Scott Hanselman

I love my Synology NAS, and I love Plex. I also love my Xbox One. Finally, today these three things are working together to give me a lovely unified view of my media library.

I have a Synology 1511 (the Synology 1513 is today's model). It's a 5 bay Intel-based NAS. I put four 2TB 7200 Seagate drives in it. In the few years since I've had the Synology I've had 2 drives fail and in each case the Synology emailed me, I pulled the drive and replaced them (I now keep two spares around) and rebuilt without incident.

I run Plex on this Synology as it also hosts all my family photos, family videos, and DVD backups. The Synology (since I upgraded the RAM cheaply) also runs Surveillance Station monitoring 4 IP cameras posted around my house, as well as  VPN Server, *and* CrashPlan cloud backup. I used to run most of this stuff on my desktop, but I'm convinced more and more that every connected home needs a Home Server. I've even added a Git Server, iTunes Server, and a "Cloud Station" which is basically "Personal DropBox." Glorious.

I use Plex extensively on my iPad and Surface Pro 3. One of the best features (there's a million) is being able to seamlessly mark a file as "offline" and sync it to a portable device. Makes airplane travel a lot nicer.

The one missing part has always been watching Plex on my big screen. While I do have a Chromecast and we enjoy it, the Xbox One is our set-top box. We changed an option on the Xbox under Settings so it "Boots to TV." The Xbox controls our DirectTV and my wife uses a Logitech Harmony One Remote that we still love. From the Xbox we can "Xbox Watch Netflix" or "Xbox Watch HBO" and it just does the right thing. But switching inputs to the Chromecast, getting a tablet out, starting Plex on the tablet and throwing it to the TV requires more tech than my wife is willing to give.

Until now. Plex is out on Xbox One (and Xbox 360) and there was much rejoicing. A Plex Pass is required, but it's SO worth it, and not expensive.

What you'll need

• Plex Server running somewhere - You can run it on any decent NAS, your desktop machine, or any machine you have laying around.
• A Plex Pass - A monthly or yearly subscription. It's a fantastic value. You CAN use Plex free, but with the Pass you get the offline sync, Xbox support, Movie Trailers, Cloud Storage Sync, and Camera Upload.
• Xbox One or Xbox 360

One note for Synology people like me, you’ll need to install the latest Plex Pass preview release of the server (v0.9.10.3). Not a huge deal, go to Plex Downloads and get the right version for your Nas. I downloaded, then logged into Synology and did a manual install.

Now, go to the Xbox One App Store and download it and sign in. If you'd signed in before and got a warning that your Plex Server was the wrong version, you'll want to shut down the Plex app completely or reboot the Xbox to get a proper retry going.

The app looks fantastic, supports both Kinect AND Voice and really fits in with the other apps I use like Hulu and Netflix.

Movies, TV, whatever.

Plex is epic because it's your media EVERYWHERE. Here's a picture of the devices that my family have used to talk to Plex this year.

Anyway, enough gushing. I couldn't be more thrilled. If you are already a Plex user, you're gonna love this. I'll do a full video and walkthrough of my setup soon, but Plex on Xbox One has finally turned my Xbox One into the ultimate media server. When the Media Player with DLNA support releases in a few weeks on Xbox One, it'll just be gravy.

Related Links

• Fixed: The Synology NAS with Plex Server and mismatched version numbers
• UPDATED 2014: How to setup CrashPlan Cloud Backup on a Synology NAS running DSM 5.0
• Plex is the media center software ecosystem I've been waiting for
• Synology Products on Amazon
• PODCAST: Creating the Plex Software Ecosystem with Elan Feingold

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About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I have a "whenever I get around to doing it" Newsletter of Wonderful Things. Why a newsletter? I dunno. It seems more personal somehow. Fight me.

You can view all the previous newsletters here. You can sign up here to the Newsletter of Wonderful Things or just wait and get them some weeks later on the blog, which hopefully you have subscribed to. If you're signed up via email, you'll get all the goodness FIRST. I also encourage you to subscribe to my blog. You can also have all my blog posts delivered via email if you like.

