Category: Computers

I Found Something Neat At the Dump

So I went to the dump a couple weeks ago and came back with something pretty cool. I was dropping off a box of old electronics (which they take for free), and I spotted an Apple product in the pile. Despite being gold in color, I pulled it out and brought it home. After charging it up, I learned that the screen was damaged, probably because the previous owner closed something in the hinge. Otherwise, it functioned perfectly. I wiped out the previous owner’s data and got macOS installed so I could get to About This Mac. I picked up a 2015 12″ MacBook; the base model with a 1.1 GHz Core m processor, 8 GB of RAM and a 256 GB SSD. Definitely not amazing specs, but it runs Firefox and ssh sessions just as well as anything else. Plus it was free.

I bought a used display assembly on eBay for $120 and used OpenCore Legacy Patcher to get Monterey installed. I’m pretty pleased with my find. I was originally planning on selling it, but it’s only worth about $250, so I think I’m going to use it until the keyboard stops working (this was the first device with Apple’s infamous butterfly keyboard) and then sell it for parts. If finances allow I’ll probably pick up the then-current MacBook Air when that happens.

I have a perfectly good HP laptop with a Ryzen 4500U, but I hate the form factor. It’s a 15″ laptop with a 16:9 display, which is just too damn wide, and the 1080p resolution is barely adequate for a display that size. The trackpad is awful, especially coming from the Surface Book I had previously. Two things Apple laptops do better than anyone else are displays and trackpads. All their displays are 16:10, which strikes a nice balance between width and height, although I think I might prefer 3:2 or 4:3. Apple trackpads are second to none in my opinion. Large, but not too large, and the force touch thing is fantastic. The whole trackpad clicks, so you never have to move your fingers off their target to make a click.

I’ve been making trips to the dump here and there since I got a truck (which is another post I should write), so hopefully the next dump trip has another diamond in the rough waiting for me.

It’s Been a While

Dang, about five months since my last update. In my defense, I’ve been pretty busy. I got my first real career job as a help desk tech at a school district. It’s been about three months in this job so far and I think it’s going fairly well. I’m probably 90% up to speed now; I know most of what I need to know and the rest is relatively minor stuff. I felt a little bit of imposter syndrome in the first couple weeks because I’ve never been a tech support person in a professional setting before. Getting a ticket and just going there and clicking around on someone’s computer until the problem is solved and getting paid for it was kind of surreal. I’m used to it now. I think I could probably communicate a bit more confidence to the people I’m helping; I don’t want to say I can fix something immediately for sure until I see the problem, but “I’ll see what I can do” isn’t the best thing to say to someone who really needs their computer to work normally so they can do their job. I might have to see if I can come up with another way to under-promise and over-deliver. Or maybe I should just say “I’ll come over and fix it.”

A lot of IT people, or maybe even most, start out on the help desk. It’s a good learning experience, it’s usually not too difficult as long as the customers are nice, and someone has to do the job. The pay isn’t horrible, but it’s not great either. Help desk staff are definitely the lowest-paid employees under the IT umbrella. I don’t want to stay on the help desk forever (no one does) and help desk has nothing to do with my degree, which is in networking. I’d be much more interested in a network engineer or network admin type job, but I need some experience and probably a certification first.

I’m getting more experience by the day, I have a degree (just an associate’s, but that’s better than nothing), but I don’t have any certs yet. The classes I took in college align roughly with the Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) cert. This is the entry-level networking cert, but combined with the degree and a modicum of professional and personal experience, I think getting this cert will open up the next tier of IT jobs, and thus salaries, to me. I’m planning on studying up this summer and hopefully taking the test by the fall. Afterwards, I’ll have to see what jobs are out there. I’m hoping for a 40-50% salary increase with my next jump.

Somewhat longer-term, in the next year or so I’d like to get at least one more cert. The Red Hat Certified System Administrator (for Linux) or the Windows Server Hybrid Administrator Associate (for Windows), or maybe even both. I’m more interested in Linux personally, but the Windows cert might open more jobs in my area. Maybe I’d wait to move jobs until I can get either of those, but it never hurts to throw applications out there.

Longer-term than that, my career goal for right now is to make $100,000 a year by the time I’m 40-years-old. I have 13.5 years to go. I think it’s probably attainable with some luck and hard (ish) work.

