12V LED Display – LG W2286L HDMI Display – Possibly Perfect for Africa
Aside from overpriced (£220), touchscreen monitors for cars, 12V Monitors are extremely difficult to obtain. In the good old days of 2006, Newegg and other retailers had 2 or 3 15" XGA monitors with an external PSU but this side of the pond it was limited to a single Acer model and that was soon abandoned.
Now everything has a brick PSU (AC to DC) built in. You convert AC from the mains to 5V DC (sometimes 12V DC) to run the display. Great for reducing cable clutter but awful if you are off grid because then you are taking 12V Solar Power, converting it to AC in an inverter (10-15% loss), then converting back from AC to DC inside the monitor (probably a similar loss).
Our motto aspires to be Direct Current Computing and we want things to be as optimized for solar as possible. This means DC computers (all but the D1 and D2 have DC inputs), DC servers (the new B2 is 12V DC input), and DC Monitors. Nothing wasted on inverters. Everything kept simple.
I'm worried my blog has become a bit of a LG fanboy site (perhaps the only LG fansite?), but a new monitor due out imminently has a lot of potential for us. 2 x HDMI and 1 x DVI ports hardly matters but it does have a VGA port, and apparenly achieves its slim design by having the brick external.
PC Pro gives it poor marks for this clumsiness but for Africa it could be great - a high quality, low power display that two students can share (a 1920x1200 model is also coming out) for about £200, or what a 10.4" 800x600 display typically goes for.
Samsung U70 USB Monitor with Ubuntu Support. Uses Just 4.5 Watts
I am extremely excited about this even though my sample doesn't arrive for another two weeks (full review and action shots to follow). As I've mentioned before, 12V monitors are a real thorn for us. We usually end up shipping dozens of inexpensive Hannspree 17" (1440x900) AC monitors and packaging them up with inverters, which though inexpensive are rather wasteful of the (very expensive) solar power.
Samsung has released what's basically a USB-powered photo frame (with marketing focused on this being a peripheral display), but it's perfect for us because it
a) uses just 4.5 Watts
b) reduces the need for another plug (DC or otherwise)
c) is an acceptable 800x480 resolution (the same as the Nokia N810). Not great for two students sharing a screen but fine for single use.
Thus any of our 12V PCs (the F5, P1, B2, and U5) could power this monitor and so you'd need just one solar panel, one battery, and one (or a few) 12V PCs. Nice and simple.
And though Samsung only offers Windows drivers, it's already been used with Linux in this fantastic example: an Asus WLAN router running OpenWRT and using a U70 since there's obviously no VGA port.
Fanless MacBook (or Why Fanless Rules)
Like many entrepreneurs, I began my startup (in October, 06) with a MacBook. I had rejected the shackles of Windows, with its endless patches, wizards, and flakiness, for a personal computer that "just worked". Icons that bounced up and down, a better aesthetic, solid battery life, and a beautiful chassis made better by a Hokusai print from Gelaskins.
But Apple suffers from infant mortality. 1 week after my 12 month warranty expired, the hdd failed. This was before Time Machine and I lost everything, except that I didn't because what mattered was in the cloud. Corporate email hosted by Google, photos on Flickr, spreadsheets on Google Docs, memos on BaseCamp, and even a handful of important presentations on Slideshare.
Now I build myself a new PC nearly every week and everything is in the cloud. I've learned that all hard drives fail. I'm lucky though - I have a 20Mb connection that costs me £18. Our partners in West Africa pay 100 times that for a VSAT that's a 40th as fast. When you can't back up to the cloud, you can't trust a component that's spinning around 7200 times per second. It will fail and everything is lost. Go Solid State or RAID it.
And now two years in, my MacBook's fan has died. It was a sudden death - for months it has been so clogged with dust that it was slower and noisier and so when the processor started heating up, it would kick into 6000 RPM and you could hear it in the bedroom or throughout a starbucks. Absurd.