• Sure, why not dress up your dog like a spider and scare people?
• How can your startup get Traction? Great new book from Gabe Weinberg
• Five BRAND NEW 3 min "Getting Started with the Azure Cloud" videos
• Check out my latest podcast, this week with the CTO of JPL (Nasa)
• For all your co-workers who mess up your phone calls and webinars: howtounmute.com
• YouTube visualization of 15 sorting algorithms in 6 minutes.
• Great talk on CSS Parallax Performance from Paul Irish! Really interesting.
• I'm making Bento boxes for the boys' lunches. They're loving it! I use these "Bentgo" boxes from Amazon.
• There's a Linux Distro for TI Calculators now! It'll run Quake!
• Tic Tac Toe - in Pure CSS
• Introducing Gulp, Grunt, Bower, and npm support for Visual Studio
• The Star Wars Trailer...re-done in Guardians of the Galaxy Style
• Ten Things to Do To Secure a Famous Person's Computer
• This sign is supposed to show you which things are forbidden. But it actually creates the coolest dog ever.
• Dancing Baby Groot Cupcakes
• Ventriloquist Nina Conti
• Forever alone? Here's the bed for you.
• My review of the Surface Pro 3
• Wu Tang Financial's motto
• Hearing a lot about the Bionic Pancreas for Diabetics? Here's my take.
• Frank Caliendo (impressionist) as Morgan Freeman. Check out the series.
• 25 ways to ask your kids "how was school" without asking
• Amazing exit email from a Capitol Hill Staffer
• Afro-Chinese marriages boom in Guangzhou
• How much does one Lego Piece cost?
• DIY Game Boy with a Raspberry Pi
• Weird Al's incredible longevity
• Open Source is taking over Glucose Monitoring in the Diabetes Space
• MathJax is an open source JavaScript display engine for equations
• How the Indiana Jones Films were just a dream by Han Solo

Scott Hanselman

(BTW, since you *love* email you can subscribe to my blog via email here: http://feeds.hanselman.com/ScottHanselman DO IT!)

P.P.S. You know you can forward this to your friends, right?

Sponsor: Big thanks to Octopus Deploy for sponsoring the feed this week. They are FANTASTIC. Truly, check it out, the NuGet team uses them. Using NuGet and powerful conventions, Octopus Deploy makes it easy to automate releases of ASP.NET applications and Windows Services. Say goodbye to remote desktop and start automating today!

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Contributing to Open Source is a great way to get involved in community. Usually it's as simple as making your contribution, but when you start getting involved with larger projects at larger companies, legal gets involved. Projects need to have a "CLA" or Contributor License Agreement. For example, AngularJS has a form to fill out before sending a pull request. For individuals, it's a small form, but for companies, it's scanning, emailing, and/or faxing time.

As more and more of Azure goes open source with Azure SDK for .NET, PowerShell CmdLets, Mobile Services all on GitHub, as well as all the documentation available on GitHub as Markdown it needs to be easier to accept pull requests (PRs).

In fact, at the bottom of all the Azure Documentation is now a "Contribute to this article" where you can send PRs to help improve the docs or fix technical errors.

In order to make Contributing easier, the Azure folks made an Azure Pull Request Bot. It will automatically look at a PR, figure out if a contributor needs a CLA, setup the online form, even accept digital signatures and more! Even better, the way you start the bot's process is that you send a PR.

I'm going to submit a PR for Azure Documentation, specifically the article on Creating a Virtual Machine.

First, I'll fork the Azure Docs Repo from the GitHub site.

Next, I'll work on the article from my fork. I could do this locally, or on the GitHub site directly depending on the size of what I'm doing. The CLA only needs to be signed if you're changing more than about 15 lines.

The article on GitHub is here but I'll work on my fork here. It's Markdown, so I can either use an editor like MarkdownPad or edit online. I made a number of changes, some corrections, some additions to this article. Next I create a Pull Request.

After making the pull request - instantly - the GitHub PR gets a comment from the Azure Pull Request Bot!

And the PR gets a label showing the status of my PR as requiring a CLA.

I click the link and can sign in with my GitHub account.

I fill out a quick form...

In a couple of minutes a verified email shows up from Docusign.

I sign it, and I'm all set! The PR and CLA will get evaluated and merged. I'm hoping this process might be used by other teams at Microsoft as we continue to Open Source All The Things.

Sponsor: Big thanks to Octopus Deploy for sponsoring the feed this week. They are FANTASTIC. Truly, check it out, the NuGet team uses them. Using NuGet and powerful conventions, Octopus Deploy makes it easy to automate releases of ASP.NET applications and Windows Services. Say goodbye to remote desktop and start automating today!

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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My perspective on JavaScript-based browser extensions has been far too naïve until this point. We were all burned by bad toolbars or evil ActiveX add-ons in the past, so when I run IE I run it with no add-ons enabled, or very few. However, with Google Chrome and it's sync feature, as well as its rich extension store, it's easy to add a bunch of add-ons and get them synced to other machines.

