Microsoft have a programme called Microsoft Rewards, which allows you to earn points for various (very simple & quick) activities; there are daily tasks, searching using Bing, and reading news articles.
This video shows you the app I use, how many points you can expect to earn, and how long it should take to save enough to redeem a Game Pass.
Google One is a subscription service which gives you extra Cloud storage, as well as a few other perks such as a basic VPN. If you have a family, you can share the subscription benefits with them for no extra cost, which is quite nice.
The first tier of Google One gives you 100Gb of storage for £15.99 (GBP) a month, which isn’t too bad, but free is better, right?!
You can actually get it for free using a combination of Google Opinion Rewards and Google Play Weekly Prizes.
The Google Opinion Rewards app lets you earn rewards for sharing your opinions through short surveys, often based around shops you’ve visited.. be totally honest; if it catches you lying it’ll realise & reduce the number of surveys it gives you!
One of the more recent additions to Google Opinion Rewards are Receipt Tasks, which ask you to take a picture of a receipt from a particular store you visited; it certainly prefers certain stores over others.. I can bet it’ll ask for a Coop receipt, but it never wants one from my work cafeteria.
Here’s how much I’ve earned in Google Opinion Rewards over the past 9 months;
The other app where you can earn Play credit is via the Google Play app itself.. take a look in your Points and you’ll find a tab called Perks where you can tap to get a weekly prize; they say you could win up to 100 points, but I’ve never got more than about 6. You can cash in 100 points for £1.
Here’s how much I’ve earned in Google Play Weekly Prizes over the past 9 months;
This video goes into everything in a bit more detail; please give me a Like if you’ve found this helpful!
Squid is a popular open-source proxy that can be configured to block adverts. I run it on a Raspberry Pi & have my iPad Air and Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra configured to use the proxy when connected to my Wifi at home. There are good articles on the web which show you how to set all this up, so I won’t go over it in this post.
One thing I needed was a way to easily turn the ad-blocking off & back on, since blocking ads sometimes breaks sites or links to sites (especially affiliate tracking links).
You can of course go into the network settings & remove the proxy configuration, then put it all back after you’re done, but this is a pain & I really wanted a 1-tap solution which would work on iOS & Android.
First, I wrote a bash script which would toggle the ads on/off.. this works by emptying/populating the adblock.txt file that Squid consumes & telling Squid to re-read it. Here’s the script I came up with;
/etc/squid/squid_ads_toggle.sh
if [ -s "/etc/squid/adblock.txt" ]; then
: > /etc/squid/adblock.txt
/usr/sbin/squid -k reconfigure
echo "Adverts ENABLED" > /var/www/html/proxyadstoggle.out
else
curl -sS -L --compressed "http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/serverlist.php?hostformat=squid-dstdom-regex&showintro=0&mimetype=plaintext" > /etc/squid/adblock.txt
/usr/sbin/squid -k reconfigure
echo "Adverts DISABLED" > /var/www/html/proxyadstoggle.out
fi
Testing this from a command prompt worked, so the next thing I needed to do was be able to trigger it from a web server call. My Raspberry Pi already has Apache & PHP running, so that was the natural place to create a quick PHP page that executes the bash script;
/var/www/html/proxyadstoggle.php
<?php
print ("Toggling ads on Squid proxy [");
$exec = "sudo /etc/squid/squid_ads_toggle.sh";
exec($exec, $output, $retval);
print($retval."] - ");
$file = file_get_contents('/var/www/html/proxyadstoggle.out', true);
print($file);
?>
The last thing I needed to give permission for the web service to run the bash script, which uses visudo to allow the ‘www-data’ user to run it. Now, I realise this isn’t ideal, but I couldn’t find a better solution; please understand the security risks of doing this if you’re going to follow this guide.
sudo visudo
www-data ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /etc/squid/squid_ads_toggle.sh
Testing this in a web browser worked, so next I could move on to triggering it from my iPad and Android phone.. I could just go to the page in a browser, but that felt a bit clunky & there are nicer ways to do this! :)
Shortcuts on iOS
‘Shortcuts’ is a really nice automation app that’s built into iOS; with just 2 steps, I can call the PHP page & output the result into a native popup notification. Here’s how it looks;
The shortcuts can be added to the slide-out widget panel in iOS, which make it really convenient to access!
