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.

I’ve been using mint.com since 2010. I was happy with the service; it worked pretty well, most of the time. But recently, I decided it just wasn’t worth the risks. So I unlinked all my banking accounts, and then deleted my mint account. Since then, I replaced it with a custom solution: my own mint.com alternative. In no particular order, here’s what I did / how it works. My banking credentials (usernames, passwords, security questions answers) are stored only on my (Mac) computer, in Keychain.

App Transport Security is a feature that improves the security of connections between an app and web services. The feature consists of default connection requirements that conform to best practices for secure connections. Apps can override this default behavior and turn off transport security.

Transport security is available on iOS 9.0 or later, and on OS X 10.11 and later. Source

What does that mean?

That unless you change something in your iOS app’ plist, your app will not be able to communicate with unsecure HTTP servers, when it runs on iOS 9.

That’s a good thing really; Apple is trying to force people to update their HTTP servers to use the latest HTTPS protocols & recommendations: TLS 1.2, SHA256 or better, forward secrecy.

Google Reader is going away later this year. This means those of us using RSS to keep in touch with the world will need to find an alternative to be able to get our fix using our different devices.

I still remember the pre-Google Reader days of RSS, when RSS clients were silos that talked to nobody. This meant that trying to read articles on a PDA (Palm Zire anyone?), and on a PC, forced us to skip a bunch of articles each time we switched from one to the other… Solutions for this problem existed at the time, but were convoluted, and not that pleasant. i.e. I don’t want to go back there!

This morning, I read a post by Ruth John, aka @Rumyra, about how she used IFTTT (If-This-Then-That) to inject the content of a RSS feed into the Pocket read-it-later service. This stuck me as a good idea, so I started with a Yahoo Pipe that took my OPML, and merged all articles into one feed, and I inputed that into IFTTT, and chose Pocket as the target. Sadly, that didn’t work so well; IFTTT has known issues with Yahoo Pipes RSS feeds. Next option: just do it myself!

Since I replaced my Apple TV 1 with an Apple TV 2, and started using Flickr as the screensaver, I was wondering how I could use group photos or interesting photos from Flickr, instead of just a user’s photos, or the result of a search. Today, I was able to hack it to do what I want!

(Note: You need a jailbroken Apple TV for this to work.)

Important note: the applications below are now officially unsupported. I'm not a Videotron client anymore, so it became difficult, and without interest, for me to continue development on both of those solutions to track your bandwidth quota.If you know any developer that might be interested in continuing development and support, feel free to send them a note. (JavaScript is the main programming language of both softwares.)   Would you like to monitor your monthly Videotron Internet quota easily?

So you got a nice Google Chrome extension, right? And people do leave comments / questions / hate mail on the extension page all the time. But the only way for you to get those is to visit that page in your browser… Not cool. Not cool at all, Google!

Wanting to get the comments in Google Reader, I simply looked in the Inspect Element > Network tab, to see what was going on, when I visited the Chrome Store page for my extension. And lo and behold, there’s an AJAX request to fetch the comments, with the results returned as a nice JSON-encoded object!

I wanted to keep track of fuel consumption (L/100km) for our two vehicles. I wanted to be able to send email to enter data, or use a simple web interface. The email part was important, because I don’t have a data plan on my cellphone, so being able to compose and queue an email at the pump, to have it sent automatically when I was later within reach of a known Wifi network, was a very nice to have.

Implemented in PHP, the result is not that pretty, but it’s nice enough, and the ease of use allows me to keep it updated without too much hassle.

I love 1Password. It looks good, it’s safe, it has a web-accessible UI, it has an iPhone/iPad application…

What I didn’t like about it was it’s Chrome extension, which required me to use the mouse to click the 1Password icon in the toolbar each time I wanted to auto-fill a form with login details!! That was so annoying.

So annoying in fact that I took upon myself to implement keyboard shortcuts in the 1Password extensions.

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.

Important note: the software below is now officially unsupported. I'm not a Videotron client anymore, so it became difficult, and without interest, for me to continue development of this solution to track your bandwidth quota. If you know any developer that might be interested in continuing development and support, feel free to send them a note. (JavaScript is the main programming language.) Download the widget version 1.3.9 What’s new in 1.

(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.

Update: The information below is about TV Forecast version 2.3.5. Since I wrote the post below, Matt Comi released an official fix, namely version 2.4, which now use TVRage.com as its data source. You should use TV Forecast official releases (1st link below), instead of trying to hack an old widget’s code like I did below. TV Forecast is a nice widget that Matt Comi created. You tell it what TV shows you watch, and it will keep track of the upcoming episodes for those shows.

**Update**: The source code of my application can be found on [Google Code: Facebook Gallery Import](http://code.google.com/p/facebook-gallery-import/) I have a Gallery where all our family pictures can be seen. My mom, dad and brother all frequently upload pictures on this site, which makes it a central point for all our family’s digital photography sharing & archiving needs. Encouraged by the fast growth of the Facebook social-networking site, I wanted to be able to easily transfer pictures from my Gallery into Facebook photo albums so that my Facebook friends could see my little guy.

(Visit the [GobbleRSS](http://GobbleRSS.pommepause.com/) website for more details about the application itself.) After I finished reading my latest book, which is what I usually do during my daily commuting to and from work, I started looking for a way to read my RSS feeds on a Palm device during that time. First, a friend of mine lent me his Palm Zire 31 (thanks!). Next, I started looking for a way to get unread RSS items from Google Reader into the Palm device.

Started to check that out in December 2002. Since then, I created a number of scripts for the FTP daemon for Windows. Many of which not many people still use, but I still use some of them. I’m currently re-writing my main script in Java. Much more fun to code than the last version, which was C coded with Visual C++. ioBanana was my most popular script. Funny name comes from a suggestion in the IRC channel #ioFTPD.