas I missed my window and along with the pens, printers and other consumables, it all disappeared into a capitalist black hole, in other words the local store shut down. So I was left with a few ideas but nothing specific to park the butt on for that practical experience. Left with little choice I opted for the path of reviews and a general consensus on what seemed to be most likely to be un-crap. I'd looked at Argos and decided upon an option from three choices which fit the price bracket, but then dropped upon this one..

I had a choice from black, brown, cream, grey, green and red, finished in pleather or velvet. Why green you ask? Well it felt like it'd be a change of aesthetic from the standard black, something to be commended in the back of my mind since it's existing in a creative spot. I also opted for velvet, again a change from the sterile office fashion, and I think all things considered a snugglier option. Buying from Amazon also assured delivery, since Argos couldn't deliver their option, for reasons unknown.

I was expecting it on the Saturday and so you can imagine my surprise when my DPD app alerted me to its delivery on the Wednesday, a full three days earlier than predicted.

It was easy to assemble - just short of 20 mins..

..conforms pleasantly to the photo as advertised and fits in very nicely!

Having typed this blog whilst sat in it I can confirm it is indeed comfy, sturdy and snuggly. It raises, lowers and reclines with the best of them, and all for a full £40 less than the Argos derivative. Job done. Always look after your back!

A Change of Heart for Lain

Sooo the last time I blogged about LainDark  I was reflecting upon her performance some two years down the line, and as was stated she continues to perform admirably. Now it's Xmas and with the season for giving upon us once more I elected, after some deliberation, to treat Lain to a new CPU cooler.

Having soldiered on masterfully since birth with the stock AMD cooler (in fairness it's no slouch for a stock unit) I decided that I would be nice to have a modest upgrade. Like anything which has a bit of a natural Venn diagram overlap between practical and fun (bikes and cars are other examples which spring to mind) a home built PC entices you to think along similar lines - many of you reading this will understand. Aside from the more obvious aesthetics it was always going to be an upgrade which would afford an improvement in one of two ways - more overclocking headroom and/or better temperatures. Whilst I like the idea of water cooling I am also mindful of both the upkeep and the introduction of a potentially volatile point of failure in return of more extreme cooling performance - to that end I ultimately find such justification unwarranted. It seems that my pragmatic/lazy side is winning such battles these days (probably a good thing) and so I decided to stick with an air cooler. Since day one the system performance has been sufficient for my needs and that remains the case. Perhaps this upgrade is probably best thought of as a well earned item of comfort.

So to satisfy performance and aesthetics was to narrow our options down to something which would work well and follow/enhance the dark appearance which dominated the original PC design. I've always thought that it could do with a little illumination in the middle zone of the PC, perhaps the only thing the stock Ryzen 1600 cooler was lacking - to choose RGB was a no brainer. This would narrow us down to the likes of BeQuiet, Coolermaster, Enermax and Noctua (the latter grey/black design models). The ultimate winner based on price to performance became Coolermaster, and so I present the new heart cooling system for Lain, the Coolermaster Hyper 212 RGB Black Edition.

As seems to be customary nothing ever goes as smoothly as you hope, and it's usually your own fault. It caught my attention that a couple of soundproofing grommets from an earlier mod to the rear case fan has unknowingly split, and so I decided to replace these. For reasons of cause and effect too silly to go into this resulted in me having to remove the PSU housing and reattach the fiddly front panel switches. A note to Corsair.. PLEASE try and make the panels fit a bit more flush and not allow a gap just the right size to allow a grommet to disappear into the power supply housing.. It's a bugger to get anything small enough to fall through back out.

Anyway..

The cooler fitting itself basically went as planned, consulting the old trusty mainboard manual and a very clear and concise video from You Tube (shout out to Gear Seekers for that!). I bought some Arctic thermal paste (still en route as we type) without believing even for one moment that Coolermaster would have been kind enough to provide some of their own, so kudos to them for putting a little tube in there. I still have my Arctic compound en route and it'll server me sometime down the line I'm sure. I don't think there will be enough variance to justify reapplying the Arctic stuff over the Coolermaster generic, but curiosity and OCD may yet get the better of me.

I was pleased and relieved to see that my reassembly wasn't in vain. Everything was OK from first bootup! Review-wise it seems as though it's going to be pretty awesome in performance. If the HW Monitor software is to be believed then the base CPU temperatures have indeed altered quite dramatically, coming down from a keen but still acceptable 38-40°C to a very balmy 26°C and holding. In fact the only thing I might give Coolermaster a little stick for is a "void if removed" warranty sticker which they elected to wrap around the fan cabling. It was a bit of a pain hiding that in the build, but you know first world problems and all that - it's not that important.

All that was left was to key in a suitable colour (apparently it's red by default) and this will change ad infinitum with my tinkering. In that respect performance was once again fine out of the stable, working flawlessly with the Aura RGB software which up to now has only had to handle the mainboard lighting. Overall I'm very happy with this cooler and even though it's early doors I'd recommend it in a heartbeat to anyone looking for such an upgrade. It was easy to work with and a modest £40 or so, which may be a little on the upper side of things Hyper 212 style. I suppose the aesthetics come with a little premium but that's okay for me because I'm not one for upgrading things at the drop of a hat.

