Author Archives: Allen Huffman

About Allen Huffman

Co-founder of Sub-Etha Software.

Drobo (3rd gen) to Drobo 5C, part 1

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This is part of a multi-part review of the Data Robotics Drobo 5C.

See also: Introduction

Drobo 5C box.

I have received my Drobo 5C unit which I will be using for this review. Much like the 3rd generation model, the 5C comes packaged in a large white Drobo box, with the unit itself wrapped in a cloth shopping bag protected by two foam inserts. In the top of the box is another smaller box which contains the paperwork, power supply, power cable, and a USB to USB-C cable.

Data Robotics does a nice job at packaging their products. It’s not quite on the level of Apple, but fairly close.

Let’s take a look inside the box…

Drobo 5C box and contents.

Drobo 5C accessories: USB cable, power cable, and power supply.

Drobo 5C quick start guide (inside of the removable cover of the small box).

Since the 5C can hold five hard drives, it is about one inch taller than the previous model. Here is the 5C (left) compared to the 3rd generation model (right):

Drobo 5C vs Drobo (3rd gen).

Please excuse the protective plastic covering you see on my drives. I tend to keep it on things I buy to protect them, so when I sell them later it is still in “like new” shape.  (I do remove any plastic that would cover air vents or similar.)

The first thing I noticed was that the 5C case is a different design. While similar looking, instead of being a sleek case where the front and back are flush to the metal casing, the new model seems to just be a metal casing, with the front and rear inset a bit with a gap running all around them. This seems like a step back, cosmetically. It just doesn’t look as sleek as the past incarnations, and the gap seems like it would be even more places for dust to collect.

You can also see that the blue capacity lights are now along the bottom of the enclosure, and no longer behind the removable front cover. I always throught the “show through” lights were a nice touch, so I am sad to see them go. BUT, in the previous Drobos I had, there were two additional lights hidden behind the front panel: power and data transfer. I would sometimes have to remove the front panel to see if the Drobo was locked up, or if the data transfer light was flickering. Function wise, being able to see these without removing the panel is a plus.

Here is a photo of the two units with the front covers removed:

Drobo 5C vs Drobo (3rd gen) – front panel removed.

You can see that the drives start a bit lower than in the old model, which is why the unit can hold an additional drive and not be as tall as you might expect. You can see the two “hidden” lights on my old Drobo, that now appear at the far left and far right of the new Drobo 5C.

In the next part, we’ll take a look at moving drives over from the old Drobo to the new 5C, and see what it takes to activate the Dual Disk Redundancy feature.

More to come…

 

Nested ternary operators in C

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I started learning C programming back in the late 1980s. I was using the original Microware OS-9 C compiler on a Radio Shack Color Computer 3. It was a K&R compiler, meaning it was the original version of C that was before the ANSI-C standard. Back then, I recall reading a magazine article that claimed C would be “the language of the 80s” so I decided to see what the fuss was about.

A Commodore-using friend of mine, Mark, was helping me learn C. He loaned me a Pocket C reference guide. That, and the Microware documentation, was all I had for reference material. At the time, Mark had moved from his Commodore 64 to a powerful Amiga computer. He would dial in to my OS-9 BBS system and upload source code he wrote on his Amiga and then compile it on my machine to see if it ran there, too. It was amazing that this was even possible, considering how non-portable BASIC programs were from machine to machine.

It was a fun time.

Over the years, I learned much about C from books and friends and just general experimentation. One thing I learned was this weird conditional assignment operation:

a = (b == 10 ? 100 : 200);

It is basically doing this:

condition ? value_if_true : value_if_false

The value of a would be set to 100 if b was 10, otherwise it would be set to 200. It was a shortcut to writing the code like this:

if (b == 10)
{
  a = 100;
}
else
{
  a = 200
}

…or…

switch( b )
{
  case 10:
    a = 100;
    break;
  default:
    a = 200;
    break;
}

I have used this many times over the years, but don’t even know what it’s called. I asked a coworker, and they told me it was a “ternary operator“. Here is the Wikipedia entry on how it works in C:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_conditional_operator#C

It is a great shortcut for response strings. For instance, turning a boolean true/false result in to a string:

printf( "Status: %s\n", (status == true ? "Enabled" : "Disabled" );

This will print “Status: Enabled” if status==true, or “Status: Disabled” if status==false. What a neat shortcut.

Recently, I saw a nested use of this ternary operator. It never dawned on me that you could do this. It was something like this:

char *colorStr = (value == RED) ? "Red" : (value == BLUE) ? "Blue" : "Unknown";

It was using a second ternary operator for the “value_if_false” condition, allowing it to have three conditions rather than just two. I realized you could nest these in many different ways to create rather complex things… Though, readability would likely suffer. I think I’d just stick with simple if/then or switch/case things for anything more than two choices, but in this case it seemed simple enough.

