LaurenandLloyd.com

where our wasted time becomes your wasted time

computers

A post only a mother could love.

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Speaking of mothers, it was my mom’s birthday yesterday.  It was also my dad’s birthday three days before that, but he doesn’t believe in the internet, and doesn’t want Al Gore to know when his birthday is, so we won’t mention that.

Lauren said that I had to write a post, but what she doesn’t know is that I already wrote one. One that is guaranteed to put you all asleep. I hope you enjoy your naps; there is a summary at the end.

We are replacing 30 computers in our PC lab at school. The current machines were built by students six years ago (to save money and also as a learning experience) and I thought we would do the same thing this time for the same reasons.

Here are my goals for these machines:

  1. They should be relatively future proof. That is to say, they will probably be in service for 5-6 years and so I have to build them a little faster than they really need to be for today’s use. They will be used for Microsoft Office, some Adobe Creative Suite, and for a little programming. No CAD classes.
  2. There should be a little “nice” factor when students see/use them. I am not above having students think, “Oh, they updated this lab, what we do here must be a little important to them.”
  3. They should be fairly easy to maintain. I’m looking for quality parts that seem to last (at least in my price range). I need a case that spastic 7th grade boys won’t idly break pieces from. I will have to remove the hard drives occasionally to reimage them, and would like that to be fairly painless.

I have about $350.00 to spend per machine. I would be happy to spend less than that, because that money would be used for other technology projects at school, and I could probably come up with a little more money if that would make the machines significantly better. I’ll be purchasing these in the United States.

One of my concerns is finding good prices for parts. I really can’t do rebates (MIR prices), because I don’t have 30 people to purchase these. I could have 6 people, so limit 5 offers are okay. Maybe someone knows more than I do about getting bulk discounts.

Here are the parts I’m considering and why:

CPU:
It didn’t look like AMD had anything better than Intel in my price range, so I didn’t really look at AMD processors closely. I don’t have anything against AMD (current machines have Athlon X2 4850e), so feel free to point me toward a comparable AMD processor. I do not see us doing any overclocking.

  • $58 Intel Pentium G3250 (I am strongly leaning this way)
  • $110 Intel i3-4150

GPU
Onboard graphics only. I can’t see any reason to put a graphics card in these machines.

  • $0.00

RAM:
It seems to me that 8GB is better than 4GB if I’m aiming 5 year out, but memory is easy to add, so I’m not above starting with 4GB and adding another 4GB in a few years if that seems reasonable. My preference is to use Crucial. I have had memory from them go bad over the years, but they have always been very good about replacing it.

  • $27 4GBx1
  • $52 8GBx1

Storage
I would really like to just put a smaller SSD in these. My current school disk images are about 64GB, so I’m looking at a 120GB SSD. These drives are not used for storing student data. I don’t know much about SSD reliability, so could use any help picking a good brand/model.

Motherboard
I’m leaning strongly toward a mini-itx motherboard, because I’m leaning strongly toward some mini-itx cases. I would not be opposed to another size motherboard, but you’d have to sell me on another case as well. I really don’t know what to do here. I usually buy an open box mother board for my own computers, but that won’t work with 30 of them. reliability is probably my highest priority here. Other than that, I really don’t know where to spend my money. There was some talk of wanting the computers to be wireless, but that’s not necessarily a requirement. I’m going to just throw out the ones I’m currently looking at:

Case
I’m a little up in the air here. I could save some money by buying a case with a built-in PSU or with an external PSU. I’m tempted to do that, but my impression is that those PSUs are never very good. Here are the options I’m looking at with built-in/external PSUs:

I actually like the cases below a lot more, but pairing them with a decent power supply raises the price. Notice that they don’t have any external drive bays. Apart from liking the looks, I think they will continue to look good longer in a lab setting.

PSU
The cheapest, reliable power supply. I think I would like an 80+bronze PSU, but I could certainly be convinced that that’s not a good place to spend money. I think my absolute max load would be 138Watts. I would be very interested in knowing the difference between the various Seasonic PSUs listed below. I couldn’t find that information.

My current thoughts
Below are the choices that I would currently make from the above options. The prices shown here are a little low, because lots of these are special offers that I wouldn’t qualify for with 30 units.

PCPartPicker part list[15] / Price breakdown by merchant[16]

Type Item Price
CPU Intel Pentium G3250 3.2GHz Dual-Core Processor[17] $55.99 @ SuperBiiz
Motherboard ASRock H97M-ITX/AC Mini ITX LGA1150 Motherboard[18] $87.98 @ Newegg
Memory Crucial 8GB (1 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory[19] $50.99 @ SuperBiiz
Storage Silicon Power S60 120GB 2.5″ Solid State Drive[20] $50.44 @ Amazon
Case Lian-Li PC-Q01B Mini ITX Tower Case[21] $54.98 @ Newegg
Power Supply SeaSonic 350W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply[22] $39.98 @ Newegg
Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
Total $340.36
Generated by PCPartPicker[23] 2015-05-26 23:43 EDT-0400

Any thoughts you have about any of the choices would be greatly appreciated.

