Author: theninja

Apps, Fun, Home Automation, MediaCenter, Tech

TorrentGrabber v3 – Now with 100% more grabbing!

6 Comments

TorrentGrabber – check for your new TV show episodes and get them loaded to your Torrent Application automatically.. and get notified when they arrive!

I love all the free & legal content you can get from around the globe. I especially like when broadcasters and other sources put their content up for free so we can legally download it. What I don’t like is being bombarded with ads and other junk when I visit legal torrent site so I wrote TorrentGrabber to go off and automatically download the shows I like.
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Tech

Syncing your Outlook with Gmail Contacts and Calendars

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One of my biggest issues in living in a mainly Microsoft Garden (Windows Phone, Windows 10 Laptop, Windows 8 Desktop) is that syncing contacts between my phone and other devices has always been an issue. A long long time ago I started keeping my Contacts in Google Contacts as this almost universally had support across IOS, Android and Windows Phone should I swap and change devices over the coming years.
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Apps, Home Automation

Belkin Wemo Control Plugin for InControl HA

12 Comments

InControl is my favourite Home Automation Software – if you are getting into anything Home Automated or ZWave related I do urge you to give their software a try.

Out of the box it supports Scenes (grouping multiple devices together) and scheduling (check out my article on cron scheduling though too if you already use InControl Scheduling) and has a bunch of features to make Home Automation easy.
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Apps, Home Automation

InControlCMD – Command Line Control of InControl HA ZWave Devices

8 Comments

InControl HA from Moonlitz Software is my preferred Home Automation Software.

It supports a multitude of ZWave devices and, of late, has an extensible plugin system so you can incorporate other non-zwave devices into the fold and control them via InControl’s iPad, iPhone, Android & Windows Phone UI’s.

InControlCMD is a Command Line executable I wrote which allows you to turn devices on and off from the Command Line. This is especially handy if you want to script actions external to InControl but also incorporate controlling devices within InControl.
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Tech

DCOM 10009 errors on a Domain Controller

1 Comment

Sometimes when you demote a domain controller in your domain and the domotion partially fails your other domain controllers can start to generate an enormous amount of DCOM 10009 errors because in their domain metadata they still expect to be able to contact this demoted/non-existent domain controller.

The specific error message is:

“DCOM was unable to communicate with the computer {computername} using any of the configured protocols”
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Tech

Implementing Apache Compression and Caching

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Compression and Caching can improve your webapp or website performance quite considerably.

A great article from David Baker can be found here for implementing Apache Compression and Caching:

http://dtbaker.com.au/random-bits/howto-enable-compression-and-caching-on-apache2.html

If you run an intranet, webapp or you run your own web server you will find this information very valuable to squeeze a little more performance out of your website.
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Tech

Freeware MTS (AVCHD) Converter

2 Comments

A few of my clients have Sony HD Cameras and are constantly asking for assistance on how to import video into Premiere or other video editing programs.

Most of the newer Sony\Panasonic Cameras (it seems) record to a transport stream format of AVCHD in a .MTS container. Adobe Premiere and other video editing applications cannot import this format so the easiest way I have found to import these types of videos is to convert it to an industry standard format that is supported by Premiere prior to importing.
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Tech

How to fix SQL Server when you have changed your computer name

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Sure every SQL Server wants to feel special.. But before you take it out on the town and give it a new name and a dinner, and a show.. Just keep in mind the SQL SERVER WILL CRASH AND BURN TO PIECES if you change your machine name..

You see there are tables in your SQL Server that explain what the machine is called that it resides on.. This is kinda important and if SQL Server can’t ‘find itself’ you start hitting all sorts of problems.
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Tech

VMWare & NFS for Windows (with a little iSCSI thrown in) for free(ish)

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Working in an environment where we have 100 or so Virtual Machines running across for a multitude of ESX Servers it becomes exponentially harder to maintain them as users begin to want to copy, backup, duplicate & migrate Virtual Machines from different ESXi Servers within our organisation. It was time to implement some additional, external, centrally managed storage to store and maintain the expanding collection of virtual machines we have.
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