Zattoo finally ready for England

Byrichard
Reading Time: < 1 minute

Zattoo is a little bit of code that allows you to watch streaming television from the comfort of your laptop rather than using a television or other device.  It’s better than Joost because they don’t discriminate against PowerPC users.

It means I can watch BBC 1, 2 3 4, ITV, C4 CBBC, BBC news 24 (that’s the crappy England only version).

I’m happy to see this change.

I had tested it months ago in Switzerland and found the product interesting.

You can read more here.

Similar Posts

Experimenting with Home Assistant
|

Experimenting with Home Assistant

Byrichard

For a long time I wasn’t tempted to play with Home Assistant or the Apple Home app. I don’t have smart light bulbs, or a smart fridge, or a thermostat that I can control remotely. I don’t have solar panels that are feeding a battery. In essence I thought that if I played with Home Assistant I would not be able to do anything. Now I see that this idea was wrong.

Mobile Device Info

With home assistant you can track your phone. You can see graphs of floors climbed and descended, battery level, storage, average active pace, the distance you’ve walked, whether the phone is charging, whether you have one or two sims in the phone, connection type and more. I have only run home assistant for a few hours so I will get a better idea of what home assistant is capable of telling me about my iphone activity. For every device that has the app installed you will get information about location and battery status.

Aranet

I get pressure, temperature, Co2 readings and humidity. I suspect that with the history function on Home assistant I will be able to see history over a period of weeks or months, rather than days.

Forecast

By default Home assistant will provide you with weather based on your location from a centralised source according to the location you give it.

Netatmo Weather Stations

Netatmo is easy to connect to. Within two clicks you have access to Netatmo weather data. If you have just one weather system then this works very well. It’s easy to see weather info for the indoor and outdoor weather modules from the dashboard.

If family or friends are sharing their weather stations with you then you need to figure out which ones are yours, and which are those of others. I had to guess which devices were mine, and create different rooms for the devices of other people. I then made my devices visible and order was restored.

Apple TV

It is easy to turn it off and on again but aside from this there is no control. I couldn’t see how to change channels or apps, or do anything interesting. Turning it on is good, but usually you want to do more than turn on a tv device.

Network Storage

in the settings tab you have the option of using Home Assistant as network attached storage. You have the primary disk on which Home Assistant runs but you also have the option of adding an NFS or Samba disk (CIFS) storage option.

Traccar

Google Map, iCloud, Suunto, Apple, Garmin and others track your location, either for sports, or for other reasons. If you have family sharing enabled on iCloud you can follow people as they move from one location to another. You don’t need to ask “where are you?” because you can check with ease. Of course this works for a person or three, depending on the size of your “family” group.

traccar is an open source alternative that allows you to track people using your own personal computer, rather than cloud services. While you’re out for a walk it will buffer the data locally, and when you get to your home wifi network it will allow you to see where you’ve been, as well as tracks, and more. I will spend more time experimenting with this.

Home Assistant Integrations

If you would like to see what integrations are possible with Home Assistant so far follow the link and you will be able to search for devices and how well they interact with Home Assistant. In some cases it’s a matter of simply logging in to Netatmo for example, after clicking a button. In other cases, such as with traccar you install the app, and use it as a secondary app on the Home Assistant server.

And Finally

Home Assistant provides us with a different user interface for Aranet devices. Instead of having to look at the app we can easily check for information in browser. In theory we could setup a Pi with an Aranet nearby to provide real time co2 monitoring for an office building or other.

One of the key benefits of the Home Assistant App is that once you add Netatmo, traccar, your mobile devices, Aranet and more you have one app available for plenty of information. Instead of having to open the Aranet app or the Netatmo app you can check within seconds. If you want to look at your walking or other history you can also use the same app.

Initially I thought it would be a waste of time for me to experiment with Home Assistant but now that I have I see that there are a number of interesting features to continue experimenting with.

I hope he doesn’t succeed

Byrichard

There is an individual from Wembley who wants to sue google for search results apparently defaming him. The content was posted by anonymous sources and due to this fact, it is time-consuming to find who was the source of these allegations.

There is a problem with the complaint. The worldwide web generates several hundreds of thousands of words a day in a multitude of languages and anyone can read the articles. It is malleable and ever-changing. If your reputation is put into question on the world wide web there is only one thing you can do. Write a response on your own website to demonstrate that these allegations are false.

If you’re going to attempt to sue a search engine for making search results visible then that is going against what the world wide web, i.e. the free flow of information. When an anonymous source prints something that is incorrect then it is up to the reader of the source to evaluate whether he will take this source seriously or not. It is up to the user to take this content and look in a number of trusted resources to form a proper opinion.

