Installing Polk 8" RC80i ceiling speakers

A long time overdue, I installed one of my 8" Polk RC80i ceiling speakers which I purchased last November in the study today. I've been meaning to do this since the start of the year and had not gotten round to this yet knowing that it would be a bit of a task.

I started by roughly working out the position that I wanted the speaker on the ceiling by measuring the distance from the walls adjacent to the where I wanted the speaker to be. I then climbed into the roof and measured the same distance from the walls and found a place as close a possible to where I wanted the speaker without a beam or power cables in the way. 

I then cleaned away the insulation in the ceiling (wear gloves and a dusk mask) and placed down the cardboard circle shaped paint shield that was supplied with the speaker to make sure that the speaker would fit in the place I had chosen. I then made a small hole in the centre of the shield and through the ceiling with a drywall saw.

Drywall saw - essential tool.

It was quite difficult to push through the hole as my ceiling is made of a combination of mortar, horse hair (?) and wooden slats. This installation would be much easier in a modern house.

From inside the room I was relieved to see the hole where I wanted it to be and then used a pencil to draw the 8" circle from the cardboard cutout guide supplied with the speaker and then used masking tape to make a circle around the outside of the speaker to try and minimise any damage to the ceiling and keep the ceiling clean. 

I then used the drywall saw (wear eyewear protection and a dusk mask) to cut from the hole from below in the center of the circle to the edge and started to cut away the plaster around the inside of the circle.  

Initial hole and vacuum cleaner setup to collect dust.

Circle to remove outlined with masking tape and initial cut.

Once I started pulling away larger pieces of the plaster ceiling the wooden slats were visible from below. It was quite difficult to cut the slats with the drywall saw so I used my Dremel 3000 with the cutting piece attached. I was considering using my jigsaw, but I think the Dremel did a better job as it allowed better control.

Horse hair and slat ceiling

Dremel with cutting piece.

Next I then unpacked the speaker and then used a paper clip to remove the speaker grill from the speaker. This step was actually quite time consuming and eventually I had to hook through the paper clip through the grill and then pull the ends with a pair of pliers to get the grill free. Access under the grill is necessary to screw the clamps on the speaker down from inside the room with a philips-head screwdriver. At this point I enlisted the help of the Drinks Master to hold the speaker up from the bottom and tighten the clamp screws while I positioned the clamps on to the slats with most support from with-in the ceiling.

Ceiling speaker installed in the ceiling without the grill.

Speaker installed with grill.

The whole process took quite a few hours working mostly solo, although I needed assistance from the Drinks Master to push the speaker into the ceiling while I was in the roof above. The dust and masonry from the ceiling made a terrible mess and took quite a while to clean up even with painters drop sheets over the desks in the room below.

Although I have only done the single speaker so far, the sound is great connected to a Sonos Connect:AMP.  I now have three of them: Bathroom and Kitchen, Library, and Patio with a Sonos PLAY:5 in the Bedroom.

Sound wise - definitely more bass than the 6" RC60i speakers that I have installed the kitchen and the bathroom. I'm very happy with the result - once I can build up the energy to make a mess again I'll tackle the second speaker :)

Nike+ Fuelband hangs on Connecting to Nikeplus.com

I have sold a number of Nike+ Fuelbands recently - they're great devices and not yet available in Australia. A great review can be found here.

A couple of people I have sold them to have had a problem that after a period of use when connecting the device to a computer running the Nike+ Connect software the software will start and hang on "Connecting to Nikeplus.com".

Reseting the device manually from the band does not resolve the problem. The fix is to  disconnect the computer from the internet. Then reconnect the band and you will be able to access the Nike Connect software and reset the band from with-in the software which appears to resolve the problem. You can then reconnect to the internet and follow the setup wizard for the band and everything should be back to normal.


Hope this helps. I couldn't find this solution searching the internet...

Custom DNS for Unblock US Fritzbox 7390

UPDATE- Sonos/MOG US have made some changes so that this method no longer works and you receive "unable to browse music" error message. More details in the comments.

I have had some problems recently with MOG no longer working from my Telstra cable connection. My Sonos was reporting authentication issues with MOG, but I could still log in to the website when VPN'd to the US.

Visiting the MOG website showed that Telstra had partnered to bring MOG to Australia. It will be interesting to see the pricing to see the "Australia tax" when it is finalised in the upcoming months. Most likely this partnership has resulted in regional DNS configuration which was directing my queries to the Telstra MOG servers where authentication was denied.

Sonos devices use the DHCP configuration for their network configuration and there is no way to manually specify DNS servers so I needed to change my DHCP server (Fritzbox 7390) from giving out the Bigpond DNS servers and handout the Unblock-US DNS servers instead.

I found many guides on line on configuring custom DNS servers on the Fritzbox via telnet and editing the configuration file, however these changes did not seem to have any affect. My suspicion is that these settings work when using an ADSL provider, but using a LAN1 port via Cable modem did not have the settings apply.

It turned out that by applying a new beta firmware that you can now properly configure the Fritzbox to use custom DNS servers. MOG is now working a treat and Netflix is now working on all devices without having to set manual DNS servers on my devices.

