Audio, photography, books and miscellany

I have a bunch of ethernet only gadgets in the Home Theater rack including the Emotiva XMC, my Tatasky Set Top Box and a couple of other knick knacks. The HT rack is across the room from my router (ASUS RT-AC68U) and the only way to connect up these machines to the network was to run an ethernet cable from the router across to the rack and then use the airport extreme to connect up all the doodahs to wifi. I wanted to originally use the Airport Extreme to extend the wifi network but being an Apple device, it refused to work with the ASUS router. Tried WDS and an old version of the airport utility to see if I could hack that set up but no joy. Then I realised that the HTPC has both a wired and wifi connection. So I hooked up the wired connection to the airport extreme's "wan/uplink" port. Now we need to set up the HTPC box (running Arch Linux) to "bridge" the wifi and ethernet connections. We could use the bridge-utils tools to do this but I thought it was...

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, Thy knotted and combinèd locks to part And each particular hair to stand on end, Like quills upon the fearful porpentine  -Hamlet, William Shakespeare That tale has nothing on getting Arch + MPD + DSD playback working. Rather than bore you with the details and frustration of the many false starts and shimmying up wrong trees, let me quickly give you the config that works for me. You can get a little more context from reading parts 1 and 2 of HTPC experiments. Since the stock mpd in the pacman Arch repos wasn't honoring DSD related settings in the configuration file, I had to compile mpd from source and patch it with a DSD patch. As of this writing, I don't know if the patch has been merged. If you use pacman to get mpd (v 0.19), DSD playback does not work. The iFI micro IDSD card only gets PCM streams at either 41k or 48...

With the base OS installed, it was time to get other bits and pieces installed. Kodi was fairly easy to install and I set it up as a standalone service  Install Kodi as a standalone-service The most frustrating part was up next.... Getting my TV Remote to work with the LIRC so that I could control Kodi from the remote. Definitely beats twiddling around with the Kore app. Don't get me wrong, the app is great. It's just that from a usability and familiarity perspective, the TV remote is a lot easier. I wasn't anticipating any headaches because in an earlier attempt, I had openelec/kodi working on a raspberry Pi hooked to the same setup and TV just working fine out of the box. The RPi has a HDMI CEC adapter built in and the openelec/Kodi setup was using that to hook up the remote. The NUC doesn't have a CEC adapter built in but comes with a Nuvoton IR controller, so I figured I would use that with LIRC to control Kodi. What followed next was a bit of a nightmare giv...

Had some time on my hands, so I thought I will put together a DIY HTPC running Linux. A couple of things that I wanted to accomplish with this setup. Use some media-center software (Kodi/XBMC) for playing videos Use a more 'audiophile' DAC for playing bit-perfect DSD music files Have a general purpose Linux box for twiddling around At some stage, use this for post processing my photography (darktable et al)  So first off, I looked around to see if I could make do with stuff I already had at home. Went rooting around and stumbled on the manual for my Emotiva XMC-1. It has an onboard DAC which can be hooked up to a computer but sadly (as of this writing, circa Aug 2016), it can't play DSDs natively.  From the XMC-1 Manual  USB Stream Input: Use this input to connect a computer or other compatible media client to the XMC-1. The XMC-1 will appear as a USB audio device (sound card or speaker) to a computer that is connected to this input. This input suppo...

I started this off to write a bit about my audio gear but junked the idea as the whole kit is undergoing a rethink but more on that later. So here is some of my favourite music, in no particular order. I may add to this later or do separate posts for different genres. AC/DC  You shook me all night long Jailbreak Thunderstruck Highway to Hell Whole Lotta Rosie Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap Led Zeppelin Stairway to Heaven Going to California Kashmir When the levee breaks The Eagles Hotel California I can't tell you why Tequila Sunrise Life in the fast lane Queen Bohemian Rhapsody We will rock you The Who Baba O'Riley Pinball Wizard Aerosmith Crazy Sweet Emotion Dude looks like a lady Dream On Guns N Roses Patience Paradise City November Rain Sweet Child O Mine Metallica King Nothing Enter Sandman Wherever I may roam Fade to Black Unforgiven II Creed My Sacrifice Higher Credence Clearwater Revival Suzie Q Jo...

I started playing with photography in the way back when. There were no DSLRs or point and shoots back then, only a Minolta SLR that I had the great good fortune of playing around with. It had a fungal growth on the lens and many mysterious buttons and knobs... spent many an happy hour noodling around with it till somebody took it away. Fast forward to 2005 or thereabouts when I bought myself a point and shoot for about a 150 Euros. That camera was an impenetrable puzzle to me but I did manage to take a few ok pictures with it. There was a hiatus after that when it was mostly cell phone cameras with mind bendingly noisy pictures. Jump again to 2010 when I finally decided that I would pursue photography as a hobby and by a happy confluence of events, also had the money to do it. So I became a Canon guy with a 550D and the 18-55 kit lens. I had no idea of all the bells and whistles it had and had even less of an idea about what to do with the pictures after I had taken them. I think ...