Category: Personal Computing

Home Networks for Streaming Audio

Post author By davehamby
Post date December 27, 2018

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.

Personal Computing Technology

UniFi Updates

Post author By davehamby
Post date November 2, 2018

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.

Personal Computing

The Moocher’s New Printer

Post author By davehamby
Post date October 13, 2018

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.

Audio Music Personal Computing

Transferring CDs to FLAC on MacOS moocher style

Post author By davehamby
Post date September 18, 2018

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.

Home automation Personal Computing Technology

GDS3710 Part 4: Opening the door

Post author By davehamby
Post date August 2, 2018

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.

Home automation Personal Computing Technology Web hacking

Further thoughts on the GDS3710

Post author By davehamby
Post date July 10, 2018

The Grandstream 3710 Door System provides a video intercom, security camera (its recordable using compatible NVRS), RFID reader, and door unlock control relay. The device has a contact input that can be used for an inside exit demand input and a second that can be used as a door status sensor input. And all of this for the price of a door controller from HID or AXIS.

This is a new device so it has a few rough edges. This post talks about the rough edges.

Personal Computing

If something can’t go wrong, it will anyway

Post author By davehamby
Post date July 4, 2018

About a year ago, the retired moocher decided it was time to retire a couple of elderly Drobo Gen 2 direct attached storage devices. After much research, the moocher undertook an orgie of parts ordering, skinned knuckles, and arcane incantations to produce a FreeNAS storage server with collateral duties for networking and media service. Then there was thunder. It wasn’t bad but freenas wouldn’t run. This post describes the recovery actions and reminds all to take a key precaution.

Audio Personal Computing

Roon Take 2

Post author By davehamby
Post date March 21, 2018

Abstract

Over the past several months, I fell in love with Roon, its ability to stream my digital music collection in pristine full definition audio, the Allmusic artist and album commentary, and Roon Radio, the ability to play other things from my library like what I had been listening too. Nothing offers this combination of features. Nothing appears to have the commercial traction of Roon.

This article serves several purposes. First, it is my working notes from rebuilding my Roon environment, an iohyve managed FreeNAS behave VM. Second, I offer this in the hopes that it might inspire others to home brew. This article is a bit advanced. You really need to have a year or two of Unix system integration experience to pull this off. It is not a character by character, click by click recipe to build a Roon Server.

Those who don’t have system integrator chops but want a quality music server should consider the Roon Nucleus described in Reference [4]. Roon has developed these robust system specifically for the music serving task. They have adequate storage and computing resources to run Roon Server and are designed not to sneak crud into your audio system over the USB ground. If you’d like a fancy panel with that, Bryston, Linn, Naim, and others, will make pretty metal for you.

Citizenship Personal Computing

Adios Facebook

Post author By davehamby
Post date March 20, 2018

The recent revelations centered around Facebook and Cambridge Analytica compel me to bring this relationship to an end. Yes, Facebook, it is you.

Buggy iPad app
Buggy iPad messnger app
Only trolls are participating. Everyone I want to hear from is a lurker
You aided a hostile foreign power’s information warfare campaign directed at the US electorate, a campaign that probably resulted in the election of the worst US President ever.
You allowed an advertising client to plunder 50 million user’s profile information
Said advertising client left that information lying about on open or easily penetrated servers

So on Passover, the account goes.

Personal Computing

Thoughts on the new iPhone 8 and X

Post author By davehamby
Post date September 16, 2017

The new iPhone 8 and iPhone X are beautiful examples of Apple design and product build. But when to trade phones? I’m not there yet. I’ll explain my thinking.