Grays Online TV auctions...

I've just won a refurbished Sony Bravia HX925 TV at auction!

I was looking at the Sony models as they have a Motion Flow feature which apparently improves the picture of streaming services such as Netflix or lower quality movies and episodes.

The lowest new online price I could find for the same model was about $2,800 when I came across found four refurbished Sony Bravia auctions at Grays Online. It looks like both Sony and Samsung offload their refurbished and returned TVs via Grays.

Grays has an odd auction format compared to Ebay in that after the auction time has passed the status changes to "Going Going - Gone" for the next ten minutes where anyone has a chance to outbid you which will then reset the timer for another ten minutes until there are finally no more bids.

I was planning to initially bid on the HX820 model of which there were two available. However, I thought that I would start bidding on the HX925 and when that got too expensive I would switch my bidding to the HX820 instead.

My autobid on the HX925 was set to $1800 - remembering that Grays generally charge a 15% "buyers premium".

At the pointy end of the auction the HX925 was quickly bid up to $1500 at which point I went head to head with another bidder to the final price ($1,614) - waiting for that "Going, going, gone" status to clear was an eternity, but it was a great relief once it had been confirmed that I had won.

It turned out that my rival bidder had decided to do what I was planning to do and started bidding on the HX820 TV sets which had a slower start but were still slowly creeping up together. Eventually the two HX820 sets went for $1,629 (more than I paid!) and $1,599 more than 40 minutes later.

Checking the bid history my rival ended up outbid on both the HX820 sets.

Final sales prices:

The television comes with a 3 month warranty and in the next 10 days or so (delivery time to Adelaide)  I'll discover the downsides to getting the refurbished model. The description for "Refurbished" suggested there might be some small scratches or missing manuals. The two pairs of 3D glasses that is normally included may also be missing.

I'll update once I have received the TV as well as documenting my wire-frame picture mount installation.

Streaming UltraMusic festival live to my Sonos via JamCast!

Ultramusic Festival in Miami is absolutely amazing - I was there a couple of years ago. If you're into dance music you should make the pilgrimage at some point.

My friend let me know they were streaming it live on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/umftv - Live Now button) so I had to look into it.

Firstly I needed to connect to StrongVPN as the streams are not available outside of the USA. I don't understand how in this day and age these restrictions are still in place.

Martin Soleveig

Watching the stream I was surprised to hear that is was pretty high quality. The sound engineers have done an amazing job mixing the music with the noise of the audience.

Of course my next thought was on how could I stream the audio from my computer from my Windows computer. Enter Jamcast. I've signed up for a 14 day trial which allows me to setup from my Windows Audio loopback adapter to be a Radio Station which I can add to the Sonos interface.

Click the image below to see it working in all it's glory :)

Sonos playing YouTube sound via JamCast

In JamCast I set the Capture Buffer Size on the Virtual Sound Card to be 1 second so there would not be a really noticeable delay from the stream and then added the Radio Station via Sonos Desktop Controller in the following format: http://192.168.178.53:58642/Media/audio/mpeg/CaptureStream

(192.168.178.53 - being the IP address of my Windows PC).

Awesome - Enjoying live streaming from around the world around the house. This makes Sonos worth the money :)

A hobby a long time coming...

I have always been interested in electronics but have never felt that I have had the understanding that would allow me to work on projects of my own design - I have always copied existing designs having fumbled my way through breadboards, wafer and season cards back in the satellite hacking days.

Hopefully that is about to change. I've enrolled in Circuits and Electronics at MITx - MIT University's beta  online subject (free). On completing the course students receive a certificate and hopefully an understanding of basic electronics.

It will be an interesting challenge for. Year 12 Physics is a distant memory and I will be doing some preparation via the Khan Academy before the course starts. Maths at an advanced level is always something I have struggled with as well so it will be interesting to see how I go.

To help on the hobby front and possibly with the course I have ordered a Sparkfun Electronics Start Kit for  Arduino from Robot Gear (an Australian distributor). The kit contains a whole bunch of buttons, LEDs, wires, sensors and the smallest breadboard I have ever seen. I've been following the Arduino project for a while now and I'm dipping a toe in.

I'm going to work through the tutorials to try and get a good understanding of the Arduino. So far a couple of the video tutorials I have watched have given great explanations of what is actually happening in terms I am familiar with - i.e "Electricity is lazy, it won't go through the resistor if it doesn't have to".

I've also ordered a UNI-T 61D multimeter which I bought from EBay from a seller in Hong Kong. I watched a couple of video reviews online and this one is apparently very accurate and has all of the features I'll ever need.

Multimeters appear to be something that people have for life, so I thought I would buy a midrange one at a decent price.

Autostart service.sh and setting timezones on the Drobo-FS

Something that I have been to lazy to do on the Drobo-FS so far is set the timezone correctly as well as configure SABNZBin, Sickbeard and Couchpotato to automatically start when the device is restarted. Until now I had been manually restarting the services after power outs or when organising my server shelf :)

Thankfully one of my mates has written two guides on how to achieve this and the scripts are working fine.

DroboApps and Daemons
How to set the Time Zone on the Drobo-FS