Computers: Building a PC with my Daughter

Me, my daughter Ivy, & her new PC

A few months ago, my daughter and I were discussing technology, and talking about the various things that people can do, and somehow the topic came around to putting computers together, and I assured her that if she wanted to, it was something we could do.

"Really?!?" she asked.

"Yep," I foolishly affirmed.

A few months later she reminded me.

"Remember that computer we're going to build together?"

So... As we ramped up to Christmas, Ivy and I talked about the kinds of projects we could do, from building a small circuit board with transistors, to putting together some kind of simple computing device from chips, to assembling a PC from parts. After some discussion, she opted to build a PC.

Our Project Requirements

1. A "real" computer. Uncrippled, updatable, and useful.
2. Runs Linux as primary OS.
3. Capable of running World of Warcraft
4. Useful as a home theater media box
5. Not horribly expensive.

Selecting and Acquiring the Components

Our first stop was at the Computer Store West, out by Frugal Muse on the west side of Madison. They've got a lot of computer parts, cases, and advice, and Ivy and I found it very helpful. After some discussion, we decided to select a motherboard, and work out from there. The store sold a nice little board, the "Asus P5N-EM HDMI Motherboard" It's a Micro-ATX motherboard with a 775 socket. (The 775 socket is a pinless socket that accepts Intel-manufactured chips).

You can look at it here: Asus P5N-EM HDMI Motherboard. $100

ASUS P5N-EM motherboard & CPU fan

This board was attractive to us because of the low price ($100), the integrated graphics card (nVidia GeForce 7100) and the built-in HDMI support, which meant easy hookup to a HD television. It also supported a wide range of powerful (and not so powerful) processors, as well as a wide range of DDR2 RAM.

Unfortunately, despite a desire to buy locally, the premium on some of the individual pieces was too much, and they didn't carry everything. Our goal was to get the minimum specification on every part, and it didn't suit our purposes to spend twice as much to get a slightly better part when we knew a cheaper (and slightly less powerful) part was readily available online.

So, we purchased the following pieces online from TigerDirect:

Thermaltake Black LANBOX Micro-ATX Case. $120

We liked this because it had clear sides. (If you're building it yourself, this is a plus, so you can show it off.) It also has a nice carrying handle, and a cool blue light when it's on.

Intel Celeron Dual Core 1.6ghz CPU. $40.

This is the cheapest processor readily available that will fit in a 775 socket. One thing I like about the route we took here is that if we need more power later on, we could replace it with something like this, a $500+ 2.93ghz quad core processor.

A Masscool 775 CPU fan. $20

Apparently modern CPUs need fans right on them. A heat sync alone won't do anymore.

2 DDR2 667mhz 1gb DIMMs. $24

I figured 2 GB of RAM, would be enough, and by picking the slower 667mhz stuff, it's another place where we could improve the computer's performance in the future by acquiring a more expensive set of DIMMs.

A Power UP 550 watt ATX power supply. $30.

Relatively low power, simple, and cheap, but it has all the needed connectors, and I don't think we'll need bigger for quite a while.

I didn't want to buy anything I didn't have to, so I started scrounging around for leftover hard drives, optical drives, keyboards, and mice. I've got extra monitors around the house, and part of the idea is that the thing should hook up to our TV as-is.

My brother was kind enough to supply a 330gb hard drive that had been dropped and that he no longer trusted for business purposes, even though it passed tests. I ended up purchasing a new mouse with Ivy, and while I was going to purchase a straight DVD-ROM, Ivy threw in her X-mas money to get me to go up to a Blu-Ray optical drive. For now, we're just using old crummy keyboards scavanged from older computers.

Scavenged Maxtor 3.5" hard drive. (PATA, 330gb), $0

Logitech wireless USB mouse. $20

LG blu-ray optical drive. $120

I'm still not sure (see below) that this thing will play blu-ray movies as is. But it comes close, and it might allow ripping them, even if it doesn't allow direct playback.

