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I have written a pretty extensive article before, on “How to install Kodi on Amazon Fire TV“. It’s still an article worth reading, but a better “trick” has become available.

In the previous article, we used an application called IkonoTV as a “front” for Kodi/XBMC. This method works well, but has it’s limitations. The new method is easier to install, doesn’t need an application like IkonoTV and … the home button on the remote brings you to a screen that just works easier.

Another important feature is that this new method is supposed to work with the newer Amazon Fire TV models – unfortunately, I do not own the newer model, so I could not test and confirm that.

For those who have read the article “Arduino – Controlling a WS2812 LED strand with NeoPixel or FastLED” might have gotten infected by urge to get more effects, after all … some of these LEDStrip effects look pretty slick!

With the holiday coming up real soon, I figured this would be a great opportunity to create and post some cool effects for your LED strips. Maybe you can be your own Griswold (National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation) with these! 

You’ve got to check out the Fire effect with toilet paper – looks pretty cool!

Please read the article Arduino – Controlling a WS2812 LED first, as it will show you some of the basics.
Also note that you’re invited to post your own effects or ideas in the comment section or in the Arduino/WS2811/WS2812 – Share you lighting effects and patterns here … forum topic.

After building my own Ambient Light for my TV (Boblight project), several users asked how to control the light intensity of the LEDs based on the ambient light.

So the LEDs should be brighter during the day, and more dimm at night.

This brought me to explore the use of different light sensors on an Arduino, where the cheapest and most common one is a so called LDR (Light Dependent Resistor). An LDR decreases in it’s resistance as light increases.

Looking at what I could find online, I did find that there is enough information available when using an Analog pin of the Arduino. In this article however, we will also look at using a Digital pin to read an ON/OFF state. So in this article I’ll show you some of the basics on how to use an LDR with your Arduino.

In this article I’ll discuss both options.

Some might have read my previous article on how to install Aria2 as your alternative download manager.

Now Aria2 has been great, but the QNAPWare version is rather old. “jokies” in the QNAP forum has created a QPKG file which handles it all, and … is up to date. (kudo’s to jokies!).

So in this article, the quicker and faster way to get the more recent Aria2 running on your QNAP.
I will describe how to remove the old Aria2 version. You can keep the Web Interface, it works with the new one out of the box, or you can try an alternative Web Interface (YAAW) which I will show you in this article as well.

If you’ve done everything right, the Chrome Addon Aria2-Integration will work right away as well.
Please note that this QPKG is Intel only!

In the past few weeks, I’ve ran into the need to find out what the hardware or system specifications are of one or the other Linux machine.

I use it every now and then, either on my QNAP, HTPC, Ubuntu machine or even my DD-WRT router.
Earlier this week I even needed it to checkout my old web-server specs versus the new web-server.

Well, with Operating Systems like Mac OS X and Windows, it’s relatively easy to find the specification with the help of system build-in tools that come with a proper user interface. Under Linux this can be more challenging though, especially when there is no graphical user interface – ie. you only have shell access.

In this article I’ll try to go through a few relatively standard commands to checkout your system specs like memory, CPU, video card, disks, etc.

There is a new version available of ConnectMeNow … version 1.51.

In this version I’ve added the option to not show an error message when a network cannot be found.
Thanks to Wolfgang for the idea! 

You can now have ConnectMeNow detect for a network, optionally retry detection after X seconds (for connections that establish slow), and optionally not show an error message about a missing network.

Read the ConnectMeNow article for download and comments.

ApplePi-Baker has been updated again.

This version addresses a bug with the detection of SD cards, and the reduction of the file size of the application (about 30% smaller than previous versions).

Visit the ApplePi-Baker article to download the latest version and to leave comments.

Yet another update for ConnectMeNow …

Due to encrypted data in the config file causing potential issues, ConnectMeNow has now a new configuration format.
At first start it will try to convert you old configuration file to the new format. If you see an error message: Close ConnectMeNow, Delete the config file, and restart ConnectMeNow. Unfortunately, in that case you’d need to re-enter your servers – our apologies for the inconvenience.

Additionally, I’ve managed to reduce the binary size by about 40% … 

Read the original article for details and download.

ApplePi-Baker, the application I developed for Mac OS X user that like to work with the Raspberry Pi, is now available in version 1.80.

This is a major update on the inner workings of ApplePi-Baker, addressing potential issues with the Sudo password.
Tests by users has shown that the new method for Sudo password verification has been very stable, and updating is therefor recommended for all users.

