KrisWillis.com

I store all of my media on a file server (running Ubuntu Server 10.04) which currently contains a 6TB RAID5 array, then stream whatever I want to watch to a client device hooked up to my TV, up until yesterday this was a Popcorn Hour A-110. Although the A-110 plays back almost anything I throw [...]

After upgrading my media server to Jaunty recently I noticed that I could no longer play FLAC files from within iTunes under OS X. I couldn’t figure out why this was happening, but to solve it I configured mt-daapd to handle the transcoding with a script rather than with ffmpeg. There are a few small [...]

One of our office printers decided to die the other day, a Brother multi-function laser printer, which I recall took quite a lot of messing around to get it printing from Ubuntu and once it was set-up it always took a while to send pages to the printer. Sometimes, it printed just a bunch of [...]

My media server was getting to the stage where it required some extra discs, so I purchased another pair of 500GB SATA disks and a SiI-3114 based PCI to 4-port SATA controller card to hook them up to as I was out of spare SATA ports. Upon booting there was no sign of the cards [...]

Since I first bought my Logitech MX5000 combo it has never worked correctly on Ubuntu (back to 6.06 maybe…) after booting. The keyboard would work perfectly in the BIOS and even in GRUB, but as soon as I reached the (GUI) log-in screen my MX5000 would become unresponsive until I disconnected the USB Bluetooth receiver [...]

Microsoft released the fall update for the Xbox 360 on the 4th of December which included support for DivX/Xvid playback. A popular choice for encoding video due to its compression to quality ratio. Could this mean I am now able to free up some space on my A/V rack? Currently I’m using a hardware-modified Xbox [...]

Ever since the upgrade from 7.04 to 7.10 I have been experiencing random crashes. The type of crash varied from full-on lock-up where the only way out was to hit the reset button to mild crashes that could be escaped by restarting X (Ctrl-Alt-Backspace). Sometimes the system would just hang for 30 seconds then come [...]

For those of us that are developing web projects on a Linux box that are fed up with jumping over onto a Windows machine to test their code in Internet Explorer there is a nice and easy script called IEs4Linux that makes the process of installing MSIE 5, 5.5 and 6 onto a Linux box [...]