I thought it was neat, and decided I’d share it here in this quick article.

Drobo (3rd gen) to Drobo 5C, introduction

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My long history with external hard drives was covered in an earlier article, so I will just summarize:

I’ve gone through a bunch of hard drives and external enclosures since 1999.

Last year I shared a multi-part series about migrating from a 2nd generation Drobo to the newer 3rd generation models. The 3rd generation version solved most of the performance issues, especially when it came to the time it took to rebuild after replacing a drive. It also added a very important capability: Dual Disk Redundancy

See: What is Dual Disk Redundancy?

This is very important because, without it, when (not if!) a drive fails, during the time it takes to rebuild on to a new drive, any other drive failure will cause loss of data. With drives becoming larger and larger (I upgraded mine, rebuild time also increases. If you buy multiple drives at the same time, you increase the likelihood of getting multiple units that have the same flaw from a bad production run, which increases the odds of a multi-drive failure.

It may seem unlikely, but from reading many articles about RAID systems over the years, it’s far more common that I would have thought.

I have worked around this over the years by always having multiple drives and backing up my important data between them. Thus, on my two Drobos, I have my most important data copied to each unit. This way, even if a Drobo completely died on me, I still have my data on the other one. (It’s also good to have backup hardware in case of a failure. I can swap my drives to the still-working unit and get to anything I need while I wait for the failed unit to be repaired/replaced.)

Of course, this doubles the hardware cost…

With Dual Disk Redundancy, you can set up a Drobo to protect data in a much better way. Normally, every bit of data exists on two drives/ if one drive fails, there is always a another copy. With Dual Disk Redundancy, the data will exist on three drives, so if two fail, you still have a copy.

The problem is … you lose storage space. A 4-bay Drobo filled with four 3 TB drives gives you 8.17 TB of storage for data. If you enable Dual Disk Redundancy, it drops to only having 5.44 TB available. You can see this at the Drobo Capacity Calculator:

http://www.drobo.com/storage-products/capacity-calculator/

When the 3rd generation Drobo came out, they added Dual Disk Redundancy support, but if you were migrating from an earlier 4-bay unit, you could not make use of it unless you had enough free space available.

At some point, Drobo also started making 5-bay units,. This allowed you to have as much storage as a 4-bay offered WITH Dual Disk Redundancy enabled.

The problem is, those 5-bay units were expensive! A 3rd generation 4-bay Drobo sold for $299 or so, while a 5-bay direct-attached drive was $699! That’s quite the premium just to get one extra drive bay.

This changed last October when Drobo announced the new Drobo 5C.

http://www.drobo.com/news/press-releases/drobo-releases-worlds-first-self-managing-usb-c-storage-solution/

At $349, it’s a much better value. It ONLY has a USB-C port, and comes with a cable to plug that in to a USB 2.0/3.0 port on your PC/Mac, so if you preferred Thunderbolt, SATA or FireWire, you are out of luck.

I will soon be receiving a unit to review, and will begin a multi-part article about migrating from a 4-bay Drobo to the new 5-bay 5C model.

More to come…

 

360 photos in 2005

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I bought my first digital camera in 1996. Back then, no one knew what the term “digital camera” meant, so I would have to call it a “computer camera” for people to understand it was some kind of camera you hooked up to a computer.

I originally wanted it so I could take and post photos during visits to Disneyland and Walt Disney World. Over the years, I created a massive archive of theme park photos at my site DisneyFans.com and Renaissance festival photos at AtTheFaire.com. Between my various photo archive websites and personal photos, I expect I have easily taken several hundred thousand digital photos.

And I still don’t claim to know a thing about photography. I just point and click.

I also got involved with video editing back in the early 1980s using my dad’s VHS editing equipment. I bought my first digital camcorder in 1999, as well as an iMac DV to do digital video editing.

Over the years, I have experimented with many types of photography and videography.

Around 2004, I purchased a NuView 3-D adapter for my camcorder, and records many hours of 3-D video at Disneyland and a local Renaissance Faire.

I was also interested in Apple’s QuickTime VR, where you could have a photo that enabled you to look all around (and sometimes up and down). Taking such photos was labor intensive (requiring taking dozens of photos in different angles and “stitching” them together with special, and expensive, computer software). But, there were some “one shot” solutions being offered that involved shooting against a circular mirror that would capture a panoramic image 360 degrees around.

