Mark's Expeditions in Technology and Life

Greetings from the Nut Hutch. Thailand is in the middle of their Songkran celebrations and it is very hot outside. So I thought today would be a good day to take a break from the heat and celebrations to finish discussing my Stereo Pi project. In my previous post, link , I listed the parts I used in this project. Now it is time to put them all together to make a working system. Speakers Because they were the first component that I had all the parts for, the first thing I assembled were the speakers. As stated before, the speakers I used were originally designed for use with a car stereo. In order to use them properly with a home stereo, some special care had to be taken in their construction. The first has to do with the size of the speaker box. If the box is too large, the low frequencies produced by the speakers will not be heard. On the flip side, if the box is too small, the lows produced will be muddled. I decided to use a very unscientific method to figure out the size of bo...

Greetings from the nut hutch that is my house here in Thailand. While Thailand doesn't celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas like we do in the West, the Expat community here does. So I have been off visiting friends, doing some Christmas shopping, and picking up the latest cold that is going around some of the students I tutor. Next thing I know, it is the middle of December, and I have not put out a blog entry in a while. During my "break", I was issued a challenge by a fellow Expat. To install and use the Manjaro Deepin Community Edition for a month. Since I was impressed with Manjaro's implementation of the Gnome DE, link , I decided to take up that challenge. Overview Before I get too far into this post, an explanation needs to be given. There are two projects that use the Deepin name, and to make it even more confusing, they are developed and maintained by the same company, Wuhan Deepin Technology. They are responsible for not only the Deepin Desktop Environm...

Like many people I know, I have a television in my bedroom. In order to watch programs from my Media Server, I have an Android TV attached to it. After playing around with some of the options on the TV, I noticed that I had another option to stream content from my Media Server. Smart televisions from Panasonic and other manufacturers have the ability to stream media from servers that use the DLNA protocol. I was intrigued to see how this protocol worked. Since I needed some DLNA server software, it gave me an opportunity to try out Plex. Little did I know it at the time, but was I in for an interesting ride. Plex and the Panasonic Viera HDTV The first thing I needed to do was install the Plex Server software on my Media Server. This was accomplished quite easily on my Linux Mint 18.2 by using the provided deb file. It installed and configured itself without any noticeable hitches. Since at this point I was just experimenting, I added only one of my media hard drives to the server...

One of the things that interests many Linux users is the sheer diversity of distributions (distros) of Linux available. While some users will settle on a distro and that will become the version they use for a long time. Others will do what is called distro-hopping. They will move from distro to distro until they find one that either "clicks" with them or one that meets all of their needs. As a long time Linux user myself, I have always been interested in different Linux distros. For a long time, I have used Ubuntu/ Debian based distros such as Ubuntu and Linux Mint. Sometimes I would step out of my comfort zone and try other distros of Linux such as the Gentoo based Sabayon Linux, link , or loose my mind completely and try out Slackware, link . Needless to say, those forays were not successful. While I enjoyed the experience, I either found them too unstable for use as a daily driver, or they just took too much work to manage properly. I always ended up going back to an Ubunt...

Do you like being a space pirate pillaging your way across the universe? Maybe you are more the entrepreneurial type who wants to establish economic dominance instead. Or do you just want to be a space cowboy smuggling contraband from one world to another. If so, X3: Reunion is the game for you. Released in 2005 by Egosoft, X3: Reunion is an open-world space simulation that allows you to play the game your way. When you start a new game in X3: Reunion, you are presented with several choices. One of which is to play the game's campaign, and the other choices allow you to play the game outside of the campaign. Whichever choice you make, the ultimate journey you embark upon is entirely up to you. For first time players, I suggest at least starting the main campaign. This will allow you to get comfortable with the game world and controls before you strike out on your own. This is because the main campaign of X3: Reunion feels like one long tutorial. The story slowly unfolds as you c...

I am a tinkerer. Especially when it comes to computers. No more so than in my early days of computer usage. At the time, I would spend hours typing in Basic programs from magazines into an Atari 800 and later an Apple IIe. Only to end up troubleshooting syntax errors because of my poor typing skills. Little did my 8 year-old brain realize that I was learning not only how to troubleshot computer problems properly, but gaining a passion that has followed me ever since. When I built my first computer in 1996, a Pentium 200 with 16mb of RAM running Windows 95, this need to tinker came back with a vengeance. Soon afterwards, I heard about this operating system called Linux. At the time, I did not give it much thought because I was content creating custom boot menus to maximize the performance I getting on the games I was playing. However, Linux remained in the back of my mind, and in 1999 when on a trip to New York City, I purchased a retail copy of SuSE Linux 6.1. Little did I know that th...