Studio711.com – Ben Martens

There are millions of apps for Android, and some of them are so useful that I think they’d even be nice to have on my desktop. It turns out, that’s not an impossible task. There are a number of Android emulators.

I searched around for a while and settled on BlueStacks because it was free and generally rated well. Once you get it installed, it basically launches a tablet in a window. You can connect to the Google Play Store (or Amazon Underground) and install apps just like you would on your device.

There are a few drawbacks though:

1. It feels weird to use a mouse instead of a finger. Most apps are ok, but forget about it if you require two fingers at a time.
2. It’s an older version of Android so more modern stuff might not work.
3. This is probably burying the lead, but I fired it up when I wrote this post and it immediately blue screened my machine. I had been using it fine about a month ago so I don’t know what happened.

The bottom line is that if you’re doing reviews of apps or have some very specific need for running an Android app on your computer then yes, it’s possible. But otherwise, it’s probably more frustration than you want to deal with.

One of my earliest experiences with a computer was the Macintosh Classic (or Classic II?) that Dad would bring home from work. I spent a lot of hours on that machine and one of our favorite games was Airborne. Gameplay was pretty simple. You had two different times of guns to shoot from the lower left of the screen. Planes and helicopters flew in from the right and sometimes they would drop parachuting infantry. Once there were enough troops on the ground, you would lose.

It turns out that archive.org not only has some of the old Mac games, but there’s a built-in emulator so you can easily play them from your browser! Airborne is on the list and you can play it right now.

Now if only I could find a few other favorites from that computer. I remember an air traffic control game, a “3D” maze game with monsters, and an elevator/frogger game. I wasn’t able to find any of those on the archive.org list but maybe they’ll show up eventually.

When you get internet service from Comcast, they rent you a cable modem. This costs around $10/month. The nice thing is that if you ever have trouble with the modem, you just replace it at no additional cost. But if you’re willing to put in a little extra effort, you can ditch that monthly fee.

Start at the official Comcast help page. They walk you through the steps of figuring out what kind of modem you should get. There are a lot of options and your specific choice depends on whether you have your telephone through Comcast too or whether you want to have your modem and router all in one device or in two separate devices.

When I buy a modem, I try to get one with the latest tech so that I don’t need to upgrade it very soon to get faster service. Currently, the top of the line units have DOCSIS 3.1. That supports some pretty crazy speeds, but as long as you get DOCSIS 3.0 you should be fine. Being a huge nerd, I like to have a separate modem and a separate router. I don’t have Comcast telephone service. I bought our current modem back in 2012 for $89.99 from Newegg and it is a Linksys DPC3008-CC R. It looks like it’s only $37 now.

I don’t remember the details of how you actually do the replacement once you have the new unit in hand. I think you just plug in the new model and then call Comcast support. They’ll ask you for the “MAC Address” of your new unit which is printed on the device somewhere. After that you can ask them how to return your old modem.

In my case, I broke even on the cost of the modem in 9 months and ever since then I’ve been saving $10/month. If you’re willing to get a little nerdy, it’s an easy way to save some money.

If you could see inside my house when I’m trying to fix network troubles, you’d see me walking around staring at my phone running an app like WiFi Analyzer. It shows all the different WiFi signals and their strengths. A quick glance at that app around my house quickly shows a lot of neighbors with improperly configured routers.

Here’s a tip: Your router probably lets you choose from 11 different channels for the 2.4Ghz radio. You should never use any channel other than 1, 6 or 11. Each channel bleeds over into it’s neighbors and that overlap causes interference for people on the other channels. So if you use channel 3, you’re messing up the spectrum for twice as many people as you need to. This chart shows how the channels overlap:

In most cases, you can randomly pick 1, 6 or 11 and be ok. If you want to go the extra mile, use an app to analyze your wireless spectrum and then pick one of those three that have the least amount of usage.

My love for UniFi WiFi points from Ubiquiti is a bit of a rollercoaster ride. I installed it at church and at our house. The church system is rock solid. The one at our house has caused me a lot of pain and I was pretty convinced one of the two access points had hardware problems so I unplugged it and put it on the shelf.

Recently, Tyla has been having WiFi troubles on her laptop. My first reaction was that the other access point was probably going bad so I started looking into the new distributed wireless (or mesh wireless) network devices like Eero, Orbi and Google WiFi. Those systems aim to simplify the deployment of multiple access points around your house.