To this end, I’ve started getting some more stuff going on my server to practice for these things. One thing that seems to be pretty important for IT jobs is experience in Active Directory. At the help desk, there isn’t much need for techs to delve into AD for anything other than a password reset. Setting up users, groups and OUs isn’t really under the purview of the help desk; it’s a systems administrator’s job to do all that. To help me get some experience, I got a Windows Server domain controller going and joined a couple virtual machines to it. I’m practicing things like deploying software, creating network shares, using Group Policy settings, and I’m getting a bit of experience with PowerShell. That last one is pretty important for a good sys admin. Windows doesn’t have any built-in bulk import tools or tools for regularly updating user groups, so it has to be done with PowerShell scripts. So far I’m mostly copy-pasting, but I’ll probably check out a Udemy class sometime to learn more.

So that’s basically it. Mostly job stuff these days. I’m going to try to post here once in a while to record what I’m doing. It might make me look like a great candidate for a new job some day.

What I’ve Been Doing

Last I left off, I was going to put an extra manifold gasket on my Triumph. I did that, and it definitely fixed the sucking noise issue, but I still didn’t have any luck with the idle problem. More expensive and pressing car problems came up, so that’s where things are still sitting. I haven’t driven the car in a few weeks. Before the summer is over, I’m going to get new diaphragms for the bypass valves and a new ground wire for the distributor. I have a friend with a shop that will soon be able to do state inspections, so I’ll have him inspect it when he’s able, and maybe I’ll borrow his compression tester while I’m there to see how the engine is doing inside. But after that, I’m done spending money on the car for the season. I have other things that need my money and time, and an annoying car can be put on the back burner.

In tech news, my Ceton TV tuner died about a month ago. Just overnight, poof, it didn’t work. There was no obvious damage to the hardware or software, and I spent two hours with Verizon support diagnosing the problem. I initially ordered another used Ceton tuner from eBay, then decided to return it and get a new HDHomerun Prime for about the same price. The HDHomerun is a sort of re-run of a tuner that originally came out like 10 years ago, so it only has three tuners to the Ceton’s six, which is a disappointment. On the bright side, it actually works, has a warranty, and the company still exists. Plus, it works with whatever software, so I don’t need to run a whole Windows VM just for CetonProxy anymore. Which brings me to my next item:

I finally plugged my server into a Kill-a-Watt, and (probably unsurprisingly) it uses a ton of power at idle, which is most of the time. Right now it only runs a couple of fairly light VMs, so processor utilization is almost always in the low single digits, but it uses 200 watts of power. I explored a few options to get rid of the whole server, including hosting Jellyfin on a Raspberry Pi, but it’s just impossible to beat the cost per terabyte on the big server. My six 3TB hard drives in a ZFS array give me 12TB of usable storage, and a failure tolerance of up to three disks (or two, I can’t remember now). Anyways, even getting just 6TB of total storage (two 6TB drives with RAID 1) would cost about $300 for new ones, and I’m still left with only half the storage space that I have now. And while that Raspberry Pi runs Jellyfin very nicely (thanks to the hardware accelerated video playback), NextPVR can’t take advantage of that same acceleration, so web browser viewing of live TV is impossible. So I’d have to purchase new hardware. Prices for crap office desktops are seemingly up from last year, which bites. Factoring in selling the server components, I’d probably come out about even switching to lower power consumer hardware. So rather than do all that stuff, I bought some different processors, a pair of Xeon E5-2450Ls, the 65 watt version of my current 95 watt 2450s. This should give some decent power savings I think, plus I’m going to take out the graphics card that I never could get working for transcoding. The processors should be in by early next week, so I’ll make an update when I get them installed.

My New Laptop Finally Showed Up

It feels like forever ago that I mentioned I ordered a new laptop. I was expecting to get it before Christmas, and initially at least, the post office agreed. It quickly made its way from Long Island to a post office distribution center in New Jersey. Where it then sat for almost two weeks. It appeared to be lost in transit. Eventually, someone must have tripped over it and got it on the right truck, because it showed up on Saturday. It’s pretty much what I was expecting so far.