Total parts cost: $474

So, without telling Ivy, I ordered all the parts, boxed them up, and carried them as wrapped gifts down to the in-laws for our Christmas visit. I think it's telling that we could have shaved $100 off the price by going with a regular DVD instead of the blu-ray. By staying away from the cutting edge on a project like this, you can save a lot of money.

Assembly

Ivy screws in the Hard Drive

On Christmas, we opened it all up, and Ivy and I set to the assembly with a will. Mostly, this is just a physical process of plugging things into other things, screwing things into other things, and spending a lot of time looking at the manual to make sure that everything that needs to be hooked up is hooked up.

One observation I have about this process is that most connectors are keyed, so you can't connect them backwards or to the wrong thing. The only exception I noticed was that the firewire and USB connections to the motherboard look the same, and you can apparently damage the motherboard by hooking them up incorrectly. We didn't have firewire on this motherboard, so I tucked that cable out of the way.

Everything else was pretty straightforward. Including mounting the drives, which required a little ambitious positioning and screwing, but nothing too out there. It was especially convenient that our case had lift out mounts for both the power supply and the drives, which meant we could pull them out to screw things in. Very nice.

Still not done, but happy.

Our only hang-up during initial assembly came in connecting the "power" light on the case to the appropriate pins on the motherboard. The case manufacturer thinks that an ATX motherboard power light connector should have three pins, and the important ones are 1 and 3. The motherboard from ASUS, however, had two pins as part of a grid of many connectors. I had to reconfigure the power connector by pulling loose one of the wires and reconnecting it, and then jamming into the available space, with part of the connector hanging out over the edge. Inelegant, but it works.

After we wired it up, we plugged it in in the kitchen for the smoke test, and had no trouble. We then hooked it up to one of my father-in-laws monitors and keyboards, and we were able to boot to the bios configuration screens, where the computer promptly froze.

A little research revealed the only significant misstep Ivy and I made in the entire process. The motherboard has three DIMM slots for RAM. One of which is a different color than the other two. I put the two DIMMs we had into the two slots that had the same color. Turns out that the 3rd slot is a different color because it requires a DIMM to be inserted there. After about 15 minutes with the motherboard manual, I figured this out, moved one DIMM to that slot, and then I could boot to BIOS configuration without crashing. Huzzah!

Configuration and Installation

Since my goal was to create a linux-primary machine, I then installed Ubuntu linux on it. I cannot stress just how easy this was. Unfortunately, I also wanted to be able to boot Windows XP, because A) That's the easiest way to play World of Warcraft, and B) The blu-ray video playing software only comes for Windows.

Sadly, it would turn out that this was a mistake on my part. Important tip: To create a dual-boot system with windows, install windows first. The dual boot manager I'm using is called "grub", and if you install Ubuntu after you install windows, it ends up properly installed, but if you install Ubuntu first, Windows blows it away during its own installation.

In my experience, new system configuration is always a hassle, and this was no exception.

Problems Overcome:

• It passed the smoke test!

  Couldn't get grub reinstalled after Windows blew it away. Fixed that by running it from the command line in Linux after booting Ubuntu from the live CD. However, the grub menu didn't show Windows as an option. Had to modify the grub boot config file to add Windows to the list. Solution: Some messing around at the linux command line. Annoying, but not too bad.


• No sound on Windows XP. For whatever reason, the default configuration after installation didn't have Windows using the nVidia sound hardware. Solution: Changed settings in Sound control panel in windows.


• Ubuntu didn't have nVidia drivers, so maxed res at 800x600. In addition, the automatic installation program in Ubuntu doesn't currently work for this. Solution: Found and downloaded current drivers. Had to boot Ubuntu in recovery mode to install them, since the installer wouldn't let me do it while x-windows was running.


• World of Warcraft and its two expansions took 8 hours to install. I kid you not. Solution: Excessive patience.

