James M. Crow: passion for technology

For the last 6 months I have been using a Microsoft Surface Book as my primary laptop. In that time it has proved to be an excellent device.

For media consumption in my house, I use MythTV. One of the computers connected to a TV is an ECS Liva. For about $100 it is a decent little Myth frontend. Mine is connected to a TV over HDMI at 1920x1080.

For media consumption at home I use MythTV. Connected to my TVs are 3 small, low power computers. One is an older Atom with discrete Intel GPU. The other two are newer. One is an ECS Liva X (ECS Liva X). Great little system for about $100. The last device is an Intel NUC 5th gen Core i5 (Intel NUC5I5SYJ).

My wife drives a 2005 Cadillac SRX V6 (3.6L) AWD. We bought the car when we expecting our first child. It has certainly been a roller coaster. I like the AWD feature and have driven it through the snow and rain and it felt very stable. Mechanical issues have plagued us almost from the beginning. Some of the things that have been done to the car include:

This is part two of my journey to get Linux running reliably on the Zotac PicoBox PI-320-W2. Please see part 1 for an overview of the hardware.Once the challenges presented by a 32-bit UEFI were overcome, I noticed Linux would not boot from a normal cold-boot, or warm boot. I would get to the Grub menu screen, but then the screen went blank and nothing seemed to happen after that. I could get Linux to boot if I opened the BIOS boot menu (hitting F8) and selected the correct entry for Grub.

This is part one of my journey to get Linux up and running reliably on a Zotac PicoBox PI-320-W2. I purchased the Zotac PicoBox PI-320-W2 mini-PC for use as a MythTV frontend. The device is cheap (open box on Amazon for under $150), Intel BayTrail powered, and should be powerful enough to support my needs.The PicoBox box came with Windows 8.1 (32-bit) w/Bing. This is the trimmed down version of Windows for devices with less memory and storage space. The PicoBox has 2 GB RAM and 32GB eMMC flash. The first challenge was getting Linux to boot.

I have been driving a 2006 Toyota Tundra for several years. The truck has been reliable and comfortable...except for trying to back out of some parking spaces. I have the double cab (DC) model and it is long. Turning radius is also poor. To assist me, I decided to add a backup camera.

I have been driving a 2006 Toyota Tundra Double Cab truck for several years. It is a nice truck and has been very reliable. One small thing I wanted to change was the stereo lacked bluetooth connectivity. I was attending college in the evenings and had about 1.5 hour commute each day back and forth to school. Instead of just playing the radio I wanted to listen to podcasts during that time. After some consideration I decided on an OEM radio from a Scion car. The Scion brand is made by Toyota and the radios from those vehicles are plug and play for Toyota vehicles.

Recently I had to setup an OpenVPN server with user account details coming from Windows Server Active Directory (as LDAP). The OpenVPN server would be in Amazon's AWS (EC2). Using the walkthrough (https://docs.openvpn.net/how-to-tutorialsguides/virtual-platforms/amazon...) on the OpenVPN site got the basic server up very quickly.

Having recently purchased a Motorola Droid Turbo (aka XT1254) I wanted to be able to connect it to a Windows 7 laptop to copy files to and from the phone. To install the drivers for Windows you must install the Motorola Device Manager (MDM) software. (Available here: https://motorola-global-portal.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/88481)