First, I want to specify what the server has to be able to do IMHO:

• Mail Server with Exchange
• VPN Server
• File Server
• DHCP Server
• DNS
• WDS
• Print Server
• Fail Safe to some degree
• Silent
• Low power consumption
• Cheap

So the first 7 can all be solved by running a Windows Server 2008 R2 with Exchange 2010 (luckily both are free for MSDNAA), so no problem here. The next point, fail safe is a little trickier. First, a RAID system is needed because the last thing I want is that I lose all my data because my hard disk died (which happens pretty often). To get a lower power consumption, the only possible solution would be running a RAID 1 (Mirror) with two hard drives. To keep it cheap and get the power usage down, only “green” hard disk should be used. I choose the Western Digital Caviar Green 1500GB (WD15EARS) drives with Advanced Format as they are really cheap and offer better performance and hopefully better security due to better CRC calculation with longer CRC data. Next was the main-board and CPU. Well, to run Windows Server 2008 R2, I would need a x64 capable CPU with at least 2 cores. And guess what, there is only one solution for this, the Gigabyte GA-D510UD. It’s the only board that supports RAID onboard while have 2 cores (+ Hyper-threading) and is really power efficient.

Gigabyte not only offers the board with CPU, but also the smallest Mini-ITX case “Gigabyte MIB T5140″ with 2 native 3.5″ drive slots, perfect for my RAID 1. The only thing that didn’t match my criteria was the 40mm CPU fan of the Gigabyte board. Why on earth didn’t they make the system passive like the competition? Well, what is the first thing you do if you have a noisy fan? Right, you remove it and replace it with something bigger and silent. I took a old 120 mm Arctic Cooling fan out of my old server and mounted it right above the CPU and guess what? It fits perfectly, like it was designed to be used this  way.

Now after inserting 2x2GB of RAM, I’m ready to get incredibly silent and cheap server filled up with data. And just in case anyone whats to recreate the server, here is the list of things you’ll need:

• Gigabyte GA-D510UD (€ 70)
• Gigabyte MIB T5140 (€ 50)
• G.Skill DIMM Kit 4GB PC2-6400U CL5-5-5-15 (€ 80) or similiar 2x 2GB DDR2 RAM
• 2x Western Digital Caviar Green 1500GB (WD15EARS) (2x € 80) or similiar SATA hard disk
• Arctic Cooling 12025 L (€ 5) or similiar 120 mm fan

Total of € 365 in April 2010.

The Gigabyte MIB T5140 comes with a passive power supply which converts from 110/220V AC to 12V DC and has a labeled efficiency level of “V”. What the hell is that supposed to mean? Is that good or bad? I started to look at my other passive power supplies and found another label on the Toshiba R400′s. This time, it says “IV”. I guess they are meant to represent numbers, 4 and 5. But is higher better? I started searching again until I found the be-quiet notebook power, which has a “CEC” efficiency of “V”. That was the missing clue. CEC stands for Canadian Energy Commision  (Energy Star) and would be perfect for certifying power supply efficiencies. But how efficient is level “V”? I started going through white papers of CEC and they only mentioned what I-IV mean, showing that V is reserved for future use. How can I have a level V power supply then?

I started to dig deeper and finally found a paper about International Efficiency Marketing  Protocol, which finally revealed what efficiency a power supply has to have at what level including level V. And  here are the results. I created a little table to show you how the the levels correspond to the actual efficiency.

So when you look at those values, you can see that III and IV are pretty much the same, only level V shows real improvement. At the same time, when you think that you are using a PicoPSU with 96% efficiency, you would actually only get 87%*96%=83% total efficiency, which isn’t so great at all.

So I waited until Thursday, the appointment was between 12:00 and 18:00 and the technician did show up at 17:20. The only problem was that he had broke his diagnosis tool, making it impossible to fix my line. How great is that? Anyway, he promised to come back on Friday morning at 10:00, hopefully with a new diagnosis tool. Well, I waited until Friday 10:00 and guess what, no technician. 20 minutes later, the technician called and told me he would come a little later because he’s busy with another costumer. So I waited and waited and at 12:00, he finally came. Well, after running around testing things for an hour, he finally managed to get a sync with his diagnosis tool, but still couldn’t get my modem to sync with the line. He simply told me that the modem is broken and I should get a new one as he doesn’t have any replacement hardware. How I do that is my problem, but he won’t charge the €100 because the line was broken too. So I still don’t know why my line is broken and now, when it is finally fixed, I don’t have any hardware to go online. WTF!