Running the shortcut will display a notification like this;
Automate on Android
There isn’t a built-in equivalent of ‘Shortcuts’ on Android, but I do have Automate, which I’ve previously used in projects I’ve blogged about on here.
Here’s how the ‘Flow’ looks;
The HTTP Request block needs to save the output to a variable, like this;
And the Toast notification can then display what’s in the variable like this;
You can add the Flow to your home screen as a shortcut (via Automate, or through Widgets), and when you tap it you’ll see a notification like this;
And there you have it! An easy way to toggle ad-blocking on your phone or tablet. Those apps on iOS and Android open up a world of opportunities to integrate with other systems & do some really neat stuff.
On November 30th 2023, Samsung is set to actively remove the Steam Link app from their TVs, which is a huge shame since it works so well & allows us to stream games (like Drawful & Stick Fight) from the PC to the living room TV for the family to enjoy together.
After moving to a Raspberry Pi 4 for my home server, I had a spare Pi 3, and read there’s a Steam Link client available for it. I set about installing the latest OS image, which is where the problems started. Long story short.. Steam Link doesn’t work on Debian Bookworm (loads of errors to do with ‘unmet dependencies‘ for libavcodec58)..
I eventually found that the ‘Legacy’ image of Debian Bullseye is what I needed, and Steam Link installed & ran without any messing (at first!).
If you’re looking for how to install steam link, check out Steam’s page here.
The interface looked fine, but when streaming a game, the image didn’t fit the TV properly. That was fixed by altering the Steam Remote Play options to ‘Change desktop resolution to match streaming client’;
The next problem was having no audio on the TV. Looking at the output it said ‘Mix_OpenAudioDevice() failed: alsa: Unsupported audio format‘.
The fix for this was to alter various settings in /boot/config.txt (maybe start with dtoverlay if you want to figure out exactly what fixes it for you).
$ sudo nano /boot/config.txt
------------------------------
# enable these
hdmi_force_hotplug=1
hdmi_force_edid_audio=1
hdmi_drive=2
# change this (add the 'f' to 'kms')
dtoverlay=vc4-fkms-v3d
# add this (stops Steam Link complaining.. nothing to do with audio)
gpu_mem=512Reboot the Pi, then use sudo raspi-config -> System -> Audio and select HDMI.
You should find the audio now works & you should have a pretty good Steam Link streaming experience!!
One thing you may want to do is have the Pi automatically run Steam Link when it boots, to do this, use settings in raspi-config to automatically log the Pi into the console, then add this entry to crontab;
$ crontab -e
----------------
# add this to the file...
@reboot /usr/bin/steamlinkCongratulations! You should now have a Steam Link client on your Pi that works just as well as the Samsung app.
On 31st October 2023, the built-in Alexa integration with IFTTT stopped working with very little notice given to its users. This post show how you can replace IFTTT and get your Alexa Routines back up and working!
I don’t have a lot of time invested in a complex IFTTT setup, but we do use it to tell the kids that dinner is ready using this flow;
We can remove the Alexa Routine call to IFTTT by replacing it with a service called Voice Monkey. Voice Monkey has a lot more features, like being able to call a web service & have Alexa read out a response. I couldn’t do that with IFTTT!
If you still want to call a IFTTT Recipe, you can change the Recipe to be triggered by a HTTP request, then call that from your Voice Monkey Flow.
In my case, I wanted to remove IFTTT entirely from my workflow, so instead of having that write the text files to Dropbox, I did the same thing using an Azure Logic App, which I’ve blogged about before and have a video showing them in action here;
My new workflow is as follows;
If you don’t need anything as fancy as Voice Money, you could try URL Switch, which is easier to set up, and lets you call any webservice/HTTP address. I gave that a go & it worked fine, but the options in Voice Monkey give a lot more flexibility & things to play with!
