Category: Technology

I’ve got that new tablet that I’ve been writing about, the Teclast X16, and I want to be able to “watch TV” on it.  No, not live TV (except for the occasional truly live event, I have little use for live TV) but shows that have been recorded on MythTV.  The shows are on the server and I could stream them from there using a MythTV Android client.  And that does work.  But if I can avoid needing a network connection, I’ll be better off and most importantly, then my TV can travel with me.

The “tPad” does communicate through Bluetooth and I could use a BT file transfer to load files to it.  But I really don’t want to struggle with those kinds of connections.  I could also do a USB transfer which skips the flakey BT connection but then I still have to worry about filling up the “drive”.  I’d rather use the SD card slot on the tPad to store the stuff to watch.  (Technically, it is a Micro SD and it is labeled as TF.  Since I’ll be using an SD adapter to write to it from the MythTV server, for the rest of this post I’ll just refer to it as an SD card.)  And rather than stuff in an empty card and then transfer stuff to the tPad and store it on the SD card, way easier to just put the SD card into my MythTV server and drop the files on the card there.  Sure, there’s an element of sneaker-net involved.  But this isn’t something I’m going to do daily and it really isn’t too much trouble to stuff a card into the front panel of the MythTV server.  Besides, this way, if the SD card fills up, I know I have enough TV to last me a good long while and don’t have to worry about breaking the tPad functionality by accidentally filling up the main “drive”.  The only real hard part was setting up MythTV to automate getting the recordings to the SD card.

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I bought my Teclast X16 Pro from Gear Best at the end of January.  I previously wrote about my initial thoughts on the device and my opinion hasn’t changed since.  I still think the device is pretty good overall.  But it still has serious battery issues and a WiFi problem.  The battery drains completely within 48 hours without using the device at all so it appears that the device never properly sleeps.  And the WiFi will only find 2.4 Ghz networks, not any 5 Ghz networks.  Over the last couple of months I’ve been trying to figure out what to do about these two issues.  And I’ve been keeping my eye on a third potential issue – that the screen occasionally flickers.

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Have you noticed a WiFi network near your house with the name “xfinitywifi”?  Have you thought it interesting that the signal seemed to be as strong as your own network in your house?  If you are a Comcast network customer, it’s probably your own networking hardware offering you an alternate connection.  Comcast has their hardware default to a setup that provides a public access point for everyone under the name “xfinitywifi”.  Their idea is somewhat admirable: save the ordinary customer the trouble of configuring a guest network and at the same time, enable every customer of theirs able to access any Comcast WiFi network anywhere.

There are a few problems, though.  First is that you have to be a Comcast customer to use the guest network and I assume you don’t select your friends based on whether or not they use the same ISP as you.  Secondly, the sign in requires you to sign in to Comcast meaning you have to go through extra login with credentials that you hopefully remember every time you connect.  Third, any knucklehead with a Comcast account walking down the street can pause in front of your house and use your bandwidth.

I had seen xfinitywifi show up in a site survey and I concluded that it was my neighbors who hadn’t bothered to customize their SSID.  I replaced my cable modem as part of a network overhaul at my house and after I did so, I noticed a new and stronger xfinitywifi signal.  I was able to look at the network info and MAC address and figure out that that new network was coming from my hardware in addition to the private network.  (And I realized that while I was correct about the previous conclusion about the signal coming from my neighbors, I didn’t realize that I was effectively seeing two signals from each Comcast neighbor.)  Since I use my own routers, I set the Comcast cable modem to “bridge mode” which means it disables the wireless signal.  Except it actually leaves the xfinitywifi network active!  And there’s no way in the configuration pages to disable it.

The way you manage it, believe it or not, is through your Comcast account.  The easiest thing to do is to login to your Comcast account in your web browser.  Then open a new tab and paste in this URL:  https://customer.xfinity.com/WifiHotspot  Choose the “Disable” radio button and click Save.  So it’s pretty easy to do when you know where to go.  But who would have thought to do that?

I wonder why Comcast wants to have users control this behavior through their site.  Perhaps this is something they want to track and the settings in an individual cable modem are not things they can “see”?  Okay, so it isn’t really a Trojan Horse, since the public network packets that are sneaking through the cable modem that you let into your house aren’t going to escape the cable modem and unlock your front door.  But still, it seems that Comcast should be more upfront about what’s going on in the hardware they give you.

