A life of servitude : Windows Home Server 2011

I was recently given a copy of Windows Home Server 2011 (WHS2011). I have read on line that WHS2011 is getting quite a slating, but given that I didn’t pay a penny for it, I thought it would be worth at least trying out to see what its like. This article is a record of my experience so far.

Installation

Installing WHS2011 was an absolute doddle, just like you would expect with any Windows package, the installation feels much like Windows 7. I found that the initial step of loading the installation data from disc took a very long time in comparison to the normal Windows 7 installation, it took about 30 minutes just to progress from the “Press any key to boot from CD / DVD” to actually getting control of the installation. This is hardly a major issue really.

Once you have put in the initial settings - just let the installer do its thing, it again takes quite a while, a good hour I’d say. Again, this isn't a big issue.

First Start

Once WHS2011 is installed, you will eventually arrive at a log-on screen. When you do, just enter your log-on details. From the very first moment I logged on, I got the impression that having a desktop is an extra service that runs – from this point I start feeling like the server should really be running headless. I found that the first log on took a long time and felt very clumsy. But subsequent logins are far faster.

Updating

I am always in the habit of when I do a fresh install of Windows, I jump on Windows Update and start it getting its rafts of updates. I had 106 updates consisting of about 570 MB of data to be downloaded and installed. Unfortunately, I had to run to work at this point, so I had the what I thought was a brilliant idea of just letting the PC run while I was at work – it would clearly take a few hours and it can do all its restarts etc and then I would come home to a nicely updated machine. So later that day I came home and turned on the monitor to see the updater stuck at update 12 of 106 because it was installing Internet Explorer 9 and the IE9 installer has manual prompts – oh well, 12 hours of electricity completely wasted then …

Configuring the server

The Router

Setting up the server truly is a doddle! Setting up involved a few basic settings such as shares and even setting up your router to allow remote control (via RDP and the Dashboard) from other PCs. Now its at this point I had my first issue – I am using a BT Home Hub 3. Which claims to support UPnP (universal plug and play), all the settings in the configuration of the home hub say it does, but WHS2011 couldn't automatically configure it, so I had to manually set up port forwarding. This was slightly frustrating because I had to consult three different WHS2011 support pages for the ports that needed forward. No one of the support pages listed all the ports, so I found the first page and forwarded on the first port. Tested it, didn't work, did some more googling, got another port, got that forwarded, still wouldn't work, guess what I did next, MORE googling, got a new port to forward, got that forwarded and then it finally worked!! I had to tell the wizard that I would manually sort out my router. But I then used part 2 of the wizard to set up my domain. With a windows live account using home server you can choose a domain with the .homeserver.com domain host.

Hard Drives

In my server I have one drive that I use for the operating system (OS) and four more that I use for “data”. My dream has been to get these four drives in to a RAID-5 array. Why RAID-5? I feel it offers the best balance of redundancy (I can have a single drive fail out of four and the array will still continue to work – although in a degraded state), and cost (I've got four drives, I effectively lose one to redundancy, so my array is 75% efficient).

Windows makes this really easy to set up, first you need four drives ideally of all the same capacity (well you can use different capacities, but the array configures itself based on the smallest drive), and get them fully formatted and clean. So in your Computer Management window you should see your OS drive, plus four blank “unallocated” drives.

Right click on the unallocated region of any of the “to be RAID-ed” drives, right click “New RAID-5 Volume”.

You then get a window appear which is basically listing all the available drives on the left, and wants you to move the drives to the right that you want to be a part of the RAID-5 array. Just pick the ones you want, move them over and click next.

The next screen then asks you what size you want the array to be. It will default to 3 times the smallest drive capacity. If you had a 20 GB, 40 GB, 60 GB and 80 GB drive, your array capacity would have a maximum limit of just 60 GB. You might for some reason what to use less than the full RAID-5 capacity (maybe you want a “backup” partition that is logically separate for instance). Make your choice and click continue …

Eventually you will get to the end of the wizard and it will congratulate you on building the array. Now a boring step – you need to wait while windows “configures” the array. This involves Windows running the RAID-5 algorithm to get the drives set up to receive data. My array consisted of 4 500 GB drives, quite small by 2013 standards, but the array still took the majority of two days to build, while this is happening, the Computer Management tool will say that the drives are “syncing”.