I picked an excellent condition open-box option, which saved about $70. The computer arrived in its original box, and appeared to include all the original items, which was just the charger and a couple papers. My HP Envy x360 15″ is equipped with and AMD Ryzen 4500U, 8 GB of RAM, a 256 GB NVMe SSD and a 250 nit 1080p display. I ordered a 16 GB RAM kit which should be in some time next week. I picked a Ryzen system to take advantage of the excellent on-board graphics capability, and I’ve been pleased with that so far.

I’ve only tried out Civ 6 and Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens, but both have been completely playable at 1080p on medium settings, getting 30-45 fps with no trouble. Neither of those are terribly intense games though, so I’ll have to try out something heavier in the near future. I should also try them out on the old Surface Book to see what a big leap it is.

Other things I like: the keyboard is excellent, and it has a number pad which is nice. It has a little cover for the webcam that’s electronically controlled. The display takes up almost the entire lid. The battery life is good, and it’s very quiet. It’s a new computer, so of course it’s still speedy and uncluttered. I almost love the trackpad. Its clicks are great, and it’s a nice large size. It would be perfect if it was glass instead of plastic.

Which brings me to things I don’t care for: The overall construction, while solid, appears to only use metal on the lid exterior and it doesn’t feel nearly as nice as the Surface, or my wife’s old Lenovo Yoga, which are both all-metal. The screen, which does have nice colors, seems kind of dim to me, but it’s not problematic indoors. This particular laptop has the lowest-end 250 nit display, and there are 300, 400 and 1000 nit versions available. I couldn’t find a 400 nit version anywhere for a reasonable price. Maybe some day in the future I can swap in a used one. The display is of course in the 16:9 format, which frankly sucks for a laptop. It’s way too wide. The 3:2 of the Surface is maybe a tad narrow, but it’s so much better than 16:9, especially for writing. My Surface pen works perfectly with this computer, but with the screen so narrow and ridiculously long in portrait mode, it’s almost pointless to write on it. I don’t think there are any Windows laptops other than the Surface line with a 3:2 screen, and they’re just too expensive now. Dell offers a 16:10 format on there higher-end stuff, but they’re a little too expensive for me. Personally, I think the 4:3 format of the iPad is probably the ideal for non-television screens.

Anyways, I really like it so far. I’m eager to get the new RAM installed and see if that makes any difference to gaming. Task manager showed that all 8 GB were used with Lego Star Wars going. Despite it’s foibles, I think it would be hard to do better for the price.

Some Computer News

Over the last couple days, I’ve acquired a whole bunch of TV shows with the HEVC codec. Not really a problem, but a lot of devices, like a Roku or Fire TV thing, can’t play it directly. That means it has to be transcoded. I use VAAPI in Jellyfin to trancode, but it doesn’t really work with HEVC. I found out the drivers that Debian provides are version 18.something, and I need at least version 20.1 for VAAPI to transcode HEVC video on an AMD graphics card. Those drivers are available in the testing repositories, but the dependency requirements are a little too complicated to make installing them worthwhile. I also put together a VM with Ubuntu 20.10, which has those drivers as standard, but it failed to boot up when I had the GPU passed though to it. The LTS version worked, but like Debian, the drivers are too old. Hopefully the newer drivers make it to Debian’s stable repos sooner rather than later. In the meantime, I’m fine for two reasons: First, I usually watch stuff through Kodi on a computer, which means I can direct play everything; second, my CPU can handle transcoding a couple streams at once, so it’s not a huge problem.

In other news, I ordered a new laptop today. I was eyeing a few during the black Friday week things a couple weeks ago, but decided against it. Today, I was at my parents’ house taking care of some school work. I had my Surface Book (first gen) hooked up to a 1080p monitor for some extra work space. I had Excel, Word, about a dozen Firefox tabs open while playing music on Spotify. It felt a little sluggish and not as responsive as it should be. In fact, when I scrolled though my RSS feeds, the music skipped when it was loading images. CPU usage was 80-95% when watching a 1080p Youtube video with the other stuff open in the background. This isn’t something I do often, and this semester is coming to an end, but I still have two more to go, and it is nice to take my work with me if I want to.

