Turning my Samsung Galaxy S2 into a micro computer

Introduction

I've got Samsung Galaxy S2 (SGS2) as my phone, yes it's old, but at the moment I can't justify signing up for a contract to get something new when my money could be better spent. I think that my SGS2 is a brilliantly capable phone, certainly does everything I need it to do, the only criticisms I can make of it is performance (it does struggle with new, more demanding apps and when there is a few running. I've noticed that apps being updated really hurts performance to the point that the phone locks up for a second or two); and the screen size.

Ironically, I can't do anything about the performance but I can sort out my screen size issue. For me, I've got big-finger-itis. Also known as a fat thumb. So whilst icons are a usable size and I don't have an issue, using the screen for detailed work like filling in text boxes is a struggle. Also looking at a little screen compared to a 21 inch monitor is a pain.

This article talks about how I'm experimenting with how I can make my SGS2 a bit more usable.

Viewing

There's two aspects I'm looking at, firstly using the screen in terms of seeing it easily, and secondly interfacing with the phone. I'll be looking at the visualisation issue now.

A consortium of members consisting of Samsung, Nokia and others have worked in collaboration to produce a standard known as MHL. MHL is an interface that allows you to export what you see on your screen out as a HDMI signal. You can then use a HDMI cable to display this on your monitor or TV.

The first step is to get the HDMI signal from the phone. This is done using the HDTV Adapter.

I looked on eBay and Amazon for these and found hundreds in the £5-10 band. When I read the reviews it was extremely mixed. Not just one or two bad ones but every third one had a grumble.

So I looked for the official Samsung one, when I discovered an RRP of £34.99 I started to change my mind, but I was very lucky and found an official Samsung adapter on eBay for £5.99 - so I snatched that up and I already had a HDMI cable and the monitor I wanted to use available.

Samsung HDTV Adapter

The official Samsung HDTV Adapter arrives in a nice compact package. There is only the one component to this, nothing complicated to get it working.

Samsung individual packaging.

The SGS2 uses MHL v1.0 which means that the HDTV adapter requires a power supply. The really frustrating issue is that the current supplied by a normal USB 2 port isn't enough. You will need a mains plug. 

The micro USB lead plugs straight into your phone, power the plugs in to a micro USB port adjacent to the flying lead. Then you connect your HDMI cable into the other end of the adapter and your TV.

You don't need to install any apps or perform and configuration, upon connecting the HDMI cable to your TV and, if necessary, switching your TV to the correct input source you will result and you seeing your phone screen projected on your TV.

Phone screen projected onto the monitor via MHL.

At the start of the article I talked about how I wanted to make my SGS2 more usable as a mobile work platform. All of the testing and learning so far has been conducted on my TV in the living room.  The next step is to start using this to assist my work, so I packed the setup in my bag and took it to work with me.

Real world use

Arriving at work I was feeling rather excited about hooking up my phone to my screen so that I could use it to display information such as my calendar. That's when I ran into my first obstacle : between my monitors in my dual-screen setup I have every single connection option (DisplayPort, DVI, VGA etc) EXCEPT HDMI!

Looking at the array of connectors, one jumped out at me : DVI.

DVI Connector on the back of my monitor

My first thought was I would be able to use a HDMI-DVI adapter to act as an interface between the HDMI output of the adapter and the DVI socket on my monitor.

HDMI-DVI Adaptor

Feeling optimistic with the adapter in hand I got everything hooked up but I was greeted with a blank screen. It turns out the the MHL adapter can't drive the signal through the adapter which is slightly disappointing.

Return to home

Coming home I was very disappointed, I had hoped to be able to use my phone as a mobile workstation while at work (when on my break of course!), despite this I was determined to try and make this work.

The first thing I noticed was that whilst the phone screen was on my monitor, it only filled the middle of the screen. 

It turned out to be a simple fix, simply turning the phone onto its side means that the image would be adjusted to fill the screen.

Now that I have connectivity from the phone to the screen, I do have to try hard to not think that my monitor is now a touch screen! Ideally I could do with a stand that would keep the phone in the landscape position. Despite this I have found it useful having things like Inbox by Gmail and Google Calendar open - it worked especially well on my dual screen setup in my bedroom which is great for multi-tasking and now that I've virtually completed a migration to using Google I ensure that my Google account is fully sync'ed across all my devices.

