Category Archives: fun

Twitch on a Samsung Smart TV

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Back in April of this year (2019) Samsung decided to remove from the SmartTV app store the application I used to watch twitch. The more annoying part was that this action also disabled the application on my two TVs. For a while I was content with the twitch app on my media player (LibreElec on a PI3), although there were some mild bugs on both the app and the system.

With WCS Fall 2019 [1] approaching (I love my Starcraft) I decided to find a better solution for this and after a bit of use of my google-fu I found Felipe’s [2] smarttv-twitch [3]. The application fully supports all 4k and 1080p Samsung TVs released in 2016 or later. Easy to follow instructions and half an hour later and a small bump with java (grrr), both my TVs had the new app installed. Oh, I guess I am a Tizen developer now (I had to mark my Samsung account as a developer account in order to be able to upload the app to the TVs).

Turns up the new app is way better than the old one and I’m really happy with it. I think twitch should hire the guy (or at least license his work) and work with Samsung to make it available trough the appstore.

Now let’s see [4]  who will win. Terran FTW! 🙂

[1] https://wcs.starcraft2.com/en-us/
[2] https://github.com/fgl27
[3] https://github.com/fgl27/smarttv-twitch
[4] https://www.twitch.tv/starcraft

Nostalgic

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Original Red Hat Linux 5 Box

 

 

Red Hat Linux 5.0. (Not RHEL).
I still have the box after 20 years.
Too bad I don’t have a floppy drive anymore. 🙂

pfSense on a WatchGuard Firebox

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pfsense

 

I was searching for a new gateway box for my home network and a friend gave me an old Watchguard Firebox Edge x1250e to play.

 

20150109_195346

Unfortunately the factory software that came with the box was old and not so feature-rich but reading trough the interwebs I discovered that you can install pfSense on it.

So I preceded in doing so, with bonus geek points that it involved opening the box, updating the BIOS (with some hoops), the works. In the process I upgraded the RAM to 2Gb (from 512Mb) and the CF card to 4Gb (from 512Mb). Here is laying for the operation, with the innards wide open:

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Everything worked perfectly, I even managed to make good use of the LCD output (via the LCDproc package), and now I have a nice firewall at the gate 🙂

I only need to get a hold of a L-shaped power cord because a standard cable is protruding too much out of the back and I have issues mounting it into the rack.

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The last gripe I still have with it is that I need to figure out how to convince the software to forward the igmp messages trough the VPN. But I like a good challenge.

Later edit: It seems that you need to be more specific than “permit ip any any” to convince pf to let the multicast packets trough. It needs “permit ip any any and also packets with ip options set”.

Later edit 2: It seems that “poor man’s error correction” (aka TCP) is actually working. I no longer have stutters in the multicast IPTV streams. (old solution: PIM over GRE, new solution: OpenVPN with TCP transport, this was actually why I was searching for a new box in the first place). Yay!