The touch screen on the Surface has also been broken since the summer. It sometimes experiences phantom touches along the bottom inch of the screen. That’s disappointing, but livable. I don’t really use the touchscreen. More unforgivable though, is the stylus situation. It won’t work along the edges of the screen, even after repeated calibrations, rendering it useless. I bought an iPad and Apple Pencil in September to pick up this slack, but I haven’t used it much. I haven’t felt the need to take notes in my classes. It feels like I kind of wasted the money on that, but eBay shows that I should be able to sell the stuff for almost as much as I paid for it if I want.

These issues got me looking for laptops this afternoon. I first turned to Slickdeals to see if there were any good deals out there today. First, I found an HP Pavilion that seemed like a good deal. It had a Ryzen 4700U CPU, 8GB RAM 128 GB NVMe SSD and a 1080p display for $450. Someone left a comment comparing it to a similar Dell. The Dell seemed like a better deal, with a better charging system, two M.2 slots, and 1x 8GB RAM stick (making the upgrade to 16GB easier). I found out from another Slickdeals post that there was 12% off Dell stuff with a sign up at a third-party site. I did that and was ready to order a 15″ Inspiron 5000 for about $500. I read and watched a few reviews, and decided the display and build quality would be too big a step down from the Surface, so I moved on.

I gave Best Buy a look and set my only criteria to an AMD processor and a 1080p display. Another HP popped up, but this time it was an Envy x360 (that means the screen flips all the way around). This one was equipped with a Ryzen 4500U, 256GB NVMe SSD and 8GB RAM for $629 new. I learned in the Best Buy questions and through some research that the RAM and SSD are able to be upgraded, and it’s compatible with an active stylus, like the Surface pen. The upgradability is a must-have for me, and the stylus compatibility is a huge plus. I waffled for a couple hours, but decided to buy an excellent condition open-box one for about $570. It should be in by December 22 they say, but of course I’m hoping it arrives earlier. The AMD processor bests more expensive Intels and has pretty good integrated graphics. I should be able to run some games at 1080p medium settings. It totally murders the i5 6300U in the Surface Book (11,286 passmark score vs. 3,269). The Verge called the 13″ version the best sub-$1000 laptop. I think I’ll probably keep the 256GB SSD for now, but I’ll definitely be upgrading to 16GB RAM as soon as possible. I’m really looking forward to it, and I’ll update when it comes in.

Resurrecting an Old Laptop

I really enjoy bringing old computer hardware back to life. For instance, I used to run a previous blog on a Frankensteined computer composed of old parts from a couple Dell desktops. This time, I brought back my brother’s old laptop. My dad asked me to take a look at it because his current laptop is a dinosaur over 10-years-old and it’s just not cutting it for the work from home stuff.

The laptop in question is an Asus Q501LA, which I feel like was refurbished when we got it a while ago. According to the stickers inside, it was made some time in 2014. It has an Intel Core i5 4200U, 8GB of RAM, a 1080p IPS touch screen, backlit keyboard and originally, a 750GB hard drive. It was a pretty good mid-range laptop back in 2014, or whenever we got it. Along the way, it broke down for some reason, and got put into the attic because my brother needed a working laptop for school immediately. The most obvious problem was cracked glass on the display, which was duct taped to the lid. My dad bought a new piece of glass ages ago, which I was planning on installing.

After a quick diagnosis, I decided it needed a new motherboard to hard drive connecting circuit board. Mostly because it broke when I pulled it out. I surmised that the connector that broke was probably already in bad condition before removal because while the computer’s BIOS loaded, the hard drive wasn’t spinning. Luckily, that part was only about $10 on eBay. I convinced my dad that it’s practically criminal to not have an SSD in a computer these days, so I ordered a 500GB Western Digital Blue SSD.

While waiting on the parts, I decided to take a crack (see what I did there?) at the glass on the screen. I quickly discovered two problems: firstly, the glass is glued to the display behind it really well. I probably wouldn’t be able to separate the two. Secondly, on this computer, the display assembly attaches to the lid with a system of snap-fit connectors, similar to car interior panels. Probably 90% of them were damaged beyond use. My dad decided he was willing to shell out for a replacement screen, thinking that this laptop would still be better than a comparably priced Chromebook or Windows laptop.

