• Mar 14, 2016

    The end of DST?

    Twice a year we go through the process of changing clocks either forward or back when daylight saving time rolls around or comes to a crashing end. Yesterday I had to change the time on 5 devices and luckily a bunch more automatically changed. While this process is a little bit of a pain and losing the hour of sleep wreaks havoc on our schedules for awhile, I like daylight saving time as the extra hour of daylight is most welcome.

  • Feb 12, 2016

    Review: UniFi AP AC Lite and AP AC LR

    I've been using my EdgeRouter Lite for more than 6 months now and couldn't be happier with it. After posting my review, Ubiquiti contacted me and asked if I was interested in testing out some new hardware. As I love playing with new hardware, I couldn't say no. I was actually eyeing the 802.11 ac access points, but the price tag put me off as I didn't need a new wireless access point; my Time Capsule has been working fine in bridge mode providing coverage throughout my house pretty well.

  • Feb 6, 2016

    Enhancing my TV Viewing Experience

    In my last post about TV viewing, I wrote that I've switched to MythTV with a few custom scripts to export to Plex. This setup has been working well and I'm quite pleased with Plex on the AppleTV. One of the features of the AppleTV 4 is the ability to ask Siri things including "What did he say?" where the video rewinds a few seconds and turns on subtitles. This is an extremely useful feature that we've used a number of times watching shows on Netflix. However, since I have my own system for recording/watching shows, I didn't have the ability to do this.

  • Feb 6, 2016

    OS X Server and the runaway process

    Yesterday I heard the fan running like mad on my Mac Mini. My mini is my workhorse machine that is my media center, surveillance system, and build server. This is not uncommon as it processes video at times and when it builds certain projects (Swift seems to cause it more), the processor has to work harder. Normally the load is about 30% (Quad Core i7), but when the fan comes on loud enough for me to notice, it is hitting the 50-90% range. I did a little poking at the machine and saw a process called sdmd hogging the CPU. I had never heard of this process, but a quick search found some references on Apple's support discussion threads.