Posts by John Tserkezis

Firstly with storage. I won't go into the DIY vs Off-The-Shelf NAS systems, probably a bit outside the scope of this post, however, since you asked, I'd lean towards Synology. By far the most important factor in storage though (whatever your option) is expandability. I cannot stress this enough, never, ever think that xTerabytes is enough. Buy or design around double or more the amount of drive bays you think you need right now, and expand later as required. It might get it a bit complicated if you want RAID 5/6, but at least you can deal with that without splurging out again on the NAS/PC cost. As far as the drives go, you need to lean towards the enterprise range of whatever brand you want. Don't be fooled into using desktop drives, or even bottom end "NAS" specific drives (like the WD Reds) they're cheapies - good luck if they last longer than 3 years. You're probably not going to get away with this cheaply (just on drive cost alone) otherwise it really won't last - or if you don't back that monstrosity up, you'll lose it too.

As far as the transport from NAS to TV goes, your wired ethernet/wifi will cover that, unless you mean hardware? DLNA might sound like a great idea, and the clients are built into every/most TVs, phones and tablets, but you're heavily restricted on file formats and codecs. I use either my laptop plugged into one TV, or a dedicated baby Atom box that is just a regular PC customised to behave like a media centre. This way, I get support for just about every audio and video format known to mankind, And I get Skype, and a REAL browser and just about any windows program out there, including my mapping software. Do NOT be fooled into the "my TV has a browser and skype too" argument - use them and see it's bollocks.

As per your question, you would need some sort of PC for each monitor. Be wary of the "transcoding" buzzword, most of what you think isn't really transcoding at all, it's merely "repackaging" (think DLNA transcoding). Real transcoding doesn't mean losing quality, and any PC wouldn't be fast enough to deal with it in real time anyway. Since you mention various formats, you automatically rule out DLNA too.

As far as multiple streams go, in your case, you're technically not streaming, but just reading the same stored video file from multiple clients. As long as your NAS, and network are fast enough to deal with that, it isn't going to be a problem.

As far as file/folder rights go, how you go about this would vary greatly depending on what DIY or off the shelf option you went for. Either way, both support login rights, where you restrict access read/write, read, or no access at all, down to username. I give read only access to the lounge room PC, because it gets mandhandled by various members of the family and other friends, and it's too easy for them to screw things up... The fact I use windows boxes to access the media makes this easy to sort out. Generic media boxes probably wouldn't work, have limited storage ability and DLNA isn't going to be suitable.

Lastly, and I found this to be by far the most important, you need a good, usable video/media menuing system. There are a few x86 "home cinema" menus available, (though I'm building my own). Having all your media listed A-Z is not an option, it's completely useless in fact. It's like having the world wide web with no search engine, just a list of alphabetically listed URLs. Billions of the things. You need to access the media easily, you need to have it sorted in a specific order (Such as TV series, or film sequels) you need to access more information if you choose, you need descriptions right there, you need search capabilities, you need to keep track of what you've seen or not. Some of us have 10,000+ video files in total, with no way of making any sense of it otherwise. Saving files on your NAS is REALLY easy compared to the database management, that by far takes the most work - because without it, you're sinking in a sea of files.

KNOX is a buggy piece of shit.

I have one of the many note 3's where even in it's virgin form (straight from factory reset) KNOX complains of intrusions. Fucking constantly.

At least Microsoft has the courtesy of allowing you to disable it's own "security".

Am I missing something with regards to not getting a smart TV?

If you don't want a smart TV, but simply can't buy a dumb one in the type you want, just don't plug it into the internet?

What are you going to lose? The EPG? Plent of other ways of getting that.

They'll learn. They'll learn that someone's opinion, or socical convention, or political push means losing many more billions in any given market, they'll either learn to deal with it, or go bust. Their choice.

Great! Another way to make political bribes donations!

Meh.

Lights here in Sydney Australia have been hacked by the goverment for a while. Witnessed a situation just south of Sydney City were one set of lights was stuck on red one way for a half hour straight. People eventually started blowing lights thinking they were clearly faulty.

Then witnessed a series of goverment vehicles and motorcycles (Presumably carrying our ever-important Prime Minister of the day) pass through the green section.

Driectly after that, the lights started magically working again.

As making fun of polititians is a national sport here, they're really not helping when they pull stunts like this.

Hey Reg, when we said photos or it didn't happen...

We kinda want to take that back now.

Why not just make the buttons bigger?

Oh, I'm sorry, you can't patent button size.

"The house doesn't always win"

Rest assured the user always loses.

As much as I would like Apple to trip over and land flat on their face, I don't that's going to happen any time soon. Especially when a 'venture captialist' predicts it, and even more so when he mentions the magic wank word "Cloud". Bingo, I win.

I don't use Twitter at all to effectively mute everyone.

Works well for me.

I'm still waiting for an Audio Player that gracefully handles bookmarks, but NOT require full internet access, reads and changes contacts list, makes phone calls, sends and recieves SMS's, full read/write access to all storage areas, you get the idea.