Unluckily, my VDSL modem is more than 2 years old, so it’s already out of the warranty, so I decided to call T-Com to ask for new hardware. They have a special hot-line for ordering hardware, but it costs 14 cent/min! What kind of rip of is that? I called the normal support hot-line (which is free) and let them transfer me the the hardware hot-line. A quite unfriendly and nerved service lady picked up the phone and after I told her the story, she told that I can either buy a new modem for €80 or a new router with integrated modem (W920V) for €199. OMG, I’m paying €70 every month for my VDSL line and after a whole week offline, I should still pay a whole fortune to get new hardware? Any other ISP would have given out the hardware for their long term customer for free (I know that from 1and1 as my girlfriend is using it and she just got new hardware). I told her that 1and1 is offering the same VDSL now for €20 less each month, free hardware and €200 bonus if I switched, but I’d stay with T-Com if they give me some hardware to go online with. Guess what she answered: “Sorry, I can’t do that, I guess you’ll just have to switch” I seriously didn’t know what to answer to that. I mean, doesn’t the T-Com want to keep me as their customer? I’m one of the few people using their most expensive packages right from the beginning. Is this the way early adopters are treated now? I recommended a lot of people for VDSL at T-Com, but that is over now!

As my contract is still going for a few month, I went on eBay and bought myself a new W920V for €100, thats half the price than what T-Com wants from their paying costumers!

1. The less the a Li-Ion battery cell is discharged, the more often you can charge it. Discharging 5% will allow you to charge it hundreds of thousands of times, while completely depleting it will drop the charging cycles to below 10 times. Luckily, most batteries will turn themselves off once discharged to 40%. Here is the thing about cheaper batteries promising to have more capacity than original batteries. Li-Ion cell’s power capacity is limited, so to increase the usable capacity, the manufacturer can either increase the battery size or allow deeper discharges. The second choice is a cheap way to buy “more” capacity by lowering charging cycles.
2. A Li-Ion battery will go bad on its own. The only question is how fast. When a Li-Ion battery is fully charged, it’ll lose about 20% a year of its capacity when stored at 25°C, or 35% when stored at 40°C. Placing a fully charged cell in the fridge at 0°C will slow down aging to about 6%. A only 50% charged cell will only age for 2% a year at 0°C or 4% at 25°C. This is the reason why notebook batteries are always half-charged when shipped. Lower temperatures will slow down aging, but never cool them below -25°C, which will break the battery.

So the big question is how should one use their battery to get the most out of it. A lot of friends ask me this question, as most known battery hints are either for Ni-Cd or Ni-MH batteries and not for Li-Ion batteries. I usually tell them to charge when it is convenient and use when needed. The thing with Li-Ion is that charging cycles will drop when discharged deeply. But if you keep your batteries always full, they’ll age a lot faster. So when the best trade-off is to charge them fully and use them right afterwards and recharge when you know you’ll be using it again soon.

I wanted slim keys, just like on my notebook, for faster typing. At the same time, it shouldn’t be too noisy and have a nice tactile feedback. It should be wireless of course, as I like to put the keyboard away when I need to space on my desk. It shouldn’t look too ugly either, as everything else on my desktop is in black/silver. The keyboard is the main interface between me and my computer, so I don’t want save any money here, so price range can be around € 100 or upward. And there I looked… and found exactly 3 keyboards: the Logitech diNovo Edge, Apple’s Wireless Keyboard and Sony’s Vaio Wireless Keyboard. Well, as I didn’t want to buy anymore Logitech products, there was no real choice for me there.. Apple wouldn’t work with Windows, so.. Wait, where is the “Del”-Button on Sony’s keyboard? It’s a tiny key above Backspace! Who even thinks of putting it above Backspace, seriously?! Delete is one of the most keys pressed and they make it small and easy to be mistyped as backspace? No way I am buying that! So I looked again on my list and the only option left for me was to buy another Logitech product again. I am seriously wondering what the competition is doing… Why are they leaving Logitech a monopoly there?

