Author: Jason Dunn

Synology DS-1019+ Plex Hardware Transcoding: This is Magic!

Back in 2012, I purchased my first Synology NAS: a five-bay DS-1512+. I added a five-bay DX-513 expansion unit a few weeks later, and for seven years I’ve been using it to store 1180+ movies and 2300+ TV episodes in MKV format. Because that Synology came with a weak Atom CPU, I had to use a Windows computer (a small Gigabyte BRIX) with a Core i7 CPU to run Plex on because the MKVs needed transcoding for most devices. That’s less the case now that so many devices are powerful enough to use Direct Play, but if I access my videos off-site they need to be transcoded. This system worked great for years, but I’ve been hoping to simplify my overall setup and get away from needing the BRIX.

When I got the DS-1019+ things changed: although it has a relatively wimpy Celeron CPU (to my external frustration, Synology refuses to put out a product with a Core i-series CPU – they go straight from Celeron to enterprise-level Xeon, with price tags to match) it has Intel QuickSync video transcoding capabilities.

The DS-1019+ was something I’d been waiting for because I’d read many reports of how well the hardware transcoding features of the Celeron CPU worked with Plex so I was eager to test it. When I got the new Synology set up, I asked some friends to help me by streaming a movie from it.

Continue reading Synology DS-1019+ Plex Hardware Transcoding: This is Magic!

A Faster, Stronger Blog Host: the Digital Ocean $10 VPS Droplet

This is the speed on Servage, my previous web host. 🥺

It’s amazing how server horsepower has gone up over the past few years, and how costs have come down.

For $7.99 a month, Servage gives me a shared hosting environment – an unknown amount of CPU power, an unknown amount of RAM (but I’d guess 256 MB at most), and 200 GB of storage. And the above performance is indicative of the kind of speed I’d see from this blog – when it was loading at all that is.

Servage, a web host I’ve been with for years, has become so dysfunctional, and their shared servers so overloaded, I’d often see 4-6 hours of down time on this blog. It was staggering how many technical problems and poor provisioning (in terms of too many sites on a single host) they inflicted upon customers. And even logging in to file a trouble ticket to ask why my site was down for the 15th time this week always started like this:

Compare that with Digital Ocean, where for $10 a month, I get a dedicated 2 GB of RAM, one virtual CPU, 50 GB of storage space…and a dedicated VPS that has (so far) perfect uptime. And look at the speeds: this site loads 15x faster! It’s amazing how painful WordPress is to use when it’s on an underpowered server 👿, but what a sheer joy it is to use when it’s on a solid machine. 😇 Granted, running your own VPS isn’t for everyone, but so far it’s been a great experience for me.

This is the speed on Digital Ocean! 😎👍

For those wondering what took me so long to move this blog over to a better service, it’s a combination of having several domains and dozens of email accounts on Servage (which is a pain to move to a new host), having all my Thoughts Media sites on a different VPS (1&1, which also needed to move over onto Digital Ocean), and of course the biggest factor: I am not a Linux expert or web hosting guru, so I was was limited by my own skillset and the gracious help of friends when they could spare the time. 😁

At this exact moment I have my digital footprint spread across the above three service, but within the week I hope to have it down to two, then within the quarter down to one…

The Maddening HP Inkjet “First Print of the Day Blurry Problem”: SOLVED

I have been brutally disappointed in the experience of owning my HP OfficeJet Pro 8710 for the past 15 months. Every single day, the first page of any print job is blurry.

The first week I used the 8710 I started getting blurry prints from it. I contacted HP support and spent 30 minutes troubleshooting it. Because this is an intermittent issue that only occurs after the printer has been idle for hours, it’s impossible to make a change and know if the fix worked. I hoped the steps I took with the first tech worked. They did not.

So I called back and HP helped me again. This time they thought it was the print head causing the issue, so they sent me a new print head. I replaced it.

The problem kept happening: blurry prints.

Then I called back and HP helped me again. This time they thought it was the whole printer that was the issue, so they sent me a refurbished printer.

The problem kept happening: blurry prints.

So I called back and HP helped me again. This time they thought it was a configuration issue with the macOS printer driver (never mind the fact that my wife also got blurry prints when printing from her Android phone). The tech walked me through some changes to the driver, and I hoped it would help.

The problem kept happening: blurry prints.

Always the first print of the day when the printer had been idle for hours.

Multiple firmware updates have occurred and every time I hoped that maybe THIS TIME it would fix the issue. 

The problem kept happening: blurry prints.

By this point, probably 10 months had passed and I’d wasted easily 2-3 hours of my life working with HP tech support trying to fix this problem. I just gave up and didn’t want to deal with it for a while.

Today I called HP support again, even though my printer was out of warranty, in the hopes that there was a known fix for this blurry print issue. The tech kindly offered to help me, despite being out of warranty, but after he had me reboot the printer and pull out the ink cartridges and look for corrosion, I just couldn’t walk through the same useless troubleshooting again. I explained in detail the symptoms of the problem, explained that the problem persisted across printer head chanages, multiple ink changes, and even A WHOLE PRINTER CHANGE, but the tech persisted in wanting to put me through the basic steps.

