Roasted

In this post a week and a half ago I conjectured that the bottleneck of my music streaming service on my Android app was the NAS, but after finally digging through the logs, I discovered this wee bit:

2020-04-04 14:09:56 [admin] (play/index) -> Playing file (/media/music/Faith No More/Sol Invictus/08 Motherfucker.m4a}... 
2020-04-04 14:09:56 [admin] (play/index) -> Media type {m4a} 
2020-04-04 14:09:56 [admin] (play/index) -> Transcoding is not enabled for this media type. Valid types: {["native"]}

Turns out the problem was the transcoding of m4a files. All I had to do was add this line to the config:

transcode_m4a = required

And voila—no more hiccups. Like scratching a months-old itch at last.

As you can see above, I tried roasting my own coffee beans for the first time. I bought that Air Crazy popcorn popper years ago based on some things I read on the interwebs about being an adequate device for the purpose, but then I discovered that the only real way to get green beans at the time was to by in enormous bulk quantities or sign up for some inscrutable membership club and follow all kinds of arcane rules so I just gave up.

Meanwhile, the box traveled from apartment to apartment unopened. While checking in on a friend, I was made aware of this site that sells small quantities of the unroasted stuff. Amazeballs! The coffee world had transformed before my very eyes. Anyway, the first roast wasn’t so bad (though I’m probably not getting the best of it with my French Press, which is why I’ve ordered some new brewing supplies—more on that in a later post). Not having done sufficient research I learned that you should have a proper cooling system for the beans so for the next batch I’ve hacked together something (more on that in a later post as well).

The coffee, incidentally, is from my late abuelita-in-law’s home region. I haven’t had a chance to visit that area, but I was lucky enough to have met her and had the chance to make tamales under her guidance. I’ll have to post a drawing I made of her one of these days.

The Church of Sysadministry

Not so long ago I decided to switch from Google Play Music (where I’ve uploaded most of my library and which is soon to be subsumed under Youtube Music) to running my own open-source streaming service from my home server (an early 2011 Macbook Pro upgraded with SSD and an old Dell Desktop that crapped out recently). I initially ran mStream because I liked the idea of running a Node app, and it wasn’t too bad, but I could never get the Android app to work.

Lately, I’ve switched to Ampache, which is unfortunately PHP/MySQL-based, but it has a whole host of configuration options and is compatible with the well-supported Subsonic API, which means I can use DSub, the open-source Android app. Minus the usual hullabaloo getting that stack working on Ubuntu, it works great. I can even connect our Roku TV to it’s DLNA service to stream the library there.

Work let me take home an ancient Netgear ReadyNAS NV+, which I figured I’d use to hold the music and mount via NFS on the server. It sorta worked, but the Android app would crap out on random songs, which I’m guessing is due to the NAS throughput? So I dug up an old 2TB WD Passport Ultra (USB 3.0) and decided to format it to ext4 (took almost 5 hours!) and decided to connect it to my Raspberry Pi 4 (the Macbook is only USB 2.0). Incidentally, I decided to try out Pi-hole on the Pi and discovered that it blocks the Zelle functionality on my TDBank app so had to whitelist a bunch of URLs that I had to discover by trial and error via the logs. Here’s the list of URLs:

  • api.leanplum.com
  • cdn.branch.io
  • identity.mparticle.com
  • mediation.adnxs.com
  • mpsnare.iesnare.com
  • nativesdks.mparticle.com
  • nexus.ensighten.com
  • nym1-ib.adnxs.com

Anyway, the Pi is running NFS and the Pi-hole like a champ, and just running ls on the share vs. the NAS is infinitely faster. As for the NAS, probably best to relegate it to backup duties.


All Teh Taaaaaaaags