TL;DR
Need to build 30 reliable school computers. Money is an object. Obviously looking for help in quality parts, but also in getting good prices when MIR and Open Box isn’t an option.

Computer Sale 2015

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Every year or so we sell off all of the computers that we’ve replaced at Lincoln Lutheran. Last Saturday was our biggest sale ever. It turns out that everything went pretty well (even considering Lauren’s stories).  But I actually lost some sleep over the whole process.

We had been working on getting things ready for the sale off and on throughout the school year, but really began working on it in earnest about two weeks ahead of time. I have about 8 students who are part of my Tech Center at school. They help teachers and students who are having problems with their computers, and I wouldn’t have made it through this school year without them.

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Those students were actually doing the bulk of the work to get ready. I just had to organize the work into bite sized jobs that they could do. They don’t get paid for the Tech Center work that they do throughout the school year, but we kept track of the hours that they worked to get ready for the Computer Sale and I paid them for that work.

But even with them doing most of the work, I still woke up at 2:00 am on Friday and Saturday and couldn’t go back to sleep. That never happens to me. I’ve always been a very good sleeper. (Just ask my mom.) I didn’t think I was nervous about it, and maybe that wasn’t why I couldn’t sleep. I don’t know. What, am I a sleep doctor? Is that even a thing?

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On Friday, during the day I had a couple of groups of students help me carry down all of our computers and stuff to the cafeteria. Boy, I’m glad we did that. It took us until about 6:00 pm to get everything set up. I bet it would have been another 2 hours otherwise.

Saturday rolled around and Lauren and I arrived at 7:30 and the boys arrived at 8:00 and we were all busy with last minute details until we opened at 9:00. There were actually other people wandering around looking at things from about 8:00 on. It was a combination of those people who come to garage sales early and those people who are at school for a tae-kwon-do tournament.  I seriously have to remember to do it on the day of the tournament again next year. It sure didn’t hurt to have about 400 extra people walk through.

It was pretty amazing how non-stop busy we were all day. Lauren was a real help. She took care of nearly all of the money (after she felt comfortable dong the credit card transactions). I had no idea how much we were selling, but once or twice she said she was uncomfortable with how much money was on the table, so she took it up to the office.

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After 12:00, everything was half price, and that caused an oddly large number of problems with people just walking around with items while they “looked at other things” or people who just hovered around items for 30 minutes. But we did get amazingly busy again after 12:00.

I’ll have to write a note to myself to come up with a better way to deal with that next year. I am certainly open to suggestion if you have any.

We were pretty much done selling things and taking them to cars for people by 1:15, and, after (finally) a break for lunch (all of the pizza was pretty  much room temperature by that point), we took the items that we wanted to keep back to the Tech Center. One of my auction buddies (let’s call him Joe), had agreed to take anything that we had left. I let the kids pick anything that they wanted first, then we hauled an entire van-full out to Joe’s van. It really was an entire van-full too. I had never seen a van packed that tightly.

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Finally, we totaled up our earnings. I just threw the cash on the table and the kids counted it. They were amazed that there were hundred dollar bills in the pile. The stack of cash was about $3,700 high. They were amazed. They knew we were busy, but they were doing everything but taking money. After that I said we should check the credit card account. Their jaws dropped when I said there was another $1,700 in credit card payments.

IMG_7474

I was actually pretty amazed as well. When people I knew came through the sale and asked how well we were doing, I would say that I though we had passed the $2,000 mark. Little did we know.

We cut the gross in half (Lincoln Lutheran gets half the money) and subtracted our expenses (mostly pizza and an ad in the classified section). Then we divided what was left by the 128 hours we worked. and the kids ended up earning $14.00 an hour. They were all excited to do it again next year, and I was glad to have gotten rid of all of the old stuff from the shelves.

The best part? I slept until 6:00 am yesterday.

Hour Of Code

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Guess what this week is, boys and girls? That’s right. It’s Computer Science Education Week. And the Computer Science Teacher’s Association (did I mention I was the Nebraska chapter president) along with Code.org is sponsoring an Hour of Code.

So far over 6,000,000 people have tried their hand at writing computer programs for an hour. We’re having all of the students at Lincoln Lutheran give it a try (during math class). We’re doing it over a two-day period and it’s been working out okay.