When the parts finally arrived, I put everything together ready for some success. Unfortunately, the backlight of the new screen was dim, and flickered rapidly while on the charger. Off the charger, the screen was only barely bright enough to read with total concentration. I thought maybe getting Windows fully installed would fix it up, but it made no difference. I was fairly convinced it was a problem with the motherboard because the screen was bought used from a reputable seller on eBay. Both my dad and I were disappointed. For the last couple days, the laptop sat on my dining room table, waiting to be parted out.

Today, on a whim, I decided to try out the old, cracked screen to verify the new screen was at fault. To my surprise, the new screen looked perfect (other than the broken glass of course). I cleaned off some exposed copper parts on the motherboard where the hinges screw in, thinking that may be part of the problem. Even if it wasn’t, clean parts are better than dirty parts. I screwed the new screen back down, and after a little flickering, it came back and it’s now totally normal. The touch screen stuff doesn’t work, which is a tad disappointing, but my dad doesn’t care. I’m pretty happy that it kind of fixed itself, but I wish I knew exactly what the problem was. So it’s mission accomplished I guess. I’ll drop it off to my dad this weekend and I’m sure he’ll be really happy with it. I don’t think he’s used a computer with an SSD for any length of time, so he’ll probably be blown away by the boot up time.

Website Downtime

On Thursday afternoon, I updated the server hypervisor and restarted it to apply a new kernel update. When it booted up, I couldn’t get to this blog or a couple other web services I run for some reason.

All but one of the broken services used the same virtual network bridge, so I tried switching to a different bridge with no change. I also tired unplugging and replugging the ethernet cable from corresponding port on the network card. The made no difference either.

I took a look at my reverse proxy settings on my router. It appeared that my problem was HAProxy because changing HAProxy settings made some difference. When I disabled the health checking in HAProxy, the sites would load, but very slowly. I thought maybe the router needed to be restarted, so I did that. Unsurprisingly, that made no difference either.

I figured the slow page loading had something to do with the Apache server having a messed up configuration or an incorrect module activated, even though I didn’t change any settings earlier. All the config files looked correct, and all the right modules were loaded. I looked a resource usage and noticed very low ram usage during page loads compared to working services. I tried updating the virtual machines, but that didn’t do anything.

Then I tried updating the working services to see if they’d break. That made no difference (probably a good thing). Finally I tried updating my database server. It couldn’t reach its update server or ping anything. Finally, a problem that could be solved. The DNS server setting was incorrect. I set up a Pi-Hole for my server subnet and I must have changed the DNS server setting in /etc/resolv.conf. Ubuntu uses /etc/netplan to set DNS servers, and I was unaware of that. I corrected the DNS server setting and everything was back to normal.

I just finished up my first week of the new school semester about an hour ago. So far, things are going well. It’s only the first week though, so we’ll see if it stays that way. I’m taking four classes: operating systems, networking 2, and a class each on Excel and Access. The operating systems class seems like stuff I’m already somewhat familiar with and it’s going to end with setting up a homelab-esque network with Windows server and active directory. I have no experience with that, but I’m looking forward to learning. Networking seems like mostly a review of the second half of networking 1 from last semester. Cisco shuffled the curriculum around I guess. I’m not even mad. These two classes are the regular self-paced online class where there isn’t any face-to-face with the teacher. The Excel and Access classes are taught by the same person, which is neat I guess. Those are going fairly slowly so far, but I’m sure they’ll pick up as the class gets more comfortable with the programs. Those classes were planned to be on campus, but due to the pandemic, they’re also online. We all gather in a Zoom meeting instead of a classroom. I don’t really mind the virtual class thing, but I don’t think it would be anyone’s first choice.

I’m disappointed that my school is using Zoom, because it’s a totally unproven piece of software whose owners/executives have bowed to Chinese pressure to silence dissidents who aren’t even in China. My school has some sort of deal with Microsoft for email and Office 365, which I have to assume comes with Microsoft Teams and involves some exchange of money. A Zoom package for a large organization also costs money. Why would you pay for worse software when you already have something perfectly functional? I’m really, really disappointed in my school.

