Experiment: Multimedia streaming from a portable NAS at 70mph

Problem: A long car journey with two boys (6 and 3 yrs)

We’re going on a long car-trip, and at best it’ll be 8 hours of driving, not counting time for breaks, etc.

In the past, in addition to books, word-searches/puzzles and ‘I spy…’ games, we’ve used iPads loaded with films and downloaded TV shows (from BBC iPlayer, etc) to keep them occupied, but this journey is going to be way longer.

Plus, the 16GB iPads can only hold a small amount of downloaded content. Depending on the quality of the media film being used, the amount of space is soon eaten up. In my case, four 1GB films was all that was possible.  As my boys seem to have a boredom threshold of a gnat, these are rotated frequently.

Challenge: Provide entertainment

1. The aim is to somehow store enough content for the boys to not run out of things to watch, without having to watch the same thing over and over again.
   
2. Independent streaming is a must – the two boys are different ages and therefore find different things interesting and entertaining.
   
3. Must be easy to use.  This must pass the Wife Acceptance Factor (WAF) test, as she is co-pilot/crowd-control whilst I drive. If she isn’t able to help them immediately find what they’re looking for, or struggling with, it’s all a wasted effort.

Solution: PLEX

Enter, Plex. A fork of the XBMC codebase, this media server/client works better than expected. The server runs in the background on a machine/device that has access to the storage capacity, where the content resides. The client can be any number of devices, from Roku boxes, Amazon Fire TV sticks, Xbox One, PS4, whatever.

In the home, Plex server would run on a PC in the back room somewhere, and the clients (in this case, the iPad) would stream content from it. 

But how to run Plex in the car?  Here’s how.

• Server: Lumia 1520 with 64 SD card, running Plex.
• Client: iPad 16GB, running Plex.
• Network: Huawei MiFi personal hotspot (no sim required)

To begin with, I had my Lumia 1520 phone connected to my NAS, where some media content resides, and used the ‘sync’ button to fully download the content to the phone. I also had to ensure that Plex and it’s downloaded content was to live on the Micro SD card in the phone, as I didn’t want to completely fill the phone space and leave the spare 64 GB stick laying empty.

From here, I could (offline) watch the downloaded media on the phone, without a connection back to the NAS. 

Aside: I understand that this is a feature of the PlexPass, which I bought a year’s pass a little while back just to get Plex working well on my Xbox One, but it has already proved to be worth the cost.

Then, I used a Huawei ‘MiFi’ personal hotspot device and didn’t bother using a SIM card, as I didn’t actually want an external internet connection. This essentially just bats-out a private WiFi hotspot.  In the confines of the car, this low-powered device should work well.

Then, I connected my Lumia 1520 phone to this same hotspot, and enabled the ‘act as mobile server’ setting.   The MiFi device wanted to troubleshoot the fact there wasn’t a SIM installed, and loaded up an intranet page in the browser on the Lumia. ‘Skipped’ that and continued (cancel closes the WiFi connection!).

Adding the iPads to the same WiFi connection, along with MiFi Troubleshooting displays, put the device in the same ball park. As I had previously disabled it, I had to re-enable the setting to ‘search local libraries’. The content that I had previously ‘synced’ to the phone started to play on one of the iPads.

Skipping on over to the second iPad, same procedure, and started to stream the same media file from the Lumia phone, but playing from a different starting position.

To push things further, I connected a third device, namely a Surface RT, again running Plex. Same procedure, and the file played well.

Result: Not two, but three devices streaming content from a phone, running on a private wireless network, travelling at 70 (ish) mph on a motorway.

I went back to my original NAS and started to pull more media files down onto the Lumia phone, meaning that the boys will have a much wider variety of things to watch and hopefully help the time pass a little easier.

I’ve had to adjust the settings inside of Plex to allow it to have access to more of the storage space available on the 64GB stick, but other than that, the content just streams happily along.

Conclusion: Plex really is great.  If you’re not using it at home, give it a whirl.

Having the kit, such as the Huawei MiFi, laying around certainly helped, and the wonders of Plex made everything possible.

Sure, there’s more than one way to skin a cat, but this solution has the least amount of friction for me to configure.

Lessons to learn for future: Pre-loading content from a NAS onto a phone via WiFi takes some time. The files I was trying to sync were about a 1GB in size. The UI in Plex does a decent job (not flawlessly, though) to keep you informed as to the progress but, occasionally, it needed a shut-down and re-open of Plex to kickstart the transferral process into gear. Whether it was happening in the background, I cannot be sure, but the UI showed no progress.

