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 

How much does a Sonos Connect:AMP (ZonePlayer 120) cost to run?

I've borrowed a Power-Mate Lite from a mate and have taken some readings to monitor Sonos power usage as I wasn't sure how much it would cost me to run three Sonos Connect:AMPs (ZP120) all year in-case it was worth considering put them on some sort of power timing device to turn them off overnight.

I'm on Red State energy at and have set the readings at 28 cents per kWH which is the "Summer step one" rate ex-GST.

Here are the readings of the Sonos players in an idle state connected via the WIFI bridge. I let the Sonos boot, and then reset the Power-Mate let it monitor the device for 10 minutes.

So just under $50 to run three Sonos players on idle for an entire year. Better than I expected.

Here are the Power-Mate readings streaming Absolute Classic Rock Radio over the WIFI bridge at half volume  with 8" Polk Audio Ceiling Speakers attached.

The meter was reset while the music was playing and run for about 5 minutes.

$23.78 Australian dollars a year at 27c per KWH (85.347kWh in a year). Cheaper than I thought really for playing music non-stop at a reasonable volume for a whole year.

I've also finally gotten around to repairing the damage to the ceiling in the kitchen after installing the kitchen speaker. I initially glued the gap with liquid nails and braced it with a piece of timber on a step ladder. After drying there was still a gap remaining on some parts of the crack which I then cleaned up with a Dremel (with a sander attachment) and then puttied up with remaining gaps white Wood Master which I got from Bunnings. I let the Wood Master dry and have since sanded it and it now just waiting to be painted.

Before

After
 (without painting)

Speakers installation in the rear of the house

Wow - what an effort, a Sunday and Monday well spent.

The plan was to install the bathroom, kitchen and patio speakers.

First I drilled down from the roof in to the study and fed up four runs of Monoprice wire from my roll (300ft 12AWG Enhanced Loud Oxygen-Free Copper Speaker Wire Cable - $85). In the picture below you can see the built in robe in the Study and the my internet connection (Bigpond Cable).

Future data cabinet location in the Study.

Next week I am having an electrician install a power point in the built-in robe and I will use the highlighted shelf as my "data cabinet" for my router, Sonos amplifiers and Drobo-FS NAS. Eventually I will have a white conduit covering the cables coming down into the walk in robe.

The wire in the roof I ran from beam to beam by attaching a staple to each beam and then attaching the wires to the beams using a cable tie. This seemed to be the best method recommended by the Polk DIY Speaker installation guide. This guide is very helpful and I would highly recommend it to anyone preparing to install ceiling or wall speakers.

The speakers I was planning to install were not in the main roof, rather in the back of the house, a lean-to which consists of the bathroom, kitchen and the back wall of the house. From the main roof we ran the four speaker wires through a conduit cable (bought in a roll of 10m from Bunnings). Four cables were the limit for the thickness and we used string to pull the wires through one at a time.

As seen below, the roof on the lean-to is very thin and is not accessible from below so we had to remove the roofing sheets.

Removing the sheets was quite easy but replacing them probably the hardest part of the job and required extra hands as it was very difficult to replace them as it was hard to push them back in above the beam under the housing sheet (which eventually had to come out) as well as cutting a hole in the sheet for the conduit. Replacing the sheets turned the one day job into a two day affair.

For the kitchen and bathroom speakers I chose to use Polk Audio RC60i In-Ceiling / In-Wall Speakers (Pair, White) based on positive reviews on the Sonos forums and a friend whom had previously had Polk equipment which sounded fantastic.

The kitchen speaker was quite easy to install from above. Roughly where I wanted the speaker I traced the outline from the template sheet and then drilled a hole in one side and cut out the hole from the ceiling with a jig saw. I then had the speaker pushed up from underneath while they were screwed in from below. 

Ceiling speaker from above

Ceiling speaker in the ceiling.

The crack occurred later when I accidentally mistepped replacing the roofing sheets. A repair job for another day. 

The bathroom speaker was a bit harder as it was under a fake ceiling. The original ceiling made of small slats, plaster, horse hair and god knows what had to be broken through to get to the top of the fake ceiling. 

We then drilled a hole down from the roof and cut up from the bathroom into the fake ceiling using a small drywall/gyp-rock saw using the template supplied with the speaker.

Hole  into bathroom under the original ceiling.

Speaker installed from below and connected. 

Speaker without the grill attached from in the bathroom.

The sound from the Polk RC60i speakers is very good and I am glad I did not go with the RC80i (8 inch) speakers for these rooms as it would have been overkill. I have a pair of RC80i speakers which I am planning to put in the bedroom in the upcoming weeks and compare the sound then.

At the moment I have them connected as left and right channels to the Sonos Connect:AMP. I am searching for a solution to have them produce mono noise instead of stereo to these rooms.

For the backyard patio speakers I chose a pair of the Definitive Technology AW 6500 Outdoor Speaker (Single, White) based on very positive reviews. I managed to get a good deal for a pair, and they where much larger than I expected when I received them.

Using the backing plate which can be detached from the speakers I marked and drilled two into the rear wall of the house. I then installed two dynabolts (12mm/70mm). The dynabolts were overkill as they can hold up to 280 kilograms each but seemed to be a good thickness to bolt the bracket to the wall.

Right speaker

Left speaker

The sound from AW6500's is amazing. There are overkill for my medium sized backyard and the smaller AW5500s would have most likely sufficed. The front part of the V shape is aimed to where there will be people and the rear side woofer bounced bass of the walls.

Mission complete! And apart from the accidental crack in the ceiling I am very happy with the result. I'll provide another update when the bedroom speakers go in comparing the sound between the 6" inch and 8" inch speakers.