Month: September 2015

Windows Update woes

I have a work laptop that I don’t actually use that often. For security reasons, we can only VPN in from a company-controlled machine, though, so if I want to be able to VPN in from home at all, I need a company-issued laptop.

I try to remember to bring it in to work with me at least once a month, so I can log in to my domain account, pull down Windows Updates, virus definitions, and so on. Well, when I brought it in recently, I noticed that it wasn’t pulling down any updates, and hadn’t since July. So I started troubleshooting. It turns out that Windows Update is still pretty opaque (though there is a log file you can look at). I found a lot of advice about how to kick-start the update process and get it going again, but I didn’t find anything that applied to my situation and worked.

Eventually, I gave up and sent an email to our help desk. Now, obviously, this isn’t a critical issue, so I didn’t get a quick response. But I did get a response eventually, with a question, which I answered. Then, when I didn’t get any follow-up response, and I had a little downtime, I decided to poke around a bit more. (That was probably a mistake.)

I saw in the update history that a few updates had failed back in June. There were some successful ones in July, though, so I wasn’t sure that was the problem. But I decided that maybe rolling back to a system restore point from back in June might get me back to a stable point, from which I could get updates going again.

I did that, but then found myself getting this exciting error message: “The trust relationship between this workstation and the primary domain failed.” So rolling back so far basically broke the link between the laptop and Active Directory. When I searched for that error, I was surprised to see a recent blog post from Raymond Chen about it. His blog often has some interesting and fun stuff on it. And the comments are often pretty interesting too.

I was pretty sure I wouldn’t have adequate rights to remove and re-join my laptop from our domain, so I handed it off to one of our support techs, so now it’s his problem, but I feel a little guilty about it for some reason. It feels kind of weird to be working for an organization where I don’t have admin rights to anything, after my long stint at a previous employer, where I had admin rights to everything. Here, I can’t join a machine to a domain, nor can I look at our WSUS server to see what’s going on. But, heck, I probably shouldn’t be messing with that stuff anyway at this stage in my career, right?

HiFiBerry DAC and Volumio setup

My HiFiBerry DAC arrived from Switzerland yesterday. (Amazing how fast something can get from Switzerland to NJ for only $11.) I took my Raspberry Pi out of the old case, plugged the DAC into it (and screwed everything together) and put the whole thing into the new case. Getting Volumio to use the DAC was easy; it’s just a selection from a drop-down menu under the settings page.

The new case is a nifty little snap-together thing made out of transparent plastic. (A small part of it cracked off while I was putting it together, but it’s fine.) I’m not hearing a huge difference in sound quality compared to using the headphone jack on the Pi, but I think I can detect some difference. (It might just be my imagination though.) Keep in mind that I don’t have a terribly high-end setup, so “your mileage may vary” as the saying goes. Also, I haven’t tried any lossless files yet, just regular MP3s and AACs.

And I got a 128GB USB thumb drive from Amazon, which is now plugged into the Pi, in place of the 32GB drive I was previously using. I’m going through my music collection alphabetically, and copying selected stuff over to it. I’ve done A through H now, and still have plenty of space left.

So I think I may have hit on a good working setup for this thing now. It’s relatively convenient to use, sounds good, and doesn’t take up much space, make any noise, or use much power.

inbox zero and project review

On this weekend and last weekend, I managed to get a lot of general clean-up stuff done. I’ve got my personal GMail account at inbox zero. (And I got my work mail down to zero too.) I downloaded and reviewed a bunch of financial statements and similar stuff that I’d been putting off for too long. And I got a lot of music-related organization and clean-up done (though my CDs are still not in alphabetical order).

So I’m thinking a bit about projects that I started, but put on hold at some point, and whether or not I should pick them up again, or if I should look for some new stuff to do.

I started learning Ruby (and Ruby on Rails) earlier this year. I read all the way through a good general book on Ruby, and started into a RoR book, but didn’t finish it. I’d kind of like to pick that up again, but I haven’t quite talked myself into it.

I also spent some time this year learning about SharePoint. I made a certain amount of progress with that, and came close to completing a SharePoint project at work, but then priorities shifted, and that project got put on hold, along with a bunch of other SharePoint stuff I was going to do. I’ll probably get back to those projects late this year or early next year.

I haven’t done anything with EdX or Coursera since the Superheroes course, which was really more for fun than a real educational course. So I should probably think about doing some kind of structured course for the fall.

