0Samsung SmartThings — A smart home hub

Published by & filed under SmartHome & IoT.

I’ve recently inves­ted in a SmartTh­ings Hub for my home to use for secur­ity and safety as well as for gen­er­al smart home func­tions. Over the com­ing months I will be writ­ing a series of art­icles with some of the tech­nic­al hurdles I cross along the way.
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0Windows Media Center eHome LogoWindows Media Center on Windows 10

Published by & filed under Windows Media Center. Last updated .

With the launch of Win­dows 10 Microsoft has offi­cially killed off Win­dows Media Cen­ter. How­ever, Win­dows Media Cen­ter was found in the early builds of Win­dows 10 and noth­ing fun­da­ment­al to Win­dows 10 is incom­pat­ible with Media Cen­ter. This begs the ques­tion: Can Media Cen­ter be added in to Win­dows 10? The answer: yes!
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0Backing up or copying the winamp media library database

Published by & filed under Misc Software.

I use Win­amp on mul­tiple PCs — even though it is old I really like the inter­face, the media lib­rary sys­tem, and the milk­drop 2 visu­al­isa­tions. The easi­est way to main­tain these vari­ous install­a­tions is to copy the data­base between the machines. This is actu­ally sur­pris­ingly easy to accom­plish
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0DVB LogicFixed: DVBLink MCE Client first tune fail

Published by & filed under Windows Media Center. Last updated .

One of my many HTPC cli­ents has had a strange prob­lem — the first time it is tuned into a chan­nel it fails with the com­mon (and mean­ing­less) Play Ready error. Chan­ging chan­nel once always seems to bring it back to life how­ever. After much dig­ging around I finally found the very straight­for­ward solu­tion
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0Enable access to the c$ share on Windows 7 and newer

Published by & filed under Windows.

I have a range of HTPCs run­ning win­dows around the house, which I largely admin­is­ter via remote desktop. Occa­sion­ally it is use­ful to access the root of the C drive remotely. Win­dows has always catered for this by cre­at­ing some default admin­is­trat­ive shares, which are hid­den. The C drive is accessed via \\remote-pc\c$ for example. In win­dows 7 I found I wasn’t able to access these shares by default as they have been restric­ted (under­stand­ably). I needed a way to make them access­ible again.
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1Fixed: Media Center PC wakes in wrong resolution

Published by & filed under Windows.

Since I upgraded my HTPC to an AMD A5400 series (from the old E350) I have had a prob­lem where on wake from sleep the res­ol­u­tion would be set wrong (1024×768 I think) instead of the full 1920×1080 that the TV sup­ports. Exit­ing media cen­ter would trig­ger a res­ol­u­tion cor­rec­tion and then media cen­ter could be reloaded without issue. This was not sat­is­fact­ory as a solu­tion.
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0Inside HDD LogoCloning a system disk

Published by & filed under Storage. Last updated .

The next job on my fest­ive tech­nic­al sup­port rounds was to upgrade my old man’s laptop HDD to a new SSD. In the past such upgrades have usu­ally involved oth­er com­pon­ents and neces­sit­ated a fresh install of win­dows, but with this upgrade being just one com­pon­ent, to a Win­dows 7 PC, I decided time was ripe for a fresh invest­ig­a­tion of the pos­sib­il­ity of clon­ing the old drive onto the new
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0DVB LogicFixed: DVBLink media center playready message

Published by & filed under Windows Media Center. Last updated .

I’ve been using DVBLink to share TV around my home for sev­er­al years. Of all the issues with it, the most dreaded is the “Play Ready” error on Win­dows Media Cen­ter cli­ents. The prob­lem is this error mes­sage is mean­ing­less — it is gen­er­ated by Media Cen­ter, and just means it can’t get a sig­nal from the tuner. The fail­ure could be any­where behind the scenes. Recently my 2 main cli­ents star­ted throw­ing this error com­pletely out of the blue.
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