Category: Misc

A few weeks ago, my Internet router died suddenly.

Not that much of an issue unless you use a custom box as a modem and you have your website hosted on it.

The server I was using for this was a Fedora Core 9 machine. I know an ancient OS.

The machine itself was not that old, I found about 4 years a cheap Intel 386 with ISA support so I replaced the really old server I had. I was able to migrate to the new box, I was running a hardware raid setup using an ISA card. Talk about making things complicated.

I initially tried using a virtual server to have things running quickly, I had a backup of the server running on a VMware workstation however, I could not make it a go for reasons that may merit another blog.

However, I had laying around my old media server, 4 Gb of ram and 500 GB of disk space. Too much space but that was the only thing I had. It only had one NIC but I found a USB to Ethernet dongle.

This time I decided to use HAproxy to present my website and blog and have proper SSL certs for each.

Continue reading “Cerbot, Oh My!”

Hello there,

Recently I encountered an issue, which is rampant, and people complaint a lot about it.

All of a sudden, Chrome would not load. I was getting “Page unresponsive”.

This is happened to me once before, on my work computer Chrome become sluggish as molasses. Try a few of the things you find on the Internet, did not work.

Then as sudden as it started it went away. No explanation.

A few days ago, on my home computer Chrome started to behave that way. Nothing worked.

I started using Firefox again which was fine, this was a clue that the culprit was Chrome.

I know what you are going to say, there was a virus, blah, blah, blah.

Nope, there was no virus. Will not go onto how I was certain, I have AV plus other things and after checking there was no virus.

Finally, I decided to uninstall and reinstall Chrome. No luck.

What was one to do? Then it dawned on me. Why don’t I try the 32-bit version? Yes, you can still get it and it is not as much of a memory hog as the 64-bit version.

So, I did uninstall the 64-bit version and install the 32-bit version.

What do you know it resolved the issue, for a while it seemed that the issue was still there however after a couple of minutes Chrome started to behave normally.

Once again, I have no explanation.

Weird.

Take care.

Ciao.

Hello there,

Well, I use Kodi as my media center on Ubuntu 20.04.

I do not use it that much nowadays since ESPN has moved most of its content to ESPN+ ( and yes I have a valid subscription via my cable provider) and there is no add-on for it.

As well as with NBC which now uses Peacock and some other apps.

I still use it to watch my movie collection and also IPTV. I have a subscription with a provider.

The other day, I decided to clean it since I had lots of repositories that did not work anymore and it was a mess So I did a clean install to Kodi Leia.

So far so good until I started Kodi. Notice that the PVR IPTV Simple Client was not working.

No sweat, under Ubuntu you can add it as a package, and perhaps it was not installed correctly.

Silly me,  the problem was that it had a dependency that was broken. It was asking for the Kodi-API-PVR=(3.5.10).

Strange since the Kodi install package should have the API on it. Not really somehow the API is no longer part of it.

Well, I tried installing it from the Kodi repository, it is no longer there it has been taken out. The new repository that has it, was trying to install a client that had the same error as when I tried it on Ubuntu. Bummer.

A long search on forums gave no answer, under Windows it seems to be working under Linux it seems to be broken but for some distros and not others.

Found someone on a forum saying it was a banned add-on, silly rabbit. First of all, it is just a client it has no configuration to try to stream stuff you are not suppose to for example.

That brings me to another thing that bothers me, there are lots of people on forums that do not know diddly.

They ask inane questions, send you the wrong path, and sound as they are doing you a favor. Who would it thought the Internet was like that (sarcasm…).

In any case, decided to go to the source.

Went to the following link for the PVR IPTV Simple Client and followed the instructions on how to compile it.

After that, I added the add-on to Kodi and now it works!

The moral of the story, sometimes you need to take the bull by the horns and do things yourself.

Take care.

Cia0.