By now I’m sure you’ve ready my Pulitzer winning articles from Part 1 and Part 2?  Good, so I don’t need to repeat myself.  I’ll just summarize briefly: I was able to improve performance somewhat by replacing a router that seemed to be failing but I couldn’t improve any more on either of my two routers through either firmware updates or through antenna modifications.  The performance had plateaued but not as high as I thought it should have.  I thought I should be able to get better results and I wanted to try a bit more to improve things.

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After having resolved some of the glitchy behavior I was seeing with my WiFi in my house, I wanted to go a little further and improve the signal strength.  The easiest way to do that seemed to be to mess around with the antennae on the two routers.

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10 years ago, WiFi needs were simple. WiFi was a nice to have and I put the router in the attic of the house so the signal could reach all of the house. We have what is called a “two and a half” story house which means that we have two living floors plus an attic you can walk up to. It’s not a big house as each floor isn’t very large, but we do have a cube, more or less, where our height is about the same as the length and width, not including the attic and the basement. Therefore, the signal in the attic meant good coverage to the second floor below it where my office is and adequate coverage of the first floor. The basement had basically zero coverage but who cares – it’s a basement.

Shortly after we got some WiFi cameras and a dedicated camera viewer device that needed to work well on the first floor.  We also had people visiting with WiFi enabled laptops.  So the WiFi needs had escaped the office and were now everywhere in the house.  I added an older router to use as an access point in the first floor kitchen and that had our coverage working pretty well.

Now, of course, WiFi is all important.  The wife’s iPad, our two smartphones, my new tablet, all are primary devices now.  And everything we do on them needs the network.  And the WiFi setup I had setup years ago just wasn’t cutting it for these modern needs.  For years, the cameras and camera viewer have been dropping out frequently.  It’s frustrating, but hardly mission critical.  More recently, I noticed that when I am home and check my e-mail on my phone through WiFi, the e-mail has to wait about 1 minute for it to decide if can get messages and it frequently gives up.  On the other hand, if I leave the house and am only on the cell network, my e-mail zips right through in an instant.  That’s not the way it is supposed to work.  What good is WiFi if I’m better off with the cell network?

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A month ago, I wrote about what I was looking for in a tablet and why I thought the Teclast X16 Pro was the right choice.  Now, the tablet has arrived and I have had a chance to play around with it.  So in this post, I’m going to talk about getting the tablet shipped form China and what I think of it so far.

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Years ago I set up a share on my Mac’s Media hard drive so that I could share the iTunes files with MythTV.  (Note that I did this before MythMusic was ruined – not that it was great before but at least it was usable.)  Now, various upgrades later, the CIFS share is no longer visible on MythTV.  The share root shows up but nothing shows up inside.  Even though MythMusic is no longer pleasant to use, it may be again someday.  (Or may already be as of this writing but I haven’t yet updated MythTV to get the improvement).  And it does fulfill a purpose occasionally.  So I wanted to get it working again.

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This one has been bothering me for ages.  I set up the receiver to get the HDMI signal from the computer running MythTV.  And for those not previously familiar with my MythTV builds, I use Mythbuntu for my builds.  So basically, my Ubuntu’s computer HDMI output was too low for the receiver.

How would one measure “too low”?  Well, if the receiver is turned up to nearly max volume and your kids can drown out the voices on the TV, then the output from MythTV is too low.  Also, when switching sources on the receiver from plain old FM to MythTV, the volume would drop significantly.  So it’s been clear I’ve had an issue and I have been turning the receiver up to compensate.  Now it’s time to fix it.

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I’d kept the old Hacintosh going for a while but I still wanted to be able to use iCloud on it.  So I had found a way to get the Address Book app to forcibly connect to the iCloud server.  Now on the new Hacintosh, I didn’t need that any more and the normal iCloud behavior works well with the new Contacts app.  Except because I did a user transfer, and because the transfer process is so thorough, it picked up the old server and faithfully moved it to the new computer.  So for a while, I’ve had two iCloud accounts visible where one of them fails to work; it’s been confusing and annoying.  But I couldn’t remember how I had gone about adding the iCloud account and therefore what I would need to do to remove it.

Today I finally got around to finding the instructions I had followed to set up that link in the first place.  Ah-ha, so there’s a folder in ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/Sources that corresponds to each source.  Inside each of the folders in this directory is a Configuration.plist file and only one of those files showed evidence of the hack from before.  The second to last key in the file is username and the string value that follows showed the %40icloud.com:password string that I had input to get it working.  Therefore, the easy way to clean out that whole source is to simply move the directory that contains the old hacked Configuration.plist to somewhere temporary, like the desktop.  Once I was able to confirm that the Contacts app comes up with the right info and no longer includes the dead hack, I could delete that folder from the temporary location.