In April 2023 123 Reg, a British domain registrar, sent out a notification that they’d soon be discontinuing catch-all email forwarding as of May 2023, and that I’d have to buy a ‘mailbox’ for about £28 per year, and enable catch-all forwarding on the mailbox instead.
I’ve been using 123 Reg for 15-20 years, and it was a big surprise that they’d now start charging for something so basic, especially since I’d literally just renewed my main domain with them for another 10 years for £150.
It’s worth saying up front that my setup with 123 Reg is really simple.. I just have the domain + email forwarding with them. My (very limited) web hosting is with Free Hostia, which just needs a A record adding in Advanced DNS. Other than that I have no other 123 Reg services to migrate; your situation may be different.
Thankfully these days it’s easy to transfer to another domain registrar, and ChatGPT came in handy for giving me a shortlist of British-based registrars offering free catch-all email forwarding.
After taking a look at each one (obviously ChatGPT isn’t up-to-date on the news of 123 Reg now charging for forwarding), I decided to try Fasthosts, and followed their domain transfer instructions on a secondary domain I have.
Before I initiated the transfer I took screenshots of all my settings on 123 Reg, just in case I needed to refer back to anything.
The transfer didn’t quite work as I expected when I selected the ‘Keep this domain’s current nameservers’ option, and after a quick Live Chat session with Fasthosts tech support (who were super-responsive), that got resolved. When I transferred my main domain I chose the ‘Use Fasthosts Nameservers’ option.
Once the transfer has gone through, you’ll need to click on the ‘Add Forwarding’ button to add the free web & email forwarding package;
After that’s been added, you’ll be able to configure catch-all email forwarding;
If you need to configure the domain to point at your web hosting, then you just need to add the A record, just like you did on 123 Reg.
And that’s pretty much it.
Hopefully that was useful for anyone else in the same boat as me; and if other companies end up doing this, the same steps can be followed to transfer to wherever doesn’t charge for this service.
After switching to a reconditioned Galaxy S21 Ultra which has no 3.5mm headphone jack, the prospect of moving to Bluetooth earbuds didn’t phase me; they’re cheap enough & the quality is pretty good.
However, I wanted to use my Boya BY-M1 lav mic (with 3.5mm jack) to record videos for YouTube, and therefore needed a 3.5mm to USB Type-C adapter. After rooting around on Amazon I found a couple with decent reviews; one at £8, the other £18.
They might be fine for listening, but both were a absolute disaster for recording audio! The cheaper one had a poor frequency range, so it sounded like I was talking through a cushion. The other had a good frequency range (similar to the internal mic), but a high amount of electrical noise.
Since then, I’ve tested a couple more adapters and have put together a series of video reviews to show you which ones to avoid, and which ones I’d recommend you buy.
Our team just started using Replicon to record our time off, but wanted to have a nice calendar widget on our SharePoint page (or wherever) rather than having to log into Replicon each time.
At first I tried their API, but struggled with permissions and getting any time-off data out of it.
However, I did find a more straight forward way.. through the iCalendar feed! I’m posting my solution here for anyone else who might want to do this with the minimum of effort (but it does need some effort! ;).
First off, you need to proxy the iCal data feed through something due to web (CORS) security.. so I’m doing that with a very simple Azure Logic App that grabs the feed & responds with the data.
This can then be consumed by our calendar JavaScript code, which takes the iCalendar data, reformats it to JSON, then tidies it to feed into a free JavaScript calendar called FullCalendar.
The full source for this is in a CodePen, which makes it easy for you to try this out yourself. https://codepen.io/mattc_uk/pen/bGYLBpP?editors=0010
(you’ll need to edit the URL in the code to point at your iCalendar data proxy).
Once you’re happy with the code (in CodePen) you’ll need to host it on a webserver, then you can use the Embed component in SharePoint to get it onto your site page. To do this, I actually used another quick Azure Logic App, since it means I don’t need to have an actual web server.
I pasted all the code from the CodePen into a Response blog & boom, we have an easily-embedded calendar containing our team’s holidays!
Hopefully this will help anyone else trying to do something similar, so you don’t have to start from scratch.
