I decided to upgrade to 2GB of RAM and replace the hard drive with a solid state drive (SSD). That would help speed up the computer and make it more durable for the bicycle tour. Both are reasonably priced upgrades nowadays.

With most netbooks, it’s rather simple to access the RAM and the hard drive, just a few screws to remove on the bottom. But not this netbook, I’ll share a couple of photos, though I’ll spare the exact details since there’s lots of sites and how to videos. First the keyboard has to be pried off. That was the major annoyance, the only thing I could find thin enough yet strong enough to fit in between was a steak knife.

Removing the keyboard revealed a set of five screws labelled “door”. Those had to be removed, then I had to stick a screwdriver in the “door release”. That then partially popped off the back panel, which I could then get my fingers underneath and unsnap the rest of it off to finally access the RAM and hard drive. Obviously not designed to be user serviceable.

Reassembly was the reverse, carefully snapping the plastic bottom panel back on as to not break any tabs, putting the five door screws back on, then reattaching the keyboard.

The other main challenge was the Windows 7 install on the SSD. I do have a set of recovery discs, but I didn’t want to have to start over. So that left the challenge of moving from the 320GB hard drive to the 128GB SSD. There’s a few ways to do this, but I ran into roadblocks on a few of them. Eventually, the route I took was to use GParted to shrink the C: partition, use the recovery discs to do a clean Windows 7 install on the SSD, and then use Clonezilla to copy the C: partition from the old hard drive to the SSD. Afterwards, I had an issue with booting, but I was able to download this recovery disc to fix the bootloader.

So the new SSD was working fine – except for the frequent system lockups. I tried replacing the RAM, upgrading the SSD firmware, updating the system BIOS, making sure I had the latest AHCI drivers, etc., but no luck. By process of elimination, it must have been a bad SSD. So I sent the SSD back to Newegg for a replacement. And now I am waiting.

(to be continued….)

(…and now we’re back)

In some discussions with friends, I pointed out that another blogger successfully upgraded his D270 with a Samsung 840 SSD. They confirmed that the Samsung 840 is a solid drive, and I speculated that there might not have been anything wrong with the Sandisk SSD, but perhaps the low end hardware for the D270 might not have played well with it. So last night I went to Fry’s Electronics and picked up a Samsung 840 Pro SSD. (I’ll find another use for the Sandisk that is coming in the mail soon…) This drive didn’t come with a spacer, so I tried using the pads that stick to the bottom of chair legs to the fill the extra space.

But the pads were a little too thick, and so I broke one of the tabs on the bottom of the back panel while reassembling the D270. I removed the pads. Turns out the extra space in the drive compartment isn’t a big deal, as it fits in there rather snugly.

Then I followed the same procedure as outlined earlier to migrate Windows 7 to the SSD, and it was up and running in no time, no freeze-ups or any other issues. Though in my discussions with friends, I noted that the irony of dropping a $150 SSD into a $200 turd of a netbook wasn’t lost on me. But the combination of RAM upgrade to 2GB (the maximum for Windows 7 Starter) and the replacement of the hard drive with the SSD made this netbook fast enough to be usable. I guess you can polish a turd after all!

Here is the route on Strava.

Now for some photos from the ride.

A little rise before the rest of the downhill.

The “Mormon Rocks” at the base of the Lone Pine Canyon climb.

Yucca in bloom – and the endless uphill.

Cloudy and hazy down below.

It keeps getting steeper as it goes up…

Another yucca in bloom. Some years the whole canyon has them blooming, but not this year.

One of the few ranches on this road – and is this the “lone pine” that the canyon is named after?

Finally made it to the top with the pines, at about 6100 feet, nice view looking down.

The slide above Wrightwood.

Back in the town of Wrightwood again.

Here’s the speed test before connecting the antenna and plugging in the AC adapter: 4 bars, RSSI -90 dbm signal strength (the latter as measured through the Signal jailbreak app).

Now here’s the speed test after connecting the antenna and plugging in the AC adapter: 5 bars, RSSI -70 dbm signal strength.

