Big Dave’s Blog

I like to think that I am pretty green. I have an efficient house, no more SUV, not a ton of garbage, etc. Recently, however, I began to wonder if it is possible to be green if you are a techie and/or into gadgets. Gadget lovers and techies have tons of electronic stuff around the house, but most people don’t realize how much power is going down the drain. How many little transformers do you have plugged in around the house? TVs? Cable Boxes? DVD Players? Receivers? Amplifiers? Computers? Typically, those little transformers consume 1-5 watts even if the device is not on or even connected. Then you add the DVD players, clock radios, TVs, etc. and power usage starts to add up. Remember, anything with standby or an instant-on feature is using power just sitting there. Reports are that this power accounts for 5-15% of all power use.

What did me in, however, was thinking the other day while mowing the lawn. I know. Why am I thinking while I’m mowing the lawn? I just do. Anyway, back in my younger days, I went to a LOT of concerts. As a result, I pay attention to my ears and wear earplugs when I mow. Since I bought an iPhone with new earphones that are basically earplugs, I listen to music while I mow. Often, I use the fantastic Pandora application, and it’s this that got me in trouble. Ever thought about how much infrastructure is required to listen to streaming music? It’s a lot. Let’s start at the Pandora data center and work our way to my yard.

• Pandora Data Center
  • I can only guess at the architecture of Pandora, but let’s guess that there is at least 3 servers (web, app, and db). I suspect there are a lot more both for load and redundancy.
  • 3 servers
  • 1 switch
  • 1 router
  • 1 firewall
  • Again, I highly doubt there are singles of anything in the data center. Otherwise, the entire system would go down with one server failure.
• Pandora Hosting Provider
  • It all depends on where Pandora’s machines are hosted, but there could be dozens of machines managing the data center. Plus, there will be various networking equipment.
  • 5 desktops
  • 2 large switches
  • 2 large routers
  • 2 firewalls (for hosting internal network)
• Backbone
  • A quick run of traceroute shows 12 hops between my house and Pandora’s date center.  That’s at least one router per hop.  The first and the last are me and Pandora’s data center.
  • 10 routers
  • Various management servers, etc.
  • 10 servers
  • 20 desktops
• Pandora’s Offices
  • Again, I don’t know how large Pandora is, but figure 10 people plus various testing servers.
  • 10 desktops
  • 5 test servers
  • 1 router
  • 1 switch
  • 1 firewall
• My house
  • My house is fully wired, so I probably have more than most.
  • 1 firewall
  • 1 router
  • 1 switch
  • 1 cable modem
  • 1 music server
  • various desktops

That’s a whole lot of hardware, and I’m not even mentioning all of it. Now, I know that most of this hardware is shared, but if there weren’t a lot of customers at least some of this hardware would not be required.

My point is to be careful when you call yourself green and you have a lot of gadgets. You many be personally green, but your habits may bring along a lot of extra hardware to feed your gadgets. Your actual power usage is a lot more than what shows up on your electric bill.

The other day I reached in my pocket for my phone, and it was hot. It had gone from a full charge to dead battery in 2 hours. I wrote it off as an app gone nuts. When it happened again a couple days later, I started to investigate.

After a lot of experiments, I think I tracked it down to Google Reader. I use Reader a lot, and I often leave it running in Safari Mobile. I’m thinking javascript went crazy as I’ve seen on the desktop once in a while. This is surprising since I thought Safari fully paused when not active, but every time this happened I had completed a long reader session and left it running.

Bottom line is to be careful leaving any javascript-heavy pages loaded in Safari all the time. Be especially careful of those that automatically phone home.

I’ll keep an eye open, but so far my battery is much happier when I don’t leave Reader running.

Recently, I began taking the train into Boston. The train ride is about 50 minutes, so I have a decent amount of time to read, listen to music or podcasts. Sometimes, however, I wouldn’t mind watching one of my many purchased DVDs on the way.  Thankfully, it’s pretty easy to make this happen.

Note, I am only transfering DVDs that I own. I can’t comment on the details of copyright law, but since I am watching a DVD that I paid for and own, and I don’t leave it around once I watch it, I figure I’m in fair use territory. I’m no lawyer, however, so ymmv.

I’m on a Mac, so this process is based on that. The utility I use, Handbrake, has a Windows version, but I never used it.

1. Get yourself a copy of Handbrake. Handbrake is a great utility for converting video formats.

2. Insert your DVD into your machine. The DVD Player will fire up, but exit it as soon as it comes up. You won’t use it for this process.

3. Run Handbrake. Click Source and select your DVD volume.

4. Handbrake will think for a while while it figures out some information on your DVD. In the presets, select iPhone / iPod Touch. For some reason, Handbrake thinks the iPhone’s screen size is 480×368, but it actually is 480×320. To fix this, click Picture Settings… and fix the width/height to make sure both numbers are equal or less than the actual screen size.

5. Click Start and wait a while. It takes about 40 minutes per 50 minutes of DVD to convert on my MBP. Both cores will be pegged at 100% during the process.

6. When done, you will have an MP4 file on your Desktop unless you changed the destination before starting the transformation process.

7. Add the MP4 file to your iTunes library (iTunes -> File -> Add to Library…).

8. Sync with your iPhone/iPod, and you’re done.

Happy viewing!