- Published:
- January 12, 2012 – 11:18 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
After I ditched cable TV, I used both Snapstream’s BeyondTV and SageTV to sate my and my family’s television needs. After almost 2 years we ended up turning cable back on. Win one for the cable company!
But that did not end my search for the perfect home television system. Our cable box, well, works; but the hard drive is limited and you have to pay 15.99/mo for it.
For the full video demo… continue to the full post!
Categories: Gaming,Other Technology,Software,Television
Tagged: demo, htpc, Windows Media Center, Windows Media Center Extender, xbox, xbox 360
- Published:
- September 24, 2011 – 8:20 am
- Author:
- By Dave
First, a bit of history. Cable TV started in the 1970s when TV consumers just outside the range of commercial Over The Air (OTA) broadcasts banded together to create community “Cable” TV systems. An antenna was posted at a high spot on a mountain and pulled in signals that were out of range for households, then retransmitted those signals to subscribers. At the time, there was a fight by the commercial television stations to protect their content, but eventually the cable systems won out, and eventually evolved to be the mega-cable companies you see today. In fact, today cable companies and content companies are one-in-the-same. Fast forward to today. Wouldn’t it be great if there was an internet television station that would take OTA broadcast signals and retransmit them over the internet to households that couldn’t receive that signal? Well, there is and its name is ivi.tv. The user experience….
Categories: Other Technology,Television
Tagged: ivi.tv, live streaming television, live tv, streaming video
- Published:
- September 20, 2011 – 10:48 am
- Author:
- By Dave
Recently picked up a “Phillytablet” from the local newspaper publishing group, Philly Media Network (PMN), publishers of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily News, and a few other smaller news publications.
Read on to view my review of the actual hardware (The Arnova/Archos 10 G2 Tablet) and of the Philly Media Network applications that you are subscribed to.
Categories: Hardware,Reviews,Social Media
- Published:
- September 6, 2011 – 9:59 am
- Author:
- By Dave
Doing some integration work with WHMCS, I found the need to export some of the announcements into Wordpress. Since there isn’t any native implementation of this, I found the best way is to export it directly from the database. The PHP code to do this is fairly easy…
Categories: Code Samples,PHP
Tagged: PHP, sample code, templates, whmcs, wordpress
- Published:
- August 30, 2011 – 9:13 am
- Author:
- By Dave
The dirty little secret about SSL certificates is that:
Anyone can become a certificate authority.
The tools to become a certificate authority, and therefore to publish your own SSL certificates, is included in a wide variety of systems – chances are if you have an Ubuntu or CentOS install you already have the capability of becoming an SSL certificate authority via OpenSSL.
Categories: Security
Tagged: certificate-authority, SSL
- Published:
- August 23, 2011 – 10:03 am
- Author:
- By Dave
Fellow tech friends, I have a find for you. If you have a job, or hobby, or whatever where you find yourself meddling with a bunch of .iso files, whether to boot off of them or just to access the data on them, then I have the device for you. It all started after I backed the Kickstarter project for the isostick. Having never heard of a device before that would accept .iso images on a filesystem and then present them to the computer as a disc drive, I thought this was (and is) a pretty cool idea. When browsing through the comments, I saw folks mentioning that this is just like the Zalman ZM-VE200 external hard drive enclosure. So of course I decided to do some research on this newly discovered gadget. Overview The Zalman ZM-VE200 at its core is an external sata hard drive enclosure. These have been….
Categories: Hardware,Reviews,System Administration
Tagged: external-drives, hardware, sysadmin
- Published:
- May 15, 2011 – 8:16 am
- Author:
- By Dave
At home I have an (admittedly small) ZFS array set up to experiment with this neat newish raid technology. I think it has been around long enough that it can be used in production, but I’m still getting used to the little bugs/features, and here is one that I just found.
After figuring out that I had 2 out of 3 of my 1TB Seagate Barracuda hard drives fail, I had to give the array up for a loss and test out my backup strategy. Fortunately it worked and there was no data loss. After receiving the replacement drives in from RMA, I rebuilt the ZFS array (using raidz again) and went along my merry way. After 6 months or so, I started getting some funky results from my other drive. Thinking it might have some issue as with the others, I removed the drive and ran Seatools on it (by the way, Seatools doesn’t offer a 64-bit Windows version – what year is this?).
The drive didn’t show any signs of failure, so I decided to wipe it and add it back into the array to see what happens. That, of course, is easier said than done.
Categories: Linux,Shell,System Administration
Tagged: arrays, RAID, zfs