Shock, horror, I must be one of the very few who doesn't "just click" yes without reading...

"as optical disk sales collapse"

I have four attached to one box, and at least one optical drive for every other of the PCs I have. Including laptops.

I'm doing my bit...

What? Renaming atoms?

I have about three dozen Periodic Tables of [something] in electronic form.

Two of those are actual of tables of real-life elements. Well, even if they are short-lived elements...

Both list 117 Ununseptium, and 118 Ununoctium.

Sure, everything from 104 onwards are mostly theoretical and of academic value only, and elements from 112 onwards are ununimaginitively named, (no, I spelled that right), but renaming it? What am I going to do with my posters and shower curtain periodic tables? Don't these scientists have any consideration for people with printed charts when they create their atoms willy-nilly?

Yeah, I'm not going to take him up on that. Some advice I got early on in the piece, never touch anything that Jodee Rich has touched with a proverbial barge pole.

I used to be fluent in 7 different dialects of basic back in the day.

Back in the day, I was proud of that, it was a challenge to work with.

But after learning real programming languages, I'm glad I left it behind.

When you give people free money, you can't dictate how they're going to use it.

"The pair of Bitcoin bods want the young recipients of their generosity to actually do something interesting with the cash - $100 is worth 0.22BTC right now - rather than changing it into dollars and buying Friday night booze."

Some years back, the Australian government paid out around AU$1000 to pensioners at christmas and the same for anyone who has children, to be spent for the children (paid to their parents). This was "officially" done to stimulate the economy while it was in the shitter. And perhaps as a bribe for votes.

What actually happened was different from the goverment's intent. Firstly, the pensioners kept the cash - sensibly thinking that this size of bribe meant they were going to get royally screwed later on. The parents spent the $1000 not on their kids, but by buying a big screen TV (I spoke to a number of retailers who said exactly that, directly after the payments whent through). And worst of all for that government, the bribe failed.

Like the title says, When you give people free money, you can't dictate how they're going to use it.

Bah, don't worry about it.

They'll probably plot your location on Apple Maps, and you'll have absolutetly NO idea where you are.

I've seen a few Arduino based cellphones that are more ready-to-use than this, in that the mic and earphone are placed where they're supposed to. Like this one here from FreeTronics that's not available on the open market yet.

Nowhere near beefy enough to do smartphone functions, one could certainly argue the price vs function factor, and would need a moderate amount of backing to keep it from bending under harsh use, but I think it still looks a lot cooler than an iPhone.

I'll hazzard a guess the PiPhone will either go flat or overheat before you manage to get it to do anything "smart", but I will miss the smart fuctions of my Samsung. Or I can keep both.

1TB over the next 7 months equates to about 150Gb per month. On top of your usual monthly downloads, there isn't an internet plan around that will cater for that.

Oh, I'm sorry, it's Denmark. That makes much more sense than any pissweak Australian ISP who don't even have the courtesy of asking you to bend over before they insert their boot.

"Nice to see that there is still hard technical innovation going on in this industry."

There are new advances in silicon every day. Unfortunately, at the consumer level, the only news that gets airtime are fights.

I used to get raw AAP and Reuters news feeds as part of my job, (I worked on the equipment, and we needed the feeds for testing). Being spoiled for choice in real news is a real problem. When I moved on from that job, I was stuck with regular biased newspapers just like everyone else. As far as they were concerned, the only news worthy of mention was which polititian was invoved with which prostitute, or on a slow news day, UFO reports.

It all comes down to which news outlet you read.

Show me the money.

Because that's what it's all about.

The IPv4 landscape is tied behind a bucket load of money, and introducing IPv6 will remove the single thing that's keeping things that way: No supply and lots of demand = Higher prices.

The people who want to plug in a plethora of devices want IPv6, the people who build the devices want and support IPv6, the people who build the networking gear want and support IPv6, because all of them don't have any real interest in the IPv4 struture, they don't have much tied into it.

The guy or entity that owns the IPv4 address you're using RIGHT NOW however IS interested, they're either making money out of it, or they have a lot of money tied up on paper, and they ain't going to let it go without a fight.

Ah, I was a bit confused about their Firefox thing, but with this, their aim is obvious.

They're intentionally pricing themselves out of the market.

They just don't want to do it, and an expensive price tag is a good face-saving way to say "we don't want to do that" without actually saying "we don't want to do that" and looking like arseholes.

Whoops, too late for that.

It's amazing how far some companies will go to enhance security, without spending a single dollar, (or yen in this case) on the weakest part of the security link. Their humans.

Not content with prevent users from making calls due to Apple's own incometence in designing antennas, now that they've fixed that, they're using a patent to prevent users from making calls.

Not only that, the patent drawing prevents the front passenger from making calls, while the driver is free to tweet all they want. Seems they still think the world ends at the US borders.

I wouldn't have thought it in a million years.

A device that makes you look like a BIGGER dork than Google Glass.