Oh XBox 360, how do I love the! Let me count thy ways … but watching downloaded movies is not one of them.

With the recent fall update for the XBox 360, Microsoft has opened you its Media Client to allow it to connect to third-party UPnP Media Servers. Which is awesome, except for the fact that the XBox 360 only supports WMV (and MPEG) encoded movies. I mean seriously, no “person” voluntarily uses your media formats Microsoft. And with the 360’s horsepower, there shouldn’t be a problem here to decode these things in software. What’s a gamer to do?

Thankfully a group, with a little piece of software called TVersity, recently added transcoding capabilities and support for the XBox 360 Media Client to allow for transcoded videos to be streamed to the XBox 360 on demand. As the little man rejoices and struggles to get it all to work, I write a guide on what I needed to do to unlock this desirable capability.
Continue reading Stream Transcoded Media To Your XBox 360 Using TVersity »

In continuation of my previous article on installing OpenWRT on a Linksys WRT54GL, I discuss how to set some of the more advanced network configurations of the router, and how to setup a firewall with traffic shaping.
Continue reading OpenWRT Advanced Firewall »

Linksys really hit a niche when they created the WRT54G line of wireless routers, although unintentional. These particular routers were originally written using Linux which, due to the GPL, requires Linksys to release the source code. Since then, many open source groups have gotten ahold of this code and hacked it to bits. As such, there are many different open source firmwares available for the WRT54G line of routers that you can install. (Warranty voiding of course)

One of the most popular third-party firmware available is OpenWRT. This firmware is essentially a stripped-down embedded Linux operation system with addon packages to allow it to be a wireless router. It’s small, simple, and powerful; though not for the light of geek, as any configuration must be done by CLI.

I recently got a WRT54GL wireless router, which is the same as a WRT54G v4 router. (Linksys changed the model number since v5 does not use Linux and will not run custom firmwares.) In only a few hours, I was able to install OpenWRT and setup a powerful router/firewall for my home network. Here’s how you can too…
Continue reading Installing OpenWRT on the Linksys WRT54GL »

Permalinks are a necessity in today’s online world. With the speed at which information is moving, it needs a way of always being referenced to without it “disappearing”. Permalinks are nothing more then a URL that will always point to the target information, regardless if it moves or not. WordPress has a built in permalink feature for posts and pages which works as intended. Unfortunately, permalinks are permanent, and if you don’t plan ahead, you could be stuck with a permalink structure that you do not like. I initially thought that the permalink structure I had setup on my website was well thought of and practical. However, in practice, I changed my mind and wanted a different permalink structure. I also didn’t want to break any links people had already made to my site. Here’s how I went about it…
Continue reading Changing Permalink Structure in WordPress »

I was looking for a good traffic analyzer for my website when I came across AWStats. It looked good compared to other log analyzers, so I decided to give it a try. I’m a fan of the Debian operating system, which I use on most of my servers. So, like any typical Debian user, I used the package management system (APT) to install AWStats. Normally the Debian packages are pretty good for doing everything automatically for you, but not so with the AWStats package - which required some setting up. For those wanting to go this route, this is how you get AWStats’ Debian package to work with Apache.
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I support web standards, which is why I chose WordPress as my CMS of choice. WordPress declares itself as a “state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.” It’s also written in PHP, which is my programming language of choice when it comes to designing web applications. Overall, after having set up this website, I have found that WordPress (tries) to be W3C compliant in terms of XHTML and common web practices, and is also not that hard to customize. In this post, I will detail the steps that I took in creating a custom theme for WordPress.
Continue reading Developing a Wordpress Theme »