In the wonderful world of the Internet, you experience time different, and after glancing at the above picture, you have transported yourself forward two days (don’t worry, only two days forward in my life!) and you have a fully configured array! Windows will report that the array is healthy.

One thing I did, that probably slowed down the syncing process was I started moving my data onto the array. I put about 500 GB of data (videos, pictures etc.), I am convinced this slowed down the process because despite plugging the USB2 external drive straight into the server PC, I was writing to the array at a blazing 3.7 MB/s ! If you were to just abandon your PC I'm sure it would take far less time (using the same capacity).

Conclusion

Setting up the RAID array and getting the shares set up is about 90% of the short-term functionality of my server, so by this point I was extremely pleased with my progress! I will write up more about my server for those that are interested.
Take care!

The Future is E!

In my very first blog post, I announced that one of my hobbies is anything related to technology (computer technology). I am very much a lover of the idea of integrating computer technology into the home. It has been talked about for years about homes becoming more digitised and “e” but it is taking off very slowly, I think there are a couple of main drivers behind this. The main one I believe is infrastructure.

For an e-home to function, there needs to be a good infrastructure to support it. What do I mean by this, well my idea is that homes basically need a smaller version of the technology that enterprises have in their corporate networks. Looking at your average (my) home. I can see bits and pieces of technology making advances, for instance, mobile devices such as laptops, phones, e-readers, tablets and consoles to name just a few are all getting more and more hungry for information, almost universally in the form of internet access. And all this data is supposed to be piped through your BT home hub? Aye right that will work well! It might be for me living on my own, but when you start getting to your average family – mum, dad, two, three or four kids and each person has their own set of electronic devices – you are really starting to hit a data flow problem.

So my first point is that the physical infrastructure needs to exist. So my idea is an effective network consisting of a core spine of ultra-high data-rate networking with branches to allow connectivity into that spine.

On the same theme as enterprise infrastructure, the infrastructure needs to support the actual management of data. One problem that I have in my house is that all my devices (I have a laptop and two desktops represent 90% of my work) have different “scraps” of data across them and it can be frustrating when I can’t remember which PC has a piece of data on it that I need. So what I want, and what I believe homes need is a data management system. In my mind, even a small family home needs a centralised data archive that anyone, anywhere in the home and ideally anywhere in the world can access.

As an example, if you look at Windows 7 onwards, you can set up what is known as a HomeGroup. It is basically a limited file sharing system between PCs. You can read data from very specific directories (My Documents for instance), and have access to some of the other PCs facilities too, such as printers. Which is very good. But the limitations of it are quickly apparent.

Further building on the management of data, there are two sub-themes in this. Data redundancy and data backup. These are subtly different problems to be solved and I will do this after I first try to define them:

• Data Redundancy, in the event of a limited amount of failure of equipment and / or problems I am still able to access my data
• Data Backup, in the event that my data is corrupted, I am able to restore the data from historical archives.

I believe that the e-home needs to have data stored centrally that has a direct link into the infrastructure for easy and rapid data access. But even more important is to address the two bullet points above: you need to have some resistance to failures / problems so that data isn't lost easily. But you also need to address the situation that if you do lose data, you can recover it (mostly typically).
One way I've seen this kind of addressed is the use of Cloud Storage solutions by providers such as Dropbox and SkyDrive. They look after most of the above mentioned issues to some degree or another.

In a very round-a-bout type way I've tried to introduce some of the areas that appeal to me and that I will talk about more in the future.

That's all for now folks. Ciao for now!

