The official tablet (and other useless electronics) thread!

[Ken]

Any of you guys use Plex? My laptop just isn't cutting it as a media server, thinking of building a cheap dedicated media server. Any tips or estimated cost?

I do. I have it set up on a Dell Zino with win7 and its been great for over 3 years now. Its no longer made but you can find them cheap on ebay. Much smaller footprint than an old desktop machine so it can be hidden in the living room easily.

Same, I use it on an a 4 year old HP desktop. I think it has a quad core AMD processor and 8GB RAM, everything runs fine. I can't imagine something similar would run you that much these days.

[Ken]

May have found one problem with my slow internet. I noticed an unsecure xfinitywifi signal when i setup my new modem router thing but thought maybe since we got the notice to upgrade, everyone else around me did to and upgraded and it was a neighbor or something. Well it shadowed my signal in the analyzer and i asked on here if it could be my signal but you guys got tired of commenting on this.
.

Dude, you never posted a WiFi channel analyzer screenshot. You posted a speedtest.net screenshot of speeds compared against your 4G, which helped exactly not at all. If I had seen that, I would have told you that's what it was.

Good luck with calling today though, that's definitely pretty odd.

[RawrImAMonster]

The xfinitywifi thing is part of comcast's new public wifi. The new routers they give you broadcast it as well as your own SSID. Anyone with a comcast account can connect to it and use your connection. I tried it at my friends house and it doesn't limit you at all. You get access to their full bandwidth.

You have to call them to get them to disable it. You're supposed to be able to do it on your account page online, but it never worked for me.

[.RJ]

The xfinitywifi thing is part of comcast's new public wifi. The new routers they give you broadcast it as well as your own SSID. Anyone with a comcast account can connect to it and use your connection

You have got to be shitting me.

[JPolen01]

The xfinitywifi thing is part of comcast's new public wifi. The new routers they give you broadcast it as well as your own SSID. Anyone with a comcast account can connect to it and use your connection

You have got to be shitting me.

You never heard about this?
<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://wifi.comcast.com/default.htm#maps_block">http://wifi.comcast.com/default.htm#maps_block</a><!-- m -->

[.RJ]

My mind is full of fuck. Comcast is the worst.

[ViPER1313]

How is that legit? So I can pay for Comcast's most basic service and then use my neighbor's router and get their full speed? Great, cause there is someone running that router in my neighborhood!

[Sully]

"Hello, my name is Hamel?, how can i help you?

Id like to disable the xfinitywifi ssid for the unsecured public wifi on my xifinity router.

This is product activation, i can give you the number for support.

Ok
Dial number, go through exact same menus and button pushes, end up in the same place.

Hello, my name is Hamel?(idk, sounded exactly the same) how can i help you?

Id like to disable the xfinitywifi ssid for the unsecured public wifi on my xifinity router.

Ok, so you'd like to disable the wifi on your router?

No, i want to disable the public xfinity ssid for people off the street to use but keep my secured ssid.

Ok, so are you using another router?

No, i want to use the xfinity router but turn off the public public hotspot feature

Ok so you want to disable your wifi?! Let me do that for you.

No i want to keep my wifi, but disable the public signal.

(This serious went on for 10 minutes back and forth)

Ok let me talk to someone and see what we can do, please stay on the line.

Ok

Please stay on the line and hold.

Ok...

(Comes back, and tells me he needs to call the wifi support line and he'll explain my issue for me, no problem, puts me on hold. Comes back after 5 mintues and tells me hes still on hold but asks me to please stay on the line, guess he was afraid i eas going to run away)

(Connects me to a new person but hes still there and says goodbye to both of us, i say nothing, new girl says goodbye and awkward pause while he thinks im going to say goodbye, gtfo dude)

New girl: so the other tech was telling me that you have a new router that you want to connect and youd like to disapple the xfinity wifi?

NO, i want to disable the public xfinitywifi thing for people off the street to use(would have been easier if it had an actual name like, Hey, we're comcast and we are going to fuck you in the ass and distribute your signal for all your neighbors)

(At some point in this exchange i said the secret code word that allowed access to this secret feature: hotspot)

Ok, so you want to disable the hotspot?

I guess

Ok let me do that for you.


3 minutes later it was done i think, havent checked cause i typed this as i was talking to them. This is the stupidest service ever and i can only imagine the users that are even worse with computers than me who dont even know about it and will continue to broadcast it.

[davej]

You'd be into newegg or amazon for like a hundred bucks to get your own modem and wireless router, and never have to deal with that dick company for this crap. (although they still push config files to your modem to throttle your speeds, and have read of cases where modems have been bricked by comcast)

are you paying a fee for the modem/router on your monthly bill? last i knew it was like $7-9/month

[WRXtranceformed]

Yeah I would go with your own hardware if you can....did that a while back and minus some wireless router issues it has been solid

[Sully]

And its back! It was gone for like 5 minutes and i updated the channel i was on and it popped back up. Then i switched to auto channel selection which i why im on such a shitty one right now

Im 167404 btw

[Sully]

Hmmm, is it gone?