Progression

The current situation, is that we have two Antminer S1 machines running, both of which are powered from a single Corsair 750W power supply, as this particular model has 4x outputs that are normally used to power graphics cards.  Each of the S1 machines has two ‘blades’, each requires a power supply input, so this all works well.

The machines have been placed into different ‘pools’ to do their mining, simply due to our naivety in terms of how to approach things, with the intention of moving one back into the other, if it turns out to be more successful and, ultimately, more profitable for the work.

• mining.bitcoin.cz, aka “Slush’s Pool”
• BTCGuild.com

These work slightly differently to each other, as Slush’s pool is a straightforward example of a group of machines working together to solve a problem and sharing the reward for it. Whereas BTCGuild is a pool that the rewards appear to be based on the last ten work items that have happened, more than the work currently being undertaken.  This almost implies a sense of working to earn loyalty in the pool, and the rewards increase as a consequence of it.

Each website offer the ability to log in and see the current work item, past rewards, current rewards as well as the ability to set up the bitcoin wallet to send the cleared/confirmed rewards to, once they’ve been earned.  In addition, there are mobile apps available on each platforms, as well as JSON-based data available for real-time analysis, if desired.

Bitcoin Mining: The start!

Over lunch at work, we started talking about the possibilities of purchasing a Bitcoin mining machine and using it to not only generate a little bit of money between ourselves, but to learn more about bitcoins, as well as to have a little tech-fun.

We settled on buying a pair of pre-owned AntMiner S1 mining machines from ebay, and as they need an external power supply, we chose a single Corsair 750W unit to drive them both. (More info here: http://antminers.co.uk/shop/antminer-s1-bitcoin-miner/)

Couple of days later, the goodies arrived and that evening, they were configured to get to work, right away.

In terms of 'how' the bitcoin miners work, their processing resources are used as part of a 'pool' of other similar machines to all crunch a load of numbers. Once the set of numbers has been crunched to perfection, the 'reward' for the effort is then shard amongst the machines in that pool. This reward, is the goal, and is paid as a very small percentage of a single bitcoin.

As time goes on, the complexity of the numbers being used in the computation process will gradually become more difficult, and quite possibly to the point that the S1 machines that we've purchased may be useless. But for the time being, they're looking like they're ok.

The overall aim is that, after considerations for electricity have been taken into account, each of the bitcoin mining machines will generate enough bitcoins to make it worthwhile. At present, the value of bitcoins is low in comparison to what it has been, so there's a chance that we'd be mining something that currently isn't worth it, due to the cost of the electricity required to power these hungry machines, but conversely, the value of bitcoins is hoped to rise to the $1000+ value again, in which case, the rewards outweigh the costs.

We shall see..!

At present, we are just over a full day into the process, so things are still very new to all five of us in the team, but we're learning more about bitcoins each day. My hope is to blog about what we're doing, how we're doing it, and the things that we've learned due to the mistakes that we've made!

Spam emails are getting better

My wife has received a couple of emails in the past days or so, claiming to be from Ikea, informing her that the delivery has been shipped.

And the email looks genuine too. Except… we haven’t ordered anything (ever) from Ikea, so this has to be spam.

I wanted to post this on here so that in case you get such an email, you’ll know it’s rubbish, and is probably a phishing email - here’s screen-shot:

Obviously, using the official logos isn’t a new trick, but getting the English words spelt properly, however, is. Although, on inspection, they have misspelled my wife’s first name, which is odd, as one would assume that somehow these would have been harvested from somewhere.

Either way, if you get one and you know that it’s not real, please just delete it and do not click any of the links within. Don’t reply either, as that’s just as bad.

Publish to Microsoft Azure… faster!

If you have, like me, an internet connection with a slow download speed and an upload speed that’s hardly worth being there at all, then publishing a large website or Cloud Service to Microsoft Azure can take ages.

I’ve found that I can achieve the same goal, but in about 16 seconds, thanks to using a Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine!

What I mean, is that on my home development PC, to upload my current project to Azure takes about 25 minutes, due to my appalling speeds, due mainly to where I live and not being able to have fibre broadband as yet.

But… if I fire up an Azure Virtual Machine that can build and publish my code, this all takes about 16 seconds to upload, mainly due to the lightning fast internet speeds that the Microsoft have, and possibly due to using the A8 VM, with it’s very fast networking facilities.