Micro PC build

A New PC .. but not for me! :(

My mother-in-law has a tiny (and rightly impressive) Mac Mini as her main computer and has used this for many years with general satisfaction. However, there is only so much processing power you can squeeze into a chassis no bigger than a ready-meal and after 10 years, she now finds it laggy playing games and unable to enjoy the latest releases at high quality.

Wendy's current computer - Mac Mini 1st Generation

As such she has been pining for an upgrade for a while and I offered my services to build one for her. This blog article is just a quick one showing what we did.

Requirements Specification

Being a Systems Engineer, I just felt impulsed to write a requirement spec. Did I write it down? No, but this is what I thought Wendy needed after talking with her about her ideal PC. 

1. It must be compact, full-size towers (ATX) are far too large [REQ01]
2. It must be quiet - hurricanes of fans are not an option [REQ02]
3. It must be power efficient [REQ03]
4. It must be powerful - a slightly subjective requirement! Further discussion revealed:
1. The Graphics Card must be powerful enough to be able to play games at the current level of quality (low graphics)  [REQ04]
2. The Graphics Card should be powerful enough to be able to play games at high quality (desirable requirement) [REQ05]
3. Boot-up time must be less than 1 minute (current experience with the Mac Mini) [REQ06]
4. No particular memory requirements other than it has to be able to play games [REQ07]

Design Ideas

OK so there we have seven requirements, here's my thought process going from requirements to design:

[REQ01] - Compact

She's familiar with the Mac Mini and loves how small it is, so ideally wanted to find a case of similar size. Overall the objective was to minimise the case size. I did stumble across a case that looks very very similar to the Mac Mini case. The problem I had with it straight away was it required a PSU of size "SFX" - what the bugger does that mean? My interpretation : bloody small with very limited options. I didn't like the idea of limited options. So had to continue looking.

[REQ02] - Quiet

I really wanted to try and use all-in-one watercoolers on the CPU to keep it quiet.

[REQ03] - Power Efficient

It must be power efficient

[REQ04] & [REQ05]- Graphics

The Graphics Card must be powerful enough to be able to play games at the current level of quality (low graphics)
The Graphics Card should be powerful enough to be able to play games at high quality (desirable requirement)

I know from experience that even my archaic GTX 260 and GTX 460 cards in my PCs are more than beasty enough for games like the Sims 4. So I had pretty much any choice of modern cards that suited both the space volume restrictions and met the budget.

[REQ06] - Quick

Boot-up time must be less than 1 minute (current experience with the Mac Mini)

[REQ07] - Memory

No particular memory requirements other than it has to be able to play games

We are going to need a bigger boat ... I mean box

So after a few hours on Scan.co.uk and Ebuyer.co.uk buttons were pressed and the debit card burned, a rather impressive two days later parcels arrived!

Unpacking

I have to confess, I left work early (3pm to be precise after being there for just 6 hours!) so that I could come home to start the build. I had been tracking the parcels online using the respective courier services so I knew they had made it.

RAM

First up is the Random Access Memory, or RAM. I've learned that your choice of RAM will be one of the two major features that will limit (or not) your overall performance. RAM is a bit like scrap-paper for doing your homework. If you have an A4 piece of scrap paper then you can write out lots easily, however if you only have a piece of paper the size of a stamp, then you can only write a little at a time and you will spend lots of time rubbing out what you've done so you can then do the next bit. That's much the same scenario for a computer, have a large volume of RAM will enable your computer to make lots of calculations simultaneously.

Now I knew from my motherboard specification that the memory controller supports Dual-Channel memory operations. What on earth is that? In practice this means that it uses two RAM "cards" at the same time for an improved data-throughput. Now I know I want to maximise performance so I want to take advantage of this, so I want to put two RAM "cards" in rather than just one large one. 

The next question is what speed of RAM do I want? Ideally, the faster the better.

Using the scrap-paper analgy again.

Imagine you are using a nice Parker ball-point pen. The pen will glide across the paper no problem so you can just write as fast as your brain can think and your hand can write. This is going to be quick to write out everything to get to the answer.

