I may be late to the Windows Media Center party, but now that I’m here, I’m not going home. I love Windows Media Center! In early 2015 I got an HDHomerun Prime CableCard TV Tuner and set it up to work with Windows Media Center (WMC) on my Windows 7 machine. WMC was on my primary PC until recently because I wanted to upgrade to Windows 10. I migrated my WMC to a Mac Mini running bootcamp and Windows 7. It’s working great! I use WMC extenders to watch TV around my house. My Mac Mini is running headless (that is, there is no monitor, mouse or keyboard attached), so it’s hard to see what its doing unless I remote into it. I wanted to be [Read More…]
Raspberry Pi – How to spoof MAC address
I’ve tried a lot of Raspberry Pi projects and the only one I’ve stuck with is tracking airplanes using ADSB and feeding that data to FlightAware using their PiAware system. The PiAware image for the Pi uses the eth0 MAC address to create a unique ID for the feeder you’re running. The downside with doing this is that if your Raspberry Pi breaks, dies, or if you upgrade to a new one like the Raspberry Pi 3, then PiAware will create a whole new feeder site. So much for your awesome feeder streak! The solution is to spoof your eth0 MAC address on the new Raspberry Pi! I’ve done this method with 3 Raspberry Pi upgrades for PiAware and have a [Read More…]
WordPress – Only logged in users can view your website
I had a WordPress site requirement where only logged in users could see the site and it’s contents. I came across this bit of code a few years ago and found it to be helpful. Place it into your functions.php and when a visitor comes along who is not logged in, it’ll redirect them to the wp-login.php page to login. Once logged in, then they can view the site without being blocked. This is an example where it can help keep unwanted visitors away from the content of your site. It’s been working great and I wanted to share it.
Redirecting Weather Station Data from ObserverIP
Last Updated 2/26/2017 Table of Contents: Method 1: Configure the ObserverIP destination hostname using telnet Method 2: Redirect traffic using a router and iptables Accepting the data on your server Creating a socket for use with weewx Undoing your changes and returning back to defaults How I use this data to run my own website! Recently I received an Ambient Weather WS-1200-IP weather station. It’s a great unit and very easy to use and setup! There is an outdoor unit which does temperature, humidity, wind speed, wind direction, rainfall, UV and solar radiation. There’s also an indoor unit which has a barometer sensor. The 2 sensors talk to an ObserverIP unit. This unit plugs directly into your router and has a little webpage [Read More…]
randomPost – A Random Post WordPress Plugin
I’ve released a new plugin, randomPost. The goal behind randomPost is to keep visitors on your website longer. By having the ability to view random posts, it keeps your visitors engaged and that means they stay on your site longer! Once you install the randomPost plugin, and select the random URL slug you want to use (for example: http://obrienlabs.net/random — where /random is the URL slug), this URL will redirect your users to a random post of yours! I recommend using the word “random” as your URL slug, but the option exists to use any slug you’d like (perhaps the word random in another language). Once configured, add the new URL with the slug to your menu as a custom link. [Read More…]
The purpose of this site is for me to share my DIY technical experiences as a place to document them publicly. Hopefully somewhere along the way they are helpful for you.