Now that test wasn’t completely scientific, but still pretty impressive results, even with an already good signal before using the Wilson Sleek 4G-V. I can’t wait to try it at the mountain cabin! I’ll update this post after I do so…

Edit 5/27/13:

I did some testing at the mountain cabin. Here’s the Speedtest results for a bunch of different configurations:

• Indoors without Sleek booster: 2 bars, 7 Mbps download
• Indoors with Sleek booster, antenna mounted on adjacent window: 3 bars, 13 Mbps download
• Outdoors without Sleek booster, in front of the aforementioned window: 3 bars, 13 Mbps download
• Outdoors without Sleek booster, but in better location and higher up: 4 bars, 24 Mbps download
• In town: 5 bars, 35 Mbps download

I think it’s safe to say that the Wilson Sleek gives an indoor signal boost equivalent to standing outside at the same location. While this is a significant improvement in signal strength, I really need a rooftop antenna and to relocate the Sleek to a different location inside the house in order to get the better signal and faster download speeds. But then that would put the Sleek too far away from the MBR95 router, resulting in a degradation of the Wifi as WAN signal.

So now I’m thinking of something that will boost the signal to the entire house. There are expensive amplifier/antenna systems out there for that, but I think something simpler like the Wi-Ex YX550 should work for me. I’ll keep the Sleek for travel, though.

But upon closer inspection, I happened to be hitting an antenna out in the high desert.

Then in early May, I got this in my back yard! The rollout of 4G LTE finally made it to Wrightwood!

At least one of the cellular antennas in town was converted to 4G LTE. I can’t show the screen shot as it would tell the whole world where I live.

Walking a block up down the street towards the direction of the antenna gains an extra bar of signal and faster download speeds.

Unfortunately, indoors I get only two bars of signal, with about 8-9 Mbps download speeds. But it’s still much faster than my 1.0 Mbps DSL connection, so I can route the LTE connection through my Cradlepoint MBR95 router via wifi while I wait for DSL upgrades to come to town. I have the Wilson Sleek 4G-V on order and I’ll see if that boosts the signal inside and increases download speeds comparable to that with the phone outdoors.

Santiago Canyon

Saw some Canyon Velo riders

Alongside Santiago Canyon

Modjeska Canyon Road

Modjeska Grade Road (a former coworker used to think it was “Majestic Grade”)

View from Modjeska Grade

Still not yet at the top on Modjeska Grade….

View from near the top of Modjeska Grade

Almost to the top of Live Oak Canyon Road

Now for the tree lined downhill on Live Oak

Through O’Neill Park

Crossing the bridge on Santa Margarita Parkway

New bicycle-sensitive loop detector on Portola Parkway

The old El Toro Marine Base off Irvine Boulevard

Portola Parkway

The climb up Jamboree Road

The last hill on Jamboree Road

Initial setup was quite easy, though the downside is that you need to have a couple of velcro strips on the laptop cover. The shade blocks out light from the top and the sides, but light from behind me is still reflected onto the screen. Still, the shade worked as advertised, and I could see the screen after adjusting the display brightness to maximum. Someday I may experiment with setting up a temporary dark background behind me to improve the view of the screen.

I noticed the top panel of the black shade started warping in the sun. Though that’s just a cosmetic issue, it doesn’t affect the display quality. The shade mostly regained its shape after cooling off. Also, the shade folds up and can stay on the back of the laptop. Though that’s a bit bulky for where I put my laptop in my indoor home office setup or my travel bag, so I simply just removed it after use.

So how do I get internet outside? The outdoor wireless access point is up by the roof peak. More information in this old blog post.

Edit: Didn’t want the mountain cabin to feel left out, here are some photos of the outdoor office setup there.

Don’t need an outdoor wireless access point here, as the signal from the router high up in the closet with the upgraded antenna works great!

So in 2012, one would have thought I’d have a lot more time for riding. Well, yes and no. Although I now had the flexibility for lunch rides a few days a week, I didn’t have that “need” to ride when I bicycle commuted to work a few days a week at the old job. It’s been easy to put off a lunch ride if I’m in the rhythm with something at work, or when I make it out for a ride, it’s easy to feel rushed to get back in time to get some more work done. Furthermore, even though I don’t race, I usually have a 4-7 day bicycle tour each year as a training goal, but sadly enough not that year. While I still got in a bunch of rides, I feel like I was just floating around aimlessly, without any real fitness goals.

I vowed to change that for 2013, but this year has gotten off to a rocky start. At the beginning of the year a nasty hemorrhoid (TMI) kept me off a bike seat. Some work travel and personal matters also kept me away from the bike. Then I found out the foam in my old bike saddles had deteriorated to the point where I can’t comfortably sit anywhere on them. And countless saddle and other small adjustments to the bike over the years have completely messed up my bike fit. Though I’m working on those issues and hope to get back on the bike soon.