In my follow up post to this, I will go into more detail about interfacing with the phone and the now, larger and improved display to further improve my productivity.

Ciao for now!

Why Im Quitting Folding@Home

My Past

I got involved with Folding@Home (FAH) in October 2010 when I read it in Custom PC magazine. I saw that people were using it on their PCs when not being used to support medical research by Stanford University (among others). Whilst initially conceived as something your typical user would install as a screensaver it quickly became a benchmarking tool and just like most benchmarking tools, there becomes a race to see who is the best.

For me FAH served a multitude of purposes, firstly, it fed my inner geek. For me there was a personal reason to it too - FAH was attempting research into deadly diseases such as cancer - I've already lost two members of my family to it, a third is diagnosed with it too, so it's been a massive motivator for me.

Setting up Windows XP and running an installer is easy and you then start to reap the rewards of your efforts when you see your hard work . But then you realise that there are several steps you can do to get more points out of your PC. Using Linux is probably the biggest boost, followed by over-clocking. So I quickly started to learn about Ubuntu and networking the computers together more efficiently. During this process I would consult the forums of the Custom PC magazine for help and guidance.

The Bit-Tech and Custom PC folding team is a very friendly group, all competitiveness is very light-hearted and the community is very supportive. At my peak when I had my own farm of computers (a total of 13 I believe) I was putting out 140,000 points per month. 

To do that I had built my own farm of folding PCs and even ended up buying a monstrous 7' server cabinet! In the picture below you can see a vertical panorama of the server cabinet - it's a little warped, but from top to bottom you can see: computer monitor, 8-way KVM switch, 8-port Ethernet switch, PDU bar, a workstation PC with dual Xeon processors, the two grey PCs are core2quad based PCs, the black PC is also a core2quad based PC, a 2U Dual Processor AMD Opteron workstation (also serves as a game server dual to the RAID-ed 10,000 RPM drives), finally the PC on the floor with the screwdriver on is a 1U Core2Duo PC.

Vertical panorama

To help grasp the size of the cabinet better here it is again

The thing is - there were still 5 PCs outside the rack as well!

Then things changed ...

By the middle of 2012 my employer transferred me from the site in the south of England to the one in Scotland. This meant a massive lifestyle change and moving out of shared accommodation and taking my own first step onto the property ladder. Despite having massive support from my employer, that first step is still challenging - especially since I was doing alone and at just 24 I was the youngest of all my friends to do it.

Upon moving in and getting settled into a new lifestyle with both bigger and more bills meant that running a folding farm was now prohibitively expensive because the total power draw of the system was approaching 4 kW, this became a hobby I could no longer justify.

Then Stanford changed things ... again ...

Stanford are regularly adjusting the Work Units (WUs) based on the research that they need. The processing power required for WUs generally increases over time. My hardware is still based on Core2Duo and Core2Quad era hardware which makes it very slow relative to the powerful i7s we have now. Earlier in 2015 Stanford withdrew WUs for GTX 2-series cards (GTX260s was what all of the PCs had, so losing the ability to fold on them hurt badly).

You can see in the image above that the WUs have a deadline of about 5-6 days, but its going to take about 4 days for my PC to process the data. Given that the PC is only on for about 4-5 hours a day it makes achieving these deadlines impossible and there's no point trying because the data will be wasted. The WU would be better spent being processed by someone who can chew it through in time.

It's been a tough decision to make because I have enjoyed learning about Linux and the perpetual PC maintenance is great fun, but money is the overriding factor, the current hardware is expensive to run and it's struggling to meet deadlines even if I could afford to run them 24/7.

I bid my fellow and future Folders all the luck in their folding career :)

Arduino Ethernet Shield

Becoming more adventurous

Life has been busy, but that doesn't mean I haven't been doing a lot of thinking. I've been following a gentleman called Jonathan Oxer for the past year or so because I came across his channel on You Tube all about Home Automation. I think he's absolutely brilliant and making his shows and he certainly inspired me to pick up Arduino.