Back around 2004-2005, I had a web page listing the various lens systems I had found:

http://os9al.com/oneshot360/index.shtml

The mirror system I wanted cost almost $1000, so I never bought one, but I did purchase a cheap knockoff called SurroundPhoto. It was a plastic lens with marginal optic quality, but at least I could afford it. I picked one up for around $130, and then picked up a Nikon Coolpix 5400 camera to use with it.

I took the 360 setup with me on a trip to Disneyland during  a trip in December 2005. I wanted to take 360 photos of Main Street and create an update to an old 1996 virtual tour I created using normal photos.

I also took the camera to the Kansas City Renaissance Faire, and to the future construction site of the Des Moines Renaissance Faire.

Beyond posting a few sample photos, I never did anything else with the device.

I recently discovered the photos I took, and thought I’d share a look at what 360 photography was like back in 2005.

The camera shot upwards, pointing to a circular curved mirror. The raw photos looked like this:

360 Disneyland in 2005.
360 Disneyland in 2005.

Special software for Mac or Windows could then convert this circular image in to a panorama:

Panorama of Disneyland 2005
Panorama of Disneyland 2005

Special viewing software could then be used to pan around in this image, with a tiny bit of up and down.

Today, this type of image would be taken with a single 180 degree wide angle lens (like the Kodak PIXPRO SP360) or with multiple lenses like the RICOH THETA or Giroptic 360cam.

One of my winter projects is going to be to finally build this Disneyland 2005 panoramic tour. The picture quality is pretty horrible by today’s standards, so I present it mostly as a look back at the humble origins to 360/VR photography that is so common today that even Facebook natively supports it.

More to come…

More tech whiners: Dongles

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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. – George Santayana

Tech pundits are complaining about new Macs that only come with a USB-C port. “We have to have dongles for everything!” And the sky is falling.

I think back to 1998, when the original Bondi blue iMac came it. It had no floppy drive. It has no parallel printer port. It had no RS232 serial port. It had no ADB (some kind of Apple port; I never had any Apple stuff before the iMac so it meant nothing to me).

To hook up a modem, you needed a USB adapter (much more than just a dongle).

To hook up a parallel printer, you needed a USB adapter.

To hook up a SCSI hard drive, or a serial mouse, or an ADB accessory, or anything else … you needed a USB adapter.

And I remember that the Tech Whiners whined about this back then, too. And there was pain. USB adapters were expensive and sparse.

But today, USB is on everything. No more dongles are needed.

You know what I bet? I bet USB-C will do that same thing, and soon everything will just be USB-C.

We’ve been down this road before, folks.

Can you imagine how many different ports you’d need on your Mac (or PC) if this had not happened? I guess that’s what the Tech Whiners want…

Next time … keyboards.

2016 HBO Westerworld versus 1973 Westworld

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I couldn’t figure out which of my existing sites would make sense for discussing the new HBO series, Westworld, so I decided to put it here. Because robots.

This article will contain updates of easter eggs and other references/links between the new HBO series and the 1973 original movie.

References to 1973 Westworld

  1. There is a reference about how you could tell the original robots were fake by a handshake. In the 1973 movie, the hands were the giveaway.

Much more to come… I wanted to post something now to get it in the search engines.

Tech whiners and the iPhone headphone jack. Plus, big phones.

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I have listened to tech whiners for years, and am always amused at how wrong they end up being when the rest of the world ignores all their concerns and embraces something that “can’t possibly work.” Tech whiners said the iPod was a stupid idea (I think I would have agreed – who would spend that kind of money to play music?). Tech whiners said the iPhone was a stupid idea (I disagreed on that one; I’d been using a “smart phone” PDA without a physical keyboard since 2000 and was hooked). Tech whiners said Apple Store was a stupid idea (I might have agreed on that one, but knew the other solutions – store-within-a-store at CompUSA – were stupider ideas). And the list goes on and on.

Now I have to listen to pundits bitch and moan over Apple removing the headphone jack from the iPhone 7. Well, I don’t have to, but it will be difficult to escape it. Whine whine whine about needing an adapter.

Guess what? This is nothing new. Every pair of nice “real” headphones I have — you know, the full size ones you use when music matters, or when you are doing music recording — have 1/4″ headphone jacks. Those are/were industry standard. In the olden days, they plugged directly in to my multi-track cassette recorder, then later my Roland VS-880 hard disk recorder, and anything else I had.

In modern days, my MacBook has a 1/8″ jack, and since GarageBand (was that also a stupid idea?) has killed all my old recording tech, I had to get a cheap adapter from Radio Shack (back when it still had the space in the name) to make this possible. Thus, I kept all five pair of my old headphones, and have an adapter so I can keep using them on modern equipment with the tiny, fragile (and far easier to snap/break) 1/8″ headphone jack.