So here I am, on a Sunday night in September, thinking about what I’m going to do with my spare time for the next few months. Hopefully, I can come up with something better than “watch Columbo episodes on Netflix”, which was kind of my summer project, to be honest. (I’m exaggerating. I did a lot of good stuff this summer. But I also watched a lot of Columbo.)

playing with Volumio

I’ve made some progress with Volumio, and I’m having fun with it, so I thought I’d write a follow-up to my previous post.

The DAC that I ordered from HiFiBerry has shipped, but it turns out they’re in Switzerland, so it’s going to take a while to get here. (I’d have know that if I’d read their about page.) So I’ve decided to go ahead and start using the Pi as-is, through the headphone jack. Sound quality is OK, but I’m hoping the DAC improves it.

I’ve installed MPoD on my iPhone, and I think that’s the best way to control Volumio, though it doesn’t let you start a web radio station; it’s just good for your local music. But it’s much better for navigating my music collection than the Volumio web interface. I may mess around with other MPD clients at some point, and see if I can find a good one for Mac and/or Windows, but I’m fine with just MPoD for now.

I’m still not sure how I want to hook up my music collection to the Pi, but for now, I’m using a 32 GB USB thumb drive. As of this morning, I’ve copied over about 6GB worth of music, which is enough to mess around with, but not really a significant portion of my collection. Yesterday, I saw a 128 GB thumb drive on sale for $30, so maybe that’s the way to go.

I wasn’t initially that interested in the web radio functionality of Volumio, but I think it might come in handy. Where I live, I don’t have much luck receiving radio signals (too far from both New York and Philly), so I don’t listen to much radio at home. But, if I can get a few interesting stations set up, maybe that will be useful. Volumio ships with a bunch of stations already set up, but around half of them don’t work. I figured out enough to add a couple of stations on my own, but I only got one working, WXPN, which is a Philly station that I can usually pick up on my stereo, but not always. I’ve also tried getting WQXR set up, but I haven’t gotten that working. And WFMU is one of the stations in the default list that works, so that’s cool. I used to listen to them a lot, before I moved out of their range.

So I’m having fun with this. It’s giving me a chance to dig into my music collection, and find stuff I haven’t listened to in a long time. And it’s motivating me to organize the collection a bit more.

And it’s fun to play with the Raspberry Pi. I have a few ideas about other uses for a Pi, so I may find myself ordering another one at some point.

Fun with the Raspberry Pi

I ordered a Raspberry Pi kit earlier this week, and it showed up in the mail yesterday. I ordered this kit from Amazon. It’s a nicely-packaged kit, with the Pi, a case, a power supply, a wifi dongle, an SD card, and a few other things.

The SD card comes with the standard NOOBS image on it already. My intention was to wipe that out and install Volumio, but I thought I’d give the standard setup a try, just to see how it worked. To do that, I had to hook the Pi up to a USB keyboard and mouse, and an HDMI monitor. My normal computer monitor doesn’t have HDMI, so I had to use my TV instead. That was a little awkward, since I don’t have a good surface for the mouse close enough to the TV, but I managed. The standard setup is quite easy, and doesn’t require an internet connection. Basically, it just allows you to set a few parameters, then it installs Raspbian Linux onto the SD card. From there, you can use the command line or start a GUI shell. I messed around with that for a while, then unhooked everything, so I could get Volumio installed.

To do that, I had to download the Volumio install image, and write it to the MicroSD card. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to do that, since I don’t have a MicroSD slot on my PC, but I managed to find a MicroSD to SD adapter in my pile of random memory cards, and used that to get the MicroSD card into my PC. From there, I followed the simple instructions on Volumio’s site, cross-referencing this useful blog post. You can set up Volumio without hooking up a monitor or keyboard. You just need to plug the Pi into a wired Ethernet connection to get the initial setup done. So I did that, and got it set up through the browser interface at volumio.local. I set up my wifi card, then unplugged the Ethernet cable, rebooted, and all was well. To test it, I copied a Paul McCartney album to a USB thumb drive and plugged it in. I also plugged headphones into the audio out jack. Volumio had no trouble seeing the USB drive, and the audio played through the headphones, no problem. The audio quality coming out of the standard output jack isn’t great though. (I also plugged it in to my receiver, to try that out, and it sounds OK there, but still not great.)

