I held off upgrading to Catalina for a long time. I was hanging onto a few 32bit only apps and also I’ve experienced trouble in the past with new OS iterations. As we have reached 10.15.5 I decided to take the plunge and upgrade. We are running a few Macs in the house. Both MacBooks support Catalina natively, but my iMac is a 2009 model and as such is technically unsupported. I’ve been upgrading my 2009 iMac for a few years using the DosDude patch and it has always worked perfectly. The upgrade of the MacBooks went great, and even the iMac seemed to be coping well.Read More....
I first got hold of this Raspberry Pi 1 Model B back in May 2012. At the time, I bought the pi to replace an ageing Apple TV 2 which I had jail broken and was using as a kodi media centre. It worked well, but I preferred the Aluminium apple remote & IR sensor on the ATV2 so the pi was largely mothballed.
A few years later I bought a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B and this became our main Kodi media centre, replacing the Apple TV 2 and coupled with a Rii keyboard. It was much faster & more stable running Libreelec.
A couple more years passed and I realized I still had my first Pi, complete with an awesome perspex case, so I had a look for projects to complete with it. I stumbled across the PiHole project and the rest is history.
PiHole is a network ad blocker/filter and DNS server. It has a great browser interface & you can add lots of adblock/ublock blocklists to the pi, to block ads on all devices on the network at a hardware level. Unlike adblockers on a browser which use more cosmetic ways of blocking ads, the pihole blocks them at DNS level, meaning a request to the ad/blocked server never leaves the network. From a privacy standpoint this is huge. It also means I can control traffic/trackers on devices such as our Smart TV and iOS devices. It’s surprising how many requests these devices make without your knowledge.
Pi Hole Web Interface
PiHole’s web interface shows all traffic & destinations and allows you to whitelist or blacklist IP’s & domains for fine-grained control over outgoing traffic on your network.
I took my setup one step further & coupled it with DNSCrypt 2.0 to encrypt all of my outbound DNS traffic. DNSCrypt coupled with PiHole on the pi & HTTPS everywhere in my browser ensures no unencrypted traffic leaves my browser. All DNS lookups are encrypted & I use non logging DNSCrypt Servers for my DNS lookups. This adds an extra layer of protection for my network traffic & prevents eavesdropping & sniffing of my traffic.
The Pi Hole raspberry pi sits in a cupboard downstairs and filters all of our network traffic. We have around 20 Wi-Fi connected devices on the network & around 10 hard-wired devices & it copes fine. It’s running 24/7 and the blocklist contains almost 1.3 million blocked domains without a hitch. Even with DNScrypt running alongside Pi Hole (which are both Python based) and a MySQL server for Kodi, the old Pi with its modest hardware isn’t stressed, runs silently, uses very little CPU time and has a 50% memory footprint. It’s even running the original SD card which has been in use since 2012.
This is a great solution. It’s silent, uses only a few watts of power & saves thousands of extra requests per day, not to mention the amount of data which is never downloaded. Browsing is generally much quicker on my home network & an added benefit is that we don’t see advertising on catch up TV services on our Smart TV.
I’m going to do a full post on setting up the pi for this usage, so if you would like to see that, check back soon.
For those of you willing to dive in, you need a Pi running raspbian. You can install Pi Hole using the instructions on their website
I started Xbox hacking back in October 2004. I bought a Crystal Xbox for £100. I wanted to get an older model due to the more complex chipping procedure of the 1.6 motherboards in new machines but after aloof thought I decided to go with the new crystal machine. I then purchased a Xecuter 2.6 Mod chip from Kaneaction who offered a great service. The mod chip fitting itself was a nightmare. Took me almost 4 hours to make all the solder points and rebuild the LPC . Also, I lost one of the copper tracks (the heat from the soldering iron destroyed the track) so I had to rebuild the track using wire. After the chip was installed i ripped out the original 8GB Western Digital HD and fitted a 250gb Samsung drive . I then booted the Xbox from Slayers Evox Boot disk and installed Evox, avalaunch & XBMC.
Just recently I removed Evox and set the new CVS build of XBMC as my main dashboard. This was for many reasons but mainly the fact that I use the Xbox more as a media centre of late than a gaming machine. I am able to play Divx and DVD on the xbox from my armchair using the remote, I have the Xbox networked to my media server for watching films. I also have my entire MP3 collection on the Xbox hard disk(about 100GB of MP3). This allows the xbox to be used as a stand-alone Jukebox with a great UI. The new builds of XBMC also allow python scripting. I have a script which random plays a play list when the Xbox boots, so I just turn the machine on and music plays. I also have Game trailers & Move trailers streamed directly to the Xbox for my viewing. Perhaps the best script I use is the Yahoo! Launch script, which streams almost every single music video to the xbox on demand at high res. Like MTV, without the adverts and crap music vids. Similar to this is the shoutcast scripting which allows thousands of free streaming radio stations to be played back. The scripts I use are included below
My own autoexec and randomplay scripts here (place autoexec in XBMC route and the randomplay scripts in the scripts folder) (Edit the autoexec and randomplay files in notepad to represent your file structure)
