Tag: technology

Media Server Upgrade

Two and half years ago, I performed a CPU and motherboard upgrade to my media server. You can read the account here.

Although the AMD Athlon 5350 APU was energy efficient, it proved to be under power for on demand video encoding when Plex wanted to transcode video for a player on a device that is not compatible with the playing video. For example, when an Apple TV (not 4K) wants to play 4K material from Plex on my media server, the server will have to transcode the 4K material to a compatible 1080p format. Unfortunately, this is very CPU intensive and if more than one person in the house hold is trying to do the same thing, which is not unheard of, this causes stuttered playback issues.

Given the choice between saving a few dollars a year versus usability, I choose usability. Therefore I started to research what I need for the upgrade. My goal is upgrade the system so that transcoding will not be an issue and I can also use the system for future video encoding of security camera footages. We can also use the system for background video encoding of family videos as well.

I continue to prefer the AMD brand, and decided on the following combo:

AMD Ryzen 5 2400G Processor with Radeon RX Vega 11 Graphics (YD2400C5FBBOX)
GIGABYTE B450 AORUS M Motherboard
Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 DRAM 2666MHz (CMK16GX4M2A2666C16)

The above were all purchased through Amazon and cost me a grand total of $473.24. The AMD CPU was the most expensive part costing almost $190.

Taking out the old motherboard and CPU combo and replacing them with the new parts went smoothly. The side SATA connectors bucked against one of my HDD chassis so I opted not to use them, and decided to connect all of my RAID SATA connectors to the SATA accessory card that I purchased and discussed in this post.

Last time I did an upgrade like this, the Ubuntu operating system had no problems and booted without any issues. Unfortunately, this time is very different. After the machine posted, Ubuntu booted into a blank, black screen. After some research, I learned to reboot the Ubuntu kernel with the nomodeset option. I learned to press and hold the shift key so that I can select the desired kernel that I wanted via the GRUB menu, and I learned to press the ‘e’ key in the GRUB menu to modify the boot options. Finally pressing F10 to boot with the custom changes (effective for only one time).

The above trick got me a login prompt. After I gained access to the command prompt, I noticed that the kernel did not recognize any ethernet devices. I now have a machine that is not connected to the network. After some more Internet research I found out that the current 4.15 Linux Kernel that I have is insufficient to run on the Raven Ridge architecture, the AMD code name for the Zen CPU and Vega GPU combination on a single chip. I have to upgrade to the 4.18 Linux Kernel.

However I cannot upgrade through the Internet, because the machine is not on the Internet. I have to download the Debian packages on a USB stick with another machine and manually install them. At this point, I learned that you cannot simply download a single package for this. I had to decide whether to go with the Linux Mainline Kernel packages or go with the Ubuntu HWE (Hardware Enablement) packages. After reading through Ubuntu’s LTS Enablement Stack article, I decided to HWE packages. I found the linux-generic-hwe packages and their prerequisites on pkgs.org. This took several iterations as I did not get all the dependent packages on the first try.

Once all the packages were installed, the machine booted without the need for the nomodeset option. However, the internet interface device was still not there. I had to run the command netpath, to find out that new motherboard’s ethernet device’s logical name was em1. To register the new logical name, I had to edit /etc/network/interfaces file.

Finally, the machine booted with an active ethernet connection. As a sanity check, I executed:

sudo apt-get install --install-recommends linux-generic-hwe-18.04

Ensuring that my new media server has all the required kernel packages. We are still not done. The IP address of the server has changed, because we now have a different MAC address, so the DHCP server provisioned a different IP. I tried to change the Unifi Controller to provision a static IP address to this new server but I was unsuccessful. I suspect that the new server is also running the Unifi Controller may have something to do with it. Since the IP address has changed, I needed to update the following configurations:

Firewall rules
Unifi Controller name space configurations
Samba configurations because we only allow for local machines to share

All of this took from 4:30pm to 11:00pm last night, 6.5 hours worth of hardware assembly, research with Google, trial and error, and finally success. I cannot imagine if Google and the super helpful community forums did not existed. Fingers crossed that the new media server will run smoothly.