So I ordered a DAC with RCA output jacks from HiFiBerry this morning. And a new case from them too, since the one from CanaKit isn’t going to work with the DAC on top of the Pi. I’m hopeful that this will give me acceptable sound quality. Between the kit from CanaKit, and the stuff from HiFiBerry, I’ve now spent more than $100 on this project, so I’m going to feel a little stupid if it doesn’t sound at least as good as a $100 CD player.

The next part of the project is going to be figuring out how I want to get my music collection hooked up to the Pi. The USB thumb drive I used for testing was formatted as FAT, so I’m glad to see that I don’t have to use an EXT4 formatted drive, or jump through any hoops to get the Pi to recognize a FAT drive. I had bookmarked a good writeup on dealing with different file systems on the Pi, but I don’t think I’ll need to worry about it. So I should be able to use either a USB thumb drive, or a USB hard drive for my music. The thumb drive would be easier, since I won’t have to worry about power. I have a 32GB thumb drive that I’m not using, but that’s not quite big enough for everything. A 64GB drive would only cost about $20 and would be big enough to fit my main MP3 collection. I also have several USB hard drives gathering dust in my apartment, including a small 120GB drive that would probably be perfect for this. I’m not sure if the Pi would provide enough power for it though, so that could be an issue. So I guess the next part of this project, while I’m waiting for the DAC to get here, will be to experiment with hard drives and thumb drives.

Labor Day

As I posted a few days ago, I’ve been thinking about the way I listen to music a lot lately. I have a rough plan sketched out to consolidate a lot of my music collection, then copy it to a USB hard drive and listen to it with a small Raspberry Pi device that’s connected to my main stereo.

I’ve completed the first part of this plan, which was to merge the iTunes libraries on my Mac and PC. I had looked at a few possible ways to do that, and settled on SuperSync. I bought a two-seat license to it, and installed one on my Mac and one on my PC. I didn’t actually run a full merge of the two libraries. Rather, I found all the full albums that were on my Mac but not my PC, and copied them over to the PC. So now the PC definitely has a copy of all the full albums that I’ve either ripped from CD or bought from iTunes (or Amazon or wherever else). My full music library is around 50 GB now. (That’s just music, not video.) So that’s pretty substantial, but not out of control.

I would recommend SuperSync to anyone else needing to do something like this. It’s fairly easy to use, and I didn’t have any problems connecting the two computers over the network and transferring files between libraries.

So now the next part of the plan is to rip some CDs. I’ve ripped a fair number already, whenever I had a CD that I wanted to listen to on my iPod or iPhone. But I have hundreds of CDs that I haven’t ripped.

When I started thinking about this, I remembered that I had a ridiculous number of CDs in the trunk of my car. With my old car, I had a six-CD changer in the trunk, and I used to buy a lot of music in MP3 format from emusic, then burn regular audio CDs, and listen to them in the car. So I just kept tossing CDs into cardboard boxes in the trunk. And sometimes I’d take some regular CDs out to the car, then they’d wind up in those boxes in the trunk and never get back inside the house. Well, when I got my new car, I just moved those boxes to the trunk of the new car. But I have an aux jack in this car, so I can just plug in my iPhone. I do listen to CDs in the car occasionally, but all those burned CDs in the trunk have really become just dead weight.

So instead of doing something normal and fun for Labor Day, I decided to clean out the trunk of my car and go through all those CDs. Most of the burned CDs went straight in the garbage. The regular CDs are getting tossed back in with my main CD collection.

I also remembered that the single-disc CD player in my current car can play MP3 CDs. I’d always meant to try that out, but never got around to it. So I decided that I could put together a much more focused CD collection for the car, with just MP3 CDs, so each CD could have a half-dozen albums on it. And I also figured that I could start on some more CD ripping too, maybe ripping some of my favorite old CDs, then consolidating them on MP3 CDs.

So I started this morning, and now it’s almost 3pm. I made ten MP3 CDs total, and I even went out to the car and double-checked them to make sure they were playable. (And they are!) So I’ve got maybe 60 hours of music, which ought to keep me out of trouble for a while. (And, yes, I could have just loaded all this music to an iPod or something, but the nice thing about the MP3 CDs is that I can use the regular controls on the CD player to control things, instead of having to fumble around trying to deal with an iPod. Also, I don’t have a working iPod, and I don’t have enough room on my phone to load a lot of music, and I have an ample supply of blank CD-Rs. So this way works better and doesn’t cost me anything.)