The silver lining in all this is that I started running at the beginning of the year as a way to stay fit while being off the bike. I downloaded a “couch to 5k” app on my phone and have been running in the trails at the wilderness park about 1/4 mile from my house. The running has worked out real well to stay in shape when I’ve been traveling for work, or during a limited lunchtime window. Based on my pace, which I thought “felt” slow, my running friends tell me I’m not doing half bad!

Unfortunately, a week ago, at the end of week 7 of the 8 week C25K program, I developed pain in my toes and the ball of my foot. I believe I traced the source of the problem (metatarsal supports which I stuck onto the wrong spot on my insoles), though I’ll need to stay off my feet for another couple of days until they get better.

So, for 2013, I’m going to run a 5K (for the first time ever) and ride a century (for the first time in years). Maybe a multi-day bike tour somewhere in there too. Maybe a swimming goal too – well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves just yet! Not big goals, but something to aim for!

Below is a photo of my “network closet” in the crawl space. I use the crawl space because it says relatively cool in the summer, which is best for the electronics. The inside of the cabin, as well as the attic, can get pretty hot in the summer when it’s all boxed up in our absence. In most places, condensation on the equipment would be an issue, but here the outdoor and crawl space humidity is very low year round. The crawl space location also kept everything away from the renters, back when we were using this as a vacation rental. Yet despite the apparent tight quarters in the photo, it’s still easy access, as the access opening is immediately to the right, just outside the frame of the photo.

So here’s a list of everything (excluding “normal” stuff such as the flat screen TVs), along with links to my previous webpages:

• 1 – DSL modem
• 2 – Network switch to split the ethernet from the DSL modem into the two routers (this only works because my ISP allows mutiple external IP addresses)
• 3 – New Cradlepoint router – This is for the “main” internet connection used in the cabin. This router is set up so that it is normally routes the DSL connection, but it can roll over to using a connection from a USB modem or Wifi connection from a smartphone. Since this router’s location in the crawl space is too low to cover the whole property, I have another router high up in a closet connected in bridge mode, with an external antenna in the attic for further range.
• 4 – Old Netgear router – This is for the backyard webcam, driveway webcam, IP phone, and IP thermostat. The Wifi is strong enough to reach the webcams on the garage, while the IP phone and network thermostat have wired connections.
• 5 – Power over Ethernet (PoE) adapter to supply 24V to the IP thermostat
• 6 – UPS to keep all this equipment running in a power outage (and I finally figured out how to turn off the stupid beeping it does when the power is out, but that’s a story for another day)
• 7 – Power strip plugged into the UPS, since the outlets on the UPS are too close together
• 8 – Power injector for the amplifier for the outdoor TV antennas – The cable from the UHF antenna and the VHF antenna on the roof come in on the right, then to the amplifier, then to a splitter to the two TVs.

I’ll have to write about the ham radio equipment some other time.

And here are the things which fell through the cracks and didn’t have their own webpage – until now:

IP Thermostat

In order to be able to turn on the heat remotely and have our place be warm upon our arrival, we picked up the (now discontinued) Proliphix NT20e IP thermostat. It was one of the few internet controllable thermostats available when we bought our new (to us) cabin five years ago, since the now popular and inexpensive Wifi thermostats had not come out yet. (And, as a side note, at our old cabin, we were using a phone controller to turn the heat on and off by telephone!) However, I like this thermostat better than the newer ones, because the ability to set up “special days” to turn on the heat works better for my situation, rather than just turning on and off the heat based on a regular schedule.

Our cabin heater is an old floor furnace, but it works just fine, though on cold winter days it will take a loooong time to heat the place up from the unoccupied temperature of 45°F to the occupied temperature of 70°F. The nice thing about the floor furnace is that it doesn’t need electric power to operate. So with the thermostat PoE adapter (number 5 in the first photo) plugged into the UPS, I still have heat in a power outage!

In addition, I have two remote temperature sensors which provide information only, they do not control the thermostat. The one in the photo below is in the crawl space, so I can know if the pipes are in danger of freezing. The other one is outdoors, under the front deck.

IP Phone

When I started working from home a little over a year ago, I got a dedicated business line through a VoIP provider. Later, after having problems with DSL and my AT&T landline at home, I ditched DSL for cable internet and ported my landline number over to my VoIP provider. So I bought a second VoIP adapter on Ebay and set it up with SIP credentials. Now both my home and business numbers ring simultaneously at both my home and my cabin!

Keyless Entry

Finally, this is the keyless entry Powerbolt 1000 door lock. We used it to avoid passing keys back and forth when our cabin was a vacation rental, but now we’ve disabled it and just use the keyed portion.

