The Retired Moocher decided to make the move to all Ubiquity UniFi home networking equipment. The moocher’s home network is typical of that found in a residence or small business. We have a wired Ethernet network that serves all of the high bandwidth stuff plus a WiFi network that serves the Moocher’s iThings, guests, and Internet of Things. A Netgear Orbi had been carrying this traffic with the occasional mysterious fade. Desiring more visibility into the network’s behavior, the Moocher decided to retire the Orbis and install UniFi In-Wall HD and AC access points. The Moocher describes his deployment.
Continue reading Installing Unifi In-Wall Access pointsCategory Archives: Personal Computing
Moving to Unifi USG Router
For the longest time, Apple Airport Extreme secured the Dismal Manor networks. This began back in 2002 when, out of curiosity, the Head Moocher bought an Air Port Express to add WiFi in the early days. The Moocher had noticed that firmware updates kept showing up for the Airport products so concluded, rightly, that Apple was making an effort to keep these products up to date and secure. When Apple discontinued the Airport product line, it was time to move on. But to what?
Continue reading Moving to Unifi USG Router
Allo Digione gets a Face
John Darko of Darko.Audio fame asked what you hide your Raspberry Pi based audio player behind. That got me thinking. Give it a face like a Bryston Audio BDP-Pi player. Could that be done?
John was a fan of the RoPieee Linux plus Roon Bridge distribution so I gave RoPieee a try. In reading the RoPieee installation notes, I noticed that it supported the Raspberry Pi 7 inch touchscreen display. Having one lying around, I decided to add it to the basic Signature One player.
As always with DIY, some assembly is required and it is not all in the fine manual. I was using my display with an Allo DigiOne Signature HAT assembly. This HAT blocks access to the GPIO power pins. Oops — what’s the work around. Keep reading after the break.
Continue reading Allo Digione gets a FaceMacOS Software Defined Radio with GQRX and RTL-SDR
Radio, like most else, has gone digital. In the early days of digital signal processing, pioneers realized that many modulation and demodulation techniques could be performed by digital computation.
As computers became cheaper and faster and integrated circuits became cheaper and faster, it was inevitable that the guts of radio receivers and transmitters would be mostly digital and that computers would do much of what went on inside new radios.
This post will describe the initial exploration of GQRX and RTL-SDR here at Dismal Manor. Most of what is already written on the Internet neglects to mention a couple of details the Moocher learned the hard way. Find out what these are after the break.
Continue reading MacOS Software Defined Radio with GQRX and RTL-SDR
Roon in a BHYVE
FreeNAS 11.2 has been out for a few weeks. After some time running Roon on a Ubuntu equipped 2009 Mac Mini, I decided I’d give Roon a try in a BHYVE VM on the new FreeNAS build. This note recounts the experience so far. As usual, both FreeNAS and Roon have their secrets and they interact.
Continue reading Roon in a BHYVE
Home Networks for Streaming Audio
I’ve not written on audio and networking in a while but over the holiday I read Jason Stoddard’s Schiit Happens about his return to the high fidelity equipment industry as co-founder of Schiit, a maker of personal audio and value oriented high end audio. I found the book after I had ordered my Schiit Gungnir Multi-bit DAC. Over the break I had also watched a video in which Mike and Jason (the founders) talked about how Schiit came to be and this, that, and the other thing. They are toying with the notion of offering a new product which Mike kept calling Schiit Pi. This got me thinking I should write about my streaming environment again as I had improved it significantly in 2018.
Continue reading Home Networks for Streaming AudioUniFi Updates
A new switch, cloud key, and updated network video recorder joined the Dismal Manor UniFi stable this October. The Moocher checked firmware to discover that updating the core POE switch to the latest firmware required updating UniFi Controller. At that time, UniFi controller ran in a FreeNAS jail. So, the cheap intrepid Moocher tried to update UniFi controller in the jail. He quickly discovered he was in dependency hell. Find out how he got out after the jump.
Continue reading UniFi UpdatesThe Moocher’s New Printer
After many years of using a Canon Pixma printer, the Moocher decided that the time had come for its retirement. Like many things in computing, changing interface standards rather than aging led to its replacement.
Continue reading The Moocher’s New PrinterTransferring CDs to FLAC on MacOS moocher style
The Moocher is a music collector with a growing CD and record collection. In this article, the moocher describes how he transfers CD to FLAC to play using Roon Labs Roon Player. We’ll look at the motivation behind FLAC, the tools used to turn a CD into FLAC encoded tracks, and how to get the tools.
Continue reading Transferring CDs to FLAC on MacOS moocher style
GDS3710 Part 4: Opening the door
This is the 4th post in a series chronicling a small church’s experience with the Grandstream GDS3710 Door System. We like the product but the deployment has been like solving Rubik’s Cube. We found we had to do a lot of tinkering to get things working, something that shouldn’t happen with such a sophisticated product.
This article summarizes some of our lessons learned, particularly with regard to use of the keypad to enter PINS, the interpretation of the virtual number field and the various way the doors can be opened using the GDS3710.