More Home IT Upgrades

This past weekend I continued to upgrade our NAS server. Last weekend, I upgraded my raid array with an additional 8TB of mirrored storage. This yielded two old 4TB WD Blue HDD. I noticed that my case has a total of 9 internal storage bays. One was used by my 500GB SSD Boot Drive, and 6 were populated by HDD drives making up the current raid array. This means I have 2 more storage bays left. However these remaining bays were meant for 5.25″ storage devices like Optical Disc Players. For me to place my old 4TB WD Blue HDD into these bays, I will need a 5.25″ to 3.5″ bay converter. I had one, and purchased the other one on Amazon. I ended up buying the ORICO Aluminum 5.25 inch to 2.5 or 3.5 Inch Internal Hard Disk Drive Mounting Kit.

I also did not have enough SATA slots and purchased the IOCrest SI-PEX40071 SATA III 8 Port Controller Card. This card along with the 4 builtin SATA slots on the motherboard gave me enough SATA connections for my 9 drives.

Once I installed the old 4TB drives, I proceeded to create another md raid level 1 device and created a matching physical volume which I used to extend the current logical volume group. When the setup is completed, I ended up with a 20TB+ fully mirrored NAS server. I love LVM in combination of mdadm.

I figured while everything is fresh on my mind, I minus well proceed with the dreaded 16.04 to 18.04 Linux Ubuntu upgrade.

The upgrade was surprisingly very smooth. However the new version of OpenVPN caused some troubles. The new OpenVPN no longer works with my old PureVPN configuration files, because the certificate files that came from PureVPN used an outdated and deprecated hash algorithm. After getting the new configuration files from PureVPN, everything worked like a charm.

I also have to reinstall the Unifi Controller along with Let’s Encrypt certbot utility.

Super happy with the outcome and the upgrades should last another 2 to 3 years.

Two New 8TB Drive for Our NAS

Our NAS has run out of space again. I saw a deal that the Seagate IronWolf 8TB NAS Hard Drive was on sale at newegg for $309 CAD. I jumped at the chance and purchased two.

I am now following the same step as I outlined in this post. Replacing two old 4TB drives with these two new 8TB drives.

So far so good. Hopefully when all is said and done, my NAS will have a total of 18TB in a RAID 1 configuration of 6 hard drives in total. Two 4TB, two 6TB, and the two new 8TB.

I noticed that I could fit two more drives in my chassis and may decide to re-add the two old 4 TB back in, but first I’ll have to check if my power supply can handle the demand.

I really like this mdadm and LVM setup.

Update: After 2 mdadm syncs, each of which was around 8 hours, and a pvresize that also took another 5 hours. I had to convert the filesystem from 32 bits to 64 bits using these very helpful instructions. Only after I converted to 64 bits can I then expand the existing filesystem to more than 16TB. It was a learning and yet rewarding experience. Next step is to reuse the 2 old 4TB drives in the same chassis and add them to the logical volume.

Creating DVD Video Discs

Recently I created a video to commemorate my mom’s 80^th birthday. Of course once the video is created, there is always the challenge of distributing the video. For people who are always online and have a respectable bandwidth, they can simply view the video online, as I have made arrangements to post it here on my blog site. The video is embedded in The Grand Birthday post. What about others who are not online savvy or are still clung to their DVD players.

I usually use a program called Burn on my Mac to burn videos into DVD Video discs. However I find the process unsatisfying. I needed something that can be applied to mass processing. I also did not like the unprofessional DVD menu that Burn applies to the DVD disc. Also the program is quite old and I fear may not work for future versions of macOS.

I came across this Convert any Movie to DVD Video wiki link, and found some really useful information. After reading through their process, I found, practiced, and proven this trimmed down version on my Mac.

First I had to install several utilities through the brew packaging system on my Mac.

brew install ffmpeg dvdauthor cdrtools

I use the above utilities to perform the following steps:

Convert the source video (typically optimized for my Apple devices and my TV’s) to an NTSC DVD compatible format;
Author a DVD directory structure using the video;
Create an ISO from the DVD directory structure for archiving and burning purposes;
Burn the ISO to a physical DVD-R disc.

The first step is to convert the video:

ffmpeg -i original.mp4 -target ntsc-dvd -r 29.97 -s 720x480 -aspect 16:9 -b 8000k -g 12 -mbd rd -flags +aic -trellis 1 -cmp 2 -subcmp 2 video.mpg

I ended up using the above command which supposedly yields the most optimum quality in terms of viewing. The output video.mpg is DVD compatible. The above command assumes an aspect of 16:9, which is what most home videos are shot at today.

