I’ve been using the DVR feature of Plex since the first beta version, and it replaced an aging Mac+EyeTV setup I was using before. Bought a HDHomeRun device, and I’ve been pretty happy with the setup since the beginning. The main issue I have with the DVR feature is the EPG. For one of the channel I record a lot from (Télé-Québec), the EPG data is very bad. It’s missing a lot of shows (it has holes), and shows will sometimes start at a different time in the EPG than in reality, making me miss a few minutes at the beginning of the end of the shows I record, or complete episodes.

The symptoms were hard to notice at first: downloaded files would sometimes be corrupted, especially large files; attempts to fix those downloads (using par2) would more often than not fail. Then it became bizarre; calculating the checksum of those files would sometimes, but not always, result in different values.

Normally, only the root user is allowed to open ports below 1024. That’s why, if you try running an application as a normal (non-root) user, and that application tries to open a port below 1024, you’ll get an error (access denied most likely).

If you’re running Fedora (and that would probably work on other distros too), there’s a command you can run, as root, that will allow such programs to open any of those ports, even if they’re run by a regular user.

The iPad is now very popular in the house. I seldom can use it as a recipe book to cook something, as it was intended… It’s either in my oldest’s hands, playing Labyrinth 2 HD, either on my wife’s lap, browsing her Facebook & reading her emails.

But still, sometimes, it’s nice to use it for other things. One such other thing would be to stream videos from the Amahi home server sitting in a closet upstairs. One can watch a recorded TV show in bed, or hand the iPad to the big kid to let him watch Cars or Nemo while we’re watching the news, or something non kid-friendly.

Being of the DIY kind, I made my own web-app to achieve this, using the new HTML5 videos tag.

So, I’m now happily using Greyhole. Good for me, you say? Not long ago, a 1 TB hard drive that was part of my storage pool died (my fault really, handling it while it was powered up). Greyhole handled this beautifully, re-creating duplicate copies of the files that were stored on that drive to continue protecting all my data. But I didn’t have enough free space on the other drives to allow all the duplicates I want to be created.

(Some background info on why I created Greyhole can be read in my previous post.) Update: Greyhole has matured quite a lot since I posted this. You can now learn about Greyhole on the official website: www.greyhole.net. There. I did it. Greyhole is now available to all avid enthusiasts who would like to try it. What is it? It’s Windows Home Server Drive Extender concept, but open source, running on Linux.

[Update] I did it. Read about it here. I do like Windows Home Server Drive Extender technology. It allows oneself to aggregate a bunch of various-sized hard disks into one big storage pool. You can then define a number of shares that will share (!) that storage pool dynamically. AND you can define which shares you want duplicated, which basically mean that DE (Drive Extender) will make sure that all the files on there are on two different physical hard drives, to safeguard those files against hardware failures.

CrashPlan****, it’s a remote backup solution for (almost) everyone. The principle is easy enough: install the software client (available for Windows, Mac OS X or Linux), change the default selection of files that will be backed up (if you want to) and you’re on your way to never loose a file again! Where are your backup stored? You have the choice. One option is to pay CrashPlan developers (the company is called Code 42) a small fee each month for them to store your backup: this is what they call CrashPlan Central.