But then it failed. I would open smcFanControl (a popular OS X app), and watch the temperature rise from 35 C to 90 or even 92 C (practically boiling!) before it would shut off, an increase that took about 40 minutes if you were using Firefox or 5 minutes if I was having iPhoto resize photos for an iPod. And then you'd have to wait 3 hours for it cool down (I actually considering putting it in the fridge.)
Luckily I could buy a spare on eBay (£23) and install it using a tutorial on iFixit. It's now load at 6000 RPM but not nearly as loud.
But what if I live in Yola, Nigeria (where 30 Aleutia E2s are installed)? No Apple store, no eBay seller with free Naija shipping...
Our B2 features a ridiculous Quad Core CPU and it has a massive 50mm heatsink on top but it still needs a short (though very wide) 1000 RPM fan on top. Silent but not fanless.
I'd love to offer serious performance but without the need for fans, whether water-cooled, or by using humongous (like more than a foot tall) heatsinks and custom cases. Or both perhaps.
Megapixel Is the Common Denominator (Like Buying Food by Weight), 720p Sucks
You go to a supermarket and the only way to sift through the prices is to look at the cost per pound/kilogram (or for paper towels, the cost per 100 sheets).
I've started to view everything in megapixels. An iPhone displays is 480 x 320 or .153. Standard Definition is 640x480 or about 0.3 megapixels. That's assuming a 1:5 ratio (i.e. you are recording a video on a phone/camera/camcorder). Movies like Lord of the Rings are shot at 1:2.35 ratio, but then have less pixels vertically bceause it couldn't fit on a TV otherwise. Not sure how this works.
720p is actually 1280x720 or .91 MP. We use a Nikon D90 which has a 900,000 pixel 3" display or 1280x720 which is 3 times sharper per cm (or inch, as in pixels per inch, or ppi) than an iPhone. Pretty insane.
Obviously, I'm delighted that YouTube and Vimeo have so much HD content, which is actually 3 times the resolution of SD content.
But so few people dileneate between 720p (.91 MegaPixels) and 1080p, which is 1920 x 1080 or a whopping 2.07 Megapixels. Even I used to look at 720 versus 1080 and think it was just 50% more resolution - I was thinking lines not pixels. But it's actually 2.2 times as sharp (2.07/.91).
Of course, this is all going to look like silly differences when Ultra HD (2000x4000 or 8 Megapixels) comes out.
It's already out in some circles, thanks to the Red Ray player.
LG M227WD 22″ LCD TV Review (1920×1080) and my own HTPC setup
Back when we were testing the Ion HTPC I bought a 1920x1080 LG 22" HDTV. Loaded with inputs (VGA, DVI, HDMI, etc.) and ideal for low power (50W) HDCP testing.
We eat our own dogfood here at Aleutia and I run a Dual Core H1 with a 320GB drive partitioned between Ubuntu 9.04 and Windows 7 RC, along with a Lite-On Dual Layer BluRay drive.
Not even going to get into the all the advantages of stability and included software, but the default windows manager on Ubuntu (Gnome) offers a wonderful, clean interface perfectly suited to computing on a television.
Meanwhile Windows 7 RC (free unti middle of 2010 when it will start to restart my system every hour) runs PowerDVD and plays BluRay movies (CPU utilization according to the task manager is just 23%).
Chicken Factories and Server Farms
5 years back the Wall Street Journal ran a human interest feature on the Hmong community in Oklahoma, immigrants who'd moved to the rural South as contractors for Tyson (which drops off day old chicks and feed, and then collects them a few months later). Mr Lee barely gets by managing 223,000 chickens and each morning starts by cleaning out the casualties: "Trudging up and down the building -- 40 feet longer than a football field --he scanned for dead and diseased birds, snatching them from the floor and piling them into a plastic pail."
