August 2015 – Page 2 – Wolfgang Lonien

August 10, 2015August 10, 2015

Done with rebuilding the computer

I finished rebuilding my machine on Saturday, and completed the software setup yesterday. What took me so long was to actually read and understand how UEFI works, and how to make a bootable USB stick with a GPT (UEFI partition table) instead of the old style MBR (master boot record). You need this since otherwise the OS would be installed in “legacy” mode, with not using the newer and much better UEFI firmware. If you want to read about the basics on how to set this up with Debian – like I did – you can do so here and here. Once I had made that UEFI USB stick and put the Debian netinstall image onto it, booting from it greets you with this:

Note the second line where it says “UEFI Installer menu”. And once the installation is finished (you’ll need internet for a Debian netinstall), you’ll have a dual boot Grub menu like this:

I got a Crucial BX100 250GB SSD as the system drive, like recommended by the German c’t magazine. Which means that from the boot menu which you see above to the login screen takes about 4-5 seconds, and lots of things like picture viewing are also sped up quite a bit. Easy to recommend one of these drives, which by now are also more reliable than spinning platter drives (I still have the 2TB rotating one for my data, these are still somewhat expensive when done in chips).

And running the Olympus Viewer 3 natively on Windows 10 is much faster than doing so within a virtualized Windows 7, which I did before, even when rebooting the machine to switch between operating systems. I reserved a small FAT32 partition on the SSD to share images between Windows and Linux, which also works perfectly.

Thanks for reading.

August 4, 2015August 10, 2015

Upcoming projects, new arrivals

Last week I wrote about Windows 10, and about hardware. Well, concerning a full Windows 10 upgrade / installation, Mitchie beat me – she got hers today, for free as promised. And, just like Microsoft’s Andre da Costa promised in his article, the upgrade even left Mitchie’s Ubuntu boot loader unaffected. Perfect.

I decided to upgrade my PC first, and as much as I’d have loved to build the mentioned Quad Core recommendation from the German c’t magazine, their whole rig just wouldn’t have fitted into my somewhat cramped space. That’s why I finally thought about replacing their mainboard suggestion, an Asus Z97-A (ATX size) to a smaller but almost similiar one, the Asus Z97-M Plus (µATX size), and to keep my current Antec 2480 HTPC case which fits perfectly. So I started ordering what was needed, and the first stuff arrived today. Like the CPU:

Intel Core i5 Processor (i5-4460 boxed)

This is a middle of the road current generation quad core processor from Intel. Not the fastest or newest or most expensive one, but the one with the best price/performance ratio on the market today. It is rated with 84W power consumption at full power, with the integrated graphics core also on full power, which is about correct – the guys from c’t measured 85W for the full machine on full steam.

To compare: my current 45nm ‘Yorkfield’ Core 2 Duo Q8400 is rated with 95W, about 10W more than this newer 22nm ‘Haswell’ chip.

But what is much more important is that ca. 98% of the time we use our PCs, they are waiting for us, not vice versa. So the real interesting value is the power they draw when idle (when they have nothing to do than just to wait for us). And that, for the whole machine running a Windows desktop was measured with 16W, on Linux it was even 2-3 Watts lower than that. And this is laptop territory, folks. Which is also the reason you won’t hear much of these machines.

I won’t reach these numbers exactly because I didn’t order the recommended power supply – my Antec case has a 380W PSU built into it. But still I’ll make a jump up performance-wise, with using less power than before.

My current hardware which runs just fine will go to my brother’s, because it’s still better than what he has now. And I’ll take some more pictures of the current and new build once I’m starting, even if it’s only for the wiring to the connectors and such. If it’s interesting enough to post these here, just let me know. Building your own PCs is fun…

Thanks for reading.

August 4, 2015

Some portraits from yesterday

Yesterday my colleague Cengiz invited to an “available light shooting”. And because this is what I do anyway, I attended. So here are some of the photos I took during that shooting in Frankfurt:

Fynntastic

Laurie, our make-up artist

Marie

Sabrina

Fynntastic

For some in the group of photographers, this was a first-time, and with (half-) professional models like Fynn, it was quite an eye-opener for them. I’m always looking for people to photograph, and if they’re beautiful, then all the better. Didn’t have too much time with most of them, but at least I could talk a bit to Fynn, and follow her preference to use the landscape (wide) instead of the portrait (high) frame view. Hope to see her again soon in Darmstadt, where we meet sometimes. And I also hope to get some more time with the others – have to get their email addresses anyway to contact them and to send them their pictures.

Thanks for viewing.