[:en]New Office and lots of networks upgrades.[:]

[:en]Our new world wide headquarters (ROFL), are almost complete. Basically a 14×14 foot office with storage room that doubles as a network room. We have power, AC, network, internet, TV and work areas. Everything a small development company needs. We have programs in development and electronic projects on the boards. Hopefully we’ll be posting more projects soon, though we might start with a few project updates:

  • Our Outdoor Sensor Array, will be connected to our solar panels and updated to our new offices needs.
  • Lighting and sound systems.
  • Network improvements

Hope to be posting again soon.[:]

Solidoodle – Rest in Peace

Seems Solidoodle, the 3d printer company, has ceased operation (as of March of this year).

Can’t say I am very surprised, we have two different Solidoodle printers. Neither has worked well, and tech support was a joke. The last resolution was to send the printer back for trouble shooting, had it boxed up ready to go, but thought better of it. Glad I didn’t send it back now. Although it still has an issue, at least I still have the printer.

Sad an American company couldn’t make a go of it and the Press is a pretty printer.

Nailed it! – Target Sale

Talk about good timing. Saw Target had a sale for 16 gb Lexar Twist Thumb Drives, for $3.99. Didn’t really have a need, till a project at work came up, image 500 netbooks. So ran to Target and purchased all they had which amounted to 8. For a total of $31.. Sometimes sales are handy.

Oh, on another note while confirming they had the drives still, I found out Best Buy also had 16 gb thumb drives on sale, for $3.99. Just no Lexar.

Score!

PyConnect – Power Failures

Wow, been a busy month, almost non-stop.

However I am now able to catch up with projects I wanna do. One was fix an issue with PyConnect.

PyConnect is a great system to connect Plex Server to the families three AppleTV boxes. Long and short it changes the Trailers channel into your Plex Server Channel. And it is easy enough for everyone to use.

However when the power goes out (normal here during rainy season), the kids would have to wait till I get home and re-run the script. The script would asked for admin password. Not something I am willing to hand over to the kids yet.

So after some googling this is what I came up with:

set sshPasswd to “supergeek1”

try

tell application “Terminal”

quit

end tell

on error

end try

tell application “Terminal”

activate

my execCmd(“cd /Applications/PlexConnect-Master”, 1)

my execCmd(“set timeout 30”, 1)

my execCmd(“expect -c ‘spawn sudo ./PlexConnect.py; expect \”*?assword:*\”; send \”&sshPassword&\”; interact’;”, 1)

end tell

on execCmd(cmd, pause)

tell application “System Events”

tell application process “Terminal”

set frontmost totrue

keystroke cmd

keystroke return

end tell

end tell

delay pause

           end execCmd

This was written in Applescript, saved as an Application bundle, and added to the startup items. Noticed if I didn’t quit terminal first, all the system would do is make a few clicking noises and pyconnect wouldn’t start.

It also has the added bonus of not displaying the password, and you still get the terminal activity window to monitor usage.

Not bad for an afternoon’s playing.

Enjoy

~David

Plex, PlexConnect and OpenPlex

Over the last couple of years my family has ripped every movie we own and stored it on a Mac Mini Server with a 4th drive attached. Using Plex and a number of plugins and add-ins, almost every device brought into the house can connect. It has been fantastic. Except.

Plex, do not work on the AppleTV. Until now! We were finally able to install PlexConnect and can now watch our movies on TV’s with AppleTVs connected. There are a couple of short falls.

1) the PlexConnect is started up using Terminal, not everyone in the house is tech savvy.

2) PlexConnect can’t easily be restarted if the system is restarted due to power loss.

Obstacles  had to be overcome included, we have been running Plex on a Mac mini server, PlexConnect won’t run on a server since the ports are already in use. We had to install another copy of Plex on an old iMac, connect that copy of Plex  it to the PlexServer  on the Mac Mini. then installed PlexConnect on the Mini everything worked fine. Oh and you need to install Certificates. There are so many different ‘instructions blogs” on how to install Plexconnect it was difficult to work out the proper install. Basically I just put down all the other instructions and tried to figure out what the end result was and why it didn’t work. Two plex servers, linked to the same data, install certificates and DON’T use a server. Bingo!

Then I wanted to find a way to restore PlexConnect in case of power loss while I was away from home. Due to bandwidths limits (by at&t) it is better for everyone if we are going to watch movies we already own, that we use local copies. (Rather than downloading it AGAIN and AGAIN.. Say ‘Frozen’ for a two year old!)

So started to work out writing a startup program in LiveCode, and ran across a program called OpenPlex. Spent a couple of hours playing with it, but it needed a lot of ‘support’ software installed. I am using an older model iMac running 10.6, and it was getting to be more of a pain to use OpenPlex than to write my own program that would just work..

I’ll keep everyone up-to-date on my progress and provide a link to the finished product when completed.

Have a great day.