Its_All.Lost

Because hope just breeds everlasting misery…

Roku, your remote is crap

Like your average American family we have a few TVs in the house. Of course we have DVDs and Bluerays, and the players to go with them. But today its all about going digital, right? So over the last few years we have made the push to go digital and away from discs. Enter Roku. We have a few Rokus, a Roku 1 and two Roku sticks.

Let me start by saying I love our Rokus. It is a great device (overall). Sure there are a few things I would have done differently but we are happy with them. Then lets bring in the remote. The Roku 1 remote works flawlessly. Zero issues with the IR remote. The two other Roku Stick remotes however, are a piece of fucking shit. Both of them equally. The sticks were purchased about a year apart so they are not the same batch either. The remotes are even slightly different from one another. The original is fat and glossy while the newer one is slim and matte. Both of them however, never fucking work. We consistently have to re-pair them to the Roku. About. Every. Single. Day. No joke, and because the remote doesn’t work we have to use a phone to do it. Or power cycle the entire thing, cause thats a quick thing to do. I have found a quicker way to get the damn thing to work – removing a battery for a second seems to wake it back up, most of the time.

Yeah, i know i can use my phone as a remote and you know what – that is completely unfucking acceptable. If i wanted to be stuck tethered to my phone I would have saved money and bought a Chromecast. But I didn’t because I wanted a Roku, and specifically i wanted the physical remote. I guess asking for the remote to actually work was a bit much.

The little bit of research i have done leads me to believe that it is an issue with the remote itself not the Roku. It seems that remote goes to sleep. How stupid is that. Lets make a remote that sleeps so it doesn’t work. Genius right there. Not sure if it is Bluetooth or RF, and I really don’t care. Although I’m guessing some sort of RF otherwise we could pair the phone and not rely on wifi.

The design is so poor that the remote will actually cease to function right in the middle of using the damn thing. Great sleep function Roku, really awesome, lovin’ it. On top of all that, the thing eats through AAA batteries like they’re going out of style.

Stay away from the Roku streaming stick and their craptactular RF remotes. I am all for Roku (1, 2 or 3), but these sticks can go in the fucking garbage. Not to mention TV USB ports don’t supply enough power so you still need cables and dongles. Whats the fucking point of the stick again? If you get the MHL stick version you dont even get a remote (they make you rely on your TV remote), yeah cause everyone still actually uses it – anyone with cable TV has 3″ of dust on their actual TV remote (because we cant use them). Manufacturers need to get their shit together.

And Roku, fix your shitty remotes.

Vizio Smart TV and Netflix – No login (updated, again)

(Update at the bottom)

A few months back I decided to drop the multi-monitor setup (I had three at the time) and get one large screen. Since my job takes me in and out of peoples home everyday I get a lot of opportunities to see many different setups. So over the years I have gravitated to the larger screens, I’m talking 27″+.

I bought a 32″ HD Vizio M-Series Smart TV (model M322i-B1) with all the fixins. Had the best picture at the time I was in the store, glossy screen, super light and thin – it was perfect. It has been perfect, I love this thing. The only downside now is that I want two, and… the TVs native Netflix app will not work.

View Post

Plex bailed on me

To try and keep this short – I had put together another server and was plugging it in to the UPS and then the protection circuit tripped. Shutdown the entire UPS, which powers my main router/server. The damn thing ended up tripping twice, so two power loss shutdowns back to back. Great. The kids happened to be watching a movie on Plex at the time. I am actually pretty impressed. The Roku Streaming Stick had buffered enough of the HD video stream to last a good 5-8 minutes after the server went dark.

So both servers online, good. No, not so good. Everything is up and working, except Plex. All indicators show that Plex is fine. The service was running, no errors in any logs that I could find, I’m stumped. It all looks good but nothing was responding. The browser wouldn’t load, the menus wouldn’t load. It was as if Plex was never there.

I did in all of my Googling find the answer, or at least something that worked. Follow the link…

http://www.clearfoundation.com/component/option,com_kunena/Itemid,232/catid,26/func,view/id,60467/

At first I tried to reinstall ‘yum reinstall app-plex’ – didn’t work, nor did removing then installing.

rpm -e plex* app-plex* --nodeps

That was the charm the saved the day. After executing that command and then:

yum install app-plex

I was finally back in business. Everything was as it was, I was even able to resume the movie were it was cut-off. All is well in the world. If your Plex won’t load (linux, ClearOS/CentOS?) give that a shot.

ClearOS DNS and local websites

Thank you Comcast, I just started my vacation and you killed my internet. On a Saturday. Right in the middle of cartoons with the kids at 9:33am and you kill my internet. On a Saturday…until 2pm. I hate you Comcast.

So back to web development I guess, oh wait no internet. I host my sites locally here at home so no internet should not hit me too hard (except for all the offsite javascript and fonts – bad idea). But it did. My domains would not resolve, so I edited the servers DNS. Problem solved.

Network > DNS Server > (edit your existing entry)

You should already have a main DNS entry when you installed your system. From here all you need to do is add the domain you host locally. Dump it in an alias box (ex: Alias #3 = mypersonalsite.com). Now your domain should resolve and load with or without internet.

Party on Wayne.

ClearOS/Apache and Mod_Rewrite

Installing WordPress on your ClearOS box? Want to use permalinks? Enable them and find out that you are getting a 403 Forbidden? If you are getting a 403, like I was, then here is the quick fix for you.

In your .htaccess file, add this line to the top:

Options +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch

That should clear up the 403 for you.