The Virtual Machine I am using is one that I have picked from the Gallery in the wizard when first creating the virtual machine. It has Visual Studio 2013 Premium and SQL Server 2012 pre-installed.  When picking the type of VM to use, I chose the A8, as this comes with 8 cores and 58 GBs of RAM, which is very fast.

This should cost me about £1.52 per hour, but this is all using the free credit to MSDN subscribers. Admittedly, when I’m not using this VM, I shut it down immediately through the Azure Portal as to not waste the credit.

Once fired up, the A8 VM is very quick at opening Visual Studio 2013, and soon downloads my code from Team Foundation Service.  A quick check to make sure all is well before publishing to Azure, and the upload takes about 16 seconds to upload.

For me, this is fantastic. My slow internet connection speeds are not a limiting factor at all in using the Azure virtual machine, and I get the best of both worlds!

Mad about Bitcoin

Obviously, if you’ve already got this far past the title, this must mean that you’re even vaguely aware of a Bitcoin and, possibly, what it means to use them.

The obligatory stock-image of Bitcoins, stacked tall like Poker chips.

I have been researching Bitcoin for a few months now and have been watching the rise, sudden fall and, currently, the slow re-rising of it’s value again.

Have I bought some Bitcoin? Yes. Not a fantastic amount, but enough to understand the process and relate theory to practise.
Have I spent them anywhere yet? Well, no, but read on.
Am I sure that our parents will all have Bitcoin wallets on their smartphones tomorrow? Possibly not, but maybe soon.

Let’s get some of the bad stuff out of the way.

1. “It’s going to take over the world.”
   If you think Bitcoin is going to take over the world and replace all other currencies, then in my opinion, you might well be mistaken. True, it has every chance of making it as an international commodity for buying and selling online, as that’s exactly what it was designed to do.
   
   Sure, there are some countries, such as China and India so far, that have made their views and comments heard about Bitcoin and this has, quite obviously, made an impact on the rate of the Bitcoin.  When China announced itself to it’s banks, the rate of Bitcoin plummeted almost overnight to almost half it’s value, as it is now easy to see quite how much interest China’s people had in the use of Bitcoin.  As they sold quickly, the price dropped fast.
   
   
2. “Drug dealers and ‘bad people’ use it.” True. They did, and this is proved by the findings of the Silk Road website, as they took Bitcoin in exchange for drugs and so forth. But drug dealers and ‘bad people’ also use cars and carry regular currency, and much more frequently at that, so it’s worth putting a little perspective on the situation, too. 
   
   I am not going to condone selling drugs or anything like that, but there almost has to be a little bit of advertising of Bitcoin to the masses by the guys at Silk Road; Would my parents have heard the term as much if it wasn’t plastered all over the news and airwaves about the ‘dark side of the internet’ if they were doing their transactions using a Paypal account, or accepting Visa online like everyone else? I doubt it, hence my thinking that Silk Road obviously dented the name of the cryptocurrency, but much more people are familiar with it’s concept as a result.
   
   
3. “The value could drop again at any moment.”
   Again, true. Thinking about it, so could the value of a lot of things that we already take for granted. Savings, investments and property prices are just some of the things that already spring to mind.  Again, it’s all about perspective, and as we already have seen, house prices across the world were slashed during the recent recession, yet we are all fixated on them and are eagerly awaiting the rise of the property prices to help rebuild the economy. 
   
   Also, from my perspective, it depends on what you see Bitcoin being for, as to whether you’re even interested in the rate or value of a single coin; for instance, if you’re buying into Bitcoin at a lower rate in the hope of holding onto them for a while and selling them on at a higher rate. then yes, I agree that the rate would be very interesting to you, especially in such a young and volatile time for it.
   
   But if you’re a merchant, as in you’re selling goods online in order to make a living, then I would argue that the rate of Bitcoin is almost irrelevant, as the sooner you ‘cash-in’ your coins to convert them back to regular currency in order to pay the rent or mortgage, the better. So, if you’re a burger vendor in London accepting Bitcoin, the chances are that you’d want your coins back almost as soon as you possibly could. I mean, this would almost certainly be the strategy if you were accepting payment via Paypal, wouldn’t it?  Credit card payments still resolve back down to 1’s and 0’s in a bank account somewhere.
   
   
4. “Other people have already made their money in Bitcoin.”
   Bitcoin is still very new to the wider world, even though it’s been developing for a while now, and some there have been a handful of news stories of people that have had a chance to get in early, some even several years ago, and are now being able to cash-out to make a considerable difference with their investment.
   