So I end up with another Logitech product. I can’t wait to contact Logitech Support (again) and report how crappy their products are…

As LCD prices are dropping like crazy these days, really good used ones with good panels are sold for the price as crappy ones on eBay. So I decided to buy myself another one of the current 20″ screen I already have, a Belinea 10 20 35W. Unlike the usual €150 22″ LCD screens, the Belinea uses a Premium MVA-Panel with a really good contrast and pretty colors. MVA-Panels are much more expensive than the average TN-Panel, but because noone on eBay really cares about it, they get sold for the same price as normal TN-Panel screens. So I waited for someone to sell his screen and bought it for €100, which is €500 below retail price.

Now I have the two screens next to each other and started to use them. But soon, things started to bug me… The task bar was always only on one screen and I never knew which program was on which screen. As I googled around for a nice background for the two screen, I stumpled upon UltraMon. UltraMon is a great tool for people using 2 or more screens, as it allows you to have a taskbar on each screen showing the programs running on it and also allows Wallpapers to go through both screens. So now developing qTranslate has before even more comfortable!

Here are some really great Wallpapers I found:

Ninjas can't catch you

Hong Kong

Forest

Road Side

Sunshine

Field

After some searching, I stumpled upon a page that showed cost/performance ratios of CPUs. As the CPU will be the most expensive part of my new PC, I decided for the Intel Core 2 Duo E7300, the successor of the winner (E7200). Their price difference is only marginal, but the E7300 is a little faster. Afterwards, I started looking for a compatible mainboard and memory. The Asrock 4Core1333-FullHD was the cheapest mainboard which supported FullHD natively and had both DVI-D output and Gigabit NIC onboard. Because the board supports DDR2 Dual-Channel, I started looking for some fast and cheap memory and found the G.Skill DDR2-800 CL4 2x 2GB Dual-Channel-Kit. Next was the power supply. As everything was onboard, a 200W supply would be more than enough, but because usually 350W are the minimum, I looked for a silent one with 80+ efficiency. The cheapest here was the be-quiet! Pure Power 350W. The only thing left is the CPU cooler. I chose the Arctic Freezer 7 Pro PWM (up to 130W), which is a little overdimensioned for the 65W E7300, but this will let it run at inaudible 0% (900 RPM) with the CPU temperature never exceeding 35°C. With the onboard RAID controller, I setup a RAID 1 (mirroring) with my 2 “left-over” 80 GB Western Digital hard disks.

Windows Vista is running extremly fast now. I can’t believe that such a computer, which is a complete overkill for an average user would be this cheap. Here are the prices (December 2008) for the parts of my new PC.

• Intel Core 2 Duo E7300 (€ 100)
• AsRock 4Core1333-FullHD (€ 70)
• be-quiet Pure Power 350W (€ 35)
• G.Skill 2x 2GB DDR2-800 CL4 Dual Channel Kit (€ 45)
• Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro PWM (€ 15)
• Case (left from my old desktop PC)
• Hard disk (left from my old desktop PC)

That’s only € 265 for a high end super silent computer!

UPDATE: I measured the power comsumption: Idle (<10% CPU usage) < 60W, 80W with 100% CPU usage.

It started of when Frank ordered his new uebernotebook for a whopping price of € 1700 with everything anyone could every wish to have in a notebook. This includes Wireless LAN draft-n (450MBit/s), which can get as fast as 100 MBit/s effectively, unlike my Wlan-g network (54MBit/s) with only real 10 MBit/s. Every copied a file via Wlan-g? If yes, you know how long that takes…

Anyway, I wanted to upgrade to Wlan-n for a long time, but PCMCIA cards are not a solution for me as they usually have external antennas. After placing such a card in my notebook, I’d have 2 Wlan cards, one external, one internal, which is one too much. So that’s why I never upgraded until now.

Now when Frank ordered his notebook, I started looking for internal adapters and found out, that the internal Wlan adapters are not soldered on the main board but only mini PCI or PCIe cards! I couldn’t believe it at first, so I opened my Toshiba R400 and took a look inside. And there it was, a little PCIe card connected to 2 antennas. Next to it the Novatel UMTS/HSDPA modem and one free slot with “UWB” written on the board. So there is the missing UWB module of the R400 which was not allowed in Germany. I looks like I can not only upgrade my Wlan card but also get UWB in my notebook! A quick search returned me my new Wlan card, the Intel Wireless WiFi Link 4965agn for only €25! But unlike the Wlan card, a UWB could not be found. Too bad…

So I ordered my new Wlan card right away. But the 4965agn needs one more antenna than my old 3945abg, so I bought one of them as well on eBay for € 3,5. Right after receiving everything, I installed the new card with the 3rd antenna. It was really easy.

