AmishGeek.com

The personal blog of an old-fashioned geek

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Amishgeek.com now with more Cloud Power

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I recently decided to migrate some of my sites to the amazon ec2 cloud.  Now this site (www.amishgeek.com) is hosted entirely on Amazon’s EC2.  I’m using a triplet of micro instances behind an Elastic Load balancer to serve up this site and a couple others.  I’m using GlusterFS as a distributed filesystem to keep files synced between my instances.

I also enabled w3-total-cache which greatly speeds up pageload times and caching, as well as using S3 + cloudfront as a content delivery network (cdn) for delivering static content.

Look forward for another post with greater in-depth details on how I accomplished this.

Amazon is becoming my new favorite company

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I’ve been a long time customer of Amazon.com, going way back into the mid-90′s when all they sold was books.  But lately, I’ve found myself using their products and services more and more often, and I am very impressed!

Since buying my Roku XD I have since become an Amazon Prime member to gain access to the unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows that Amazon Prime has to offer.  While the interface of the Amazon On Demand channel for Roku needs much improvement (their customer service dept was happy to hear my suggestions about creating a queue/playlist/subscription), it gets the job done, and it has a good selection of content to watch.  I’ve also puchased a couple season of TV shows to watch On Demand, and their HD movie rental rates are cheaper than what I get direct from Charter (my cable provider).

Moving on from their video services, I’ve been very impressed with their new cloud storage and MP3 cloud player service.  I’ve purchased several albums from Amazon that I would have previously purchased from iTunes because they were a few dollars cheaper.  And with the Cloud Player on my Android phone, it makes having my music with me wherever I go as simple as a click of a button. (I just wish there was a native cloud player app for my iPhone/iPad2).

I’m also an avid book reader and enthusiast, and the fact that the Amazon Kindle app works on my EVO, my iPhone, and my iPad2 means that I can take my whole library with me wherever I go.  Granted, I also have the Barnes & Noble Nook app on all 3 devices as well, but the Kindles whispersync is so much nicer to keep my books synced between devices.  With the Nook, it’s annoying to have to figure out where I was in the book when I want to read a quick chapter on my EVO after reading for a bit on my iPad2 before bed the previous night.

Amazon’s seller marketplace also makes it easy for me to convert my old collection of physical books into money, which in-turn helps me expand my Kindle library.  I’d love it if they had a book exchange program where you can send in physical books and receive discounts on the kindle versions of those same books.

All in all, I’m a very happy Amazon customer!

Roku XD first impressions

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I’m always trying to improve my home media experiences, and until now, I’ve been happy with my Original Xbox running XBMC and my 1st Gen Apple TV running XBMC & Boxee.   I keep most of my media on a 1TB network storage device, and it works great.

But yesterday, I was at Best Buy picking up some accessories for my iPad2, and I ended up buying a Roku XD.   I have a Hulu+ subscription which I enjoy with my iPad, and a co-worker clued me into Amazon’s instant on-demand videos which are actually cheaper than the Charter on Demand videos I get through my cable service, and since the Roku XD supports both of those, I thought I would give it a spin.

So far, I am very impressed.  With Hulu+ I have access to more TV shows than I could possibly watch, and a subscription to Amazon Prime will give me even more, including movies.  I was also pleasantly surprised with some other channels available on the Roku device, like Crackle.com which has free movies on demand.

The UI on the Roku is a little meh.  It’s functional and thats about it.  I really like the remote, and performance wise, while the menu changes are a bit sluggish, the video playback on my TV is excellent.

For a $79 device, the Roku XD gets my approval.  I actually am considering getting a 2nd Roku for another TV in the house, and I’ll play around with a server software called Chaneru which should let me play/stream my current media library off the network to the roku devices, eliminating the need for a 2nd XBMC/Boxee device for downloaded media.

As much as I love apple products, I cannot forsee or justify spending the prices Appple demands for media in iTunes.  Why buy a TV season for $36 in iTunes, when I can get the same thing from Amazon for $19?  Or included in a monthly subscription from Hulu+ or Amazon Prime?

Playin with the WordPress app for Android

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I just installed the WordPress app for Android on my HTC evo. This is a test post from the app.

So far this seems like a pretty sweet app! I’m still not used to the Android/evo keyboard… I think the spacebar needs to be a bit bigger as I’m trying to type as fast as I do on my iPhone but my words blend together, so its either the auto spell correction or I’m missing the spacebar as I type.

HTC Evo & Apple iPhone

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I’ve had an iPhone 3g for just over 1.5 years now, and I LOVE IT!   I’ve also had the Samsung Instinct as a work phone for the past 2 years, and it’s been pretty meh.   Today, our new work phones arrived, the new HTC Evo, the worlds first 4G smartphone blah blah marketingspeak.