[Update: As featured on Hackaday! :) ]
The Fire TV remote has a neat feature which lets you control other equipment like the TV or a soundbar. The list of manufacturers & devices it’ll control is massive.. but not all encompassing!
I bought an Edifier R1855DB (very similar to the R1850DB), and wanted to control it using the Fire TV remote.. which saves juggling 2 remotes (and the Edifier one is pretty cheap & feels like it could break at any moment!).
I soon found out that this particular Edifier model isn’t in the list of supported devices in the Fire TV equipment control feature which is really frustrating. There’s no route to get added to the Amazon list, nor does it have a ‘learn’ mode.
When I contacted Edifier they said “Our remotes use custom IR codes that can not be inputted into a universal remote”. And “information about the IR code is not open to the public”. Pretty ridiculous.
This is where I got curious about what IR codes the Edifier remote is sending out.. so I took a cheap Arduino Nano microcontroller and an IR receiver & wired them up on a breadboard. There’s an IR library with a bunch of examples, so I used the ‘IR dump’ code, uploaded it to the board & could instantly see the codes from the remote.
Apparently the Edifier R1855DB uses the NEC protocol, which is really common, and you can see the sequences it sends easily enough. I noted down the IR codes for each of the buttons I was interested in, and can now look at transmitting them!
You can get an IR transmitter for the Arduino .. at first I tried an IR LED from an old TV remote, but it needed a transistor to make it work properly, which I didn’t have. So I ended up buying a KY-005 IR module from eBay for £2.50.
Hooking this up to the Arduino was simple, and I tested it was working using more example code from the IR Remote library. Finding the right format to play back the NEC codes I captured was a bit trial-and-error.. I eventually found the raw codes worked best. I actually used a Raspberry Pi with another IR receiver to validate the codes being sent were identical to the original remote.
What I can then do is have an IR receiver AND transmitter hooked up to the same Arduino and have it act as a translator between one manufacturers codes to another.
We can power the Arduino using the USB socket on the TV. This only powers up when the TV is on, which is quite handy.. and if it turns on, we can write some code to send the speaker power on IR command when the Arduino boots.
Here’s a quick wiring diagram, showing how everything is connected together;
I didn’t have a cable long enough, so I took an old USB cable, cut it up, and soldered it into the IR transmitter so that I could place it near the Edifier IR receiver.. that was the most fiddly bit of this project.
Once I had that set up, I picked a supported device from the Fire TV equipment list – the Amazon Basics Soundbar – and dumped the IR codes for it from the Fire TV remote.
I then wrote some code to listen for the Amazon Basics Soundbar commands & emit a corresponding Edifier IR code. This worked an absolute treat after a bit of debugging. I even added a sequence detector so you can press Mute x2 then Vol Up to send the speaker power signal in case it somehow gets out of sync. Adapting the code to work with whatever equipment you have should be straightforward..
You can build your own version of this for about £8, and it’s incredibly easy to put together, only requiring some basic electronics and coding skills.
Hope this has been useful.. let me know how you get on if you decide to build one of these yourself.
The GitHub repo for this project has a lot more detail & all the source code you need; https://github.com/mattcuk/IRtranslator
There’s a video of this project on YouTube if you want to see a bit more of the build process and see it working.
We have an elderly relative who, in the coming years, we expect have to keep a closer eye on. It’s not like we don’t have almost daily contact with them already, but having an early heads up of any mobility issues would be beneficial & give a degree of peace of mind.
Having a wifi-enabled camera installed is one option, but would be pretty intrusive, and I don’t want to have to watch it to figure out if there are any problems.
What I realised I needed was a Passive Infrared (PIR) movement sensor which could ping a service in the Cloud & alert me for anything out of the ordinary.
There are such solutions sold by a bunch of companies, but cost upwards of £100 and tend to have a subscription charge.
I started to think I’d roll my own solution using a development board and PIR sensor, but I remembered I actually have an old battery-powered PIR which activates a mains adapter (the idea is you’d maybe have a lamp in the socket for home security).
The adapter I have is from a company called Timeguard, but it’s about 15 years old and is obsolete.. they don’t have any current products of this type, but you can find similar ones on Amazon easily enough.