I realized that they aren’t generally targeted at me. They lack some of the advanced features that I like and they generally use a wireless connection to sync up the access points. I have my house wired with CAT6 ethernet and want to have everything wired, if possible, including my access points. WiFi has been around since the turn of the century and it has been causing me pain ever since. If a device in my house doesn’t move, it gets a hardwired network connection. Wireless is reserved for laptops, phones and Internet of Things devices that don’t have a wired option. So that’s my long way of saying that I don’t want to have access points that connect to the mothership via wireless.

Before plunking down more money on some replacement hardware, I decided to give the UniFi system one more try. After a fresh look, I realized I should check the network cable that runs downstairs into the living room where I had the “broken” access point hooked up. Sure enough, one of the 8 wires is not connected! Duh. I used a different jack on the other side of the room and it worked fine. I’ll have to go back and figure out why that one jack doesn’t work, but for now, I’m up and running.

I flashed the firmware on both access points to the latest version, adjusted the placement of both access points to provide optimum coverage around our house, and now I wait to see if there are any more wireless networking reports from Tyla.

For the last 11 years, I’ve been storing all of my internet bookmarks on a site called delicious.com. When you save a bookmark, you associate a bunch of words (tags) with it and then you can easily search for bookmarks via the tags again later. For example, if I want to see all the bookmarks that I tagged with “map”, I just go to https://del.icio.us/bwmartens/map.

Unfortunately the site seems to be dying. Yahoo acquired it in 2005 and it was doing very well until Yahoo went down the tubes. Ownership has changed a few times since 2011 and I’m worried that some day soon it’s just going to disappear. They got rid of the delicious.com domain and are now only available under their original domain: del.icio.us. That broke a lot of the apps and extensions that had been built up around the site.

The biggest concern to me was that their export functionality was gone. So the 2600+ bookmarks I had saved there were in a black hole. I need very few of those but I regularly use it to pull up old bookmarks with solutions to various problems, especially for issues I encounter at work. So I set off on a journey to figure out how to get the bookmarks exported by myself. That proved to be tricky because their API is now shut down. I couldn’t even write my own app to export the bookmarks.

I came up with two ideas:

1. The pages of bookmarks are easily accessible via this URL format: https://del.icio.us/bwmartens?&page=2 so I could download each page and then write a program that would convert the raw HTML of the bookmark list into something readable by another app. I actually did download all the pages since it was pretty simple. curl.exe is a great command line tool for downloading HTML and I quickly wrote a batch file that downloaded all 200+ pages of HTML. At least I had something in case it died the next day.
2. I eventually found a Chrome browser extension (Delicious Bookmark Bar Sync 1.1) that still worked and would let me export my bookmarks. It ended up saving them into the Chrome bookmark list (each tag becomes a folder) which isn’t ideal, but it is possible to export bookmarks from Chrome so again, at least I have something.

Now that I know I have a fairly easy way to export my bookmarks periodically, I’m still using Chrome. This doesn’t seem to be a very popular product category anymore so I haven’t found a lot of other options. Google Bookmarks is a similar service but they don’t allow you to bulk import bookmarks. That’s such an obvious feature that it makes me wonder if Google is going to kill off that product some day too.

If you have a good bookmark tagging solution, please shoot me a note!

I’ve been slowly weaning myself off of Facebook. I waste too much time there and don’t get enough value out of it. The first step was to start unfollowing people. I stay friends with them but I don’t have their stuff show up in my news feed. The most recent find was the Facebook Purity extension for Chrome. It gives you all kinds of customization options to clean up Facebook and bend it to your will. For example, I have mine set to always show the stories in chronological order and hide any story with the word Instagram since I’ve already seen those posts in Instagram. I also have keyword filters set that hide anything with the words Trump and Hillary.

Facebook is beautiful now. Of course this only works when viewing through Chrome on my desktop but not having it on my phone just makes the phone app more repulsive and helps break the habit of clicking on it all the time.

Give it a shot if you’re a grumpy curmudgeon like me!

Our home TV set up runs on Windows Media Center. Our cable line comes into a PC and all of the DVR functionality occurs there and gets fed around the house to Xbox360s hooked up to TVs. For the past few weeks, it has started having more and more issues with basic playback. It stutters or pauses for long periods of time and it almost ruined our last football party. That PC is ancient. I bought it in 2006 and it has been running nonstop as our Media Center since 2010. I never touch it and it just works. That’s the way things should be. But given the problems we were having, I had to go take a look.