That was in 2014, for Christmas I persuaded my partner to buy me a starter set (which is a very comprehensive set that I do recommend for anyone) and thus I started learning. I got about halfway through the "manual" before life became a bit hectic and never got a chance to do any more with it. 

The problem I had was that a lot of cool things that were being done using Arduino almost all involved networking to it in some form. The most commonly used way was an Ethernet Shield. So I just had to get one!

Official Arduino Ethernet Shield

Unboxing

Despite owning an Arduino for a year now, I still get shocked at how small it really is! I got home tonight to find the infamous RS bag on the dining room table so I knew what it was (to be truthful I knew what I was coming home to because I had been tracking the parcel all day!)

Arduino shield box next to a standard 3.5" hard drive

Inside the tiny package is the Ethernet shield, a small warranty booklet and some cool Arduino stickers. The shield itself comes with the pins secured in some foam. Below you can see the standard RJ45 Ethernet network port. It should be noted however that the chip set only supports 10/100 Ethernet.

Arduino shield, front

Arduino shield, side

Arduino shield, rear

The great feature about this shield is that it also has an SD card slot which means you can do data logging which you can see in the picture above, in the bottom left corner of the board, but also indicated below.

Micro SD Card Slot

Secondly, it also has an expansion feature that allows you to use a PoE chip. A PoE chip allows the extraction of power that has been put into the unused wires of Ethernet (either by a special switch or a PoE injector). This is useful for deploying your devices where they might not necessarily be in a place where you can get a plug to them.

Power over Ethernet Adaptor

What to do?

Well now I've got my Ethernet shield I intend to start using it by creating some data logging projects to see if I can have the Arduino capture data and then publish the data to somewhere like Google Docs. Although in the interim I'll just log to the SD Card and extract the data on an ad hoc basis for doing some analysis.

Making a penny with Google Rewards

Background

There is a new app from Google called Google Opinion Rewards, it's a really simple app where you get paid for answering questions. you get paid in the play store with credit.

The amount you receive varies wildly. on one survey I got 48p, on another I got just 6p and there's no real way of telling, although the more questions you answer the more you get. 

Getting going

Firstly, you'll need to install the Google Opinion Rewards app from the Play Store. There is a small calibration / test quiz for you to do, it doesn't give you any rewards but you do need to do it to get going. It can take a while before you get your first survey, it took about 3-4 days for mine to come through.

Answering your first survey

You'll get a notification whenever a survey is available. All the surveys I've had are valid for 24 hours,  so I don't think you need to live by your phone.

Once you've got a survey, just tap the icon to get started. some surveys are just one question, some are more.

For me, I only got the one question (out of the maximum of 9) so that mean't a small reward for me unfortunately.

It's that simple, for a few seconds work you can get up to 50p credit quite easily to spend on whatever you want in the play store. You can't use the credit to subsidise purchasing an expensive item, you have to be able to completely pay for the item using the credit but other than that there is no real restrictions.

Good luck!

Modifying my home network

In this blog entry, I'm talking about a minor change I made to my network to improve functionality because of the limitations caused by having the BT Home Hub 3 router as the core of my network.

What I used to have

For the last 14 months since I moved into my house I had the ultimate in basic networking. I have BT Infinity feeding my house so I have a lovely 40 Mb internet connection arriving at the door. From there the BT Infinity modem modulates/demodulates the internet traffic which feeds into a BT Home Hub 3 Router. The router is also a wireless access point. The router also provides one (yes ONE!) one gigabit port which I had hooked up to my PC in the living room for watching films. There are two other 100 megabit ethernet ports available too, but the current positioning of the router in the house made it impractical to use the wired connections, so everything was over Wi-Fi.

My original architecture

The problems

One of the many things I do on my network is use Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) between computers - this applies in particular to my personal data cluster / folding farm which is in my garage. However, whenever I did this, the connection would fail. After much tracing and head scratching, it was the router.

I put it down to an internal firewall blockage that meant the router would not pass the RDP connection through it. But I couldn't see an easy fix because it's not like a port-forwarding issue where I know which PC/ IP address is the intended recipient. With this, I might use any PC to RDP to any other PC. So I didn't want to have a million RDP rules.