But whatever I guess. I only have this semester and then one more before I graduate. Hopefully I won’t have too much trouble finding a big boy job in a year or so. I’m looking forward to making some real money so I can get a car. I’m tired my old salvage stuff and I’m willing to trade more money in exchange for a more solid car. On the other hand, I noticed that supercharged 2012 Range Rovers are in the $15,000-$18,000 range, which would probably be attainable. I would love a Range Rover, but it’s a Range Rover. Probably known more for its unreliability even more than its luxuriousness and off-road ability. I’m not sure if I want another car with a reputation like that.

In other news, my dad has asked me to troubleshoot my brother’s old laptop so my dad can use it. Currently, my dad is using a laptop that’s probably 10 years old at this point. It blows, in my opinion, but he soldiers on. My brother had a fairly decent Asus laptop that stopped working for some reason. He needed a laptop right away for school, so he just got a new one. I’ll be checking out the old Asus on the weekend. I hope I can get it going again because it’s fun to “supercharge” older computers I think. If I can get it running again, I plan to install some more memory (8GB at least, unless it already has that much), an inexpensive SSD and probably some fresh thermal paste on the surfaces that require it. Plus a thorough cleaning. My brother’s laptops get gross as hell very quickly. There will be more on this computer over the weekend.

Here’s an update on a little bit of everything:

The computer stuff is working great. The TV set up seems to be working just fine, despite its Rube Goldbergian nature. In fact it’s probably working even better than the old set up. With the old set up, I’d have to restart the living room computer (containing the TV tuner) occasionally and often when I’d be getting comfortable in bed for the night. So far, no restarts of the cetonproxy virtual machine have been required. I suspected network performance might be degraded by having a network TV tuner, but it has not been impacted at all. I’ve been acquiring more TV shows and movies from a variety of sources and Jellyfin handles them with no trouble. I’m sure my system isn’t the sleekest out there, but it gets the job done for me. I’m sure I’ll make more adjustments in the future though.

On the car side, things are finally starting to return to normal. My car has been on jack stands in the driveway for two or three weeks now. I’ve been having a problem with erratic and incorrect readings from the right rear wheel speed sensor. I swapped the sensor with the left side and had no change. I decided to replace the right rear wheel bearing because it contains a magnetic wheel that the sensor reads to generate a signal. It’s not possible to see this ring without taking the bearing out of the spindle, so I decided for $50 or so, I might as well replace it if I take it out. So I got the new bearing installed in the span of a day, but had trouble putting the axle into the bearing. It’s an extremely tight fit, which I think is normal for my type of car. I tried hitting it cup portion of the axle with a hammer and pry bar to drive it into the bearing, but I poked a hole in that cup. So I need an axle. I took a chance on one labeled for an automatic version of my car for only $60. The flange on the differential side was 10mm too small to bolt up. So I sent it back and spend about triple the price on one that should fit my manual car. It should arrive by the end of the week I hope. I also hope it slides into the bearing easily like the automatic axle.

In the meantime, the air conditioning in my wife’s car quit working. I bought a set of manifold gauges to see what was going on inside the system. The gauge reading led me to suspect a broken expansion valve. My initial plan to remedy this was to have a local shop discharge the AC, then I would replace the valve myself, and go back to have the system recharged. I called a shop and they said it would cost $120 to do that. Way more than I was hoping to spend. So I decided to buy a vacuum pump and a few pounds of refrigerant for about the same price and do it myself. After draining the refrigerant, I set about replacing the valve. I was hoping I’d be able to take the valve out under the hood where the AC pipes go in and out of the cabin. Unfortunately, whoever at Honda designed that hole made it a few millimeters too small to get the valve out through it. So what could have been a half hour job took several hours (I did stop for breaks a few times). I had to remove the glove box, the cabin fan and a couple more pieces of plastic to take out the evaporator and then replace the expansion valve. Installation was the reverse of removal. Happily, the new valve did the trick, and the AC works again. I don’t think it’s quite as good as before though. With the car stopped in 90 degree heat, the air is cool but not cold. Moving along it’s fine. I’m so glad to have a car with working air conditioning again.

That’s it for now I guess. Computer things have been pretty static lately. I’m thinking about getting a Minecraft server going. I never really got into Minecraft back in the day, but I really want to. I’m usually a fan of open-ended games like Cities Skylines or No Man’s Sky, but maybe Minecraft is too open-ended. I did install a shader and neat texture pack, which makes a huge difference in the visuals. Maybe I’ll have to see if my brother can help me get into it.