   But isn’t this the case across many other walks of life?
   
   >> Property developers buy houses and flats off-plan to get a cheaper deal, hoping that when the building work is complete, the property has already gone up in value and has already added equity to the house.  
   
   >> Venture Capitalists want ‘in’ on businesses before they get popular as they, too, want to buy low and sell high.
   
   >> Some collectors of art buy paintings and store them hidden away. And so on and so on.
   
   In each of these situations, money is risked when the stakes are relatively low and then the higher value is realised at sale later. And just because a house is currently worth £200,000 now doesn’t mean that in ten or twenty years’ time it won’t be worth £300,000.  Just look back at property prices from when you first bought your house, or even further back.
   
   
5. “What if I’m an IT worker and I forget about my Bitcoins and throw my laptop out in the dump which are worth £4M?”
   There’s a dozen different ways you could lose money. Carelessness is not an excuse. 
   
   My thoughts on this particular matter, is if this chap really is an IT worker, and had spent all that time mining for the 7500 coins he claims, regardless of how long ago this was, then he really ought to not only have the IT-sense to look after a laptop with personal data on it AND have the data backed up, but should also have looked after his hard work a little better, no?
   
   Besides, what IT worker in the world throws away a hard drive without scrubbing it first?? Not one I ever what to work with!
   
   
6. “It’s a scam. It’s a pyramid scheme!!” Who knows. Maybe it is. There’s always someone else out there making money whether you or I succeed or not. The scale of this ‘scam’ would indeed make it a fantastic, highly publicised scam in the world. I’m not saying “jump in, feet first”. Far from it, in fact. I’m saying that there could actually be some merit in this new way of purchasing items, particularly if you’re buying/selling across different countries.
   
   
7. “Where can I even spend Bitcoin, assuming I had some??” That’s a good point, in all fairness. But probably more than you might give it credit for. The occasional news items on TV might bring to your attention the fact that a bar in London will sell you beers for Bitcoin. But this is only really a news item because it’s not yet a conventional currency. What fantastic national, or even international, publicity is that for the pub? But to answer the question, there’s actually a website that is trying to help pin-point the establishments across the world that will accept Bitcoin for it’s goods.
   
   
8. “It’s not secure.”
   Yes. That’s right. It’s not secure. It’s not safe, or anything. In fact, why not use your debit card instead to make those online payments. You know, the same debit card for the account where your wages get paid into. That one. That’s much safer, isn’t it?
   
   Despite my irony and sarcasm, why do we feel ‘safer’ typing in a credit card number into a webpage? Key loggers are, what, £20 online? And they’re available to almost anyone with a credit card! Or even better, Malware/Spyware is free! …if you’re unlucky enough to contract some online. 
   
   And who’s to say what’s on the other end of the web-page, where your credit card number is being stored?? In many of the major countries, PCI-DSS compliance is helping to ensure that operators that accept credit card-based payments, either online, in-person or over the phone, are handling the customer details properly, and ensuring that the websites and back-end services are up-to-speed in terms of patches and securities. And this is me speaking of having to adhere to those rules for the company at which I used to work.  But where else are those website being run from? And are they the real websites anyway? How do you really know that they’re not billing you for a hundred times the amount you entered on that ‘safe’ little web-page?
   
   To come at this question from the Bitcoin argument, for and against, the use of Bitcoin could be argued either way. There are articles online of people having their Bitcoins stolen by malware thieves, who have hacked into an unprotected PC and simply transferred the money away. But is that any different to leaving cash, or a credit/debit card laying around? Maybe not, but we still do that, too. 
   
   But in regards to Bitcoin itself, during the act of transfer the payment is validated to check for spoof or invalid transactions, trapping for faults of mis-payments to incorrect accounts, which is something that our banks are a little poor at themselves. There’s a little confusion that I’ve come across myself, in that payments by Bitcoin are done anonymously and this is a problem. Well, possibly, but again, bringing perspective and reality back into the equation, how do you know who that taxi driver really is? Or that man you just bought a newspaper from?  My best argument is that you own the money, in whichever currency you prefer it to be in; if you can’t be trusted to look after it, then don’t.
   
   

All this is good fun to discuss and it’s also easy to argue a case back and forth, for the pro’s and con’s of anything like that. My interest comes from not investing a large amount of money for the sake of seeing it increase or decrease. Instead, I am looking at from a software development perspective, as this is my regular view on life. Is this worth using? How easy is it to use as a customer? What about as a merchant? Is all of the lingo an unnecessary barrier to entry??