Still Flying in the Fast Lane

It's hard to believe that it's coming up on two years now since I built LainDark, my first proper computer - that passed quickly.

A 1st generation Ryzen system sporting a 1st generation Pascal nVidia graphics card, we're now well into the 3rd generation Ryzen and a few incremental products from nVidia, but it's good to know that my initial system design continues to perform well and handle all I want to throw at it. The design choices I made were twofold - a PC which would last me for a good while whilst also providing a good upgrade path, though I suspect I'll still be lauding basically the same beast in another two years. Surpassing my old PC (a Core 2 Duo.. yep THAT old) by a mile, I've been enjoying some modest gaming, DVD transcoding, along with artwork and video editing experiments thrown in for good measure. All water off a ducks back, in stark contrast to the performance of its predecessor, which made quite a meal of such tasks, frequently choking on them.

I haven't had the need to upgrade anything essential, save for a few tweaks as it fell out of its boxes on testing day.. the monitor stand, the speakers and the Corsair keyboard/mouse combo. The keyboard was to have been a K63 with basic red illumination - perfect to raise its profile in the dark yet not excessive enough for it to become an "RGB vomit" peripheral. The price difference between that and the keyboard I did end up with was significant, but a silver lining from the misfortune which consumed the high street electronics store Maplin was me landing the K65 (RGB vomit) model, owing to a lack of K63's in lieu of it's more expensive brother on display at only £10 more (as opposed to £60 RRP). Overall I'm glad I got it, even if it has been broadly set to that same red colour (by way of the iCUE/wallpaper engine setup in this case, which interestingly takes advantage of the RGB keys to physically mirror the wallpaper). The mouse only got replaced because I got heartily sick of a motion glitch, but the replacement is also a lot more comfortable to use. It made sense to go for a Corsair, in keeping with the ecosystem.

The speakers too had an upgrade, from an old 2.0 Creative set which I'd had for over twenty years and which still work to this day (albeit in the budget sphere of performance), I elected to explore my options, descended upon Currys/PC World (pretty much the only store of its kind left now) and took a peek at Logitech before (ironically) landing again upon Creative. They were however a more significant investment than my original pair, and you can hear it.

Software-wise, aside from the old usual suspects, I've thrown Affinity Photo and Designer at it.. no problems. It laughs in the face of DOOM and scoffs at the likes of Rocket League and Final Fantasy. So confident is it in its multi-core hyperthreaded-ness that it juggles Wallpaper Engine across two monitors in the palm of one hand whilst enjoying breathing space to rule the rest of the galaxy. Benchmark software - Cinebench, Heaven, Valley.. loves them! The old beast used to have a coronary just looking at them.

I may have done some future casting about upgrades in a blog here before now but somewhere on the horizon there will almost certainly be a change of CPU cooler - it's managed wonderfully with the stock unit (which is measurably superior to the stock Intel equivalent - well done AMD), but I think it would be nice to either squeeze a little more performance out of it or embrace efficiency and lower temps. I'm not overclocking the CPU (which is ironic almost to the point of insult since all the AMD CPU's are unlocked) but honestly I haven't felt the need to. Neither am I at this point too keen on getting giddy for water cooling. I love the aesthetic of AIO coolers, particularly NZXT, but much prefer the simple reliability and (let's be honest) absent mindedness of air cooling. I suspect I'll be looking at an external USB Bluray drive to compliment the DVD drive I already have. In my experience it still pays to have hard copies of your entertainment. Other than that the only thing I can imagine adding in the short term would perhaps be an SSD scratch disk? That might smooth out any video editing, or cover any such situations where data access at a faster rate than a mechanical HDD might be preferable. Beyond the internals and base peripherals however is the bigger goal which I had in the back of my mind as an end to the means  - VR. This system is almost certainly geared up to that task but which company path to take with that is the real question at this point and I'm not even sure I have the space for room scale, but Elite Dangerous is just calling out to me.. one day.

A lot of this is just playing really though.. It continues to be a wonderful, solid system.

Normal?

This evening I am not a happy bunny. This evening I face the prospect of returning to work with a head and heart full of anxiety and apprehension, on a magnitude I haven't felt since I was a kid returning to school.

It's no secret to anyone who follows my blogs, or who knows me, that there is no love lost between me and education. I can't honestly say that I even like the threads of my job any more. It used to be an acceptable pain to bear in exchange for a pay cheque, and before the job changed this time last year there was always the fact that there was a flesh and blood person to work with onsite. To say it has decayed still further in quality is an understatement and frankly I’m amazed that after sixteen years as part of an on site team I’ve managed to keep it together working alone in an office for the past year, the lion’s share of it with only remote support. For reasons which these days are quite beyond me I keep returning to notions of art from time to time, but often lacking the will or energy to actually engage in it. The best part of my art away from the day job has been the joy of productivity and achievement. Nothing so valid exists in the former - its problems are repetitive, often created by misuse, ignorance, third party fuck ups, or a combination. Art is a far cry from changing printer toners (most benign), diagnosing those third party fuckups (more annoying), or perpetually replacing keyboards and mice in abused IT rooms (the most heinous and repetitive crime). It's fair to say that I'm heartily sick of directing my efforts in such an environment.

