Category Archives: hardware problem

hardware problem

Church Meeting Broadcast – improvement iterations

I blogged previously about the setup for broadcasting church meetings. And again about some alternatives. But in the interest of trying to make improvements, I am still working to make the church meeting broadcasts better. This is an update from February 2021 to catch some of the changes that have gone on so far this year, including adding a on-podium microphone.

Continue reading →
hardware problem

Church Meeting Broadcast Notes – Alternate Setups

So far we have two different kinds of meetings that differ from the “normal” meetings I blogged about. Our church once a month has special Fast and Testimony meetings, where members are encouraged to fast and pray for 24 hours on the first Sunday of a month and come to church to share their testimonies of the Gospel. We also twice a year have Stake Conferences where members from different congregations in the area get together for a larger meeting. I’m adding notes about them here in a separate post in the hope that they are useful to someone else.

Continue reading →
hardware problem

Church Meeting Broadcast Notes

I’ve been asked to help set up a broadcasting session for a weekly church meeting (a sacrament meeting but without the sacrament part, just talks and prayer). This is just a temporary measure during these COVID-19 times. I know there are a lot of other churches out there that do regular weekly broadcasts, and even record them. But our policy is to avoid that in favor of in-person meetings… usually.

For this project, there are three requirements
– live broadcast only (not recorded)
– easy to use (avoid login accounts)
– limited and controlled distribution (not trying to broadcast to the world, just for our local congregation)

My own requirement is that the setup should be simple enough that I can explain it to someone else and they can replicate it so I can go on vacation.

NOTE: If you don’t need all the details and just want a summary, skip to the end.

Continue reading →

hardware problem, software engineering

From DVD to .iso in openSUSE in bash

Just a quick note on something I found that was super useful. My new laptop doesn’t have a DVD drive, so I needed to rip an .iso file on one laptop to copy to the other. After some googling, I found https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/385648

The short version is:

<assuming your DVD drive is at /dev/sr0>
> isoinfo -i /dev/sr0 -d
<that gives a bunch of info, look for "Logical block size" and "Volume size">
...
Logical block size is: 2048
Volume size is: 1880567
...
> dd if=/dev/sr0 of=./some-img.iso bs=2k count=1880567

I think there is also a way to get progress out of it using status=progress but I haven’t tried that yet.

hardware problem

Slate 7 – quick usage update

Since I’ve been working at home, I’ve been using my Slate 7 more.  Most of the time I use it as a convenient Pandora terminal, hooked in to the two Rokit 6 studio monitors I was given from a previous project.  That works pretty well, and the battery life is good.  But I still occasionally have issues with the wireless.  It will randomly loose touch with wireless, and the only solution is to shut down and reboot.  It has been happening about once a day this week, and it seems to be related to having Pandora paused from the lock screen when it goes into a deep sleep.  But I have no easy way to debug it.

Oh, and the Amazon Music app on it just screws up all the time.  Which is too bad, because I’d like to add that variety to my listening.

I also still use WordPress on it to write blog posts. 🙂

hardware problem

Slate7 minor miracle

I’m typing this on my Slate 7.  At the end of a week long trip to Hawaii in January, I dropped it on the plane while it was plugged in. That seemed to be the start of the problem, because after that i t went completely black the next day and refused to acknowledge it was being charged.  Continue reading →