What I like about this, is that I can concentrate on the IoT piece, and let the adapter + sensor do their thing without worrying about the electronics.
All I needed to do next was take a small ESP8266 board I had lying around and code it up to connect to the local wifi & call a URL.. which in my case will be an Azure Logic App. Logic Apps are great.. you can get them up and running very easily, at minimal cost, and without writing any code!
At first, the code for the ESP8266 just used the examples from the Arduino IDE. In very little time I had it connected to Wi-Fi and ready to make a HTTP call to wherever I wanted. However, I soon discovered the examples only worked with non-HTTPS sites (Logic Apps are HTTPS-only).
After a bunch of Googling, I found this library from gojimmypi on GitHub, which allows you to make HTTPS calls.
After switching to that & rewriting portions of the code, the board called the Logic App URL without issues and I received a 202 response (Accepted), and I could see the call in History;
Now we’re cooking! The motion sensor will activate the power adapter, which boots up the ESP8266 board, connects to wifi & calls Azure. The adapter will stay powered for 15s to 15min.. so having it set to 15 minutes means we’re not repeatedly powering the board & calling Azure (and incurring a load of cost).
The Logic App can do whatever we want to record the event.. update a table, or write a small text file with a timestamp.
Now we have that, we can have a secondary Logic App running on a schedule to monitor the events & alert us by email (or whatever) if it falls outside what we typically expect. For example, at 9am check that there’s been motion detected in the last 3 hours. If there hasn’t, send me an email so I can give the relative a quick call to check they’re ok.
With Azure, it’s always good to keep an eye on costs. In this case, lets look at the worst case scenario where we have a very active elderly relative who trips the motion sensor every 15 minutes from 7am to 11pm.. so that’s 16hrs x 4 = 64 possible calls a day.
Logic Apps cost you per Action block, and cost a bit more for Standard + Premium actions. In our case we have 1 trigger block and 1 standard block to write to a Storage Account (table or file).
The Azure cost calculator can then be used to figure out the monthly cost..
That’s a maximum of 21 pence (GBP) a month if it triggers every 15 min (which it won’t).. not bad!
We’ll also have the ‘event monitor’ Logic App, but that won’t run as often.. maybe every 4 hours starting at 9am, finishing at 9pm.. so that’s 4 times a day, with a few more action blocks in it to figure out what to do.. so maybe 10-15 blocks, 5 of which might be ‘Standard’…
As you can see, the monthly costs are minimal, and helps illustrate how useful Azure can be for something like this!
It took a few hours to put this all together & I’m pretty happy with the solution. We can put the battery-powered PIR sensor in somewhere like the kitchen, or hallway and be safe in the knowledge we’d get an alert if there wasn’t the level of activity we’d typically expect to see.
If you’re interested in the ESP8266 source, here it is;
One of the pieces of tech I bought this year was a mirrorless APS-C digital camera which replaces an ageing Nikon D5000. I wanted something super-compact, but with interchangeable lenses & the ability to record 4K video.
Since were so many options, I started researching cameras & ended up creating a spreadsheet to record all the things I was interested in :)
Long story short, I chose the Fujifilm X-E3 due to the price-vs-features, and 8 months later I’m still happy with my choice; it produces some brilliant images, and is very portable for taking with me & the family.
Video is pretty decent from the camera, as long as you choose the right resolution & FPS. I’ve uploaded samples from the camera into a YouTube playlist for anyone who is interested it how the different modes look.
There are a few things that could be improved; adding 60 fps for 4K video, longer recording times (it’s limited to 10min at 4K, 15 min for 1080p, which is low these days), a dedicated ‘Record’ button (rather than having to dip into the Drive Mode menu to switch from Photo to Video), and a larger flippy screen on the back. Let’s see what the X-E4 brings in 2021!
Camera Bag
Next, if you’re looking for a really compact bag, I really like the Think Tank Mirrorless Mover 10, which is the smallest I could find that fit the camera + the 18-55mm lens. It’s also pretty cheap at about £20-30 (watch out for deals!).
Extra Batteries
There are plenty of cheap 3rd party batteries available; the ones I chose are from Baxxtar and I’ve had no issues with them at all.. performance is just as good as the one that came with the camera.