Solutioneering

That's actually a word? No squiggly red line under it! Wow! For a second I thought I made that up, d'oh there goes that ray of sunshine... Come on Chris, focus ...

Anyway, ultimately I want to ditch the BT Home Hub 3 for something that is more powerful, read DD-WRT (http://www.dd-wrt.com/site/index) compatable. But thats off in the future yet. 

I wanted to have the home network on its own network and only go to the router for the internet access. So this is what I did : the internet still went from the modem to the router, but then the GigE port on the router went to a switch which is where I would then fan out GigE cables to all my devices. Ultimately I will set up a comms cabinet with a full patch panel, but this is step 0.5 implementation for now (and it cost me nothing because I already had the switch).

Modified network

My new switch

The switch that I'm using for the job is a simple NetGear one :

Conclusion

From now on, all network connections will be going into the switch. That's my basic improvement, there's much left to do such as setting up the comms cabinet and running Ethernet about the house, but its a start to an improved network, I've noticed far fewer packet collisions (when both my girlfriend and I would try to log into Lord of the Rings Online I would be unable to log in due to network problems - helped by using a different port).

Review: Google Chromecast

New toys

For Christmas my parents gave me their old TV, since moving into my first house I've been using a computer monitor as a TV. Which hasn't been that bad if I'm honest, the distance from my sofa to "TV" was never more than 3m so when watching on a 22 inch screen even full HD video looked lovely and was pleasing to watch.

Out with the old

That said, I was using a computer monitor as my TV, clearly that means that I had a computer set up nearby driving it, the problem with a computer driving what you watch is that you have to get up and operate said computer because computers usually don't have an interface to them that lends itself for operation from your arm chair (does anyone under the age of 80 even have an arm chair these days?)

The reason it doesn't is that your typical computer is equipped with a keyboard and mouse, which even when wireless isn't desirable because they are precision tools but when interacting with a display at a range of 3m+ precision isn't what you need.

What you need is something simple and robust that is independent of range. Once solution is to implement the Google Chromecast and use your mobile device(s) such as your smart phone or tablet as a remote control.

Unboxing

As of January 2015, the Google Chromecast is on sale for £30. Until the end of January, the purchase of a Chromecast also has four offers:

• £15 of Google play credit
• X-men on Google movies
• 90 days of Google play music subscription
• Three months now TV

The current package makes for an exceptionally good deal. The X-Men movie is worth £2.49, 90 days on Google play is worth £20.96 (3 off £6.99) and finally the now TV subscription is worth £29.97 (3 off £9.99).

The Chromecast comes in a very neat, simple glossy cardboard box.

The outer sleeve is removed to reveal another similar cardboard box. Opening this box gives you the first glimpse of the Chromecast dongle.

Underneath the dongle tray are the final three components to make the Chromecast work (and two of these are optional).

The Chromecast is powered over USB: the lead approximately 1.5m long when fully stretched out, which means that you should have no problem reaching any USB port on your TV regardless of the HDMI port location. For slightly older TV's (like mine) without a USB port, an AC-DC plug is provided.

The final item is a HDMI Extender. This is really useful for giving you a bit of extra length to reach your mains plug, also if the area around your HDMI port is quite congested due to the design of the TV, it again gives you some breathing room for the dongle (like you can see in the picture below, there was very little room directly below the HDMI ports due to the shaping of the TV). But its primary purpose is to boost the Wi-Fi signal the dongle recieves. Having used the dongle when there has been high internet traffic causing a bandwidth issue for iPlayer and witnessing the drop in resolution during playback, I can say it is unpleasant on the eye to see such a drastic change unexpectedly. So to ensure there is no bandwith issue, I use the HDMI extender and would recommend that you also use it.

When the Chromecast Dongle is installed with the HDMI Extender, and with the USB powering lead plugged in this is how it looks on my TV (only has two HDMI inputs).

Now that the Chromecast is installed, the next steps are all about getting it registered on to your Wi-Fi network. It should be noted that if you want to install a custom ROM on your Chromecast, now's a good time to do that.