Overall, I’ve now got another 20 or 30 CDs ripped, I’ve organized my collection a bit more, and I’ve cleaned out the car a good bit. So that was worth doing, though if I have to tell anyone at work tomorrow what I did on Labor Day, they’re going to think I’m a nerd and/or an idiot for wasting a perfectly nice day.

By the way, I stuck with iTunes for the CD ripping, tweaking my settings a bit so I’d be getting fairly high-quality VBR MP3s. I still want to try dBpoweramp, but I don’t think I need it. Recently, I had been allowing iTunes to rip CDs with its default settings, but that leaves me with AAC files instead of MP3 files, and my car CD player can’t read AAC’s. (I was pretty sure it wouldn’t, but I checked and verified that it can’t.) So now I’m going to be sure I rip only to MP3.

thinking about music

Listening to music used to be pretty simple. I’d turn on the stereo, put a record on the turntable, and that was it. It’s gotten a lot more complicated now, though, and I’ve been going back and forth on a few things, thinking about what kind of hardware, software, and services I use to consume music.

I could (and probably will) write a new post about how I’m listening to music on my iPhone right now, but this particular post is going to be about listening to music at home.

I have a fairly old, but still good, stereo setup: a receiver with a handful of standard RCA inputs, and a decent pair of speakers. I used to have a low-end DVD player hooked up to it, which I was using as a CD player, but that broke a while back. (I hooked that up after my original CD player broke.) And I used to have a turntable and a cassette player, but I got rid of those a long time ago. I have a mini-stereo cable hooked in to one of the RCA inputs, and I plug that into my iPhone when I want to listen to, say, Slacker on my stereo. But I currently have no way to listen to CDs on it, or to stream music from my Mac or PC to it. I can also listen to music via my Roku, Apple TV, or PS3 (using various services), but I need to have the TV turned on to use any of those, and I don’t really like to have to leave the TV on while I’m listening to music. It generates a fair bit of heat, and a little noise. (If there was a way for the TV to pass the audio out without having the screen on, that might work, but my TV doesn’t do that.) And I can use the PS3 to listen to regular audio CDs of course, but that’s serious overkill, given the amount of noise and heat produced by the TV and PS3 combined.

So I’d been halfheartedly looking for a new CD player to hook up to the stereo. Well, it turns out, nowadays, that it isn’t as easy to find a small, simple, CD player with regular RCA outputs as it used to be. One limiting factor for me is that I don’t have that much room, so I need a small one. (I actually have my Dad’s old 5 CD changer, and that would work fine, but I just can’t fit it on my shelf.)

So now I’ve been thinking that I’m really a bit behind the times, and I should instead come up with a good way to pipe my digital music collection through my stereo.

First, I started thinking about consolidating the two iTunes libraries that I currently have. I have separate libraries on my Mac and my PC, with significant overlap. But there’s a lot of stuff I ripped to the Mac and never copied to the PC, and vice versa. So, first, I’m looking at ways to merge my iTunes libraries. I looked at a few programs, and SuperSync looks like it would be the best option for me. If it works as advertised, I should be able to install it on my Mac and on my PC, and consolidate the libraries over my network, without pulling over all the duplicates.

Second, I started thinking about ripping all of my CDs. I’ve ripped a number of them already, maybe 20-30% of the CDs I own, but I haven’t ripped everything. I’d say I have a couple of hundred CDs that I don’t have in my iTunes library. So I considered doing something vaguely fancy, like using dBpoweramp to rip them to FLAC, so I’d have lossless copies. Or maybe using EAC. But after thinking about it, I think I’d be fine just using iTunes, and ripping them using the higher-quality AAC settings, or maybe the Apple lossless format.

From there, I’m thinking about building a little box with a Raspberry Pi running Volumio or OSMC. I would just attach a USB hard drive to it with all my music files, and plug it into my receiver with the regular mini-stereo output on the Pi. (And if that doesn’t sound good enough, I could add a DAC with RCA outputs to the Pi.) So that would be small enough to fit on my shelf, use minimal power, make very little noise, and it should be controllable from my laptop and my phone, via a web interface.

I’m not sure how far I’m going to get with this plan. And there are a number of alternatives which might be simpler than my Raspberry Pi plan. But I had some fun today investigating software and hardware options for this. And I like the idea of messing around with a Pi and some open-source audio software. If I go that route, and it works well, maybe I can consider trying some other Raspberry Pi projects.