I then use the dvdauthor tool to create the DVD directory structure. Before I use the tool, I first have to create an XML file containing how I like the DVD to be configured. Below is a bare minimum XML file configuration that I used to simply create a DVD disc containing a single movie. The tool gives me the option in the future to add menus, chapters, etc.

    <dvdauthor format="ntsc">
        <vmgm />
        <titleset>
            <titles>
                <subpicture lang="en" />
                <audio lang="en" />
                <pgc>
                    <vob file="/Users/kanglu/Downloads/video.mpg" />
                </pgc>
            </titles>
        </titleset>
    </dvdauthor>

I then proceed to run the tool with the above XML file, which I named dvd.xml.

    dvdauthor -o dvd -x dvd.xml

This will result in a folder called dvd which will contain the contents of the DVD disc. Once I have the folder, I can then create the ISO file.

    mkisofs -dvd-video -udf -o dvd.iso dvd

The resulting dvd.iso file is a good archiving format in case I want to make more DVD discs in the future. At this point, I no longer need video.mpg, dvd.xml, and the dvd folder. The ISO file is all I need to create a DVD Video disc containing my video. After sticking in a blank DVD-R disc, I executed the following command.

    hdiutil burn dvd.iso

I repeated the above hdiutil command with several more blank discs to make a bunch of discs for distribution. The resulting DVD Video disc contains a single video without any confusing menu system; the way I like it — keep it simple and stupid.

Too bad not everybody has Plex or Kodi. Even a Raspberry Pi with OSMC installed would be wonderful. That will make future distribution of family videos a lot easier!

However, I am now happy to have a workflow that works for me. I hope you will find this helpful.

Linux LVM Super Simple to Expand

During the Boxing Day sales event of 2017, I purchased a couple of Seagate Barracuda ST4000DM004 (4TB) hard drives. The intention is to expand our main home network storage, which is a network accessible / attached storage (NAS) managed by our Linux server using mdadm and Logical Volume Manager (LVM).

However I procrastinated until this weekend and finally performed the upgrade. The task went smoothly without any hiccups. I have to give due credit to the following site: https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Growing. It really provided very detail information for me to follow. It was a great help.

One major concern I had was whether I can do this without any data loss, and a question of how much down time would this upgrade require.

I had a logical volume, named /dev/airvideovg2/airvideo, consisted of 100% usage of a volume group which was made up of three RAID-1 multiple devices (md). Since I ran out of physical drive bays, to perform the upgrade, I had to effectively replace 2 older drives which were 2TB in size with the newer 4TB drives. The old drives were Western Digital WDC WD20EZRX-00D8PB0 (2TB). I can use these old drives for other needs.

First I had to find the md containing the 2TB pair in RAID-1 (mirror) configuration. I did this with a combination of lsblk and mdadm commands. For example:

$ lsblk
NAME                       MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE  MOUNTPOINT
sdb                          8:0    0  1.8T  0 disk
└─sdb1                       8:1    0  1.8T  0 part
  └─md2                      9:3    0  1.8T  0 raid1
    └─airvideovg2-airvideo 252:0    0   10T  0 lvm   /mnt/airvideo

$ sudo mdadm --detail /dev/md2
/dev/md2:
        Version : 1.2
  Creation Time : Sat Nov 12 18:01:36 2016
     Raid Level : raid1
     Array Size : 1906885632 (1725.90 GiB 2000.65 GB)
  Used Dev Size : 1906885632 (1725.90 GiB 2000.65 GB)
   Raid Devices : 2
  Total Devices : 2
    Persistence : Superblock is persistent

  Intent Bitmap : Internal

    Update Time : Sun Mar 11 09:12:05 2018
          State : clean 
 Active Devices : 2
Working Devices : 2
 Failed Devices : 0
  Spare Devices : 0

           Name : avs:2  (local to host avs)
           UUID : 3d1afb64:878574e6:f9beb686:00eebdd5
         Events : 55191

    Number   Major   Minor   RaidDevice State
       2       8       81        0      active sync   /dev/sdf1
       3       8       17        1      active sync   /dev/sdb1