And guess what? That adapter has been on the end of my big headphones for the past decade. I have never lost it. You just leave it there.

Problem solved.

Whine, whine, whine, but this is how audio folks have done things for decades. Apple gives you an adapter with the new iPhone, so just plug it in to the headphones you’d normally use and you are done. “What if I lose my headphones?” You no longer need the adapter ;-)
Yep, if you lose something, you lose it. How is that Apple’s (or Radio Shack, or Samsung, or Disney) fault?

Whiners amuse me.

BONUS: I hear so many people complain about how bulky these big phones are because they “won’t fit in my pocket.” Guess what? Years ago, all phones were big. They came with (or sold separately) cases that had belt clips. You carried your phone on your belt, and you never sat on the phone and bent it, and you never sat down and had it hurt your stomach.

This problem was solved long ago. Thing of all the phones that could have been saved from broken screens or being bent or even lost because people constantly set them down … If they just kept them on their belt.

Oh, but that would be tacky. Strange, we do a bunch of tacky things every day now, but since “everyone does it” no one seems to be bothered by it.

Millions of dollars a year of damaged and lost phones might be eliminated if folks would use the solution we had twenty years ago…

But, hey, whining is fun.

Giroptic 360cam review by a Ricoh Theta owner

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Updates:

  • 2016/07/20 – more commentary.

[vrview img=”https://subethasoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/360_0027.jpg” ]

I have been following 360-degree (sometimes called VR) images for many years. I even had an old webpage dedicated to one-shot VR style devices like the 0-360 mirror device.

The whole concept of a VR-style picture, where you could move the image and look in all different directions, was pioneered in 1994 by Apple QuickTime VR. In those days, you had to mount a camera on a tripod and take a bunch of photos then have them stitched together using special software. The viewer (QuickTime) then allowed the user to look left and right in the image.

As time progressed, other methods of doing these types of images were developed, including a process where you used a 150-degree fisheye lens and took only two photos and stitched them together. These spherical images allowed you to also look up and down.

0-360.com's one-shot VR lens attachment.
0-360.com’s one-shot VR lens attachment.

The easiest solutions were one-shot devices that used a mirror. The camera would point up towards the mirror and create a donut-like image that could then be turned in to a VR image without any stitching. I always wanted the 0-360 device (about $600), but ended up with a much cheaper one called SurroundPhoto ($250). It produced poor quality images, but you get what you pay for.

In recent years, special multi-lens cameras have been introduced that are substantially cheaper than a camera+lens mirror system, and can offer greater field-of-view (up and down).

The Giroptic 360cam was the first such camera I became aware of when it was announced as a Kickstarter project in 2014. It a three-lens camera that can take a 360 VR-style picture with one shot.

I signed up to get one at the half-price early bird level, and at the time they hoped to ship before the end of the year. A year later, the camera was nowhere to be found. During this delay, other similar devices from established companies  entered the market at a much lower price point, including:

  • Kodak SP360 – I saw the one advertised at RadioShack for under $300. It used one lens with a huge fisheye pointing up, so it couldn’t get full VR images, but it could create a circular panorama. It could be mounted on a bike or helmet so it was more of a 360 GoPro type device.
  • Ricoh Theta – This $350 two-camera came out with a first model, then the m15 improved model (which added video!) . It could instantly create full 360 images with one click. I had the m15 model.
  • …and likely many others by now.

The Theta m15 and it was amazing. It was small enough to carry with you at all times, and as fast as a regular digital camera at taking the images. There was an iOS and Android app to download and post photos and videos from the device and share them immediately. The resolution was not great. Photos and video could be especially grainy in lower light situations.

In July 2016, the 360cam finally shipped to all of it’s original 2014 backers. Today I want to quickly review how the 360cam stacks up. To save you some time, I’ll present the conclusion first:

CONCLUSION:

This camera is way too slow to be useful. I believe if you are looking in to a device like this, you should probably get something like the Theta S (now available at Best Buy). It is substantial cheaper, easier to use, and much easier to carry around. If there is any advantage to the 360cam’s three-lens setup, I feel most users will not benefit from it.

DETAILS:

The 360cam is neat, and had I obtained it two years ago (before owning a Theta), I would have raved about it. But today, it feels like a dinosaur.

