* Posts by juski

6 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Apr 2011

Synology to enforce use of validated disks in enterprise NAS boxes. And guess what? Only its own disks exceed 4TB

juski

Re: If you want it to work....

I used to be the chump a former employer got to validate hard disks (and environmental testing on them). It never ceased to amaze me how OS drivers based on PATA (and later SATA) specs would fail to work with some drives, yet Windows & Linux machines worked just fine. Report findings back to the driver guys, who'd contact the HDD manufacturer & be told "oh yeah, use THIS register, not the one in the book!". Standards? They might've heard of em! Hence the need for all this validation. Can't say I blame Synology at all here

IT blokes: would you say that lewd comment to a man? Then don't say it to a woman

juski

This isn't isolated to the IT industry or trade conferences & whatnot. There are a hell of a lot of idiots around in all walks of life. I've seen plenty of evidence first hand (being paid to be sober in bars & clubs where I played music). Lots of women keep quiet about being harassed because they think it's just something they have to put up with. It wasn't very long ago that my wife told me about what typically happens to at least one of her peer group on a 'girls night out'. There was I thinking you generally had to have consent before leaning in, tongue out to snog somebody when you've not even said 'hello' yet.. and worse besides.

Anybody who is subject to this kind of abuse would be well within their rights to lash out as hard as they feel necessary IMHO. I'm not going to say anybody who meekly tolerates it is an enabler but it'd surely help if everybody helped put a stop to this kind of behaviour & change attitudes.

Raspberry Pi B+: PHWOAR, get a load of those pins

juski

FWIW anybody having problems playing DVB-T in the UK is likely falling foul of not having bought the mpeg2 codec license. The Pi's puny CPU will struggle terribly playing even standard def mpeg2. Been there, tried that.

TV transport tech, part 1: From server to sofa at the touch of a button

juski

I read about VM re-encoding the same feeds Sky send to directly to customers but wasn't sure they'd do it because of the losses multiple codec cycles entail. Mind you, for anything else to happen Sky would need to provide VM with the higher quality source feeds. Who was I kidding?

Reg reader seeks living room Myth advice - can you help?

juski

Un-universal Plug n Pray

FWIW 'HTPC' cases are almost without exception FUGLY (cheap looking front-mounted tatty ports, anyone?) - or those that aren't are ludicrously expensive or are badly designed to the detriment of sane airflow. In the case of smaller Nvidia-powered SFF bricks they can (rightly so) be hidden behind the TV, mounted VESA style.

The concept of UPnP / DLNA is very nice & all but server software like that in MythTV needs to have a shedload of workarounds hard-coded into it to cope with many different clients. Apparently the 'universal' part of the acronym seems to mean "here's the standard, do whatever you want".

Besides, with a dumb streaming client you'll miss out on being able to schedule recordings but most importantly seek within streamed content (some clients can't even do that!) & do funky stuff like time-compress during playback. My wife *really* loves MythTV's ability to play her recordings back faster than real time & wouldn't be without her one button 4 minute skip feature.

Unless you really *must* have an optical drive in the livingroom you can still adhere to the 'no PC in the lounge' by using the existing backend machine as your frontend too. HDMI can be comfortably run for 10+ metres without an extender & extenders to put HDMI over 30 metres of cat6 cable are under £50 nowadays. Your remote control can be RF, or a local USB IR receiver (again, USB extenders don't cost the Earth) - or even just the one which comes with most TV tuners these days (obviously extended long enough to sit near your telly). I'll be doing this when (if?) we upgrade our TV - what's the point having 2 boxes when one can do the job just fine (I'd already have done it were it not for the fact you can't easily buy a PCI-E graphics card with s-video out).

Of course now with MythTV's APIs (http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Services_API) on the cards it'll likely be possible to write a native mythtv frontend app for network connected TVs and possible to sideload apps the set manufacturers see fit not to approve for their walled garden. I'm pretty excited by the prospect - no more having to de-fuddle the virtually undocumented protocol, no messing about with MySQL... It'll be wonderful.

Sony brings Skype to Bravia HD TVs

juski
Stop

WMD as standard?

'This Island Earth-style Interositor'... minus the remotely-activated high energy destructor-beam, I hope