Edit: I added some photos of some other gizmos.

Dish Heater

That’s the red thing stuck to the back of the satellite dish, which keeps it warm enough for falling snow to slide off it, rather than sticking to it. It’s an Ice Zapper 2, which is the “always on” version for warmer climates, rather than the thermostat controlled version for colder climates. I leave it on all winter, and in the spring time, I turn it off for the season with a switch wired inside the house.

Heat Tape for Pipes

Our pipes run in the crawl space of the cabin, so there is always a concern about them freezing. Most of them run close to the floor and therefore get some warmth from the house, but the greatest area of concern is where the cold water supply pops out of the ground. I originally had a Frost King electric heat cable to keep that part of the plumbing warm, but I never found it to be reliable. So I upgraded to the Frostex self-regulating heat trace cable. Unlike the Frost King tape which (supposedly) turns on with a thermostat, the Frostex is “always on” but with more heat input at lower temperatures and less heat input at higher temperatures. We had a recent cold spell with single digit (F) temperatures  and even with the cabin interior at 45°F, no pipes froze. The electric outlet is connected to a switch inside the house, so in the spring I turn it off for the season, just like the dish warmer. Note the access panel to reach the shutoff valve from the outside without having to get inside the crawl space.

Here’s a photo taken from the outside looking in through the shutoff valve access door. Note the heating unit in the top right of the photo, as well as the Frostex cable coming out of the bottom and wrapping around the pipes.

Here are the switches for the heat tape and the dish warmer.

Driveway Electric Receptacle???

So why do I have an electric receptacle (circled in red) in the driveway?

Here’s a closer view.

Actually, a receptacle wasn’t there when we first bought the cabin. There was a keyed light switch, similar to the kind that you’d see in elementary schools. It was a three way switch, wired with another switch in the house to turn on/off the outside lighting. I imagine that back in the day, when the previous owners came up on a Friday night to the spend the weekend in town, they would turn on the outside lights from this switch in order to be able to find their way to the front door. Now the need for such a setup is moot, since I have motion sensor lights as well as lights on a timer. Not wanting a good outdoor wiring run to go to waste, I threw away the old switch and rewired it up as a receptacle. (Yes, it is protected with a GFCI.)

So I headed out towards Santiago Canyon with partly cloudy skies, and rather than do the normal loop, I wanted to mix things up with the Silverado Canyon out and back.

I started to see a few sprinkles as I made the turn into Silverado Canyon. It started to rain harder as I continued to climb through the canyon, until it was downpouring right at the Maple Springs turnaround point.

I had expected the rain to let up as I retraced my steps, but that was not the case. So a steady downhill in the steady rain, and having to keep it slow since my black SwissStop pads, while great for dry conditions, aren’t doing so well here.

The steady rain in Silverado Canyon turned into light rain as I turned onto Santiago Canyon.

Finally, it started to clear up again as I approached civilization.

And then it was totally sunny again when I got home.

Closeup of the bike, it needs a good wash down. Next time I’ll take the rain bike with fenders.

But still a good ride, nevertheless.

At this time, there are no other feasible alternatives for a faster, always on connection. Cable isn’t an option – heck, it’s barely even an option for television up here. Satellite internet is available, but the latency is a deal killer for remote desktop access for work, and I’m not too happy about the bandwidth caps either.

Even cellular data, even though there’s currently only 3G in town, doesn’t look so bad compared to 1.0 Mbps. My Verizon iPhone 5 – even only at 3G speeds – gets about 1.5-3.0 Mbps. When I had AT&T, I’d get around 5.0 Mbps up here. (I never saw anywhere near that in LA/OC due to network congestion.) But the main issue with cellular, besides the data caps, is that you don’t get an external IP address. So no webcams or the ability to turn on my thermostat to warm up the cabin before I arrive.

That got me thinking – was there a router which would let me have an always on DSL connection, but let me use a connection from a mobile hotspot or a USB modem when I’m in town for the weekend? Surprisingly, yes – the Cradlepoint MBR95 router. It can take a connection via the WAN port (from a fixed modem), “Wifi as WAN”, or a USB modem plugged into the router’s USB port. So I picked up an MBR95 to give it a try.

Setup

Here was my network configuration before installing the MBR95.

Normally you’d only get one external IP address, so you couldn’t set up the two routers in parallel like that with a bridged modem. But the nice thing about my ISP (not Verizon, though they are using Verizon’s infrastructure) is that they give up to 5 dynamic IP addresses. Hence the two routers connected to the bridged modem via a switch, allowing the routers to have separate IP addresses and avoiding issues with double NAT if I had one router behind the other.