I found that I needed to replace /dev/md2 which consisted of two /dev/sdf1 and /dev/sdb1 partitions. These partitions belonged respectively to the old WD drives. I have 6 hard drives in the server chassis, so I needed to get the serial number of the drives to ensure that I was swapping the right one. I used the hdparm command to get serial number of /dev/sdb and /dev/sdf. For example:

$ sudo hdparm -i /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb:

 Model=WDC WD20EZRX-00D8PB0, FwRev=0001, SerialNo=WD-WCC4M4UDRZLD
 Config={ HardSect NotMFM HdSw>15uSec Fixed DTR>10Mbs RotSpdTol>.5% }
 RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=0
 BuffType=unknown, BuffSize=unknown, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=off
 CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=7814037168
 IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:120,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
 PIO modes:  pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4 
 DMA modes:  mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 
 UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 udma5 *udma6 
 AdvancedPM=no WriteCache=enabled
 Drive conforms to: unknown:  ATA/ATAPI-4,5,6,7

 * signifies the current active mode

Before I physically replace the drives, I must first remove them from the md device by doing the following.

sudo mdadm -f /dev/md2 /dev/sdb1
sudo mdadm -r /dev/md2 /dev/sdb1

After swapping out only one of the drives, and replaced it with a new one, I rebooted the machine. I first have to partitioned the new drive using the parted command.

sudo parted /dev/sdb

Once within parted, execute the following commands to create a single partition using the whole drive.

mklabel gpt
mkpart primary 2048s 100%

I learned that I can only start at sector 2048 to achieve optimal alignment. Once I created the /dev/sdb1 partition, I have to add it back into the RAID.

sudo mdadm --add /dev/md2 /dev/sdb1

As soon as the new partition with the new drive was added into the RAID, a drive resynchronization begins automatically. The resync took more than 3 hours. Once the resync is completed, I did the same thing with the remaining old drive in the RAID, and performed another resync. This time from the first new drive to the second new drive. After another 3+ hours, we can now grow the RAID device.

sudo mdadm --grow /dev/md2 --bitmap none
sudo mdadm --grow /dev/md2 --size max
sudo mdadm --wait /dev/md2
sudo mdadm --grow /dev/md2 --bitmap internal

The third command (–wait) took another 3+ hours to complete. After a full day of RAID resync, we now have the same /dev/md2 that is 4TB instead of 2TB in size. However the corresponding physical volume of LVM still needed to be resized. We did this with:

sudo pvresize /dev/md2

Once the physical volume is resized, we can then extend the logical volume to use up the remaining free space that we just added.

lvresize -l +100%FREE /dev/airvideovg2/airvideo

This took a few minutes but at least it was not 3+ hours.

Aside from the down time that I had to use to swap the hard drives, the logical volume was usable throughout the resynchronization and resizing process. This was impressive. However, now I have to take the volume offline by first umount the volume and changing it to inactive status.

sudo lvchange -an /dev/airvideovg2/airvideo

Note that I had stop the smbd and other services that was using the volume before I can unmount it.

The last step is to resize the file system of the logical volume, but before I can do that I was forced to perform a file system check.

e2fsck -f /dev/airvideovg2/airvideo
resize2fs -p /dev/airvideovg2/airvideo

I rebooted the machine to ensure all the new configurations held, and voila I upgraded my 8TB network attached storage to 10TB! Okay it was not super simple, but the upgrade process was pretty simple and painless. The down time was minimal. The LVM and mdadm guys did a really good job here.

Possible Future of the Connected Watch

On Tuesday of this week, Apple announced the Apple Watch Series 3 with the ability to connect to the LTE data network, allowing the watch to stay connected to the Internet without an accompanying iPhone. This greatly enhances its functionality and removes its original handicap and its requirement to always be tethered to the phone. You can now get notifications and listen to the plethora of songs on Apple Music while on the go without your phone. The future is here.

Ever since the Apple Watch was released in the spring of 2015, it has been thought of as a companion device to the phone. However, I always thought it should be the other way around. The phone and tablet should be the companion devices to the watch!

The watch should be the only device that has the mobile networking radios and should operate in an always on manner, while sharing a personal hotspot via its WiFi radios. The phone and tablets can then function as displays with WiFi connectivity to your watch. This will also simplify your cellular data plans. I just see this as a more convenient setup, and hopefully a cheaper way to go with your mobile carrier.