There are about 20 different tutorials that you can choose from. We’re having students start off with the Angry Birds/Plants vs. Zombies tutorial. It uses a programming language called Scratch that you program by dragging different colored blocks around the screen.

The tutorials are mostly game-like. And, while you can’t do anything really Earth-shaking in an hour, you can get an idea of whether you might like to learn more about programming. They say that there will be 1,400,000 new Computer Science jobs in the next 6 year, but we are on pace to produce only 400,000 Computer Science majors.

This concerns big computer companies like Google and Microsoft, so they are sponsoring this sort of thing to encourage more people to study programming (and to encourage more schools to teach it).

You can try the Angry Bird’s  Tutorial and see what you think. No, seriously, give it a try.

Our first event

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Warning: Boring post ahead…

So, Lauren didn’t want to post anything today. My first thought was to try to describe what the stomach flu was like, but I’m going to give that a pass for the time being.

Instead, let me tell you about the latest geeky thing in my life. Over the last few months, a group of computer science teachers around here have been putting together our very own Nebraska Chapter of the Computer Science Teachers Association*. A little less than a month ago we were approved as a chapter and  on Tuesday we held our first Event.

I bet you didn’t know that this was Computer Science Education Week (yes, there’s a website). One of the things they tell us when they can get us to look up from our computers is that people think that all we do is stare at computers. So we rounded up the only 3 guys who work with computers who actually do anything and had them show [and tell] as many high school students [as we could convince to give up an hour of their evening] the cool stuff they were working on.

It was actually some pretty cool stuff. Attaching computers to cranes to track migration, behavior, habitat and so forth. The computers actually sent data back via text messages. One crane sent 25,000+ texts. I hope they got an unlimited plan. Burying computers in a corn field to track moisture content and tell the center pivot how much water to spray in each portion of the field (okay, that last bit is only exciting in Nebraska).

One guy was working on flying robots that could collect water samples or maintain devices that monitor the structural integrity of bridges. He brought one of the flying robots and you can just barely see it in this picture it you know where to look (this photo was taken after the event while he was just showing off).

I spy, with my little eye, something that begins with R.

The third guy was working with simulation of complex real world objects to try to solve problems that are traditionally hard for computers to solve. Things like how traffic light timing should change in response to traffic accidents in order to let traffic flow as smoothly as possible. Or figuring out the optimal number of firefighters for any given part of a forest fire.

We had a pretty good turnout, and the people who came asked some good questions afterwards. I am pronouncing our first event a success. And, as no description of puking was involved, I think we can call this post a success as well. In fact, that might be a good enough description of success in general.

Sold!

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Yesterday was the annual* Lincoln Lutheran Technology Flea Market. For 5 hectic hours we sell off all of the various computer junk that has accumulated over the course of the last 12 months or so in all of the various nooks and crannies of Lincoln Lutheran where I’ve found that I can reasonably stack things without anyone (a) noticing or (b) complaining.

If you’re going to hold your own anytime soon, allow me to present a few Lessons Learned from ours:

  • Advertise under “garage sales” in the paper instead of “computers”. You’ll hit your target audience better.
  • Do not go from 9:00am until 5:00pm. You’ll have as many customers in the first 10 minutes as the last 5 hours. 9:00am until noon really seems about right
  • We’ve been advertising that everything will be half price in the afternoon. I don’t know if this is really effective. I think some people think (a) they will come back, but forget or (b) that maybe what you’re selling is only worth half as much as you’re selling it for.
  • It took 64 man-hours to get ready for the sale, but students (and alumni) did most of this. They are motivated to do a good job because they get half of the profit.
  • Do not sell anything at all to the annoying guy who tries to get you to lower the price on everything and get a discount for buying a lot of items. If your prices are right, someone else will buy them.
  • If you have too much to sell, stack them behind the tables and bring them out as things sell. Note: there will not actually be time to do this.
  • Remember to order lunch.
  • Write down (preferably in a sort of treasure map) where you’ve stashed things during the year.
  • Price things to move. The very worst outcome is to have to store things for another year.

Anyone want an overhead projector? Anyone want 10 of them?

The event was deemed a success. We grossed something like $1,500.00, and everything went pretty smoothly. We couldn’t lock the doors this time, because NHS was doing something or other, so we had some early birds wandering in, but that seemed to work out okay.

*Used here in more of a sort of hopeful sense, rather than a strictly chronological one.

Macro Fun

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I was working at school for about 13 hours today trying to get student accounts to log into Netware 6.5 from the latest version of OS10. In the end, after upgrading 3 servers and installing a few patches, digging through lots of documentation and trying lots of different fixes, there were still a few bugs.

Cute little babies

This little fellow was shy.

I dare you to click here for a full size image.

I have to go back tomorrow. Wish me luck.