Problems still outstanding:

• Blu-ray software "PowerDVD" won't play blu-rays. When I first installed it, I put in the Dark Knight blu-ray, and it played at a reduced frame rate. I fiddled with the settings trying to get better performance. Then quit and tried installing an updated version of PowerDVD. Since then, and despite a full reinstall of PowerDVD, when I put a blu-ray disc in and try to play it, PowerDVD quits without generating an error message. Very frustrating, especially since it worked once. mini-update: It worked again when hooked up to HDMI instead of VGA. Could it be a copy protection thing?

All photos courtesy my wife, Liana Loos-Austin.

Apple: 10 Burning Questions about the iPhone

Update: I've updated some of the answers as of 3/14/08

The just-announced iPhone looks very very cool. So cool, in fact, that if you'd told me all the features before the announcement, I would have called you a damn liar. This post may not make sense if you aren't already familiar with the baseline, so you might want to check out the link to see Apple's multimedia presentation on what the phone will do.

The Apple iPhone

That said, the announcement (and my subsequent reading) has left me with some questions. None of these are necessarily make-or-break deals, but I'd dearly love to know the answers.

1. Is the storage space expandable?

It comes with either 4 or 8GB, but that's not much when you're talking about full length movies and tv shows. There's a slot on the side, can you put some sort of memory card in there to expand its storage?

Answer: The iPhone does not have memory expansion, which means the video-playing capabilities are a little dubious, especially if you have a lot of music you want to keep on the device as well. I'd say to figure the 8GB model as a must if video storage is in the plans. That will let you get 2 or 3 full length movies on there at any one time. More if you skimp on either quality or other data.

Update: However, if you have wifi, and the wherewithal, you can compress a movie in MP4 so that you can play it in the web browser. I've compressed a good chunk of my library in this way, so I can watch movies on the road from my home server.

2. Can you access the unix command line?

One of the very cool things about OS X is that when you need to, you can fire up the terminal and access the basic unix command line. The new phone "runs OS X" but that's only an advantage if it offers the same sort of accessibility that makes OS X what it is.

Answer: Not yet. Someone has hacked shell access using the port on the bottom, but that's a far cry from command line access on the device itself.

Update: Yes, if you hack it. The hack, called "jailbreaking" has improved to the point where you can get true shell access. However, it does involve either a fair amount of work to keep up to date, or a commitment to not updating to the latest firmware at every chance. Apple's upcoming official solution for third party apps will doubtlessly not include shell access.


3. Does it support ssh?

A device that allows me to make a ssh (secure shell) connection to a server at my office is easily worth half again as much as one that doesn't.

Answer: Kind of. There's no way to do it on the device itself, but, since it supports a pretty powerful web-broswer with SSL, you could connect to a secure web service that provided a terminal window. It's clunky, but doable. I still hope for a real ssh client to be added at some point.

Update: Yes, if you hack it you can install a true ssh client, and it works quite well. I imagine that there will be an decent ssh client that runs in the 2.0 firmware as well.

4. Does it support video to an external TV?

One of the super cool things about the current video iPod is that with an inexpensive cable, you can hook it up to a TV and use it as the source for watching a movie or show. I'd hate to lose that capability.

Answer: This is not possible with any existing iPod peripherals or cables. I'm still not sure whether this means that the capability is truly gone, or if it just requires a new peripheral of some sort.

Update: Yep, it just required new cabling, which is now available. However, you do have to watch out for GSM interference on the audio from the cell phone. Putting it in airplane mode will solve this if you're doing a presentation or the like.

5. Does it support the iTunes music store?

If you can use the device itself to buy music from the store, and then transfer that music later to your other devices, that would be pretty nifty. If you could use the store to buy games, movies, and tv shows as well, even better. (but see question 9.)

Answer: No. However, this capability could easily come as a software update. The presumed problem here is AT&T's desire not to have their limited EDGE network bandwidth taken up by this kind of traffic. This might be a feature that waits until a G3 version of the iPhone hits the shelves.