As memory capacity increases with the watch, personal identity, application data, and other confidential information can be stored on the watch akin to the secure enclave on the iPhone today. This way display centric devices slaved to the watch can restore your last working state from the watch. Imagine a world where display slates are near commodity devices sans your personal information. You can be working with a shared slate in the office. All the while, your data is being centralized and stored securely on the watch. When you travel offsite at the airport or in the hotel, you pickup another shared slate, and you continue to work where you left off.

It is also more difficult to lose your watch than your phone. When you do misplace your phone and cannot find it, then just pickup another, because your personal data is stored on your watch.

Power consumption is probably going to be a major challenge for the watch in this scenario. But if the power challenge can be solved, then imagine having only WiFi display slates of any size of your choosing, and your watch has the only mobile data radio you will need. Instead of the phone being your most personalized information device, it will be your watch. I hope Apple has this vision in mind. Do you believe this to be a better future?

Three Cheers for Software RAID

Last year, I built a NAS machine as referenced by my previous post here. This month, my media drive composed of an LVM logical volume of almost 5TB is almost filled.

This drive contains all purchased media and our home videos for Plex, as well as our time machine backups. To alleviate the storage shortage, I purchased two 4TB Western Digital WD40EFRX hard drives. This weekend I took the plunge and installed the two new drives into my NAS computer. In the spirit of the moment, without performing a backup, I proceeded to:

Use parted to partition the drives;
Use mdadm to create a RAID 1 device of the two drives;
Created a new LVM physical volume with the new RAID device;
Added the volume to the existing volume group;
Extend the logical volume to newly added 4TB;
and finally, Extend the ext4 file system to include the 4TB

In the end, I now have a near 9TB network drive that should last me for quite sometime.

In researching how to extend the logical volume, I also found out how I can upgrade my drives in my existing physical volumes to higher capacity drives without having to recopy everything to another drive first. This should come in handy in the future, because my NAS computer box has no more drive bays.

I know I probably should have taken a backup before this, but everything worked and I couldn’t be happier. Hurray, hurray, and hurray for software RAID.

Thank you Gigabyte and Western Digital

This morning I upgraded my media server. The server was running on a seven years old motherboard, Gigabyte GA-M61PME-S2P, and an AMD Athlon II X2 245 processor. The hard drive is the oldest, a Western Digital WDC WD800JB-00JJ 80GB hard drive that was released back in 2007. This makes the drive 9 years old! At the time of this update, all systems were nominal and operating without issues. Running Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS (Xenial Xerus), next to my iMac, it was the lowest maintenance box I’ve ever put together.

The real reason for the upgrade is for me to reduce the power footprint of a box that is effectively running 7×24. Even when it was idling, the old components where clocking in at 100+ W of power usage.

I decided to replace the motherboard and cpu with an ASRock AM1H-ITX and a system on a chip AMD Athlon 5350 APU. I was able to get the system down to 55W. I also replaced the old WD800JB with a Seagate BarraCuda 7200.10 ST3500630AS 500GB hard drive, along with the existing 4 WD Green EZRX hard drives. A total of 5 traditional mechanical hard drives. Along with new Kingston HyperX Fury Black 8GB memory, this entire upgrade cost less than $220 CAD with taxes included.

I want to shoutout to Clonezilla. What an amazing job they did in creating a super simple piece of software to clone drives and partitions. Of course Linux is just so wonderful to work with. After changing the CPU and Motherboard, the original Ubuntu installation boot up and run without any major issues. The only wrinkle I had was the ethernet port that came with the new motherboard had a new logical name (enp3s0 vs eth0). Luckily, I know how to fix that. My LVM volume assembled without a hitch. Everything is now running fine with the new hardware and configuration.

My next step in the coming months is to shop for a 500GB SSD. Perhaps I can find one during Cyber Monday or Black Friday sales. This should further reduce my power footprint and also increase my performance.

AI & Our Future Generations

When I came into the workforce in the early 90’s, any career connected to the computer was hot. The Internet was at its infancy. Any two or more (often just two) computers connected was called a network, which was a huge deal. Believe it or not email was the killer app. The World Wide Web was not invented yet, and when it came into the scene, finding a photo on a web page was a big deal.

My young and arrogant mind was extremely happy with myself, since I was all ready to take on the world with an engineering degree specializing in computers. It was a fearless time. We called the shots, not the employers. Our salaries increase astronomically, often with accompanying perks. We could do no wrong, because we were in demand.