CONS:

  • Heavy. The 360cam is much heavier than the candy-bar style Theta.
  • Bulky. It is the shape of a smaller pear, and therefore cannot be carried in a pocket. After lugging mine around, I find I have to carry a fanny pack or other type of pouch with me because there’s just no convenient way to attach something like this to a belt. (The Theta came with a belt strap padded carrier.)
  • SLOW! Oh my gosh. This thing is stone-age slow! When you turn it on, it takes about 25 seconds to boot up! This is ridiculous. Forget any concept of pulling out the 360cam and taking a quick photo. You have to plan ahead. Also, switching between video and photo mode is also frustratingly slow. My device spins a little animated mustache graphic for about 28 seconds while it goes from one mode to the next! (And right now, the display is showing me “E801” so I guess I have to go look up what went wrong. A quick look at their support site shows five codes, including the 801, that could mean “Something might be wrong with the camera last firmware update. You can restore your camera to factory settings, and try to update the camera again.” Great.) It also does not take pictures quickly. I have mine set for a 3 second countdown, and it will often display a little animated graphic for a few seconds before it even gets to the countdown! Useless!
  • iOS iPad App only works in Portrait Mode. In this modern era, why are any iPad apps still not supporting device rotation? The VR images rotate just fine, but all the menus are set for portrait mode, which seems odd for a world where video and modern digital images are 16×9 landscape.
  • More Seams. Three lenses means you will have three seams in your images, rather than just two with a two lens system. With the Theta, you just pointed it at your subject and hit the button. With this thing, you have to make sure one of the three lenses is pointing there to prevent a theme down it. Frustrating, but once you get used to this, it will become second-nature.
  • No Bottom View. Since the base of the camera is large, there are no straight down views offered. Instead, a large circular graphic is placed there (just like old VR images had, to hide where the tripod was). The Theta has no problem with straight down.
  • SHORT Battery Life! It seems with the unit on (WiFi and GPS enabled), you will be out of juice in 30-60 minutes just having it “on” and barely using it. I am watching the battery drain as I type this. I doubt I could ever fill up my 16GB memory card with only one (or maybe even two) batteries. I managed to completely drain the battery after recording a 9 minute video, and about 30 images. Do not expect to take this with you all day without stocking up on a ton of extra batteries.
  • App Required to Change Basic Settings! Why do I need the use my phone and WiFi to change between one picture and self timer mode? By the time I toggle through 360cam menus to turn on WiFi, then connect to the camera. then run the app … I’ve forgotten what I was trying to take a picture of.
  • Awful User Interface. The built in color display (big pixels) is neat, but the user interface of two buttons is very sluggish and cumbersome. At least it’s better than having to remember what button to hold down to change modes (like the display-less Theta does; they fixed that with the new S model). Once you learn how to navigate, it becomes easier, but it it still time consuming to dig through a half dozen or more displays to make a simple change.
  • SLOW!!! Did I mention how slow this thing is? It’s ridiculous.

That said, let’s look at the PROS:

  • Three lenses! This should mean better resolution for video and photos. But does it? I do not have a Theta S to compare side-by-side, so I will leave that to other reviewers. I will say the images from the 360cam look very nice and it handles low light better than my Theta m15 did.
  • GPS. The 360cam has GPS built in so images can be geotagged without requiring linking to a phone. That’s nice (but it will drain the battery quicker).
  • Removable battery. My Kickstarter package came with two batteries, so I can charge them up and swap them out during the day. Unfortunately, you have to pop open three connectors on each side and remove the base (and not lose the microSD card that seems to pop out easily). It’s a “stop walking to do this” operation.
  • Nice iOS and Desktop Software. The app and desktop software are nice, and probably on-par with the Ricoh software. They allow remotely operating the camera, changing modes and limited sharing. You will need to link your 360cam to an iOS/Android device if you want to change modes (one photo, self timer, timelapse, etc.). That is frustrating but at least the modes are there.
  • “Patch”. Many 360 image systems allow you to put a special graphic at the bottom of the image where the tripod would go. Giroptic refers to this as the “patch” (I’d call it a logo). You can customize your own logo, which is a nice touch. The last Ricoh I used had no such option.
  • NO HUGE FINGERS!  Since you can hold the 360cam by the base and take a picture using the self timer, you can voice the HUGE THUMBS problem all the Ricoh Theta selfies seem to have. This is very nice.

I personally plan to get rid of the 360cam and replace it with a Theta S soon. I’m quite disappointed. While I might be able to get used to the pear-shape, the slowness of this device is absolutely unacceptable. “Hey, let me take a cool picture. Everyone wait a minute while I boot up and switch from video mode to picture mode.”

Great attempt, Giroptic, but competition has rendered your device obsolete except for those who may benefit from the three-lens setup. I would have to see a side-by-side comparison to see if the 360cam even has that advantaged.

Just get a Ricoh Theta S and use the heck out of it :) They are $350, versus $499 for the 360cam.