Update: They added this capability in a firmware update (1.1.1), and the addressed the bandwidth concern by making it something that only works over wifi, not over the cell network.

6. Is it compatible with the games already released for the G5 iPod?

I own three of these. Admittedly, they're not expensive, but I like them, and it would be really nice if I could bring them along, and one more reason to make this my portable device of choice.

Answer: No. Doubtlessly there will be games for it eventually, but there were none at launch. There are now some games that can be played in the Safari web browser, but none of them are especially grand.

7. Does it support Adobe Flash in the browser?

Sure, it's Safari in name, and looks like a pretty good browser, but a browser that doesn't support Adobe Flash is essentially crippled on today's web. Lots of video sites rely on it, many web games rely on it, heck, even some web comics now depend on it. What degree of Flash is supported? (For that matter, how well will it work with web 2.0 apps?)

Answer: Actually, this isn't turning out too badly. The answer is still no, but A) web 2.0 support is decent. and B) Flash is rumored to be coming as a future update. Wait and see, I guess.

Update: Still not too bad, but it doesn't look like flash is coming.

8. How open will it be to third party developers?

This is a biggie. One of the nice things about many of the palm and windows-based smartphones is the ability to install applications written by independent developers. From useful utilities to entertaining games, this ability is nearly crucial, but Apple won't even talk about what kind of processor the device has yet, so it seems like it's not exactly approaching the development community with the most open of arms.

Answer: No. Apple is calling it a "Closed Platform". Steve Jobs told the New York Times: "These are devices that need to work, and you can't do that if you load any software on them." Which is obviously bullshit, since I put stuff on my PDA, my computer, and my PSP, and all of them continued working just fine. Jobs told MSNBC: "Cingular doesn't want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.", which is, I suspect, closer to the truth. The deal-with-the-devil AT&T exclusive probably required some compromising, and crippling the device so that user apps couldn't be installed was probably one of those compromises. This may be simply to proctect AT&T's various fee-based markets. I wouldn't use SMS messaging at all if I could install an AIM chat client, for instance. I hope this position changes, or that (at least) it allows for widgets and/or Adobe flash programs. Even decent support for HTML or Web 2.0 apps running from local memory would be better than nothing, here. (Web apps so far only run from the web, not from local storage.)

Update: Well, Jobs relented, and the SDK for writing applications is now available. Full application support is coming in June with the 2.0 firmware. While there are some caveats, I think it will address this point quite nicely.

9. What will the monthly service cost?

This is a pretty big deal. With the capabilities of the device, you're going to want unlimited (or nigh unlimited) data transfer. What kind of a monthly pricetag is that going to amount to? Especially important because of the two year contract.


Answer: $60 for 450 minutes with unlimited data. Not too bad, actually.

10. Does it support easy net access for my MacBook via Bluetooth?

One of the grails of cell phones for me has been the transparent ability to set it up next to my laptop and get my laptop online through the phone's access to the net. This has, historically, been way more difficult that it should be. This phone seems to have all the pieces, but I've seen that before.

Answer: Nope. I'm guessing that AT&T didn't want this because they charge a lot more for data plans that allow "tethered" access of this sort. I've crafted a way to write an email on my laptop and send it using the iPhone, which takes part of the burden of this restriction away. Would be nice to see this capability added.

Update: It is possible to do this with a hacked iphone now, but it's against AT&Ts terms of service, so is probably not a good idea if you want to keep your cell phone plan.

Bonus Q: Will I be able/want to get one?

Despite my initial skepticism about some of the devices limitations, the fact turned out to be that I needed a phone. With that as a baseline need, and the surprisingly reasonable monthly rate, I decided to spring for it. Its email capabilities are really what I needed in way of data, and it's phone features are just what the doctor ordered. The rest of the built in capabilities vary from cool to great, and that makes it a pretty good phone for me. I'm still hoping to see some of the shortcomings fixed, either by new versions of the device or by software improvements. Time will tell.