I remember reading an article about our company’s solution. The solution was installed at a food and beverage manufacturer, who recently announced a significant layoff caused by the application of our software. Our customer was happy, because we saved them a tremendous amount of costs. I thought that anyone who picked a career in a job involving repetitive tasks will be in trouble. Cashiers, banking tellers, and warehouse pickers are a few that comes to mind.

We were all too eager to implement algorithms and solutions to turn repeatable tasks into optimal applications running on computers. We as a profession were clear and present danger to people’s livelihood who were dependent on honest jobs that are replaceable by robotics, advance supply chains, automated warehouses, or just simply better data visibility and communication. On reflection, I was / am part of a group that is undermining the economic value of a human being in a capitalist economy. People that are displaced are forced to upgrade and migrate their skills to other areas that are still in demand.

With artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning coming into the consumer and business market in a big way, I am led to believe that the next set of jobs, jobs requiring judgement and decision making are now potentially replaceable by AI technology. Even software developer jobs may be under threat, when you have technologies like Viv that fulfills a human vocal request by manufacturing a custom program. I fear that replacement of traditional professions like lawyers and doctors are not too far away when IBM Watson can now perform medical diagnosis. How will these displaced professionals upgrade their skills?

In today’s news, one can frequently find mentions of self driving cars. How they are on the cusp of mass market availability and adoption. Companies like Tesla, Apple, and Uber are all either actively implementing production quality solutions or developing them. Imagine all the UPS, Fedex, freight truck and taxi drivers that will be displaced. The disruption does not stop there. If the technology is as successful as advocates tout it to be, then accident rates will drop. The transition from human to driverless solutions can translate to a large decline in automotive body shop business, and potential insurance revenue impact.

You can make arguments that displaced drivers will find other types of work, but I fear that under the current, exponential improvement of AI technology, the total some of human demand in the economy will continue to diminish, because AI will be so good that you will be hard pressed to find a job that AI cannot perform. So whenever you have an over supply of humans and a dwindling demand of their usability, you get erosion of the economic value of human beings.

So what’s wrong with this picture? Is it not good that AI capable machines pamper us and do all the hard work and thinking?

Assuming that we continue to function in a market based society, my immediate concern is, how does the next generation make their income when their economic value is eroded to the point where there may not be any jobs left. Well, I suppose there are jobs that involve creativity and innovation, such as artists, and musicians. From another hopeful perspective, this may resolve itself since providers, even if they are machine run, must find matching buyers with enough spending power to buy their products and services.

My second concern is, as a species, how do we continue to excel in our own knowledge and achievements, when AI can solve most of our problems. You can probably find some evidence of this today, with the usage of Google and other specialized search engines. I am not sure that the current education system are raising deep thinkers complemented by these new AI based tools, or more academically hampered ones because of the same tools.

Lastly, there is the Matrix or Terminator scenario, but the difference is that it may not be a violent take over. It could be a slow transition, as we welcome these technologies as new found creature comforts. A gradual displacement of our economic worth and values, until we are all powerless with our machine overlords. Or if you believe in Ray Kurzweil’s singularity, we can be in a symbiotic, and harmonious relationship with the AI machines.

Please tell me that my fear for our future generations are unfounded.

Google Adopts Apple Combine Hardware and Software Philosophy

Google held an event earlier today and introduced a suite of new hardware:

A phone called Pixel that works with Daydream their new VR headset;
Google WiFi router;
And an Amazon Echo like device called Google Home, that will work seamlessly with existing Chromecast devices

Google Assistant is the culmination of Google’s software strength in the area of search and machine learning. The event is peppered with a plethora of examples on how your daily life will be improved and facilitated by the Google Assistant through the use of Google’s new hardware. The hardware and software combination makes for a compelling and attractive offering to join the Google ecosystem.

I think Google is finally seeing the light of Apple’s philosophy of building solutions with full control of both hardware and software design. Apple still has two other areas where Google is still lacking:

A retail presence with a second to none personable support experience;
And its devotion and practice in personal privacy

It will be interesting to see if a future Google will make ways to close the remaining gaps. Of course, I’m also worried about how Google will serve you ads through these devices once they’ve trapped you into their ecosystem.