I eat free range, but I'd argue that data centres are heading this way, and should. Google owns well north of a million servers. For anyone with 1000 servers it makes no sense to buy expensive enterprise blades from HP and IBM. Instead you stack 'em high and cheap and you start mapping your power costs and TCO (or in Google's case, install them next to cheap power plants).
It doesn't matter if the servers die, since you'll just distribute your computing power elsewhere, something Cal Henderson of Flickr pioneered. And they don't have to be built to enterprise spec because they are never going to be moved - they'll sit in the same rack until they die.
I'd argue that cold-swap is fine. All hard drives fail but if you have a distributed architecture it doesn't matter if server E7891 dies - you can just clean it out the next morning when you do your rounds.
Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo aren't the only ones with a million servers - big web hosting companies are getting up there too and that's where we hope to come in.
You can charge more for dedicated servers but most people who need a web server would be overserved by a power-hungry, expensive, 2U server from HP. Much better to have something that's "good enough", cheap, and doesn't use much power (cheap TCO).
Dell is making a stab at this with a cheap ($600) blade called the XS11-VX8 that uses a 64 bit Via processor (supports virtualization), and has a 3.5" drive. The problem is that if you're carving up a server with 10 users and your drive fails, you're going to have 10 angry customers and the clock is ticking.
Our Virtual Private Server will be cheaper, and have a hot swap chassis (1/2 U) for RAID 1. Drive dies and the clock isn't ticking except for you to replace the drive. Which you do, because otherwise you'll have ten angry customers.
S2 will be single core, 2GB RAM, dual disk and Gb lan.
S8 will be dual core, 8GB RAM, dual disk, and 3Gb Lan.
Aleutia Ion HTPC: Dual Core Atom CPU, Nvidia Ion GPU, 4GB RAM, Blu Ray Drive, 1TB Storage and Low Power!
Given our dual focus on Sub Saharan Africa and low power computing, Blu Ray (and the onboard graphics and HDCP support required) hasn't really been a focus for us. But the new Nvidia Ion platform enables us to add to our existing Intel Atom systems and offer a small, low power, and silent (very small, low speed fan) Home Theatre PC, complete with Sony Blu Ray drive as standard and 4GB of RAM. It plays 1080p content smoothly whether from the ultra-fast desktop hard drive or off the Blu Ray drive, and it boasts a DVI, HDMI, and VGA port and Optical SP/DIF Audio Output. Runs Ubuntu 9.04 as standard though it's been tested with Windows 7, Vista, and XP.
For £399 (ex VAT), you get a standard configuration of 2GB and 500GB Drive (16MB Cache, ultra quiet). For an additional £50, you get it loaded with a 1TB Drive and 4GB RAM.
Aleutia Nvidia Alliance: The GPU is the New CPU
I'm excited to finally announce that Aleutia has been selected along with Acer as an Nvidia Ion release partner. As Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huan said on May 8th, "Ion has forever changed what consumers can expect from the mainstream PC. Even affordable and small PCs can be wonderful and deliver the full PC experience." Aleutia couldn't agree more. The PC industry is so modular that most hardware makers live a miserable, profit-free existence, whilst Intel (and to a lesser extent Microsoft) capture the vast majority of profits (and enjoy far more powerful brand value than the expendable builders who use them). Only Apple, with its integrated OS, manages to avoid modularity and achieve acceptable profits.
I've always argued that Intel (and thus the PC industry) overshoots most customer needs and I presented this at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Conference in '08 (slides here). Many people just wanted to word process and browse the web and so we produced the E2 which offered the performance of a 4 year old computer but in a much smaller case and with much lower power consumption, which meant it could be used in rural Africa and so open up new markets.
However, the web itself has changed and flash-heavy services like YouTube and BBC iPlayer demand more processing power. So we released systems based on the Intel Atom, itself a rebranded Centrino processor from a few years ago. Good for web browsing but unable to play the media that increasingly faster broadband speeds deliver, such as YouTube HD and Vimeo.