Companion App
If you get any newer Fujifilm camera, there’s a companion app available which allows you to connect your phone to the camera & do automatic synchronisation of the photos. It does this after you turn the camera off, and sets up an ad-hoc Wifi access point to do the transfer (Bluetooth is too slow). It’s pretty handy, since your photos all end up on your phone, which can then sync with Google Photos when you’re back at home, making the whole process quite seamless.
However, if you use this, one thing you’ll want to do is enable full-resolution files, since by default it downsizes everything to keep the transfer fast. Here’s how to do that;
Synchronise Videos to Your Phone
The Fujifilm app won’t transfer videos, so you’ll need to use some other apps to sync them automatically to your phone using a USB OTG adaptor & SD card reader. One of the apps is called FolderSync, and the other is Automate. Here’s how I use them to automate the process;
That’s it, I hope these tips have helped anyone with an X-E3, or anyone doing their research on what camera to buy.
For the website I’m responsible for, I was interested in capturing the data from the Google PageSpeed Insights tool, and having the data recorded somewhere on a schedule. There’s a blog post on Moz.com that talked about doing this with a Google Sheet, but it wasn’t quite what I was after; I wanted the data to be collected more regularly.
Instead of using Google Sheets (and a fair amount of code), I decided to use an Azure Logic App (you can use this or Microsoft Flow), which is part of Microsoft’s Cloud platform.
The Logic App is run on a Recurrence trigger which I set to every 6 hours. By collecting the results automatically over time, you’ll see how the changes you’re making to your site affect your PageSpeed scores.
The first step simply defines the URLs you want to check, then it’ll loop over each one & call the PageSpeed API. Go get an API key, and make sure PageSpeed API is enabled.
Results from the API call are parsed out and pushed into a new row in an Excel Online sheet.
If you’re interested in setting this up yourself, I recorded a short video which shows how it works in more detail.
There are a few foibles in Logic Apps which caught me out, first, getting the list of URLs into an Array didn’t work as expected. I had to switch to Code View to correct the escaping of the return character to read;
@split(variables('urlList'), '\n')
The JSON payload from the PageSpeed API is pretty large, so I’ve listed the path to the elements you’ll be interested in below. I’m using split (on space) purely to get at the numerical value, which is more useful in the spreadsheet;
First Contentful Paint
@{split(body('HTTP')?['lighthouseResult']?['audits']?['first-contentful-paint']?['displayValue'], ' ')[0]}
First Meaningful Paint
@{split(body('HTTP')?['lighthouseResult']?['audits']?['first-meaningful-paint']?['displayValue'], ' ')[0]}
Speed Index
@{split(body('HTTP')?['lighthouseResult']?['audits']?['speed-index']?['displayValue'], ' ')[0]}
Time To Interactive
@{split(body('HTTP')['lighthouseResult']['audits']['interactive']['displayValue'], ' ')[0]}
Time to First Byte
@{split(body('HTTP')?['lighthouseResult']?['audits']?['time-to-first-byte']?['displayValue'], ' ')[3]}
Overall, this was quite easy to put together and shows the power of Azure Logic Apps. Being able to do this without any code or (your own) servers, and getting things live in a couple of hours is a fantastic tool to have at your disposal.
After clearing out some junk, which included an old halogen desk lamp, I was thinking about putting in an LED light behind the PC monitor.
Then I remembered I’d bought a ring of 24 RGB LEDs from Aliexpress last year & hadn’t used it in a project.
I also had a spare Arduino Nano, and all the things I’d need to allow me to hook up a dial (potentiometer) for the light level, and button to cycle through different colour modes.
Here’s a quick video of it in action..
Parts
LED Ring – £2
Arduino Nano – £1.75
Breadboard & bits – £1.25
Wiring it up
It’s an easy one to wire up.. I took a few basic examples and mashed them together to get what I wanted from the design.
I’m not an electronics expert, and approached this like I approach software development; write it in manageable/testable chunks, which I can implement and test individually, then bolt it all together.