Pretty much as soon as I touched it, it totally fell apart. I blew the dust out of it and maybe I was too aggressive, or maybe it was just a few reboot cycles that did it in, but the thing won’t even get to the BIOS screen anymore.

Decision time. We’re so close to just cutting cable out completely. We only watch a few TV shows and those are easily purchased on Amazon Video. The small cost of those shows is easily outweighed by the convenience and lack of commercials to skip over. But as I thought more about it, technology isn’t quite ready to fit our needs. Specifically, the NFL is too tight with their content to give me many options. I want to be able to watch live NFL games or record them and start watching them and hour or two after they’ve started. There’s no online offering that I know of in our area which allows this. Our Comcast subscription does have a live streaming TV option that works well, but I can’t record that at all.

What about just getting a Comcast DVR like everyone else? We currently pay $71/month for a package that includes 120Mbps down 10Mbps up internet, very basic HD cable channels and HBO. The Comcast rep said that my package “doesn’t support a DVR”… how is that a thing? Anyway, getting a DVR would mean adding $30-40/month to my package price and then another $10-20/month for a DVR. And then I’d only have a DVR hooked up to one TV. I’d need two if I was going to have them on both TVs. Yuck. That’s never going to happen.

There are a lot of online offerings now like Sling TV, Direct TV Now, and PlayStation Vue. They all look awesome but I don’t see the local channels available in our area and the DVR offerings are spotty at best. We’re getting there but I think it will be a couple more years until my scenario is covered.

So in the end, we decided to build replace the current PC with a new one. I built one out with parts available at Fry’s for $340. That included a case, motherboard, CPU, RAM and a power supply. I already had an SSD for the OS, a hard drive for the recordings, and the cable card tuner to receive the Comcast signal. Here’s my shopping list at Fry’s:

• Intel Core i3-6100 CPU
• MSI H110M Gaming Motherboard
• Enermax Ostrog Case
• Thermaltake 430w PSU
• DDR4 8GB 2400MHz RAM

The build only took 30-45 minutes and it booted right up. Then the trouble started. I need to run Windows 7 to use Media Center. The product has been slowly killed off since then and no longer exists in Windows 10. The problem is that the motherboard I picked had the Skylake chipset from Intel and the old Windows 7 install media doesn’t have the right drivers for that. The result is that you can’t use the USB ports on the machine. Umm… how do you install Windows from your USB key or use your USB mouse and keyboard to get through the installer if you can’t use your USB ports? Ugh. I’ll save you the long, painful story, but I ended up moving an old DVD drive over and putting the Windows install disc in there. I was able to get a USB keyboard to work just enough to make it through the installer and then I was able to install the drivers in Windows off of the mother board DVD. (This post was particularly helpful for adding drivers to the WIM files in the installer.)

I’m home free, right? Nope. Microsoft wants everybody on Windows 10 and it’s really obvious if you try to start with a fresh install of Windows 7 SP1. Windows Update won’t work for you. After gobs of trial and error and researching, I found this post which worked for me. It basically involves manually installing two Windows Update packs that update the functionality of Windows Update itself. After that it was just a matter of installing around 200 updates and THEN I was ready to go.

Media Center works great on this machine and even though it was about the cheapest PC I could build (without delving into totally unknown brands) it’s crazy fast. Windows 7 still has that “Windows Experience Index” feature. I ran it for fun and got these scores. Recall that the scale goes from 1.0 to 7.9.

• Processor: 7.4
• Memory: 7.9
• Graphics: 6.9
• Gaming graphics: 6.9
• Hard drive: 7.9

I’ll be putting it through it’s paces over the next couple weeks but I’m hopeful that this will sit quietly in the closet for 3-4 more years until I’m able to fully switch to a more modern solution.

P.S. Did you know you can still get WEI scores in Windows 10? This post has the details but I’ll copy the instructions here.

Open a Run window (Windows Logo key+R), type perfmon and press Enter. Click Data Collector Sets > System > Right-click System Diagnostics > Start. When it has finished, go down to Reports in the left pane > System > System Diagnostics and click on the name of your computer and the data will be collected. Scroll down in the main pane and expand the Hardware Configuration drop down > Expand Desktop Rating drop down > Expand the + sign below Query, finally expand the + sign below Returned Objects to display your WEI score.