Now imagine you are using a quill and ink, every now and then you need to dip the quill back in the ink pot so you can carry on writing - you will eventually get to the answer, but your hardware choice has resulted in it taking much longer compared to the ball-point pen.

Finally how much RAM do I want? MOAR!! Mwahaha. *composes oneself* the operating system, Windows in this case, is going to munch the best part of 2 GB by itself before you start using any applications. Wendy likes to play The Sims, which also burns up a few GB on its own, so we are very easily needing a MINIMUM of 4 GB. Purely because I've not factored in multi-tasking and application means we should double it to 8 GB. You can buy 8 GB memory kits, so it makes sense to go for that. But I know that Wendy won't want to buy a whole new PC for quite a while, so to future proof it I decided to go for the next level up which is 16 GB.

The very last factor is brand. Should that be a factor? I think it should, some brands are better than others. One of my favourite brands for RAM is Corsair.

Corsair XMS3 16 GB RAM Kit

CPU Cooling

Working inside a tiny chassis compared to my usual ATX and XL-ATX cases means that I had to be careful about how large the cooler was. It is important to keep the CPU cool, but I also had an envelope to fit it in. After scrolling through the options I settled on this. It is a very low profile cooler and by a brand that I knew offered good and very quiet performance.

Scythe Kozuti CPU Cooler

Power Supply

Ah the power supply - an area of much contention for PC builders. The PSU is responsible for converting the mains power (230 Volts, changing at 50 Hz of Alternating Current) to what the PC actually needs. Fundamentally this is typically 3.3 V for the CPU, 5-7 V for drives and 12 V for peripherals such as graphics cards.

The main question is how much do I need? There are a few PSU calculators available online that will work out what you need and recommend a PSU size once I had worked out what parts I was planning on using the calculators said I need about 350-400 W. Now I chose a PSU of 550 W. Firstly because whilst a 400 W one was available, the next one was the 500 W. But I also wanted some headroom because I knew I would be upgrading the PC in the future to have more powerful components. I also wanted to factor in that a good PSU will last decades, so to support it I wanted additional power head room.

The next factor is efficiency. The only PSUs you want to even consider will have an efficiency branding known as "80PLUS". This means that they are at least 80% efficient. Now 80% is pretty poor, the other 20% of the energy is lost as heat (by the PSU). That's a lot of energy! Buying a more efficient PSU does cost more, but it can work out that they will save money in the long run.

I knew this was a key feature, so I tried to find the best I could.

Finally, because I was working inside a tiny case, I wanted to have a modular (or at least partially-modular), this again restricted my options further. That's why I've got a PSU that's probably a bit overkill

EVGA Supernova 550 GS Power Supply.

Motherboard

The choice of motherboard was important. I personally believe that the motherboard is one area to truly invest in out of all of the parts (other than the PSU) because its the backbone to your PC. Frustratingly there was actually very little choice when looking at the mini-ATX boards. They were either £70 area, or £300. For a tiny board I think £300 is stupid (an XL-ATX with lots of features I might consider £300 for!), it was also out of budget. MSI is another very good brand so the choice was simple here.

Graphics Card

The graphics card was another key feature of this computer. The size constraints were the driving force here, I had to choose a card that was no bigger than a dual-slot card. It also needed to be quiet, so the large heat-sink was a must.

Once I had limited the scope to cards that would fit, it was then getting the best I could for the money available.

An Nvidia-based GTX 750.

Processor

Storage

Optical Disk Drive

Chassis

The case that I settled on in the end is a Coolermaster CM130.

The Build

First things first ... stripping down the chassis so that I can start getting bits in.

Stripped down case

I was really impressed with installing the Optical Disk Drive. The front cover of the case pops off to let you slide it in the bay. The bay itself is tool-less. 

Tool-less 5.25 inch bay

The SSD gets mounted on the side panel wall (which in itself is removable).

Now its a game of 3D-tetris

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!