Graphics cards have been doing a lot of the heavy lifting for the last few years and their consumer focus has driven costs down massively. The premise of the Ion is to marry an entry level low power CPU (the Atom) with a really decent GPU. These always use less power and are frequently passively cooled. And so you get something that offers "good enough" general computing for the masses with outstanding media playback, which is more and more what users demand.
Aleutia's focus on fanless, low power computers has made us a natural candidate to be an Nvidia Ion launch partner and we're proud to announce the release of 3 new Ion-based PCs which will be released on the 18th, the same day that Acer releases its single core Revo. Exciting times for everyone at Aleutia!
Fanless Intel Atom Board (D945GSEJT) to Arrive in Low Profile Aleutia PCs Soon
A new Intel motherboard has snuck its way onto their site, with a release expected by the end of June. It's much lower profile than the D945GCLF2 that we use in most of our PCs and it's got a handy DVI port. Most impressive is that the 945GC Express Chipset has been swapped for the less power hungry 945GSE which will be passively cooled.
What boggles my mind is that they've equipped this with the crummy N270 single core Atom processor found in about 100 different netbooks and not the dual core 330 Atom that we use (and which is also passively cooled.
Incidentally, Jetway released a reference design board of this same spec (fanless, with DVI, N270, and 945GSE) back in January as the NF94-270-LF but that cost a fortune (£117 wholesale) and I'd expect this to be much cheaper.
Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope Boot Time of 19 Seconds on New Aleutia D1
The latest release is only a few days old but already are all our products are running it. One major change has been to cut down the boot time, though of course the faster the drive, the faster the boot time. After talking with some of the Canonical guys at the Jaunty launch party, it seems boot time is measured from just after grub boot loader until the login screen.
The new Aleutia D1 comes with a dual core Intel Atom CPU, 2GB of RAM, and integrated dvd burner. With a 30GB OCZ solid stated drive we've installed for a customer in the Gambia, it boots up in just 19 seconds.
Launch: The Aleutia U5. Userful Software + 5VGA Ports = 5 Desktops at $98 and 8 Watts each.
Though many customers use our PCs as thin clients, I've always been a fan of stand alone desktops, and preferred to think of our E2 as a "medium client", able to function as an adequate PC for individual users or for customers who weren't familiar with configuring and managing a server. But the definition of adequate has changed since then, and with YouTube now a killer app we wanted to look at alternatives that could match its power consumption.
The U5 is is powered by a 2 x 1.6GHz Intel Atom processors, has 2GB of high speed RAM, and is equipped with 5 VGA ports thanks to the PCI graphics cards we've added. It's still small and good looking, and practically silent. Most importantly, it's designed to run our partner Userful's Desktop Multiplier software (on top of the Ubuntu 8.10 OS).
Virtualization has conquered the server room, where expensive hardware no longer sits idle at 10% CPU utilization running one application but instead is maxed out to save both upfront hardware and ongoing electricity costs.
Userful's software offers a smarter solution to classroom computing: instead of taking low-end spec PCs that use 8 Watts, you have one high-spec system cleverly shared over 5 monitors. Same power consumption per seat but disproportionately better value.
Either go for value with popular TFTs that have been massively price reduced by consumer demand in the West - such as the Hannspree HW173AB (1440x900 res).
Or, since the U5 has a 12V DC Input, keep the entire classroom on DC power by using 10.4" touchscreen TFTs that use just 10W. The latter means we can offer the U5 with 5 monitors, an 80 Watt Folding Solar Panel, and a 100Ah carbon fiber leisure battery as a "Solar School Lab in a Crate".
The U5 will cost $490 to government or education customers, and $550 to businesses. You'll need Userful licenses ($69 for education, $99 for business) which we can supply.
For an extra $15 each, you get a USB and audio hub that sits beneath each monitor (with USB A extension cable plugging into the U5).