All I can say is this thing is HUGE!  And when I turned it on, it’s got a nice, crisp, hi-res display and it looks fantastic.  I can’t wait to get it activated and start playing with it.  I primarily use my iPhone for personal, but I use the email / web features of it for work because it was so much better than the instinct.  I might actually start using my work phone for work (email/web) as well as personal.

Here is a picture of the phones side by side while I wait for the new phone to activate…

Ebook Raders – iPhone, Nook, Kindle, and now Edge

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I recently grew a love for ebook readers.  I use my iPhone with the Stanza app, which allows me to read ebooks, purchase and download ebooks wirelessly via my phones internet connection, and access the full project Gutenberg library (my personal favorite).  I enjoy it immensely, as it lets me bring my books with me wherever I go, since I bring my iPhone with me wherever I go.

Over the holidays, I had the chance to play around and use my brother’s Kindle from Amazon, and I was impressed!  I liked that the Kindle had a bigger screen, and the e-ink was very nice to read, compared to reading the backlit ebooks on my iPhone.  However, I did not like the fact that the display was not touch-sensitive, and I had to use the physical buttons to turn the page.  The Kindle interface wasn’t very intuitive and it took me a while to get used to it and be able to quickly navigate the menus.

Also over the holidays, I was able to check out my Uncle’s Nook from Barnes and Noble. Feature wise, the Nook and Kindle are pretty evenly matched, but due to the fact that the Nook has a 2nd screen, and has built in Wi-Fi, I would probably buy the Nook over the Kindle, if I had to get one or the other.

BUT! (there is always a but)  I just read about the new enTourage eDGe which combines 2 displays, and the google android OS to make a hybrid ebook reader that functions also as a tablet pc/netbook.  Now this is more along the lines of something that I would buy.  I’ve been contemplating getting a netbook, and if I make the plunge into netbook ownership, I’m going to take a hard look at the eDGe.  I’m not that familiar with the droid OS, and if there was a version that would let me run the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, then it would be just right.

Clever use of Twitter!

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http://twitter.com/newlywedsontjob

This is a hilarious use of twitter, this guy is his friends Best Man in the wedding, and swears not to prank them until AFTER the wedding.  So while they’re on honeymoon, he installs a pressure sensitive pad in his friends bed which automatically tweets when it detects action on the bed.  It reports back the weight/duration/intensity of the action when they’re “on the job”.

Brilliant!

When dealing with PETABYTES of storage…

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A friend sent me a link to a blog post over at backblaze about how to build cheap storage.  I was just amazed!  45 drives crammed into a 4U chassis to provide a total of 67 terabytes of usable storage space.  Stack 20 or so of those pods together and you have a petabyte of storage!

One of these days when I have $7k lying around burning a hole in my pocket, I’m going to build myself one of these things.  It looks like a really cool way to get some cheap storage.

I do wonder though, why they use 1.5TB drives instead of 2TB drives… and with the drives crammed in that tight, do those fans supply adequate airflow for cooling?

AT&T Navigator for iPhone

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I just got an email from AT&T letting me know about the new AT&T Navigator app for my iPhone 3g.   I love my iPhone and one of my biggest gripes was how much of a pain it was to navigate anywhere while on the road.  Google maps was funcitonal, and since I can read a map, I could find my own way, but if I was anywhere unknown and just wanted to get there without dealing with anything complex, I would use my Samsung Instinct on Sprint that I have through work.

I think it’s great that FINALLY after how many years the iPhone has been out, and for the past year with the 3G with GPS, that they have a turn by turn direction app.  But I think it is TERRIBLE that AT&T wants to charge me $9.99/mo for the service.

$9.99 to download the App as a one time fee would be perfectly acceptable, but don’t tell me that they need to charge a monthly fee for the service.  I don’t pay extra for the Sprint Navigator on the Instinct, nor do you pay a monthly fee (that I’m aware of) for a TomTom.

Come on AT&T, give us the app for a one-time $9.99 or even $19.99 fee, and then charge per update.  Let me know when the routes in my home area have been updated due to construction, and give me a $1.99 update option to update when I want to.  Don’t nickel and dime me with a $10/mo recurring charge.  Over 1 year, that’s $120 spent on navigation, and how often do roads change?

Windows 7 Pricing announced

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ars technica lists the new windows 7 announced pricing structure. I’m intrigued, as I’m still running Windows XP on my home computer, and within Parallels on my Macbook and my iMac at work.  Windows 7 might be the first Microsoft [software] product I’ll purchase in almost 8 years, ever since I bought Windows XP.

From everything I’ve read and seen (I have yet to download and install a copy of the beta/release candidate), Windows 7 blows both XP and Vista out of the water.  We’ll see if it holds a candle to MacOS, especially with the SnowLeopard release.  I applaud Apple and their pricing structure, only charging $29 for an upgrade from Leopard to SnowLeopard. Add that to the fact that a retail “Family Pack” of MacOS can be installed on up to 5 machines for only $199…  Apple has their software pricing right!