More years ago than I can remember, I was investigating Paypal and seeing how to integrate it into a shopping basket for use on a website for the sale of goods. Back then, Paypal was a dirty word, just Bitcoin can be portrayed as now.  There were no readily available templated-shopping baskets that could be simply dropped onto a webpage to allow it’s use instead of credit cards. Not enough people had heard about Paypal to make it even worth thinking it was going to be any different to the likes of NoChex or e-Gold at the time.

Fast forward to today, and Paypal is (almost) a household word. Heck, my dad even uses it (a lot!), which is on (and even away from) his beloved eBay, in order to sell his wares to people in this country and beyond.

So, why can’t Bitcoin be like that?

Why can’t I already ‘see’ an array of e-commerce templates, boasting Credit Card and Paypal payments, in addition to Bitcoin?
Why wouldn’t they even promote Bitcoin over the other alternatives? The merchant of the goods may even prefer it due to low costs and transaction fees, as opposed to the relatively high charges imposed by other forms of payment? Looking at you, Paypal! Paypal’s rates are great for the young start-ups, with no monthly tie-ins, but they soon earn their money when the money starts coming in.

My biggest niggle with the Bitcoining operations in effect at the moment, are that they’re still lacking that touch of ‘ease’ that Paypal have struggled to find and now reaping the rewards. I’m talking about the thin layer of gloss that makes the payment part almost transparent, as let’s be honest, we don’t shop somewhere primarily because of the currency that they accept. In some cases, I’ve been to websites and bailed-out of the purchase at the shopping basket entirely as the payment steps are too complicated or cumbersome to deal with.

In my eyes, the payment stage should be the last part to a happy purchase. Imagine if you were fortunate enough to buy a Ferrari or Lamborghini; imagine that you had been and chosen the exact model and extras that you’d like and then you get to the payment stage, and the dealer only accepts payments by Western Union transfer, in many transactions of small amounts. It just becomes more effort than going somewhere else and starting again, as internet surfers are probably the most fickle people in the world.  Just ask yourself how long you wait for a webpage to load before you click the ‘back’ button and go elsewhere!

I think that when more business-minded, or even Marketing-minded, people pick up the notion of Bitcoin as a valid form of payment, the steps to a thin layer of gloss will begin to form and soon, there’ll be a payment gateway on every website that can offer payment from a mobile device with so little effort that my mum can do it without getting flustered or confused about the transaction, and without panic attacks of imagining her life’s savings being transferred to the man at the green grocer’s shop.  If we can’t get to that stage, whereby the user interface of it all is drop-dead easy to use, then it’ll take a long time.

The flip-side to the same view-point, is that if the green grocer can’t transfer his day’s takings back into the regular tokens of money that his mortgage provider will accept, and be able to do this at ease and on a regular basis, then there’s little scope for him to take-up the payment mechanism just for the chance of a lower transaction fee. 

This all needs to be seamless and effortless.

Are we there yet? Not yet.

Outlook Social Connectors

This may not be news to some of you, but I have recently found time to investigate the Outlook Social Connector that can pull data directly from Facebook / LinkedIn / etc., based on the contacts that you already have!

The reason why I thought I needed this in my life, is because since purchasing a Windows Phone 7, the integration with Facebook really surprised me, especially as I’m not a fan of Facebook at all!

Microsoft have integrated friends in Facebook directly into the address book within the WP7 operating system, meaning that you can instantly access a person’s record, regardless of ‘how’ you wish to contact them, i.e. by email, text or writing on their wall.

There are plenty of examples online of the Outlook Social Connector, so I won’t bore you with them, but here’s the basic premise to whet your appetite:

1. You download (see below) and install the Outlook Social Connector for Office 2003, 2007 and 2010
2. Tell the Connector which social networks to connect to
3. Add in your username and password details
4. Press Save and that’s it.

Now, when you open an new email inside of Outlook and begin to type a message to a friend, as normal, the Outlook Social Connector fires-up in the background and goes off to Facebook (or whatever other social sites that you added) and brings back their recent activity and shows it at the bottom of the email.

Microsoft’s Channel 9 video announcement of the Facebook connector is available here, along with a demo of how it works.

Brilliant!

Download links:

• Outlook Social Connector for Facebook (from Microsoft)
• Outlook Social Connector for LinkedIn (from LinkedIn)
• Outlook Social Connector for Windows Live (from Microsoft)