New Mac Mini out. Costs £499. Idles at 13 Watts. Ra Ra.
I bought the original Mac Mini, when it had a 1.1GHz Power PC processor and a decent 256MB RAM because I'd always pined for a portable desktop and remember the wow factor people experienced seeing it in the flesh.
Thought it's by far the least successful of Apple's line up, it has become the defacto small desktop.
Of course, we aim to disrupt that minor hegemony with our B1 which has 4GB of faster ram, a much faster dual core CPU (or even Phenom Quad Core), up to 500GB drive (250GB 7200RPM as standard), and onboard ATI 3200 chipset (with HDMI and DVI output) as well as 2 eSATA ports for real (not USB) RAID and dual gigabit LAN. All for a measly £450 ex VAT.
How Many E2s Fit in an Office Envelope? 6
Hot off the cutting room floor of the Aleutia marketing department, an MacBook Air homage/parody.
Fanless, Intel Atom 330 PC with DVI, 12V DC Input
The Aleutia team has been working on a fascinating project recently for a client in the hotel industry. Any PC that goes ito a five star room is going to have be small and silent but this one has to offer MPEG4 decoding, HDCP, and 1080p playback as well as DVI/HDMI output and ideally optical output.
We've actually achieved this (see my next post) though with the Achilles caveat of a fan, albeit a 13dB fan and we ultimately want to go fanless.
The "H1" system pictured is a powered by two Intel Atom 1.6GHz processors. Though Intel brands this as Dual Core, the chips are actually on a seperate die and feature individual hyper threading - on Ubuntu this shows ups as 4 cores (a quad core Atom?). (Similarly the Intel Atom is just a rebranded Centrino, albeit at a great price).
It features Gigabit Lan, 2GB of 667MHz DDR2 RAM, and a coral reef of heatsinks to dissipate CPU heat, Northbridge heat, and more heat coming from an Ati 2400 GPU which provides DVI output and should shortly offer 1080p playback.
2.5" Drive slot means you can go up 500GB at 5400RPM (about £90 these days) or 250GB at 7200RPM (about £60).
Completely silent, fanless, wall-mountable, and great as a Boxee box, HTPC, or just a powerful home/office workstation.
We'll be selling it shortly without the PCI slot populated for customers who can get by with VGA output.
Measures: 190 x 205 x 83mm.
Author's Note: In the end we decided the PCI interface was too mediocre for decent graphics and the onboard GMA 950 cannot drive HD. The H1 standard (single core Atom, onboard Nvidia 9400) can do 1080p playback but little else so we're working on an Aleutia H3 which will combine a fanless AMD Sempron 140 2.8GHz (45W) with Geforce 8200 chipset. (This is a completely new Sempron - much faster with 1MB L2 Cache.)
Seagate Skips SSDs
We've been rather impressed with Seagate hard drives. We still use IDE Western Digital drives (WD800BEVE, 1600BEVE, and 2500BEVE) in our E2s on account of their quietness, minimal power consumption (about 1 additional watt) and general reliability. But our new Atom PC runs on SATA-II and what's more our forthcoming E3 likely will as well.
Seagate has made some great inroads with their new 7200.3 series. Low power, a bit noisy, 7200 RPM, and 16MB Cache. It has 80MB/sec read speed and 50MB/sec write speed - that's way above CF cards and approaching SSD levels.
As they announced today in London, they're skipping the market. To quote Bill Watson, "When Samsung can't make money at this… it's a tough market."