The code for the project is pretty simple.. I think the most complicated bit is handling the button, which needed debounce functionality.
| #include <Adafruit_NeoPixel.h> | |
| #ifdef __AVR__ | |
| #include <avr/power.h> | |
| #endif | |
| #define PIN 6 // pin on the Arduino is connected to the LED ring | |
| #define NUMPIXELS 24 // Number of pixels on the LED ring | |
| #define POT_PIN 0 // Potentiometer pin | |
| #define BUTTON_PIN 2 // Button pin | |
| Adafruit_NeoPixel pixels = Adafruit_NeoPixel(NUMPIXELS, PIN, NEO_GRB + NEO_KHZ800); | |
| int showType = 0; | |
| bool oldState = HIGH; | |
| void setup() { | |
| pinMode(BUTTON_PIN, INPUT_PULLUP); // Declare pushbutton as input | |
| pixels.begin(); // This initializes the NeoPixel library. | |
| } | |
| void loop() { | |
| // Read the potentiometer value and translate to how many pixels we want to illuminate | |
| int value = analogRead(POT_PIN); | |
| value = map(value, 0, 1023, 0, 25); | |
| // Switch colours if the button is pressed | |
| bool newState = digitalRead(BUTTON_PIN); | |
| if (newState == LOW && oldState == HIGH) { | |
| delay(20); // Short delay to debounce button. | |
| // Check if button is still low after debounce. | |
| newState = digitalRead(BUTTON_PIN); | |
| if (newState == LOW) { | |
| // Cycle through different colour schemes | |
| showType++; | |
| if (showType > 8) showType=0; | |
| } | |
| } | |
| oldState = newState; // Set the last button state to the old state. | |
| uint32_t color = pixels.Color(255,255,255); // default to white when first booted | |
| if (showType==1) color = pixels.Color(0,0,255); // blue | |
| if (showType==2) color = pixels.Color(0,255,0); // green | |
| if (showType==3) color = pixels.Color(255,0,0); // red | |
| if (showType==4) color = pixels.Color(0,127,255); | |
| if (showType==5) color = pixels.Color(255,127,0); | |
| if (showType==6) color = pixels.Color(255,0,127); | |
| if (showType==7) color = pixels.Color(0,255,255); | |
| if (showType==8) color = pixels.Color(127,127,255); | |
| // Illuminate X pixels depending on how far the potentiometer is turned | |
| for(int i=0;i<NUMPIXELS;i++){ | |
| if (i<value) { | |
| pixels.setPixelColor(i, color); | |
| } else { | |
| pixels.setPixelColor(i, pixels.Color(0,0,0)); // Don't show anything | |
| } | |
| } | |
| pixels.show(); // This sends the updated pixel configuration to the hardware. | |
| } |
And here are a few pictures of it in place behind the PC monitor..
The 2018 flagship TV from Samsung is the Q9FN (Amazon link: https://amzn.to/2IvwmkO). This is a FALD (Full Array Local Dimming) display with 480 LEDs lighting the display, rather than being edge-lit like a lot of the models. This generally means it’s much more capable of providing good contrast ratios. Overall I think it’s a good TV … most of the time….
However, the reality is different from the headlines and reviews in the major publications. What a lot of people have found is that the Contract Enhancement & Local Dimming features can cause light fluctuation problems, which are especially apparent in dark scenes with subtitles.
Light Fluctuations
You can see for yourself in this clip from Narcos Mexico S01E05 at about 45 minutes. This is being viewed via the built-in Netflix player in HDR, with Contrast Enhancement turned on, since without it enabled, dark scenes are waaay too dark to see anything!
It shows how subtitles affect the light levels in other areas of the screen.. like right at the top, nowhere near the subtitles.
Backlight Flicker
This shows how I’m seeing a flicker certain scenes. It’s like the TV can’t quite decide on the light level it’s supposed to display, and clicks into place. I’ve run this at standard speed, then slowed it right down to illustrate the flicker. You’ll need to look closely at the background & look for the light fluctuation.
FALD Confusion!