The Buffalo router is high up in a closet and and upgraded with an external antenna for maximum wireless coverage at the cabin, as described in this previous post. The Netgear router serves mainly the webcams and the thermostat. So it sits in the crawl space to be safely kept away from renters, as well as to provide a cooler home for it during the summer. (No crawl space humidity issues in the Southern California mountains.) This is a “file photo” from when I had a Linksys router instead of a Netgear, but you get the idea.

Here is the new configuration, after I added the MBR95 to the system. (Changes are in italics.)

The MBR95 is in the crawl space, and so the Buffalo is set up as a wireless access point to share the MBR95′s internet connection (whether it be the DSL, mobile hotspot, or USB modem) with separate private and guest networks. While the DD-WRT operating system on the Buffalo router is very powerful, it was a real pain to set it up to work the way I wanted it to behind the MBR95. I was going to write up a whole section about how I did it, but I didn’t save any of the links. Suffice to say it was a real bear, though. (Note that most people won’t need to have another router behind the MBR95. I only did it that way because the range of the MBR95 is terrible down low in the crawl space. So the Buffalo router is high up in a closet with an upgraded antenna to give better coverage on my property.)

I could have also moved the thermostat and webcams over to the MBR95 (while keeping a separate wireless network for the webcams) and eliminated the Netgear. If I’m ever in a situation (such as changing DSL providers) where I can only get one external IP address, I’ll do that. But I already had the Netgear router and the multiple IP addresses, so I left it as-is.

I originally wasn’t planning on going through the trouble of wiring up the USB connection. But then I realized I had a blank wall plate on the wall above the portion of the crawl space containing the routers. (That blank wall plate was the former home of a three way switch for outdoor lights, which I had since removed to relocated it to a more “proper” location.)

So in went the USB keystone wall plate! A 10 foot USB A Male to A Male cable connects this to the USB port on the router. Now a USB 3G/4G modem could be plugged in here, rather than having to crawl under the house to do it.

Results

I didn’t have a 3G/4G USB modem to test the setup. So I used my Verizon iPhone 5 as a mobile hotspot (allowed by Verizon, but counts against my monthly data allowance), then entered the phone’s Wifi SSID and password into the “Wifi as WAN” configuration in the MBR95 router. A nice feature of the MBR95 is that you can assign priorities if more than one internet connection is present. In my case, the DSL is “always on” and so I’ve set that at the lowest priority. When the mobile hotspot is turned on, the MBR95 ignores the DSL connection and uses the mobile hotspot connection. Then when the mobile hotspot is turned off, the MBR95 falls back to the DSL connection.

One question I should have answered earlier: if I’m going through all this trouble to share a mobile hotspot connection through my cabin Wifi, then why don’t I just have my computer connected directly to the mobile hotspot instead? Well, I have a wireless printer connected to my cabin Wifi, so I would lose connectivity to it. And I wouldn’t be able to take advantage of the faster hotspot speeds when watching Netflix on my Blu-Ray player.

With the way things are looking regarding internet connectivity in town, my bet is that we will have 4G LTE wireless service in town long before the promised DSL upgrades go through. If I’m right, then the money for the MBR95 has been well spent. The major downside of 4G LTE compared to DSL is the data caps, but I am generally in town only on the weekends, so that is not a major issue for me.

Followup – May 2013

Well, I was right. 4G LTE came to town before the DSL upgrades!

Here’s the screen shot from the router configuration page before I turned on the wireless hotspot. The wireless hotspot has priority, but since it isn’t turned on, the wired ethernet connection has second priority and is active.

Here is the corresponding speed test. I’m not even getting the 1.0 Mbps that I’m paying for.

Then I turned on the wireless hotspot feature on my phone. I forgot to get a screen shot from the router afterwards. But just picture a green light next to the Wifi line and the state “connected” instead of “unplugged”. More importantly, here is the speed test, much better than the previous one!

On another note, the native wireless hotspot feature on the iPhone 5 didn’t reliably and consistently connect to the MBR95. Often it would say “connecting” and then fail to connect. That remained true even after following some advice to delete the BSSID in the wifi configuration. But using the jailbreak wifi tethering app MyWi instead worked flawlessly, connecting successfully every time!

And yet another note: here’s how to enable automatic restarts on the MBR95, as it’s not directly accessible from the router configuration pages.