Jul 04

Announcing Current Weather Conditions

Home Audio/Video, Home Automation No Comments »

Last year I promised to post the scripts used to obtain and announce the current and forecasted weather conditions over our home speakers. We have a couple of key fobs in various locations of the house that can be used to trigger announcing of the current and forecasted weather conditions. Those key fobs use RF signals to trigger X-10 commands which are then used to execute the script below. The Cepstral Text to Speech (TTS) utility is used to announce the current conditions and forecast over our home speakers. Here’s an example of an announcement.icon

Read more to see the Perl script.
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Jul 04

Broadcasting Severe Weather Alerts Through Home Speakers

Home Audio/Video, Home Automation, Home Monitoring 3 Comments »

Last year I hacked away at some scripts to report on current weather conditions and to announce caller ID information through our home ceiling speakers.  I had also hacked away at an initial script to poll the US National Weather Service for severe weather alerts associated with our area.
tstorm
Although the severe weather alert script seemed to be reliable, my family – including the dog – weren’t too pleased about hearing an emergency buzzer and alert broadcast every few minutes while a severe weather alert was in effect. To keep the family and dog in harmony, I did some more hacking to:

  • Announce the weather alert twice and then be quiet for a period of time
  • Override the quiet period when a more severe alert occurs

I’ve also published the current source code for people to leverage.
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Feb 27

Fun with EyeTV and AppleScript

Home Audio/Video, Mac OS X 22 Comments »

Since we recently ditched satellite TV (the subject of another post), I bought an EyeTV One dongle for our iMac to record over the air (OTA) TV broadcasts. Fortunately, the St Louis metropolitan area has 16 or so OTA channels available. After trial and error, I was able to successfully automate the process of converting and publishing recorded shows such that various devices in our home can easily access the recordings.

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Feb 23

Hack Our Car

Car Stuff No Comments »

My son and I had some fun tweaking our 2010 Audi A4 using a $30 cable.  None of the changes affect the performance of the vehicle; they’re more geared toward entertainment, exterior lighting and window controls.  All we had to do was install VCDS, the program that came with the cable, connect the cable to the diagnostic port under the dash and start modifying the configuration.  Some of the tips came from AudiEnthusiasts.com, a great collection of information.

Overall, it was a pretty simple process and relatively inexpensive.

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Feb 22

A Rippin’ Good Time

Home Audio/Video, Mac OS X 2 Comments »

Now that we have an Apple TV 2 hooked up to our main level TV and have moved our Samsung Blu-Ray DVD BDP-C5500 player to another room, it made sense to see how we could back up our DVDs to our NAS server such that we could load the movies on our iPad for road trips and stream them on TVs via the Apple TV, our Samsung Blu-Ray player and a Sony PS3 in the basement.

Many tech savvy people have been doing this sort of thing for years, but I’m glad that I finally got around to trying it for myself.  The results have been worth it: Not only are we able to easily access our 70 odd videos from all of the devices mentioned above, it helped set the stage for our use of EyeTV to record over the air (OTA) digital TV broadcasts and store them on our NAS server.

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Feb 21

Clonezilla rocks! Image back up and restore for home server

Home Network Storage, Home Server No Comments »


We’ve had our low power consumption home server running for several years, but I hadn’t gotten around to performing a full system image back up of the server. Since I have been backing up critical OS and application configuration files and all of our database, web content and other files of importance are stored on our NAS server and accessed via NFS, not having an image back up wasn’t the end of the world. However, when it came time to replace the internal 8 GB SSD with a 30 GB unit, it was time to bite the bullet and perform a full image back up. Fortunately, I ran across the excellent and free Clonezilla tool to make this a pretty easy task.

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Feb 21

Migrating to QNAP’s Time Machine Feature

Home Network Storage, Mac OS X, Personal Computers 1 Comment »

Back in April, 2010 we started using Apple’s Time Machine feature of Mac OS X to automatically back up the hard drives of our iMac and MacBook Pro computers to our QNAP TS-109 Pro NAS server.  Since earlier versions of the QNAP firmware didn’t have built-in Time Machine support, we used some command line magic to make it happen. Overall, we were pretty happy with the solution and we were able to demonstrate how we could easily restore the complete hard drive of our iMac using one of the back ups.

We have since updated to firmware version 3.3.0 Build 0924T, a version that includes built-in support for Time Machine. I figured why not try out the built-in support and move away from the earlier command line-based approach.

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Feb 19

Replacing Internal Drive on QNAP TS-109 Pro

Home Network Storage 5 Comments »

We’ve been chewing up a lot of space on our NAS server as we’ve ripped and encoded our DVD collection and began recording over-the-air (OTA) TV shows through a new EyeTV dongle on our iMac. So it was time to increase the NAS’ storage capacity from the original 500 GB to at least 1 TB.  As I’ve come to expect with administration of the QNAP TS-109 device, the task of swapping out the original drive with a larger unit was pretty simple.

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Jan 22

Solved: Videos Files Won’t Import Into iTunes

Home Audio/Video, Mac OS X 1 Comment »

Over the holiday break I ripped and encoded our DVD collection such that we could easily play our movies on various devices ranging from UPnP clients such as a Samsung BD-C5500 Blu-Ray palyer and PS3 to a set of Apple devices.  Getting the videos loaded into our iTunes library was key to sharing the videos with the Apple devices.  Although I was able to easily add most of the videos to the iTunes library, some files that were encoded via the exact same process wouldn’t load.  The .mp4 files played fine via QuickTime.  Initially, as a workaround, I ripped and encoded the problem videos over again and was able to add them to the library.  But I hadn’t figured out the root cause of the issue. 

Recently, while working on another home project, I ran into the issue again and finally tackled the problem.
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Jan 03

Using Mix of 500GB and 1TB Drives on QNAP TS-109 Pro

Home Network Storage No Comments »

Several months ago one of our trio of 500 GB SATA drives we use with our QNAP TS-109 Pro NAS server bit the dust.  Since it was one of the two external HDDs that failed, it was pretty simple to replace the failed external HDD with a new Western Digital WD10EARS 1 TB “green” HDD. (This was several months ago. If it was today, we would have used a new 2 TB HDD.)

Our shared network storage approach uses a three-disk scheme where:

  1. there’s an internal HDD in the NAS server,
  2. another HDD plugged into an eSATA drive caddy and
  3. a third HDD residing in an off-site storage location.

We rotate the two external HDDs on roughly a monthly basis.  When attached to the NAS server, the QNAP Q-RAID1 feature backs up the content of the internal HDD to the external HDD in near real-time. As explained earlier, this scheme has been successful for us in that it’s really simple to perform the external HDD swapping.

The one wrinkle with the introduction of the 1 TB HDD in our rotation scheme has been that whenever we swap out the 500 GB external HDD an replace it with the 1 TB HDD, we have to restart the NAS server to get it to start the Q-RAID1 syncing process. When we swap in the 500 GB HDD, we don’t have to restart the NAS server: it automatically begins the Q-RAID1 syncing process.

All in all, this is a pretty minor wart in our rotation scheme.  It’s nice to see that the NAS server doesn’t seem to be bothered by the fact that the external HDD is larger than the 500 GB internal HDD.

The other revealing aspect of this HDD failure was that it helped chart the path for our future HDD replacement and storage expansion.  Our approach is to simply wait until each drive fails before purchasing a new, larger capacity HDD.  Since even this relatively dated TS-109 device supports 2 TB HDDs, we have a fair amount of headroom for the next year or so as the other HDDs fail.

Let’s just hope the QNAP itself keeps humming along…

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