Since switching from my BT SmartHub to a pfsense router I’ve had a few minor teething problems. One of which has been the squid proxy service causing a problem where I can’t access the BBC website with an error. Whilst I did eventually fix this through a slightly strange method, I encountered a possible source of the problem which was worth fixing on it’s own
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0How to move recorded TV from Media Center to Kodi
A few months ago I finally gave up on Windows Media Center and switched my home media setup to Kodi. After some early challenges I am now mostly happy with my new setup, and today I finally decided to migrate a large collection of old recorded TV from MCE to Kodi.
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2Why linux will never be mainstream
The title of this article almost reads like click-bait, but that isn’t the intention. I’d just rather it sounded like click-bait than the rant that it really is.
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0Fixing a slow Amazon Fire HD 8
A couple of xmases ago I bought my better half an Amazon Fire HD 8 tablet as she wanted a budget tablet to read books on at night, and to play free android games like clash of clans. The Fire seemed an ideal option as it would link into her Kindle account without any hassle, and is also android based. It was also possible to get a good sized device within the price limit we set each other.
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0BT Mesh WiFi
After replacing my BT SmartHub with a pfsense router, I’ve been looking to upgrade the house WiFi as well. Most devices are wired as most rooms have wired connections I fitted for my parents years ago when wireless was barely a reality. However phones, tablets, e‑readers, and laptops really do work best with wireless (or only with wireless in some cases), and to work well need a wireless system that enables mobility.
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2Replacing the BT Infinity SmartHub with pfsense
When I moved into a new home a year ago I was finally able to join the 21st century and ordered BT Infinity which is supplied with a SmartHub. The SmartHub is actually reasonably decent kit considering it comes for free, but as with most ISP supplied devices it is locked down in some ways, for example you can’t use your own DNS servers which I prefer to do. In the early days of ADSL (circa 2001) I ran a smoothwall box in place of a router, and for a range of reasons (including internet filtering controlled by me, rather than an ISP) I decided to go back to a linux-based firewall router.
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0Kodi keymap for miniguide on arrow keys in livetv
What a horrible title that is, but I didn’t know how else to describe this. Since switching from Media Center to Kodi I’ve mostly been very pleased, but a few small niggles have remained where for some reason Kodi just doesn’t default to “nice” behaviour in the same way that Media Center did. I long ago managed to get the “Live TV” link from the main menu to point to the guide view instead of a channel list, but once a channel is being displayed I couldn’t find a neat way to describe a mini-guide like Media Center would do.
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0True home cinema for a grand
I’ve long had a “home cinema” setup with a fairly budget HTPC, a 50″ plasma TV, and a 4.1 surround system, but when I moved house a year ago I found I no longer had a place in the main family room to fit the 50″ TV, so had to revert back to the old Samsung 32″ 720p CRT that I bought in around 2006. The room has a large bay window with a little recess perfect for fitting a screen, so a plan was born for true home cinema
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0Display photo info in Kodi slideshow screensaver
I have a large photo collection with lots of metadata that I wanted the kodi slideshow screensaver to display. With lots reading, experimenting, and trial-and-error, I’ve finally got a reasonable system that shows what I was hoping for.
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0WordPress Local Gravatar cache
I like to have avatars shown for people who comment on my blog. WordPress supports the gravatar service natively so enabling this is very easy. However it comes with a cost — accessing external files from another domain adds lots of extra load time in the form of new DNS lookups, new SSL connections to make, etc. Wouldn’t it be nice to have gravatars stored locally and served from your own server. Well that’s what I’ve been doing for some time now, if you’d like to know how, read on…
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“Hi James I realise it has been a long while, but I just checked this on windows 11 (build 23H2)…”