TV is Working, More or Less

So I’ve gotten the TV working on the new system. It’s kind of a convoluted set up, but it works just about perfectly so far. I have coaxial cable coming into the office from the ONT in the basement, and that goes into a Ceton InfiniTV 6 Eth cable card TV tuner. The tuner is connected by ethernet to the Cisco switch and in turn to an ethernet port on the server. To my surprise, the tuner was plug and play with the switch. I was expecting to have to adjust some settings, but it worked right out of the box.

The tuner is accessed directly by a Windows 10 VM running a piece of software called cetonproxy. This makes the Ceton tuner appear to be an HDHomerun to other programs. It’s a Windows-only thing right now unfortunately, so I have 3 cores and 5GB of memory dedicated to a VM just to run this little utility. I’ve never used a container, but this seems like a good use case for one. I don’t know if it’s feasible to run Windows stuff inside a container, but I’ll have to do a little research.

After cetonproxy works its magic, the tuner is usable as an HDHomerun on everything. I initially wanted Jellyfin to handle all the TV tuning stuff, but it turned out the Jellyfin plugin for Kodi doesn’t really do live TV. It lets you watch channels, but there’s no guide or access to recordings, so it’s kind of useless in my opinion. This meant I had to use NextPVR to do my TV tuning.

I generally like NPVR, and I’ve been using it as my TV solution for about a year and a half. It does everything I need a PVR package to do, but it always felt a little bit rough around the edges to me. That’s probably because it’s developed largely by one person, and he can only do so much. It’s closed source, so no one else can contribute. I personally feel like the developer could have a much more robust package if he open-sourced it, but whatever. In the fall, he released a huge update to the program, and created a version for Linux.

After a couple false starts, I had the Linux version installed. The documentation for NPVR v5 is very sparse, and almost nonexistent for the Linux version. The web interface that’s now used to control the program seems to include fewer settings than the old set up, and the descriptions of the settings are very brief. This is something that could be vastly improved in an open source project. I’ll be researching to see if tvheadend can replace NPVR for me.

Yesterday, I recorded a bunch of shows. NPVR, and I assume most other PVR programs, record shows to a .ts file. I’m not sure what kind of encoding these files use, but it results in huge file sizes. A two hour-ish recording of the move Tangled resulted in a ~15GB file. That’s not a whole lot smaller than a similar-length Blu-Ray rip with multiple DTS and AC3 audio tracks. Handily, NPVR includes an option to automatically re-encode recordings after they finish. There is a choice between CPU and VAAPI (graphics card) encoding. Since I had the GPU set up for Jellyfin, I figured that would be the thing to use. I set it, and it didn’t work. I got some help from a rather brusque forum member. Turns out the developer omitted a line or two of code that is needed when selecting the VAAPI option. Again, something that probably wouldn’t happen in an open source project. So for now, VAAPI is useless. Additionally, either VAAPI sucks or my GPU (an RX480 4GB) does, because it can only process one of those .ts files at half speed, which means it takes 10 minutes to encode 5 minutes of video. I’m very disappointed because my RTX 2080 Super, which I know is a significantly better GPU, can plow through a 2 hour Blu-Ray rip in 20 minutes or so using NVENC. The CPU encoding option is much faster, at double speed, meaning a 5 minute video would take 2.5 minutes to encode. This uses 20 virtual cores though. I’ll have to see how it works with multiple simultaneous encoding jobs. I only have 32 cores to give, and the rest of the VMs need some too. For now though, I don’t have a choice.

Another fly in the ointment is Jellyfin and its NPVR plugin, which allows Jellyfin to use NPVR as a backend for TV services. I had it going in a test when I was using the old PCI tuner, but since I set up and then removed the tuners on Jellyfin, I can’t get it working again. There’s an update to Jellyfin out that I’ll probably install next week, so we’ll see if that fixes it. That successful test also used an older version of NPVR, which might have something to do with it. I don’t want to use the old version though. Overall, I’m satisfied. I get TV on my TVs, so I guess I can’t complain too much.