Dismal Manor Dispatches

A house call goes wrong

Post author By davehamby
Post date July 2, 2019

While looking after his church’s Ubiquity UniFi network plant, the Moocher scrapes his knuckles. A simple update and put guest policies on the various guest wireless networks.

A year ago a local managed network services contractor configured our USG, switches, and access points. The church played the role of contractor subbing some of the wiring, doing some ourselves, and hiring a network installer to dress out the rack and install the service outlet plates. A second contractor configured the church purchased network core.

A year later, we discover that one of our contractors had left the guest WiFi networks open to the main LAN from whence the controller could be configured. So change that right? Yes, but not from the WiFi. All hell broke loose. The hot wash is after the break.

Audio

Digital Recording of House of Worship Services

Post author By davehamby
Post date June 28, 2019

This is the first of a series of articles about contemporary digital recording practice in a volunteer church service recording context. The advent of digital mixers and digital audio workstations has completely changed this game allowing a patient amateur to make a clean pleasing service recording for distribution to shut-in and traveling members.

Those wishing to learn more about copyright in house of worship program production are advised to see reference 1 for a complete discussion. Copyright law specifically exempts houses of worship from royalty payments for material performed or presented as part of a worship service proper. Houses of worship are required to pay royalties for non-worship use of copyrighted material not in the public domain. For this reason, we distribute service recordings to members on physical media and include only material copyright by the church or our speaker in our weekly sermon podcast that is publicly available.

After the break, we’ll talk about track capture off of a digital mixer. Although not hard, each mixer has its quirks and limitations so our intent here is to alert you to typical challenges and limitations rather than to provide switchology for a specific mixer or mixer family.

Personal Computing

Installing Unifi In-Wall Access points

Post author By davehamby
Post date June 11, 2019

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.

Personal Computing Technology Web hacking

Moving to Unifi USG Router

Post author By davehamby
Post date May 10, 2019

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?

Audio Music Technology

Music Discovery in the 21st Century

Post author By davehamby
Post date April 8, 2019

Are streaming services evil? For some. For others, they are the gateway to new artists, concerts, and record purchases. Audiophiles that have made the leap are in this latter camp. There’s more to life than the next Beatles reissue. Read on to learn how Roon, Qobuz, and Tidal combine synergisticly to promote artists and music. Roon 1.6 Radio is the secret.

Audio Personal Computing

Allo Digione gets a Face

Post author By davehamby
Post date April 4, 2019

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.

Audio Personal Computing

MacOS Software Defined Radio with GQRX and RTL-SDR

Post author By davehamby
Post date March 30, 2019

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.

Audio

Personal Audio on the Cheap

Post author By davehamby
Post date March 19, 2019

Much written about personal audio is written to separate the established audiophile from a few dollars to buy a new gadget. This article is written for a student using Spotify or iTunes with headphones on an existing laptop.How can you begin a personal audio system and what are your migration paths going forward.

Audio

Why Digital Audio Systems Upsample

Post author By davehamby
Post date February 19, 2019

Digital audio systems since the beginning have used elevated sampling rates for processing while down-sampling the product to 44.1 or 48 KHz sampling rates for storage and transmission. These design decisions are attempts to satisfy the requirements of the sampling theorem using easily implemented anti-aliasing filters and reconstruction filters.

Audio Personal Computing

Roon in a BHYVE

Post author By davehamby
Post date February 13, 2019

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.