Of course, we're happy to take advantage of loss leaders and will be announcing the Atom PC with 32GB OCZ SSD (Ubuntu or Vista) next week
Cheta Nwanze, a new addition to the Aleutia Team
Cheta had volunteered quite a bit in the spring and early summer, working to provide a custom OS. He joined the Aleutia team full time on Thursday, August 23rd helping to guide our road map of product development and create an amazing OS for our computers. He's also the author of a blog with a much larger following than mine: http://chxta.blogspot.com/
Full Screen Video on the E2 and Why I Love LXDE
Aleutia E2 Playing FullScreen Video of Scary Robot Dog
YouTube is one of today's killer apps, and has been a key weakness of the E2, whose 500MHz Via CPU and onboard graphics chip struggled to play streaming videos at more than a frame or two per second, i.e. unusable. But we've just installed LXDE, a great "lightweight" windows manager that is much snappier and speeds YouTube up to "just kind of jerky".
Before today, downloaded divx files on the E2 running on Gnome would open and be extremely jerky and unusable, even at quarter screen. However, by installing LXDE (just 20MB) by following their instructions for Ubuntu, adding the Medibuntu repositories and w32codecs (to play Window Media files, and not have to worry about drivers), and using the fantastic MPlayer (we've fully removed Totem and aren't using VLC anymore), smooth full-screen video is possible without even frames dropping.
In the above video, I'm playing a downloaded .wmv file from Boston Dynamics, the company behind the amazing (and kind of terrifying) autonomous robot Big Dog.
A Gaggle of Cheap Laptops
I'm not sure what the collective noun is for the "ultra portable" laptops that have proliferated so much recently, but given the cacophony they've generated I think "a gaggle" is appropriate. Over the weekend, I read of Acer's Aspire One, which appeared to offer the build quality and keyboard of HP's 2133 Mini-Note at the price of the Asus's Eee 901 (~£220, $395 stateside). Asus claims sales of nearly half a million of UMPCs and at last Dell seems to have lumbered into this space, with rumors of a $300 notebook (the Asus Eee was originally rumored to sell for $200). All these systems feature Intel's new Atom CPU (1.6GHz and "low power"), 512MB-1GB RAM, and 1024x600 displays and so would seem to keep us, and our sideshow 500MHz, 1GB RAM desktops (not even a display!), awake with terror.
The reason we sleep soundly is that with the exception of Asus, none of these vendors have bothered to tweak their Linux distribution for the hardware they so efficiently produced. HP grabbed OpenSuse off the shelf and dumped it on the Mini-Note resulting is a clumsy interface intimidating for any novice. Asus at least made some changes to Xandros and installed 3G drivers to allow you to "plug n play" a USB 3G modem - something a Vodafone team provided for them (and which you can now run on your E2 - download vodafone-mobile-connect-card-driver-for-linux_1.99.16_i386.deb from the Betavine site to use on your E2.)
Our aim at Aleutia is to provide an OS which is fully tweaked and optimized for our hardware spec and so renders benchmarks such as CPU speed less relevant.
Nevertheless, some of our customers would be better served with such laptops and their power consumption usually hovers around a respectable 20 Watts. We are working on both a low-cost laptop (Q1 2009) and an E2 with integrated 5.7" 800x600 touchscreen (Q3 2008), but we focus on micro desktops because they offer the advantages of:
Modularity - if your laptop display is cracked, you have a problem. With an E2 you can swap in a second-hand TFT or even a televsion.
Ruggedness - it's much easier to make a palm-sized desktop with no moving parts rugged
Much Bigger Screen, Much Nicer Keyboard - working on a compressed keyboard and 9" display sucks. Working on a 23" display and ergonomic keyboard (Microsoft is good at some things) is rather pleasant and, these days, rather inexpensive.
Portability - the E2 is half the size of any UMPC, save the fabulously expensive OQO. Sure you'll need a monitor, keyboard, and mouse wherever you go, but provided you're not a road warrior and just work from a few locations (Home and Office?) and are looking for a "one ring to rule them all" computer, it's a lot lighter than anything else you're going to see.
Those are the advantages I see for consumers. Most of our work is project-based and it's a lot easier to set up and network a lab with 50 VESA-mountable E2s than to secure the same number of laptops with 50 competing wireless cards.
Enough invective for now - back to Zigbee development.