Wlan signal strength has improved a little, now I’m only missing the Wlan-n access point.

I won’t discuss the cheap ones here, but the good ones. There are a few brands making these kind of protectors, for example 3M, Exim or Brando. Their protection quality is usually comparable, so the major difference is the cutting.

For my O2 Xda Diamond for example, I have tested 3 different kinds of screen protectors, the Brando Protector Plus, the 3M Vikuiti DQC-160 and the official HTC screen protector that came with the Xda Diamond. First one was the Brando, which felt nice, just like on my O2 Xda Orbit, but the top right corner, where the camera is, was missing. That destroyed the look and left the corner unprotected. So I bought the 3M next. They come not only with the screen protector but also with one for the bottom keys. They didn’t cut anything out for the camera, making the foil protect the camera too, which is great. But even after applying 2 of them, none of them glued perfectly to the screen. Dissapointed again… So I tried the official protector. Fits perfectly, glues perfectly. Perfect? Well… not really. It’s not scratch resistant at all. I already have a lot of scratches on it and I use it much more careful than I did with my O2 Xda Orbit with Brando protector.

So frustrated with all the protectors, I emailed Nina at Brando and asked her if they could fix their corner problem. After one month and quite a few emails, Brando has now made a new cutting for their Protector Plus Ultra-Clear and sent me 2 new pieces of it for free! Great products, great support and now highly recommended by me!

UPDATE: 3M just send me 3 new protectors for free! This time, they cut a hole where the camera is, so it is pretty much like the original screen protector except with a better quality.

After using it for a month now, I thought it is time to write a little about it. If you look at the hardware specifications, the device is quite powerful. It has a 528 MHz CPU, 192 DDR-RAM and a VGA screen (that’s 640×480 pixels). With some more goodies like GPS, UMTS, HSDPA, HSUPA, 3.2 Megapixel camera with auto-focus, G-Sensor and an extreme slim and stylish look, I had no chance of resisting. It looks so good that even my girlfriend bought one for herself, too. She of course got the glossier bling-bling HTC version of it.

HTC build a new interface for the really user unfriendly Windows Mobile 6.1, called Touchflo 3D (TF3D), which has changed a lot of my PocketPC behavior. When I used my old Xda Orbit, the first thing I did is to pull out the stylus. It was almost impossible to use with your fingertips. With the new TF3D, the only opportunity to use the stylus is… Wait, there is none! I sometimes still pull out the stylus just to put it back in after realizing that I don’t need it. That said, the new interface also has some shadow sides. First, it doesn’t allow anymore Today-Plugins, making it not really customizable. Second, the finger-navigable interface takes a lot of space, making it necessary to scroll on the Today screen.

The 3.2 MP camera with autofocus is also a big improvement compared to my old 2.0 MP with fixed focus. Sharp pictures which look better than most digital cameras astonished me. Too bad there is not flash. The G-Sensor is also a really nice new toy to play with. Everyone I showed the G-Sensor Game Tweeter to was amazed by it.

Some people asked me why I bought this phone and not the Apple IPhone 3G. Well, first, the screen resolution is much higher on the Diamond than on the IPhone. Second, the Diamond is smaller and thinner. Third, the camera in the Diamond has autofocus and 3.2 MP and has way better picture quality. Not the mention the price of the IPhone, which is 50% higher. I seriously considered the IPhone, even though I hate Apple users, but there were no arguments at all for me. It’s the same with the IPod, there are way better devices out there for a much better price, just like my iriver clix 2.

So is the Diamond flawless? Not really. The size also has its disadvantages, which is battery life. When actively using the device, the battery barely holds for 8 hours, which is not much really. The major battery killer is the screen. I don’t know exactly how much it needs, but this bright VGA screen has to need a lot. I never used it as a phone, mostly to write emails and surf on the web, so I don’t know how the battery will do when calling someone.

All in all, I am very satisfied with the Diamond. It’s the first device having all the functions I need. I can finally walk around with my Sony BT-50 Bluetooth headphones listening to SRS WOW HD enhanced music with SBC at 328kbs and surf around without the music lagging. Well… almost. It still lags a little when it has bad reception and needs to switch from 3G to GSM or when it need to switch to Roaming. But other than that, the device is simply great!