Also, is this showing ssid being broadcast? Wouldnt it be like the blank one if it was hidden like i want?

I'm giving it like two more days and then switching back to my old router to see if it helps. Its almost stupid to pay for internet if i have to constantly switch to 4g to get a page to load.

Do you think it could be a signal thing? The guy was here a few months ago and changed a bunch of things at the street box to boost our signal. Could it have been favorable to thr old modem and maybe not to this one?

[JustinG]

Can you get FIOS, cause if so. Cancel that garbage immediately. We had Comcast and it kept shitting on us. When Casey started to WFH full time we had to go with FIOS, never again will I deal with Comcast's BS.

[BLINGMW]

no problem

I lol'd

[JustinG]

Any of you guys use Plex? My laptop just isn't cutting it as a media server, thinking of building a cheap dedicated media server. Any tips or estimated cost?

I do. I have it set up on a Dell Zino with win7 and its been great for over 3 years now. Its no longer made but you can find them cheap on ebay. Much smaller footprint than an old desktop machine so it can be hidden in the living room easily.

Same, I use it on an a 4 year old HP desktop. I think it has a quad core AMD processor and 8GB RAM, everything runs fine. I can't imagine something similar would run you that much these days.

My laptop is only like 3yrs old and has an i3, which according to Plex should be able to handle 2 1080 streams at the same time. But it will barely handle a 480 stream without buffering every 10 min. Would upgrading the RAM help? I dunno how this shit works.

[Evan]

looks like the comcast buttrape wifi is gone. id also change to channel 11.

honestly though I dont think it was ever your problem. your bandwidth was fine. its your latency that is fucked, which usually is an issue of routing (external or internal).
like i said, you need to run a wired test, and if possible bypass the router entirely.

also run a pingtest.net and see what it says.

[Evan]

Anyone have experience with Sonos? Seems like good value for the money and has applications well beyond a lone entertainment system. The "home theater" system is fairly expensive but you could really creative with multiroom setups for audio, if nothing else.

looked into it pretty hard a few years ago. I thought it was way overpriced at the time, I ended up going with Squeezebox which I <3 <3 <3 but of course Logitech discontinued it. Whenever those crap out I guess Ill look at sonos again, but honestly I think a tablet (plus optionally a DAC) makes a pretty kickass music source.

[Evan]

Any of you guys use Plex? My laptop just isn't cutting it as a media server, thinking of building a cheap dedicated media server. Any tips or estimated cost?

Yeah I run it on my NAS. Nas was $250 + drives so ends up about $450-500 pending drive size. Everyone should have a nas to keep important files and pictures safe IMO so its a multipurpose device, and it uses way less electricity than a real desktop.

if you build yoru own to save $$, just dont cheap out too bad on the cpu. you need some horsepower to do transcoding. just stay away from atom. i3 or even new pentium/celeron should be fine.

[Apoc]

Anyone have experience with Sonos? Seems like good value for the money and has applications well beyond a lone entertainment system. The "home theater" system is fairly expensive but you could really creative with multiroom setups for audio, if nothing else.

looked into it pretty hard a few years ago. I thought it was way overpriced at the time, I ended up going with Squeezebox which I <3 <3 <3 but of course Logitech discontinued it. Whenever those crap out I guess Ill look at sonos again, but honestly I think a tablet (plus optionally a DAC) makes a pretty kickass music source.

We almost always use our phones. I'm more interested in wireless speakers that can be placed/moved throughout the house. With DirecTV wireless Genie and a backyard we use FAR more than we ever did in VA, the idea of everything everywhere is appealing.

[Apoc]

Any of you guys use Plex? My laptop just isn't cutting it as a media server, thinking of building a cheap dedicated media server. Any tips or estimated cost?

Yeah I run it on my NAS. Nas was $250 + drives so ends up about $450-500 pending drive size. Everyone should have a nas to keep important files and pictures safe IMO so its a multipurpose device, and it uses way less electricity than a real desktop.

if you build yoru own to save $$, just dont cheap out too bad on the cpu. you need some horsepower to do transcoding. just stay away from atom. i3 or even pentium/celeron should be fine.

Anyone running into size limitations with routers and NAS? The router we just got only supports up to 2 TB, which is plenty now, but there are some killer deals on 4 TB drives. Could I take a 4 TB and make two 2 GB partition with MBR?

2. Capacity

In theory, there is no capacity limit, but there are two aspects as follows which restrict the capacity:
A. Currently, the GPT partitioning is not supported. Due to limitations of MBR, each drive can only read up to 2TB.
B. Supports at most eight partitions in theory, if the hard drive has more than eight partitions, it just load the first 8 partitions. (On the same drive, the total capacity of each partition cannot exceed 2TB; If there are different hard drives connected via an USB hub, in theory it can identify a maximum capacity of 8 * 2TB)