Can you imagine the millions of hours it would take to investigate and verify all the content on the web? It’d make the world wide web far slower and less responsive to news and information.

One of the great things about the world wide web is that it encourages people to do research from the comfort of their own home. If you want to buy a new laptop you can find information easily from a number of sources, the same as with travel destinations and more.

When someone writes something then the creator of the content, rather than the search engine, should be held accountable for the content they make available, not the search engine. If you want to control what search engines link to then you are slowing down the world wide web and you are hindering its progression.

What makes the world wide web so powerful is it’s size. It is dealt with on a daily basis by millions of people, some being experts and others being more impulsive. What this means is that content on the world wide web should not work you up so far as to attempt to sue a company.

He’s got increased visibility, by writing something negative more people find out about the company. As they find out about the company they may be more interested in what the company has to say. If it does not address the issue then it is missing a PR opportunity.

It seems rather stupid to sue Google for something like this.

| |

Hit the ground running (waking up in Web 2.0)

Byrichard

There was a time when you would wake up and it’s only half an hour later that the world around you would be clearly visible. In today’s web 2.0 world you wake up and twenty other people are wishing each other good morning. Many are celebrating that it’ Friday and others have pathetic status messages about 40 days of celibacy, about being overworked and all those other messages.

Of course everyone has the right to their feelings and to their own experiences but as certain individuals spend more and more time online they notice these status messages and trends and get really tired. Look at the level of media saturation about the McCann story. I muted a podcast for mentioning the story. Careless parents lost their daughter, end of story. It’s not worth as much airtime as it’s been given.

Then there’s the “back from the dead media coverage” that gets just as tiring. If a royal driving a car doesn’t wear her seat belt and dies as a result of a crash then she should not be idolised in the way people have done. It should have been an opportunity to promote the use of seatbelts to avoid repeat deaths in such a manner.

Then there’s the enthusiast’s oversaturation of the media. In particular I’m thinking of the Iphone. Of course it’s a beautiful new interface, of course it’s ushered in the fully screen tactile device but for anyone outside the US the media saturation has become too much. If you’re an active consumer of new media news then there’s a good chance you would have read several thousand articles boasting about how great it was. As a result a lot of people got media burn out from the story. It’s only as a result of getting an ipod touch that I can tolerate those stories once more.

The 30 minute news round up in the evening preceeded by the daily newspaper has been followed by an era of instant access to news stories once they have been written. What this means is that for ardent consumers of new media it is easy to reach a burn out/saturation point. we, as new media consumers must be careful not to read about single topics so much that we are unable to hear about specific topics anymore.

NixOS and Darwin – Partial success

NixOS and Darwin – Partial success

Byrichard

Yesterday I experimented with NixOS and Debian. I managed to install NixOS on the Pi4 and I managed to implement several changes to the configuration.nix file before the Pi started to overheat and become much slower. At this point I tried to run Debian and that worked.

At first Debian was running in command line mode so I took the time to install the KDE desktop and that’s when I ran into the same limitation of the Pi4. It tends to get hot and slow down to a crawl.

This could be seen as a failure, or as a success. The reason for which it is a success is that I managed to get NixOS to work on a Pi, in the first place, and that I managed to compile a few changes before the system became too slow to work.

With Debian too, I class it as a success, rather than a failure. I class it as a success because I read documentation, understood it, and then installed Darwin first in command line, and then with the GUI. It was working well enough for a bit. it’s when I left the machine to “sleep” and the display time out that the system failed to start again.

It counts as a success because if I had been using a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB or higher it would have worked well. It’s only because of the limitations of the hardware that this could be considered as a failure.

The other success that I am counting is that I was able to get my log ready for editing on three linux machines, within minutes, rather than quarter hours as I had previously. I have learned the work flow to get the hugo version of my blog downloaded locally, and set up the theme, and then git-ftp to upload the latest hugo compilation.

And Finally

Today I wrote my blog post using VIM rather than Wordpress and VS Code so it went faster. I find that I am gravitating towards simpler blogging habits once again. I only broke with blogging via VIM because I thought it would take hours to set things up again on the current machine.

|

A MacBook, a MacBook Pro and a Remote

Byrichard

Yesterday I was lucky enough to be asked what the remote on the new MacBook and MacBook pros were for. I went to the owner of the Macbook’s room and picked up the remote. Both my machine and hers were side by side and I started to play. I was controlling both computers at once. It’s not the type of thing I usually do but it’s amusing. You could control quite a few more machines if you like.

For some reason they appeared to be on the same menu so I’m wondering whether there’s something built in that tells them whether the remote wants video, music, DVD, or photo.





Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.