I wanted to download a YouTube video recently so I installed a "U-Tube Downloader" extension. It is highly rated, seemed legit, so I added it. It puts a nice Download button next to any YouTube video. Like greasemonkey script it was there when I needed and it, and out of sight otherwise.

I installed it and forgot about it. So, put a pin in that and read on...

Today I was on my own site and this happened. A video slid onto my page from the right side and started playing. I was gobsmacked. I know this site, I know its code. I know my advertisers. WTH. Where is this coming from?

It's the surfing video there in the lower right corner.

First I knee-jerk emailed my advertiser asking if they were injecting this, then I pulled back and started to Inspect Element.

Looks like there's a supporting iframe, along with an injected div. That div includes JS from "vidible.tv" and the ads are picked from "panoramatech." But that's not all.

There's references to literally a half-dozen other ad-networks and then this, something called RevJet.

Search around and here's the first description of what RevJet is.

Whoa, ok, it's an extension. But which one? Grep for "Rev" in this folder C:\Users\Scott\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Extensions and I my U-Tube one.

Nicest Ad Ever

I particularly like the comment "nicest ad ever."

This extension also injects ads from "Yllix" when I'm on YouTube, and RevJet when elsewhere. Apparently if I set revjetoptout in my local storage, I can get around this. Very NOT intuitive. I saw no options for this extension exposing this.

Worse yet, every once in a while, Kim Kardashian shows up in my New Tab page. Again, there's no way for non-technical relative to figure this out. And it's pretty hard for technical me to figure it out. This is deceptive at best.

Ugh.

Yes, I realize someone put work into this extension, and yes, I realize it was free. However, it wasn't clear that it was going to randomly inject ads into any website without asking. It wasn't clear that the ads were injected by this extension. There was/is no clear way for anyone without the ability to debug this to make it stop. Charge me a $1, but don't reach into webpages I visit and mess with my content without telling me.

I recommend you check out chrome://extensions/ and give each enabled one a good hard look. Consider disabling or uninstalling extensions you may have forgotten about or ones you don't explicitly trust. If you're a dev, consider reading the code within the extensions and make sure you're getting what you expect.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Much has been written and much will be written about the Windows 10 announcement.

Windows 10, because 7 8 9.

— Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) September 30, 2014

I'm pretty stoked, and am playing with the Windows 10 Technical Preview now. I can see that there's lots of new enhancements to the shell, the Start Menu/ Screen, how Universal apps work, and so much more. But, let's focus on the "other shell." The console!

The console (conhost) that cmd.exe (often incorrectly but colloquially called the DOS Prompt) and PowerShell live within hasn't had much love in the last several years, IMHO. But then, suddenly, on stage at the Windows 10 announce we've got a VP showing folks that Ctrl-V (paste) works in the command prompt. Why would he do such a crazy thing?

remember when microsoft demoed the command prompt in windows on a stage in 2014

— spooky dan seifert (@dcseifert) September 30, 2014

Well, from what I can tell looking at the Preview, there's a LOT of cool Console goodness coming in Windows 10.

Here's a list of hotkeys in the Windows 10 Technical Preview console. This is just hotkeys! Be sure to explore the Properties dialog as well, resize, word wrapping, and more.

Text selection keys

These combinations interoperate with the mouse so you can start selecting with the mouse and continue with one of these commands, or vice versa. 

Extra Fun with CTRL + A

CTRL + A behavior is interesting. Regardless of the state of mark mode and quick edit mode, one of two things should happen. Either the entire buffer is selected, or (only in a single case) '2-Phase select' starts.  2-Phase select is the process where the first CTRL-A selects the characters to the right of the edit line prompt, and the second press selects the entire buffer.

Editing keys

As I mentioned above you can copy and paste text with the keyboard. When copying text, you might worry that CTRL + C has always been the BREAK command. This is a nice touch, it will still send the break signal to the running application when no text is selected. The first CTRL-C copies the text and clears the selection, and the second one signals the break. Nice attention to detail, IMHO.

Mark mode keys

These keys function in mark mode. You can enter this mode by right-clicking anywhere in the console title bar and choosing Edit->Mark from the context menu as before, or via the new shortcut combination, CTRL-M. In the original console, mark mode resulted in block mode text selection. While in mark mode, you can hold down the ALT key at the start of a text selection command to use block mode in the new console. The selection key combinations above are all available in mark mode. CTRL + SHIFT + ARROW operations select by character and not by word while in mark mode.

History navigation keys

Other keys

If you are like me and also love the console and want it to get even better, head over to the Windows Command Prompt Uservoice and be heard!

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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