There are also instances when FALD gets in the way of drawing a background with a solid colour. This video shows a short excerpt from the film Searching (2018).. at about 52 min 30 sec. The FALD back light system has real trouble working out what to do with the dark blue satnav background which should be a solid/uniform colour.. but the bright white roads cause it a lot of problems. This could be a disadvantage of FALD over edge-lit or OLED. At least that’s the way it seems. I’m not entirely sure whether you could even solve this in software.
The blue lights/dots on the left are a reflection of the Xmas tree lights.. so nothing to do with the TV ;)
Okay, enough with the problems, and onto the tips!
Secret Buttons!
At first glance the TV has no physical buttons to control it.. so if you’ve misplaced the remote, it looks like there’s nothing you can do. However, take a look under frame near the logo and there’s a neat directional control + OK button.
Steam Link for Free!
Instead of buying a Steam Link device, there’s actually a free app that lets you stream games from your Gaming PC to your TV. Install the app & plug your controller into the TV and you’re pretty much good to go!
Removing Adverts(!!) from the Menus
Yes, adverts.. in the menus.. on a brand new TV that you paid a lot of money for!
This video shows how I’ve been able to get rid of the movie trailers which annoyingly play so easily. They’re coming from apps like TV Plus & Rakuten. It’s not that easy to figure out how to get rid of them.. you certainly can’t uninstall the apps.. Samsung don’t let you do that :(
I found ads in the menu too.. if you go back into the policy agreements and make sure you’ve not ticked any of the options to agree to them, the ads should go away.
Here’s a link to the Q9FN on Amazon; https://amzn.to/2IvwmkO
For quite some time I’ve been running SABnzbd on a PC, downloading files, and then transferring them over the local network to a USB drive attached to a Raspberry Pi which is running OSMC. There’s a Linux version of SABnzbd which means I can cut out the PC and have the Pi handle the downloads. It’ll mean I can queue up the downloads from a web interface running on whatever device I have to hand, like an iPad.
First Try
The initial installation of SABnzbd was quite easy;
sudo apt-get install python-openssl unrar par2
sudo apt-get install sabnzbdplus
Edit the settings so that the web client starts up on port 8085..
sudo nano /etc/default/sabnzbdplus
USER=osmc HOST=0.0.0.0 PORT=8085
sudo service sabnzbdplus restart
This then allowed me to connect to SABnzbd and transfer over all my settings that I was using on my PC.
Delayed Start
What I found was that SABnzbd started before the USB drive was properly mounted by OSMC, so I disabled the main service from starting up, and added a script to wait for the USB drive to get mounted at a particular path.
There was a good forum post here that pointed me in the right direction.
Disable the default service…
sudo update-rc.d sabnzbdplus disable
Write a quick shell script to wait for the directory/USB drive to be mounted…
nano /home/osmc/startsabnzb.sh
#!/bin/sh # Wait for this folder to be mounted... DIR=/media/Elements while [ ! -d "$DIR" ]; do sleep 120 done
/etc/init.d/sabnzbdplus start
chmod a+x /home/osmc/startsabnzb
Add the script to system startup…
sudo nano /etc/rc.local
/home/osmc/startsabnzb.sh
Upgrading
The version of SABnzbd that installed above was very dated. That repo doesn’t get updated very often. Here’s how I updated it to the latest version.
sudo su root
echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/jcfp/nobetas/ubuntu xenial main" | tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/jcfp/sab-addons/ubuntu xenial main" | tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://pool.sks-keyservers.net:11371 --recv-keys 0x98703123E0F52B2BE16D586EF13930B14BB9F05F
sudo apt-get update
Upgrading sabyenc
This solved the issue where SABnzbd was complaining that sabyenc wasn’t the right version. It uses the 2nd repo (sab-addons) we added in the steps above.
sudo apt-get install python-sabyenc
Final thoughts
SABnzbd runs quite well on the Pi. It is a lot slower than it was on a PC.. it only manages about 3 MB/s on the download on a wired connection (compared to 6 MB/s on a Wifi connection on a laptop), and unpacking is slow.
However, the files are unpacked onto the device which I was manually copying the files to anyway, so that saves time.
Endpoint 101 
You must be logged in to post a comment.