I’ve owned HP printers for 15+ years, and I’ve never felt like I feel now: that my HP printer is incapable of doing the most core thing I need from it…printing. I will likely never buy another HP printer so long as I live given the extreme distrust I now have for their printing products (and lack of faith in HP tech support to solve customer issues).

July 2019 Update: I am pleased to share that HP solved this problem for me. I was told the 8710 printer was known for having this problem, but only in rare cases and they couldn’t duplicate the problem in their labs and thus figure out how to solve it. That makes it a tough issue to fix for customers. However, HP solved this for me by sending me a different printer: the HP OfficeJet Pro 9015. So far I’ve had it set up for a few days and have had no blurry prints, so I’m happy. 😁 I am extremely impressed that HP support was both empowered and willing to offer me a replacement printer. This undoes a lot of the frustration I had toward HP and I am pleased with this outcome. Kudos to HP leadership for giving their techs the authority to do things like this for customers! It’s unfortunate though that I had to go to such lengths to have them offer me a replacement printer. ☹️

This is What Storage Salvation Looks Like: Western Digital RED

Huge thanks to my friends at Western Digital (hi Heather!) for helping me out of a storage bind with these three 10TB WD Red NAS hard drives! These will save me days of moving 35+ TB of data over Ethernet from one NAS to another, twice. And these drives are rated for 24/7 use + a three year warranty. These are my first NAS-appropriate drives – I’ve just used basic consumer-grade drives until now – and I’m excited to see how they perform.

Why was I in desperate need of 30 TB of hard drives you might be asking? I’m in the midst of dealing with a defective Synology 1019+ NAS that has given me non-stop headaches for months, and moving this much data around is incredibly difficult. When I went from my old Synology 1512+ to the new 1019+ I migrated the drives and OS, but I’m convinced that played a role in some of the issues I’m seeing now (as well as outright hardware failures).

So instead of migrating, I’m starting from scratch with a replacement 1019+ and these WD drives, then moving the data over – but only once, which will be a huge time-saver.

Customer databases are hacked more often than you might think

Although I can’t prove this – only the biggest of companies will admit to the most egregious data breaches – I’m convinced there’s a near-constant theft of customer data happening from improperly secured servers. And I’d bet that in many cases, the company involved doesn’t even realize it. Hackers don’t make their presence known unless they have reason to.

How do I know this? I use unique email aliases whenever I give out my email address. I use catch-all email forwarding for jasondunn.com. So if I sign up for something from company XYZ, I give them xyz@ as my email address. It’s hilarious when I do this in person, watching the expression as people try to process it. 🤯 They sometimes think that I work for their company. 😂

I do this to have some control over incoming email; every email address becomes a “burner” that I can throw away by routing it into an inbox with only 1 MB of storage space (so it bounces all incoming email at this point). I have easily over 100 email addresses that are routed this way. These email addresses are compromised in various ways: some are shared/sold to other legitimate companies (“cross marketing”), some keep getting email even after I’ve tried to unsubscribe, and some are used by spammers/phishers like this one below.

I’d contacted Congressman Adam Smith via his online contact form, using this unique email address that had never been used anywhere else before, and a couple of months after using it, I started getting repeated email spam to that alias.

I’ve seen this many times before; I used to try and follow up with the company to point out they might have a problem. Once, years ago, when I did this with an online reseller of Roomba products, they got back to me and confirmed that they did in fact have a security breach and customer contact info was stolen – and they hadn’t realized it. It’s more efficient now for me to just rout the compromised email address into oblivion than to try and make the case that my info was compromised by a third party.

This type of issue happens several times a year to me, so I’m glad I have the ability to control the inflow of email. It will be very hard to go back to the “regular” way of doing email if I ever can’t do an email catch-all…🤔

The All Dressed Potato Chip: Welcome to America!

One of the things you quickly figure out when you move to another country is that there are certain things you’ve taken for granted. When it comes to food, you’ll spend the first few shopping trips assuming that you’re just not finding the thing you bought back home. Then, after you’ve been to a few different grocery stores you’ll realize that thing you want to buy just isn’t sold in the country that you now reside.

We’ve lived in the USA for almost eight years now, and there are still things we could buy back in Canada that are missing from grocery stores in the Seattle area where we live. Some of these include Bicks Dill Pickles, pierogis, Alphagetti, Smarties, Caramilk chocolate bars, Tim Horton’s coffee, scotch mints…and two kids of potato chips that are everywhere in Canada: ketchup chips, and all dressed chips. Continue reading The All Dressed Potato Chip: Welcome to America!

Dramatically Speed up Synology NAS Network Folder Browsing on macOS

Since adopting macOS into my computing world five years ago, and having a Synology NAS in the mix for even longer, one thing I’ve consistently noticed is how much slower it was to browser NAS folders via macOS compared to Windows. Every folder loads so slowly on my Macs, but immediately on my Windows laptop. It’s not about server load either. After five years of wondering why it was so slow, I finally found a solution right on Apple’s tech support pages:

To speed up SMB file browsing, you can prevent macOS from reading .DS_Store files on SMB shares. This makes the Finder use only basic information to immediately display each folder’s contents in alphanumeric order. Use this Terminal command:

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores -bool TRUE

To complete this change, you log out of your Mac and log back in. Boom! You’ll be able to browse network folders as fast as you can on Windows. The negative to this method is that the DS_Store files aren’t scanned, so Finder won’t remember custom file sorting views, etc. No big loss from my perspective, but something to be aware of.