When you are ready, you'll need to switch your TV to the correct HDMI input to use the Chromecast as a source. You'll need to download the Chromecast app to your phone, tablet or computer to get started.

In the same way that you pair your phone with your car using bluetooth, the next few steps involve pairing your Chromecast to the Wi-Fi network and record it on your Google Account.

Once the Chromecast is on the network, it will do an update. These updates can be about 1 GB so this may take a few minutes depending on your broadband connection.

The Chromecast will automatically reboot itself and apply the updates so you should eventually be greeted with a screen like this:

Now you can start casting. You can cast from desktop using Chrome (once you've installed the Google Cast plug-in), cast from your android device (you've already installed the Chromecast app) and then you can cast within an app such as iPlayer or Netflix to beam your video to your TV. For the latest list of apps that you can use with your Chromecast check the Chromecast website.

It should be noted that the video stream isn't going via your tablet (or phone), a dedicated connection is setup between the Chromecast and your Wi-Fi. So you can then continue to use your tablet to watch whatever you want. I've found that if you cast from Chrome on your computer, you can't close Chrome or turn the computer off, it seems some connection is still maintained.

Final thoughts (on the extras)

Having had access to Google Play Music for 90 days I've found that for the most part it's been unused. The biggest reason for this for me is that I don't have a large data allowance (only 500 Mb), for someone with a 3+ GB allowance that could use it on the go. The NowTV subscription is in same boat. It wasn't made as clear as it could have been, but what you actually get is 90 days Entertainment pack access. The entertainment pack gives you access to TV shows, such as Game of Thrones, but not access to films which is slightly disappointing. Furthermore I found that the collection available whilst broad didn't have anything particularly impressive until Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead came out. So in my opinion I can't recommend NowTV - I find Netflix has a better selection.

Final thoughts (on the dongle)

One sentence : I bloody love it. The ability to just fling whatever at the TV is certainly extremely convenient. I did discover when trying to watch something from 4oD. They don't have an app, so I tried watching the video when casting the tab from Chrome. But that proved horrifically laggy, so in the end I had to just use the other HDMI cable in the TV to connect it to the PC. No major issue there. Casting a normal webpage is a little laggy but acceptable.

Generally I absolutely love the Chromecast and can't wait to buy more to plug into the rest of the TVs and monitors around the house.

PC Mod: Minecraft Creeper Case Build Log #4

Intro

Firstly, apologies its been a long time since I put up anything.
Since I am not a pro modder and don’t possess the skills that most avid modders have of being able to go from a conceptual drawing straight to a working on the final product in metal work, I figured that I would try mocking up my design and ideas first.
Having moved into my first home a couple of months I have an abundance of cardboard boxes, so I believe I can hack and coerce them to help me model my project.

Rallying the Soldiers

The first step was that I needed dimensions from the items that I knew I would be using in this build, so it was a case of digging into the chassis of my gaming rig so that I could measure up the size of the motherboard and a GTX 260. The PSU I would be using is currently in what is my HTPC so I decided to measure up one of the random, no-name ones that I had laying around.
So, armed with dimensions, a stanley knife, a measuring tape and a bit of wood I headed out to the garden to start slicing and dicing (hopefully not me!).

I got cracking by working out how best to maximise my usage of the cardboard. It worked out that the large square side is, give or take a centimeter the same size as the motherboard. So that was a quick decision.

Out of the material that you can see in the above picture, I managed to cut out shapes for the motherboard, the PSU and the graphics card.

So now that I had all the bits, it was time to start sticking them together. The motherboard was just left as is, the two pieces that were for the graphics card were taped together quickly. Now the PSU took a bit more effort. I had cut out 8 pieces for the PSU, I then used smaller pieces of card as a spacer to try and bulk up the stack to make it more like the actual PSU size.

So now I have the motherboard, graphics card and PSU modelled, the next task is a bit to represent the SSD/HDD, radiators and pump. Once they are made, then its on to making the actual chassis/framework that will be the case. Personally, it’s starting to come together slowly I think!
Take care, ciao for now!
cav3 d1v3r