I knew, even before I booked the time off, that taking the recent four week holiday was always going to be a double edged sword. This used to be the case ten years ago, when I worked term time only and had all the school holidays to myself. I tends to be the case that too much time away leaves me blissfully restored back to factory presets (to extend a professional parlance) which I think is why I’d been neglecting the idea of taking a break at all since Xmas.. an act of self harm I never imagined I’d ever contemplate. I had been looking forward to a happy break of self determination, but life had other plans and all was succinctly undone by two crises. One thing I had consoled myself with was a return in the final holiday week, construed on my part to help soften the blow, and to a degree it worked. What caused the next headache was the state of play regarding the new network, which I will not go into here but suffice to say it’s not as it was supposed to be, promises and otherwise. With the cumulative stresses of the “holiday”, combined with four days of trepidation and two and a half live days of actual chaos complete with staff and kids, I spontaneously folded in two and have been off sick for the past week. I’m supposed to be returning tomorrow (as I write this) on the grounds that my week’s worth of self certification will have expired. An extension would require a doctor’s certificate and that would be fine if I could actually get a spontaneous appointment. Alas such things no longer seem to exist and so with that circumstance it seems most prudent, if undesirable, to try returning. If I’m honest I really don’t know how well it will work out. In addition to the unknowable headaches there will also be the coming disruption in the form of my girlfriend's exacerbated treatment, which I only found out about ironically thanks to a meeting which I shouldn't have even been able to attend. This may well pose a bigger headache for the people I work with than I would wish for them, but I have hopes that they can accommodate our needs as they arise. From my perspective I'm not sure they have any more of a choice in the matter than either of us.

A Compassionate Pause

Recent events have once more put me in a place where the practice of mindfulness has very much become an ally, and I feel compelled to scribe a little piece about the value and importance of compassion. Let’s face it there's always a place and a time for this.

I’m reading a book which some of you may have heard of, called “The Book of Joy”. Maybe some of you will have read it, in which case (even though I’m only part way through it) good for you! If you haven’t (even though I’m only part way through it) I recommend it. It’s a meeting of minds between old friends the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu, together with author Douglas Abrams, the latter member also somewhat involved in the discussions. In fact it was a point which he himself raised between them which caught my mind. He mentioned almost casually a lab experiment involving eighteen month old children who were shown dolls facing one another versus others who were shown dolls facing away from one another. The former group were more cooperative than the latter, which arguably demonstrated that cooperation is a deep evolutionary drive which exists in our earliest development. In concert with the Dalai Lama’s assertion in other texts that our continued presence here today after so many millennia is likely due to a natural disposition for cooperation and compassion, rather than aggression and conflict, lead me to ponder our present social situations in a general sense.

On the same morning I was also engaged in conversation with a handful of friends over matters of immigration. It became evident once again that matters of practical mindfulness are as equally important to awareness of actual political facts if not more so, the latter of which can be fraught with objective corruption through to irresponsible reporting. In fact one of the people I was conversing with admitted that they didn’t really understand the political scene that easily, and who can blame them? It really is a quagmire of chaos, and I personally believe (as I stated in the chat) that we are in the midst of a fight of considerable magnitude when compared to the general impression given by the media, an information world war if you will - somewhat ironic when I think of us all living through the background fear of matters more nuclear. This is why I would implore people to embrace some responsibility and shrink the chaos we live with down to something manageable by meditating (in the sense of reasoned contemplation) upon those same natural, core instincts which the children mentioned above displayed.

Whilst I hesitate to broadly call the media out on “fake news”, a particularly reprehensible act when issued from those demonstrable sociopaths in our midst (no names mentioned), such problems whether inadvertently misinformed or purposefully fabricated are very real, and bring a destructive chaos to our efforts. What is undeniable however is the power of stepping back and looking deep into the heart of any matter with a sense of right minded compassion and empathy. Again, given my current circumstances I can assure you that these senses are currently quite tuned within myself and it was whilst I was engaged in this debate that the truth of such an approach became obvious. As I considered those children, free from complicated ego and social indoctrination, so too does this point to the validity of our own efforts as adults to undo those irksome habits in exchange for positive and clear mindsets. We all have a base sense of right from wrong which I would argue are influenced by real life experience even in the absence of parenting - the latter usually brings those lessons with a tempered kindness. By taking the time to allow ourselves some space when engaged in connection with others, tolerance to help us filter our knee-jerk emotions to feelings of confrontation, compassion rather than admonishment (for ourselves and others) when we fail to prevent our own vengeful reactions to verbal/actual conflict, we can take an active hand in creating better dialogue and actions. We can make clearer progress on a level where so many leaders, political and otherwise, bring little except shame in their “profitable” rhetoric. If so many of them cannot be trusted to demonstrate virtue then it really is up to us, as members of communities both virtual and tangible, to take the lead and smooth our own rhetoric into something worthy of the tools of communication at our disposal.