Fettled any computer stuff today?

[tiermat]

The soundbase will play from a DNLA box, in fact it sees the Popcorn Hour box straight away. However being able to use GC would have been nice but it forces you to use content from Playstore. I have ~100g of MP3s and >1Tb of videos which I can play other ways (reminds me I really must re-enable Twonky on the filestore)

However I was more interested in streaming from Android devices.

BTW we are using a Sony HT-XT3 as the soundbase

You can upload all of your own music to Google Play. Then you can play it through the Android app, and cast to Chromecast etc.
It allows up to 50,000 tracks for free. Though it might take a while to upload it all...

That I didn't know!

However I would have to upload them 3 times over*. Makes just using a DVLA box seem like a good idea!

*once each for me, Mrs T and TLD!

[Phil W]

Android 4 upwards has DNLA baked in. So you could just broadcast direct from phone if they are not too old or have been updated in last couple of years.

[Afasoas]

Reinstalled and re-configured the UPS gubbins on the home server. Data should be safe in the event of a power cut.

And for double bonus points, I've finished tidying up the ZFS backup scripts so snapshots over 60 days old on the backup server are removed and the storage pools scrubbed on a monthly basis.

I've written everything down, which I'll be publishing as a full guide in the next few days.

All I need to do now is image the home server and set-up some sort of regular file-based snapshot, both of which should be fairly trivial, especially as for the latter part I can cull scripts I've written for backing up VPS boxen.

And then I can continue with other projects, including finishing the website for a fellow patron of yACF. I'm slightly embarassed it's taken so long, but then life does keep getting in the way!

[rr]

The soundbase will play from a DNLA box, in fact it sees the Popcorn Hour box straight away. However being able to use GC would have been nice but it forces you to use content from Playstore. I have ~100g of MP3s and >1Tb of videos which I can play other ways (reminds me I really must re-enable Twonky on the filestore)

However I was more interested in streaming from Android devices.

BTW we are using a Sony HT-XT3 as the soundbase

You can upload all of your own music to Google Play. Then you can play it through the Android app, and cast to Chromecast etc.
It allows up to 50,000 tracks for free. Though it might take a while to upload it all...

That I didn't know!

However I would have to upload them 3 times over*. Makes just using a DVLA box seem like a good idea!

*once each for me, Mrs T and TLD!

As I  understand it, it doesn't do that. When syncing your music it compares what you've got against its library of tracks. If it already has it it doesn't upload it, but lets you access the one it already has.
So for three identical collections each track will either be uploaded once or not at all.

[tiermat]

The soundbase will play from a DNLA box, in fact it sees the Popcorn Hour box straight away. However being able to use GC would have been nice but it forces you to use content from Playstore. I have ~100g of MP3s and >1Tb of videos which I can play other ways (reminds me I really must re-enable Twonky on the filestore)

However I was more interested in streaming from Android devices.

BTW we are using a Sony HT-XT3 as the soundbase

You can upload all of your own music to Google Play. Then you can play it through the Android app, and cast to Chromecast etc.
It allows up to 50,000 tracks for free. Though it might take a while to upload it all...

That I didn't know!

However I would have to upload them 3 times over*. Makes just using a DVLA box seem like a good idea!

*once each for me, Mrs T and TLD!

As I  understand it, it doesn't do that. When syncing your music it compares what you've got against its library of tracks. If it already has it it doesn't upload it, but lets you access the one it already has.
So for three identical collections each track will either be uploaded once or not at all.

Good idea, but...

Each person's devices (phone, tablet etc) are using a different Google account...

[rr]

The soundbase will play from a DNLA box, in fact it sees the Popcorn Hour box straight away. However being able to use GC would have been nice but it forces you to use content from Playstore. I have ~100g of MP3s and >1Tb of videos which I can play other ways (reminds me I really must re-enable Twonky on the filestore)

However I was more interested in streaming from Android devices.

BTW we are using a Sony HT-XT3 as the soundbase

You can upload all of your own music to Google Play. Then you can play it through the Android app, and cast to Chromecast etc.
It allows up to 50,000 tracks for free. Though it might take a while to upload it all...

That I didn't know!

However I would have to upload them 3 times over*. Makes just using a DVLA box seem like a good idea!

*once each for me, Mrs T and TLD!

As I  understand it, it doesn't do that. When syncing your music it compares what you've got against its library of tracks. If it already has it it doesn't upload it, but lets you access the one it already has.
So for three identical collections each track will either be uploaded once or not at all.

Good idea, but...

Each person's devices (phone, tablet etc) are using a different Google account...

The matching is across their whole database, so if you bought the track as a download they will already have it. If you ripped it they will have that version after the first sync and not do it again.

[Mr Larrington]

Made Calibre talk to Lt. Col. Larrington (retd.)'s Kindle Fire.  Did not make Lt. Col. Larrington (retd.)'s laptop talk to his crappy no-name Android tablet even after installing drivers, multiple reboots and bad language.  It utterly fails to show up as any kind of accessible mass storage in Windows

[Vince]

Not sure if it is a successful fettle yet, but having been confronted with an 'Ink System Failure' message on the printer and the usual rattling and shaking of ink cartridges has been of no benefit, I have taken out the print head and run it under a hot tap for five minutes. The water was a very pretty colour as it ran down the plug hole.
Waiting for it to dry out before putting it all back together.

