0 Setting up an XBee ZigBee repeater

Published 30^th April 2020 by Jon Scaife & filed under SmartHome & IoT. Last updated 3^rd May 2020.

As part of the gradual expansion of my smarthome (might as well do something during lockdown right?) I decided to set up an XBee to improve the reach of my SmartThings hub. Good information for total beginners is a bit of a mission to find so I thought I’d put together a basic summary to start with.
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2 Comparing madvr GPU performance

Published 14^th April 2020 by Jon Scaife & filed under Media PC Hardware. Last updated 7^th July 2020.

My current HTPC has an nVidia GeForce GTX 1050Ti 4Gb with which I am able to upscale all content to 1080p with fairly high quality settings, and am also (just) able to playback 8k 60fps content downscaled to 1080p. However, I have long wondered what the benefits of a more powerful card might be on the ability to use higher settings. Sadly, no-one seems to provide any benchmarks for madvr, so how can cards be compared?
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0 Use encrypted SNI in firefox and sync the setting

Published 26^th February 2020 by Jon Scaife & filed under Web Technologies.

I’m always looking to keep my internet access as secure as possible. One thing that recent came to light is encrypted SNI. If you don’t know what this is google is your friend. If you want to make use of it in firefox you have to turn it on as it is off by default
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0 script to create and name network shares

Published 13^th February 2020 by Jon Scaife & filed under Windows.

When updating or replacing a home PC I use Windows Deployment Services (WDS) to reinstall Windows. It means I only have to maintain a single up-to-date source for all the little free apps I use (Firefox, 7zip, Kodi, etc) and makes a new setup much more painless. One of the few bugs that has irritated me for ages is the network drive map that I create has always had to be renamed manually.
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0 Windows shares not connected after wake fixed

Published 12^th February 2020 by Jon Scaife & filed under Windows.

I’ve had a very long standing problem where mapped drives on Windows PCs are shown as disconnected after a PC wakes from sleep or after a reboot. Clicking to open the drive results in a delay of several seconds and then the share opens. I had this problem with Windows 7 right through to Windows 10 1909. Today, thanks to a different issue, I finally cracked it.
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0 WordPress updates progress

Published 30^th December 2019 by Jon Scaife & filed under Wordpress. Last updated 3^rd January 2020.

I’ve had an issue for a while now where installing wordpress updates doesn’t show any messages or progress. The updates generally do install but it is tricky to know when the updates have finished. There are a few threads online with possible solutions but most of them haven’t been helpful in my case.
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0 Getting old scanners working with Windows 10 64bit

Published 29^th December 2019 by Jon Scaife & filed under Windows.

Many years back I wrote an article about how to get old scanners working with Windows 7 x64. I recently upgraded the PC connected to the scanners to Windows 10 and was faced with the same challenge all over again. Amazingly the same tricks worked and both scanners are now working! Below I detail precisely how to achieve this.
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0 Website testing tools

Published 24^th December 2019 by Jon Scaife & filed under Wordpress. Last updated 29^th December 2019.

I am constantly working on both my websites and my web server stack with the aim of it being fast, reliable and secure. New technologies and new vulnerabilities mean a constanyl moving target and sometimes things that have been previously fixed can recur. As well as maintaining articles about many fixes, and a site updates log, I use a range of website testing tools. As this list has grown it has reached a point where I felt the need to document the services I use
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0 WordPress visual editor not working

Published 24^th December 2019 by Jon Scaife & filed under Wordpress.

I’ve had an issue for a little while where the wordpress visual editor button stopped working. The code editor was fine, and the button for the visual editor is present but clicking on it has no effect. After much fiddling around I finally discovered it was being broken by my Content Security Policy!
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0 Responsive background images for websites

Published 21^st December 2019 by Jon Scaife & filed under Web Technologies.

I’ve recently been updating my websites and web server and adding a new site (LoveCrete.org). I wanted to have a background image on LoveCrete and realised that of course 1 size doesn’t fit all screens. Here is a summary of what my thinking was and what I did to cater for the numerous screen sizes and orientations.
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