Hidden Wi-Fi Network on the Roku 2

If you have a Roku 2 media streamer and use a wireless network scanning tool such as Acrylic Wi-Fi Home, you might see a hidden wi-fi network on exactly the same wireless channel as your router. Depending on the location of your PC, the signal for this hidden network might be stronger than your wireless router. Changing the channel on your router doesn't help, as the hidden network "follows" and switches to the same channel again.

This is due to a feature in the Roku called "Wi-Fi" direct. This allows for wireless devices (such as phones and other wi-fi remote controls) to connect to the Roku. As the Roku 2 comes with an infra-red remote control, this additional Wi-Fi network isn't really needed (as long as you're not planning to control it via wi-fi).

Connecting the Roku 2 to the internet via a wired connection means that the hidden Roku wireless network can be on a different channel, but to reduce interference I've  disabled Wi-Fi Direct on my Roku 2 by following these steps: -

•     Home
•     Settings
•     System
•     Advanced system settings
•     Device connect
•     Disable Device connect

Once you've done this, you should see the additional wireless network disappear.

BT Infinity and Netflix on Roku 2 (Error message ui-800-3)

If you're having issues getting your Roku working with Netflix on BT Infinity, it might be worth trying to turn off parental controls.

It appears that BT enforce the use of their own DNS servers which causes issues for the Roku when connecting to Netflix (but strangely things work OK via the app on YouView).

This gave me the error message "Netflix has encountered an error. Retrying in xx seconds. Code: ui-800-3 (%MSL_INTERNAL_CODE%)

When trying to test the connection I got failures acccessing "nw-2-5".

Turning off (and then deleting the settings) parental controls within the "My BT" website fixed things on my Roku 2 (4205E) but I had to wait for a couple of hours after the changes.

Hope this helps somebody!

Best Swift Programming Tutorial

For anybody learning Swift to develop iOS apps, there are plenty of tutorials around, but the best one that I have found by far is this one: Hacking with Swift iOS Tutorial. It contains loads of hands-on tutorials, and also a quick overview on Swift theory too.

I've tried other courses/tutorials, but this is by far the best, and even better, its free!

Highly recommended.

Apache, MySQL and PHP in OS X Mavericks 10.9

Unfortunately upgrading from OS X Mountain Lion ( 10.8) to Mavericks (10.9) stopped my AMP (Apache, MySQL, PHP) installation working.

Luckily, this is just down to an apache configuration file being overwritten and is easy to correct...

1. Edit Apache Configuration

sudo vi /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf

a. Uncomment following line to re-enable virtual hosts: -

    Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

b. Uncomment following line to re-enable PHP: -

    LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

2. Restart Apache

sudo apachectl restart


There was no need to change any of my MySQL installation, this continued working after the installation.

Installing Streamripper on Mac OS X via Homebrew

Here's a quick post on how to install "streamripper" on OS X, with a little help from homebrew.

1. Install homebrew

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSkL raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/go)"

2. Check installation

brew doctor

3. Fix any issues

I had the message "Warning: /usr/bin occurs before /usr/local/bin"...

To fix this, edit "/etc/paths" and change the order of the directories.

On re-running "brew doctor", you should hopefully now get the message "Your system is ready to brew."

4. Install "streamripper"

brew install streamripper

5. Run streamripper

streamripper http://(your stream URL here)

6. Play files

If you want to listen to your MP3 recordings from the command-line, you can use the built-in OS X "afplay" command.

afplay file.mp3

Homebrew Notes

Here are some additional notes on homebrew.

Software is installed into directories inside "/usr/local/Cellar/" with symbolic links created in "/usr/local/bin".

For example, after installing "streamripper", a directory "/usr/local/Cellar/streamripper" will be created (along with some other dependencies), and a symbolic link "/usr/local/bin/streamripper" will be created which points to "../Cellar/streamripper/1.64.6/bin/streamripper"

To get the latest packages and homebrew: -

brew update 

Upgrade the installed software with: -

brew upgrade

These commands can be combined as: -

brew update && brew upgrade

To uninstall softeare: -

brew uninstall imagemagick

There is a great on-line package browser here: http://braumeister.org/

Quick Wipe of Hard Drive using Linux

This is what I have found to be the quickest way to wipe a hard drive under Linux (you can use an Ubuntu Live CD to do this).

sudo shred -v -z -n 1 /dev/sda

(where 'sda' is whatever your drive is - sda, sdb, sdc etc)

The parameters used in the above example are: -

• -v = verbose (show progress)
• -z = add a final overwrite with zeros
• -n 1 = Overwrite 1 time (instead of the default of 25)

This should overwrite any sensitive data on the disk once followed by zeros. Modern hard drives shouldn't need more than one pass overwrite anyway according to this article.

This method is by far the fastest that I have found - some of the other methods were estimated to take 3 days to complete on a 250GB hard drive, this way only took an hour or two.

Installing SL4A on Alcatel Android Phone

The first thing to do on my new cheapo Android phone is to install Scripting Layer for Android and Python on it.

Here's a quick guide...