Wow. The signal from upstairs is so strong, that I go downstairs again, the phone does not switch access point and retains the connection. Maybe I should think about replace the Netgear downstairs with a Siemens 😉
Aug 192013
Aug 182013
Finally I solved my wi-fi problem that I was having upstairs. In the bedroom and bathroom I have a weak signal, and sometimes in the middle of a page reload or a game load, it would switch to my providers network (3G). Upstairs in the computerroom or on the roof-terrace I have no wi-fi signal whatsoever.
Until now.
I thought, why not try the old Siemens SX762 ADSL router, and just skip the ADSL part? Turns out it can be used without ADSL, and LAN-port4 can be used to uplink. With that port connected to my switch upstairs I now have wi-fi there. It’s only 54g, but good enough for the phone.
Yeah!
Aug 082013
Experimenting with Spotify, throw (Sony), DLNA, uPnP and knowing that my Squeezebox server is something that will obsolete in a while, I found something that might just be right. Of course it does not have the nice hardware like the Squeezebox itself, but I get some stuff in return.
I found Plex. It is a mediaserver that you run on a computer in your home. It indexes your music, your movies, and your pictures. And with the Plex clients, you can browse and even play that content. DLNA browsing is not so surprising, but DLNA by itself does not help if the browser/client does not know how to handle a specific filetype. My phone does not know how to handle a movie in MKV format. It does not recognize my camera’s RAW format. Plex does. And it does it well.
The client app on my phone was not free, it was € 3.71 or something like US$ 5.
When connected to WiFi on my local LAN, I can play content (movies will be the main bottleneck) in any quality, even 20Mbps in 1080p is no problem. But you don’t always have your own WiFi at your disposal, that’s why you can connect your server to myPlex. On the server you enter the myPlex account information, and you enter the same credentials in the Android app. This is how they find each other, much like the Squeezebox has.
Now I can still see everything on my server, and from within the client I can choose the quality I want the data to be streamed to me. If you’re on a tight data-subscription, you can turn the quality down, but when that is of no concern you can turn it up as much as you like (or as much as your provider lets you).
Just tested all this, and tonight in the restaurant I could show a movie in full HD with subtitles. Over just 3G. Don’t worry, it was just a test, we had a lovely dinner with no movies 😉
Aug 032013
Yesterday I started with the “real” Zombies, Run! app, not the 5K training. I knew I had to evade the zombies for real now, noone to protect me or so. Very early in the run, I picked up some supplies. Batteries, a sports bra, things. Not long after that, I got a zombie warning, about 100 meters away from me. Evading the zombies meant accelerating, so I did. But the distance between me and the zombies only got smaller and finally I threw away 3 items from my inventory which seemed to distract the zombies from me. WTF? This pattern continued until the end of the run, so in total: 0 zombies evaded.
Read the FAQ.
Here’s how chases work:
When a Zombie Chase is triggered, the app calculates your average pace over the previous 30 seconds
You must increase your pace by 20% from this average
You must maintain that increased pace for 1 minute in order to escape the zombies.
Right. Should have read that before I ran. Hope things get better on the next run. You can see my run here.
Aug 022013
I never knew that there was Linux support for SQLServer, but it turns out that there is a JDBC 4.0 driver for it that can be used in GeoServer.
From the download, put sqljdbc4.jar in the tomcat/lib directory if you only want JNDI connections, or in the GEOSERVER/WEB-INF/lib directory if you want connections that can be defined in GeoServer as well.
Download the sqlserver plugin for GeoServer, and put the jar file (in my case gt-jdbc-sqlserver-9.3.jar) into the GEOSERVER/WEB-INF/lib directory.
Now restart Tomcat (or just the GeoServer webapp if you don’t want JNDI connections). Now create a new store. Be sure to open up port 1433 on your Windows firewall, or otherwise GeoServer can’t reach it.