Just a reminder for Retina users; if the window of ApplePi-Baker looks a little fuzzy, please execute the following in TerminalL

defaults write com.tweaking4all.PiBaker AppleMagnifiedMode -bool no

As usual: Download it from the original article where you can also leave feedback.

Since I’m always looking for the “best” and “easiest” way to develop applications cross platform (so far Lazarus Pascal is the winner), I decided to give Delphi 10 Seattle a try. After I recovered from a heart-attack from seeing the price, I decided to give AppMethod a try. Mind you that AppMethod is cheaper but still very expensive.

AppMethod is pretty slick (as is Delphi 10), and supports Windows (32/64 bit), Mac OS X (I’m guessing 32 bit), Android, and iOS (32 bit and 64 bit). Development is pretty easy and deployment of your app is also very easy.

The first test I did was reading a webpage (NZBGet), which worked great on all platforms, except on iOS 9, which threw a “The resource could not be loaded because the App Transport Security policy requires the use of a secure connection” exception.

I did some research on what caused this and finally found the answer and a few work-arounds – which might be practical for other development environments as well.

For whatever reason you can think of, for the fun of it, or to show off how well your website is doing; displaying the Google pagerank and/or the Alexa ranking of your website is kind-a nice to have.

I have seen several useful PHP scripts that can help with that, but they all kind-a rely on the fact that a page is being loaded, and while loading the Google Rank and Alexa Rank are begin retrieved, over an over again. This is not only causing an unneeded load on the Google and Alexa servers, but it’s also slowing down the loading of your website (even though it might not be noticeable by the end-user).

Both Google Rank and Alexa do not refresh multiple times per day, so a once a day refresh would be good enough.
In this article I’ll show you how I have implemented this in WordPress.

For those using a QNAP and that have looked a little further than just storing files on it, both pyLoad and Download Station should sound familiar. And they work … most of the time. Since it’s “most of the time”, I started looking for an alternative and found one in Aria2, which so far it has proven to be rock solid and faster!

Now Aria2 is actually just a command line utility which supports HTTP/HTTPS, FTP, SFTP, BitTorrent and Metalink. There is no webinterface, so we will add WebUI-Aria2 as the webinterface. Both are free, but strangely enough nobody made a “one package does all” QPKG for this.

Unfortunately, I have no idea (or time) how to create a QPKG so I’ll describe, step by step, how I installed it on my QNAP.
Note: This should work for ARM (untested) and INTEL based QNAP devices. This article was based on QTS 4.1.4 build 910.

Tools like Sonarr have always fascinated me – it’s a good indicator that our way of watching TV has changed from fixed schedule to on demand, or: watch what we want, when we want.

I have played with SickBeard, which works very well. After that, I tried SickRage, which is a fork of SickBeard, but offers just a few of those nifty little additional features SickBeard was lacking, making it even better (and that’s just my opinion).

Over time another alternative appeared: Sonarr, also know as NZBDrone.

I’ll admit, it took me a long time to give that one a try, and I have to say … I’m regretting having not done this earlier, it looks and works pretty slick. Don’t get me wrong though: SickBeard and SickRage are great! I just favor Sonarr a little bit more at this moment.

In this article I’ll show you why I like Sonarr better and how to install it on your QNAP NAS.

Note : This article is in no way meant to promote pirating! Verify what the legal limitations are in your country before proceeding!

Recently released for the first time and already 2 updates …

The first one involves a bug related to passwords with special characters.

Some additional features have been added, like support for FTP and SSH, force unmount on close, sorting the list, and icons in the menu indicating the protocol a share will use, etc.

Read the original article for details and download.

In this day and age we are more network connected than ever before – at home and at work. Some of us have network shares on their computers, want to access company network shares, or have a dedicated file server or NAS (Network Attached Storage) to store our shared information or make our backups.

Unfortunately, at times anyway, it can be rather cumbersome under Mac OS X to connect to those “shares” (also known as the so called mounted “Volumes“). In Finder, a server doesn’t always appear right away, we need to go through a list of shares on a given “server”, get confused if we need SMB, CIFS, FTP, SSH, WebDAV, NFS or AFP, and I’m not even mentioning the need to enter a username and password on protected shares.

Additionally, Wake On Lan is being supported as well.

I do have a NAS and I do have several shares on that device and … I just got freakin’ tired of going through each step over and over again. So, instead of complaining, I started looking for an application that would just that – and didn’t find one to my liking. So I just created one … free for all … enjoy!