A few months ago, I enabled the ‘live update’ feature on my QNAP TS-410 NAS. It seemed like a good idea.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t. Seems that something happened with it’s auto-update feature, which caused the firmware to be completely bonkers.
So tonight, I had an interesting (har har) and fun (NOT) time using my laptop to execute the firmware recovery process. Hopefully this works.
It worked.
I’ve been messing around with BrightScript (the language used by Roku products) quite a bit lately, and found their Eclipse-based development tools to… Well I think they suck. Then again, I’m no fan of eclipse.
So I dropped back to using the roku sdk makefile examples, and my text editor of choice: jEdit.
Here’s a BrightScript Editor Mode for jEdit. It does rudimentary syntax highlighting, knows about the keywords and built-in global functions, and handles indenting gracefully.
Download the zipped mode definition, expand the zip into ~/.jedit/modes and add the following to your ~/.jedit/modes/catalog” file.
<mode NAME="BrightScript" FILE="brightscript.xml" FILE_NAME_GLOB="*.brs" />
So this year I got a couple of Roku 2′s around Christmas time. We have one on our main TV in the familiy room, and another in the master bedroom. Since we don’t have traditional cable channels, we watch a lot of stuff on netflix, and we’ve contemplated Hulu plus (but I just can’t bring myself to do it). What I really want, is to pay cafeteria style for specific TV shows… but until the industry catches up with what people really want, I can settle for netflix, and a good year-lag for most shows.
Anyhow… I had a large library of content on my old Series 2 TiVo that I’ve transcoded to H.264 mp4′s, and stashed on my QNAP. This has the benefit of being accessible from pretty much anywhere, but I wanted to stream my mp4s to my Roku.
I have Roksbox setup on one roku right now, but I don’t want to pay for the other roku. And I don’t need (or want) music library / photo streaming to the roku (yet), so….
So I’m writing my own php script for the QNAP, and my own client on the Roku.
Update 1AM 1/18/2012 : Got basic functionality (show, episode selection, video playback) working. This is so neat-o.
Over the holidays, my cousin’s son (my cousin once removed?) Eric made a box for his girlfriend. We patterned it off a small jewelry box Kylene had, and we liked it quite a bit. The top slides off, and all the joinery can be done with a dado set on the table saw or a router table a few straight bits. It’s a pretty simple build. The plans below are for a solid-top, but Eric made a rail & stile picture frame top. You can adapt the plan however you like.
I put together a SketchUp drawing and instructions, and put together a quick rendering.