Roku2024-03-27T17:39:22Zhttps://d.moonfire.us/tags/roku/D. MoonfireCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 InternationalAnd a lovely Monday to say the least2014-01-20T06:00:00Zhttps://d.moonfire.us/blog/2014/01/20/and-a-lovely-monday-to-say-the-least/<p>This last week was a fairly productive one, though not always in ways I expected. I didn't have any real plans for the week, which always makes me feel like I'm floating in a tub, but given the project at work, it was for the best. (I don't think I have enough commas in that previous sentence.)</p>
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<h1>Writing</h1>
<p>I had no writing goals this week. I ended up doing a few hours of relaxing writing (e.g., writing without a goal in mind) on Saturday, which was fantastic. Other than that, I didn't do much.</p>
<p>I did submit two chapters of <a href="http://d.moonfire.us/blog/tag/sand-and-love">Sand and Love</a> to the writing group. It seemed fairly positive, though I still have a lot of work with one of the chapters (the one I inserted for the plot).</p>
<h1>Jekyll verses DocPad</h1>
<p>Yesterday, I converted one of my secondary sites from <a href="http://docpad.org/">DocPad</a> to <a href="http://jekyllrb.com/">Jekyll</a>. It wasn't on a lark, but a hope that it would take less CPU and heat to generate the site. And, thankfully, it did. This is a 500+ page site and whenever DocPad ran through it, my laptop would heat up for six minutes while it ran. The Jekyll version is about two minutes and didn't overheat the machine.</p>
<p>I wasn't really using the things DocPad excelled at. I use templates, but I also prefer to pre-process my files in other languages (Perl, typically). So, I was giving both versions complete versions.</p>
<p>I did abstract and polish up some of those <a href="https://github.com/dmoonfire/mfgames-jekyll-perl">utilities</a> and threw them on GitHub. They are pretty rough, but eventually I'm planning on leading into a wiki-like generator that takes Markdown files and generates a website with good quality taxonomies.</p>
<p><em>And since I'm trying to focus my tasks on writing, the wiki-like is going to eventually be the encyclopedia site for my fantasy world.</em></p>
<h1>Map</h1>
<p>Speaking of encyclopedia sites, I spent most of my lunch breaks starting to work on the map of Fedran, my fantasy world. It's going to take a few weeks to complete, but I really want to make sure that the events in my novels actually make sense.</p>
<p>I made a mistake by creating speedsters. They can cover so much distance that 1,000 miles isn't that far. Since I want to finish <a href="http://d.moonfire.us/blog/tag/sand-and-blood/">Sand and Blood</a> this year (again), this is one more thing toward that goal.</p>
<h1>Raspberry Pi</h1>
<p>For the holidays, my mother got me a Raspberry Pi. It was such a tiny little thing, too. There are a few things I want to do with it, but the first one was to create a wireless access point for the far side of the house. This ended up being a remarkably hard thing to do. Apparently the Pi's default settings resists bridging two networks as opposed to creating an entirely separate network for that side of the house.</p>
<p>I'm not entirely sure if this will work, though, but I'm hoping. I'm using the same ESSID on both sides of the house but with different channels. In theory, from my reading, this means that devices will switched access points depending on which one is stronger.</p>
<h1>ownCloud</h1>
<p>Last week, I was excited to notice that <a href="http://owncloud.org/">ownCloud</a> had a synchronization client for Linux and Windows. It promised to give me something like Dropbox, but with me controlling the end and without as much advertising.</p>
<p>Overall, a week of using it has not been unpleasant. There are some quirks about the clients I dislike. The biggest is having to enter the password every time I reboot since I picked a "secure" password (it looks like line noise). It also doesn't have a Javascript API, which means I can't migrate my TODO file over quite yet.</p>
<p>I've been pretty happy with it so far. I know Dropbox is an awesome company in general, I like open-source software, I like being in control of my networks, and I don't like the pyramid scheme of advertising ("refer your friends, get more space"). I already know they use Amazon's S3 for their filesharing, but I'd rather pay a monthly amount and get advertisement- and nag-free.</p>
<h1>Cleaning</h1>
<p>Oh, it never ends. Three hours on Sunday, but it meant that the rest of the days was very pleasant. :)</p>
<h1>Exercising</h1>
<p>Last year was a bad year for my health. As much as I want to say otherwise, it was. Last Wednesday, part of the effort to correct that showed up in the form of a brand new elliptical machine. And a co-worker happened to be getting rid of their flat-screen TV <em>and</em> I happened to get a Raspberry Pi to create a wireless network for the Roku. So, I have a workout room. And a nice TV for a distraction.</p>
