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.

For quite some time now, Plex has been plagued with a bug preventing Google Chrome users from watching YouTube videos they saved into their Watch Later queue. Being a fan of Chrome (I’m not using anything else really), Plex, and their Watch Later queue, which I populate using both IFTTT (widget: IF new RSS item THEN send email to [my_plexit_email_address]) and their Plex It! bookmarklet, I decided to further debug the issue.

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.

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.

Maybe you just want to back them up for when something goes wrong, or maybe you want to set up a new two-factor authentication app on a platform that Authy doesn’t support (cough Windows Phone cough). Whatever your reasons, if you want to export your TOTP secret keys from Authy, their apps or support guys won’t be much help to you.

The trick, that I just used to install all my existing TOTP secrets in the Microsoft Authenticator app, is to change one of their app of which we have the source, namely their Chrome app, to show us what we want.

Last year, I took the plunge and switched from a big local telephony provider to a web-based VoIP provider: Phone Power. Their features set is quite something: free second line, voicemails to email, some free international minutes, etc. But, when it comes to routing local calls, they are so-so.

I live in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Many local agencies & companies have 1-800 numbers that are geolocation-locked; you can’t call those numbers from outside Canada, or outside Quebec (depending). How they detect the origin of the call is not based on the caller ID (the caller’s phone number); it has to do with how the call is routed, i.e. where it’s coming from for real.

Now, the problem is not that Phone Power isn’t technically capable of routing those calls correctly, since I have been able to call those numbers on multiple occasions. The problem is that they are unable to keep routing consistent. The result is that those calls will only work sometimes, and will sometimes fail. And, when it’s not working, and you call/chat support to fix it, they don’t know how to resolve the situation. Sometimes, after 20-30 minutes of back and forth, they are able to make those calls go through. Other times, they can’t fix it, and answer that they’ll investigate further, and contact me later when they found something.

I’m not sure if I’m the only one who noticed (I hope not!), but recently, the Gmail spam filter started marking as spam a lot of messages that were NOT spam.

Here’s the ones I found, while looking at only the first two pages of my Spam folder (about two days worth of spams):

• A Logitech.com shipment notification;
• My monthly Yak invoice;
• My monthly ‘your invoice is ready’ from Citibank;
• The OpenDNS newsletter;
• Two commit notifications from Google Code;
• Three ‘your password has been reset’ emails, from Wordpress.org, and other less known bulletin boards.

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.

So, I was happily copying files around on my Windows Home Server, when I noticed that the speed of the transfers were now at 1.5MB/s… Uncool, when copying similar files from the same directories was at 50-80MB/s minutes earlier. I tried to think what I might have changed since it worked fine. I tried reseting the CMOS, disconnecting all hard drives (IDE, USB, SATA) that were connected, except my primary drive, to no avail.

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.

I had a problem with [Folder Actions](http://www.apple.com/applescript/folderactions/ "Folder Actions"): they always stopped working after a while! Quite annoying. After some digging on Google, I found one post on [MacOSXHints](http://www.macosxhints.com) forums where a user mentioned that a FA attached to a folder on an external HDD would always stop working after un-mounting / re-mounting the hard disk; exactly what was happening to me! So I started fiddling with AppleScript, and found a way to detach then re-attach a FA associated with a folder.

_Do you want to skip all this text and just get the new FrontRow Enabler for 10.4.8? Then click __[here](#frontrowenabler131)__. _ Ok. So I wanted to install FrontRow 1.3 on my _old_ PowerMac G5... Downloaded [FrontRow Enabler](http://andrewescobar.com/frontrow) 1.3, followed instructions, rebooted... And **bam**, no more login screen. How fun. Checking the comments on [Andrew Escobar's page](http://andrewescobar.com/frontrow), I realized 10.4.8 wasn't supported just yet. So I used my trusty FireWire cable to fix my PowerMac (see how in the comments of Andrew's page), and started to look for a way to patch FrontRow Enabler 1.