[Mr Larrington]

Just because dBpoweramp claims those files are munted when downsampling them to 160 kbps doesn't mean they actually are munted.  That's a gigabyte of space reclaimed on the iPod

[woollypigs]

Installed tt-rss on the Pi2 and it is running just fine. Now news overload

[Pingu]

Just found out that the HTML/CSS/Javascript I've been frobbing with on the lappy works OK on a tablet 

[Afasoas]

Website work. 12 hours straight yesterday.
Just a couple of finishing touches and it will be ready for the reveal.

On a different note, automated backups from the home server to frankenserver are now working. 

And the replacement hardware for frankenserver is here. Well almost. I ordered the wrong memory - registered ECC DIMM instead of unregistered 

[Pickled Onion]

Raspberry pi.

For some reason I had assumed red led = bad, green led = good. Actually, if the red light goes out it's underpowered. That would explain why it took a week to copy a TB over ssh/rcp. I was powering the pi and the portable disc off the same USB hub. Oops. It would also explain why the disk kept needing to be fsck'd. Separate power supplies, now all is good.

[Pickled Onion]

Fixed BBC iPlayer on the Squeezbox again  Wondering how long before it stops working permanently.

Got it working for listen live, and now for some listen-again. Can't get R4 listen-again working, is it working for you?

[woollypigs]

[...] building a case for it in LEGO.

Pictures or it didn't happen

The first "server" rack was a bit over the top and if you looked at it LEGO fell off. So therefore this more solid "server" and with an Admin too. Cool place to work I'll say, as the bikes can be parked in the in office. Sadly Slaske (as the Admin is called), is getting a bit long in the teeth - got him back in middle 70's my first LEGO man - as he fried my 1TB USB disk. We mounted it, played music from it on this laptop, rsynced to it just fine. But upon reboot the disk just clicks - WD forums tells me, that it is dead Jim. Sadly 26000 tunes, went with it ...

[Pingu]

Fixed BBC iPlayer on the Squeezbox again  Wondering how long before it stops working permanently.

Got it working for listen live, and now for some listen-again. Can't get R4 listen-again working, is it working for you?

Seems to be.

ETA: I added a plugin called BBC Iplayer Extras and downloaded a file called BBCXMLParser.pm. I got the info from a Squeezebox forum. The thread from this post on refers.

[Woofage]

I'm upgrading my media server/tv recording box. It died recently due to a dead mobo . I have:

- new mini-ITX mobo with (Intel Celery 3150)
- 4GB RAM
- a currently unused 1TB drive (former NAS drive, since upgraded)
which will go in the existing case. I'm awaiting delivery of a new TV tuner (HD, natch)

Box up and running in fanless quietness . XUbuntu* installed with TVHeadend running off a PCTV Systems 292e USB dongle. Next job is to transfer music over and think about photo sharing (photos reside on NAS).

* I started off with Mint 17.2/XFCE but miniDLNA wasn't in the repos for some reason. More seriously, it also had problems booting so I ditched it in favour of XUbuntu.

[Plug1n]

Replaced the audio jack and usb port assembly in my 2012 Nexus 7 tablet.  Not really a difficult job but the audio jack had stopped working.  A tablet makes a good media player for turbo training out in the shed.

Actually, this was the 2nd go.  Attempt #1 failed as the £7 replacement part from a far Eastern Amazon seller had the micro usb socket about 1mm too low on its mounting board - couldn't connect a cable to charge the tablet when the case was back in place

Attempt #2 with a £10.50 part from a UK Ebay seller was entirely successful.

I am bit sad that Google is not releasing Marshmallow for the first gen Nexus 7, but Cyanogenmod will probably do the trick.

[Afasoas]

Set-up DHCP and DNS on the backup server - thus managed to take the home server down without anyone noticing. At some point I might mangle those services into some sort of pseudo high availability affair, so that they start-up automatically if there's no response from a dns request/dhcp ping.

Then imaged the hard disk in the home server, so I'm prepared for a quick recovery should it suffer another boot drive failure.

Which is good news, because the only big fettling I've got left is some sort of server monitoring complete with graphs.

[Pickled Onion]

Fixed BBC iPlayer on the Squeezbox again  Wondering how long before it stops working permanently.

Got it working for listen live, and now for some listen-again. Can't get R4 listen-again working, is it working for you?

Seems to be.

ETA: I added a plugin called BBC Iplayer Extras and downloaded a file called BBCXMLParser.pm. I got the info from a Squeezebox forum. The thread from this post on refers.

Fantastic, thanks for the ETA! All working now 

[Pickled Onion]

I see Slaske chooses to wear a helmet when driving Raspberry Pis - given his reputation for crashing disks, that's probably a wise move.

[woollypigs]

Spot on

[Pingu]

Fixed BBC iPlayer on the Squeezbox again  Wondering how long before it stops working permanently.

Got it working for listen live, and now for some listen-again. Can't get R4 listen-again working, is it working for you?

Seems to be.

ETA: I added a plugin called BBC Iplayer Extras and downloaded a file called BBCXMLParser.pm. I got the info from a Squeezebox forum. The thread from this post on refers.

Fantastic, thanks for the ETA! All working now 

 

[Pingu]

Backing up FLACs after an apparent HD failure 

[Tim Hall]

Finally got a DAC working on my Raspberry Pi.  The first didn't fit, as I was unaware of the difference between a Pi B and Pi B+.  Then the first install of the one that did fit didn't work.  I had trouble enabling modules and all the command line stuff in OpenElec.  Ditched OpenElec in favour of OSMC and shazam!, noise comes out of where it should oughter.  This means I can play my ripped CDs, using my phone as a remote, through my Big Amp and not have to turn the telly on.

Downside is while getting an OSMC image I seem to have borked this computer by enabling the wrong repo, so trying to update it ends with an angry "No Entry" sign.  Sigh.