<p>Though, the captioning on the Roku 2 still sucks. (Though, I saw something that said they were finally letting users pick caption colors. Please, please let there also be outlines.)</p>
<p>SMWM's current plan is to force me to work out at least twenty minutes every day. If I don't do it cleaning or walking or going to the gym, I'm going to be sent down to the basement. As much as I'm going to hate it, I'm probably going to like it in the long run.</p>
Wrong technology choices2012-12-05T06:00:00Zhttps://d.moonfire.us/blog/2012/12/05/wrong-technology-choices/<p>So, occasionally (frequently) I pick the wrong technology to stick my stuff behind. It happens to everyone, I'm pretty sure, but there are only two things I can do. One is to keep chugging forward and make the old stuff work or change. This weekend, I hit one of those points.</p>
<p>We have two <a href="http://www.roku.com/">Roku</a> in the house. We have a first generation in the basement and a second upstairs for the main television. I ended up buying the first gen about a week before the second came out... which annoyed me greatly since they basically dropped all support of that device the week the second came out. And their customer support was <em>terrible</em> when I was trying to figure out something.</p>
<p>But, we stuck with it because of a few factors (the low energy draw main). The big thing was accessing my media server and the movies I have on there. I originally picked <a href="http://roksbox.com/">Roksbox</a> but I found that <a href="http://www.plexapp.com/">Plex</a> would have been a <em>far</em> better choice.</p>
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<h2>Self-contained server</h2>
<p>One of the drawbacks of Plex is that it is a self-contained server. It wants to do everything including hosting files, acting as the web server, and everything else. I'd rather trust individual programs (Apache, NFS, etc) but I realized that if it works, I don't mind giving up a bit.</p>
<h2>Insisting to on online</h2>
<p>Plex really, really, <em>really</em> wants me to connect to their service. It nags me every management screen and even in the configuration. I don't really want my movie collection online (doesn't want to piss of the MPAA).</p>
<p>They have a donate feature and I'll probably use that within a week (it is "worth" it when it hits $1/hour).</p>
<p>I just don't want my stuff on the cloud and this isn't any difference. However, if SMWM insists on having it for her Android, then I'll do it. But, not until then.</p>
<h2>Format limitations</h2>
<p>I have some trouble hearing. I use captioning pretty heavily and I used to have my entire collection as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matroska">Matroska</a> (MKV). However, Roskbox couldn't handle MKV files at all. So, I wrote a bunch of Perl and Bash programs to convert my entire collection. Took about three months to run.</p>
<p>Apparently Plex does transcoding in real-time. So I could have kept all my pretty MKV files with soft subtitles. But, as I converted, I deleted the old versions because I ran out of space. (<em>sigh</em>)</p>
<h2>Subtitles and audio</h2>
<p>I like how it handles multiple subtitles and audio channels while Roku doesn't. I watch a fair amount of anime, so I like to listen to either the Japanese or English audio channels.</p>
<p>The subtitles are also great because I can actually get black-bordered with white text. The first generation Roku insisted on non-bordered white subtitles which disappeared in bright screens. The second generation is non-bordered yellow... which disappeared on different scenes.</p>
<p>With the Plex, I can have something that actually works nicely around Roku's limitations.</p>
<h2>Recently watched</h2>
<p>One of the really nice featuers is that Plex shows me the recently viewed movies. Remarkably, this is one of my favorite features because I watch a <em>lot</em> of movies over the week and weekend, but with EDM, I have frequent interruptions.</p>
<h2>The work so far</h2>
<p>I spent a lot of hours writing programs to get files int he format for Roksbox. that included downloading stuff, formatting, and everything else. But, even though I wrote it (and <a href="http://github.com/dmoonfire/mfgames-media">stuck it up on Github</a>) but don't need it anymore, I don't regret writing it. It was a learning experience to work with those systems, APIs, and services. And worth the time I spent on it. But, I'm also happy not to work on them anymore.</p>
<h2>First impressions</h2>
<p>I'm pretty happy with it so far. Yeah, I'll have to rebuild my collection make to MKV if I really want to, but I'm patient and most of the anime never got converted because I hadn't verified it worked yet.</p>
<p>But, given a choice between Roksbox and Plex, I would seriously recommend Plex at this point.</p>