Month: April 2016

Satellite TV has been a hobby of mine for ages and as my loyal Dreambox 7025+ started to show signs of old age, I had to let it have it´s well earned rest. I upgraded to GigaBlue, which has newer version of the same interface I installed to DM7025+ has so other family members can use it too.
The UE Gigablue HD 800 Plus is the successor to the HD 800 UE, the design was revised and a faster 750 MHz processor ensures orderly processing power. The difference with the little brother to the HD 800 SE Plus is the display, the 800 SE Gigablue a 7-segment display is installed in this model, a refined LCD display.
Even though the enthusiast sites don´t like my other receiver much, I have to say my Miraclebox 9 has served just as well. Just leave the unnecessary nick-nacks out and everything is hunky-dory. There are other devices for Youtube and similar services, like for example WD TV Live .

Bought five, nice toy but haven´t yet figured out what to do with those. Running Kodi mediacenter has been the most useful task.
Running virtual machines on a server seems much more flexible way to test stuff. On Pi you can´t take snapshots and revert to those like on Virtualbox and others. On the other hand, if you´re running VM´s on a Windows machine, constant updating shuts down VM´s too. Damn.

Installed SiteScope Freemium version on a VM. It keeps an eye out for my set-top boxes, NAS´ and servers and alerts me if something horribly crashes. Even though SiSFree has it´s limitations, I think many small companies could manage with that. Nicely done HP.

In this age of digitalization as even the smallest companies start their internet services, nobody seems to take notice about the fact that even the greatest product or service of them all does not bring you customers if your frontend doesn´t work. As I have been interested in service monitoring for a long time, I made a test environment for myself where I monitor my site, cloud services, surveillance systems etc. If my site goes down or gets hacked and the content changes, my mobile alerts me immediately and I can react. Best of all, most of these systems are free, you just have to know where to look and how to use them.