For anyone like me who’s constantly accessing network shares on a NAS, this tweak is a game-changer!

ESPN+ Reviewed: The UFC Head Kicks UFC Fight Pass, and it’s Fatal

I knew the ESPN partnership was firing up in 2019, but I didn’t quite grasp the extent of it…that the UFC would completely destroy the value of being a Fight Pass subscriber if you only watch UFC content and live in the USA (as I do). I don’t have cable TV, don’t watch UFC PPV fights live (too much $$$), and completely rely on UFC Fight Pass to watch 100% of my UFC content. So imagine my shock when I went to watch new fights and everything is blacked out and only available on ESPN+. There’s no reason for me to remain as a UFC Fight Pass subscriber from what I can see so far. Anyone else feel the same? My thoughts so far on the ESPN+ experience replacing UFC Fight Pass are below – I’d love to hear from others here how they are finding it. I used the service for five days before writing this.

The Good

The video quality of fights on ESPN+ is superior to UFC Fight Pass – it looks like it’s 1080p and at a much higher bit rate. I’ve always been irked at the crappy 720p quality of UFC Fight Pass, so I’m thrilled to see better quality on ESPN+. This is a big plus. And, well, that’s about the only good thing I found about it so far.

The Bad

The biggest negative I’m finding so far is while the UFC Fight Pass app was laid out logically – I’d always go into the UFC section > replays and find the event I hadn’t yet watched – the ESPN+ app is, by comparison, an ugly mess. I don’t care about other sports, so it takes some digging to get into the MMA section. That’s not a big deal – the big deal is that once you are into the MMA section, there’s just a long horizontal scroll of UFC content mixed together. About one third of it is Ariel Helwani shows, which I don’t care about (no offense Ariel).Taking a “dumping ground” approach to organizing UFC content is absolutely the wrong approach. It’s messy, it’s confusing, and the fact that they don’t use even show the name of the event makes it so much worse. In order to find the event I hadn’t watched yet, I had to go into UFC Fight Pass, find the event name and date, then go into the ESPN+ app and find the “Sat 2/2 UFC Fight Night Prelims” event. ESPN needs to work with an information taxonomy specialist because this is a dumpster fire right now.

I’ve never seen cameras lose focus though during a UFC fight, but three times during the first Feb 2nd prelim event the shot went completely blurry – did ESPN hire interns to shoot this? Lots of amateurish video production as well – weird fades to black, goofy cuts, etc.

I was surprised to see an ad during the round break, and a bunch of ads before the decision – I guess even though we’re paying for ESPN+ it’s still mostly ad-supported? If I’m paying for something I don’t like see ads, but at least they can be skipped. There are a LOT of ads though – I’m unclear what I’m paying for, honestly, with this many ads.

The Ugly

It doesn’t look like UFC PPV events will ever be viewable for free on this service. I’ve been searching for a firm answer on this, and couldn’t find one so reached out to ESPN+ support and this was their answer: “We don’t know what the future will hold, at this time there are no plans for this”. So it’s looking like the new owners of the UFC have decided that they are going to squeeze fans for more $$$ to watch these events.

The ESPN+ app is extremely buggy and unstable on Apple TV. On the Apple TV, once you pause it pressing play/pause won’t unpause the video – you have to back out (via the Menu button) and go back in to watch it. The more I use this app the more bugs I find. At one point the fight audio was playing while the video was a grey blur – I had to kill the entire app do to anything. It also doesn’t do progress tracking as you watch; after I killed the app when I went back into the fight it started over from scratch.

There’s another bug where, after pausing, pressing menu and going back into the fight, the play/pause button no longer works – neither does the menu button or the dpad, so you can’t skip commercials. The only way get out is to kill the app. The ESPN+ software QA team is not doing their job – I haven’t seen a commercially released app this bad in years.

The Bottom Line

This is a huge step backward for anyone who was a UFC Fight Pass subscriber. The UFC has delivered a huge eye-poke into the eyes of UFC fans who relied upon UFC Fight Pass to watch UFC content. Maybe someday ESPN+ will mature into a suitable replacement, but it’s certainly not that today. For the first time ever, people outside the USA will have much better content and access to UFC content via UFC Fight Pass (for now).

What Search Engines Have to Say About Left Handers

As a left handed, but mostly right-dominant person, I’m always interested in learning more about the genetic component to left-handedness. This article has a lot to say about the topic – I am still reading through it – but I was highly amused at what came up in Bing’s autocomplete. Evil? Demonic?

Google had no autocomplete options for the same phrase as Bing (“are left handed people”) so I had to use a shorter search term to get any autocomplete results at all. Are the people using Bing really using these terms to search for things about left-handed people? That’s pretty funny! 😉