Roku 2 HD getting it to work in Europe (Partly anyway)

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Today my Roku2 set top box arrived from the USA (my first order via www.shopusa.com which seem to have workd fine), I had ordered this to be able to watch Netflix in my bedroom and the Roku2 box seemed the easiest and cheapest way.

The device which comes with remote and build-in wifi seemed nice, small and elegant and I did not expect many issues connecting it, I had read in advance that the service www.unblock-us.com was supporting this unit so everything should be a brease.

Well things did not go acording to plan 🙁

First things first, www.unblock-us.com works by you replacing your DNS servers with servernames (or rather IP’s) they provide, well the darn box has no network settings it gets it’s configuration from DHCP and that is it.  Well no problem, I run a Windows 2008R2 server with DHCP so I just created a new reservation for the MAC address of the Roku 2 box and setup the Unblock-us DNS server ip’s for this reservation – and sure enough this part worked like a charm (note you have to follow the instructions on the www.unblock-us.com site and activate the service before starting to use it, I’m not 100% sure how they register you, likely by your external IP – but how do they deal with dynamic IP’s then??).

So now I had the device connected to my WLAN and tv.  The first thing is then to link the Roku box to an account, you need you computer for this – so I created an account and entered the ID-code from the Roku 2 box (it displays a code you need to enter into your new Roku account to link the device to your account), and everything worked like a charm (I used a P.O.Box address in the USA as my postal address and my American Express as credit card, everything was fine).  But now began my trouble, see the device somehow knew that it was not in the USA and only showed a few totally uninteresting streaming channels (no Netflix, no Hulu etc. etc.), and now began a lot of googling – I found these two threads that seemed to give some insight to the matter;

http://support.unblock-us.com/customer/portal/questions/141869-roku-2-not-showing-us-content

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1695235

And the issue appears to be that the account somehow is not accepted as a fully valid USA account, now I tried deleting the account and recreating it via a USA vpn as some suggested, I tried different credit cards, I tried creating a USA Paypal account but nothing solved the issue.  It was suggested that by using a verified USA creditcard you might overcome the problem, however USA credit cards are hard to come by in Europe :-/  I only know of a few places where you can obtain these and these are not free so a streaming service would end up being fairly expensive 😐

Link to obtaining a USA credit card;
http://www.unblock-us.com/how-to-set-up/us-unlocked
https://readmydamnblog.com/?p=1860 (might also work)

I did however in the end find a liveable solution to my torment, once the device is fully configured and setup you unlink it from your Roku account – then you wait a few minutes and either restart the Roku or refresh your channels – this strangely enough caused the device to remove all channels BUT at the same time restore the Netflix launch button to the frontpage – and now Netflix works (and possibly also Hulu) – you still need Unblock-us not to forget, however all other channels are gone…  Ok, my objective was to get Netflix so I’m happy with this, but at the same time it’s a shame to not be able to try out all the other stuff – but I guess there is no winning every time 🙁

Btw; the powersupply supports both 110v and 220v so no problems there other than the wall jack which a universal adapter took care off

So status at the moment is; Got Netflix working (by unlinking the Roku from my Roku account) but now that is all the device can do…..  Hrmpf I am not totally satisfied, but guess this will have to do…

Streaming and Netflix navigation seem to work fine, quality is not fully as good as when I stream from a PC but quite acceptable.  Do let me know if anyone figures out a way around this messy situation.

Another odd thing about the Roku 2 box, there is no standby?  you need to unplug the darn thing to shut it down, acording to Roku it is because it uses so little power, now I don’t know in these days where we all are suposed to be thinking about the environment :-/

UPDATE March 8th 2012;
Found this site that appear to offer a workaround for any non USA credit card problems, I have not had the need to test it myself but it looks like a workable solution:
http://www.buyfrompowerseller.com

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iPhone Configuration Utility – easy configuration of iPhones/iPads

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You may be an IT administrator or just the person in charge of helping your users (or friends for that matter) configuring iPhones.  Now setting up an iPhone is not hard once you have tried it once or twice, but it is still time consuming and lets face it not very fun, well imagine that you had a piece of software in which you could prepare the configuration and then just sms the configuration to anyone?  Well it is almost as easy as that 🙂  and best of all, I will show you how 😀

What you need is the “iPhone configuration utility” from Apple, you will find it here;
http://www.apple.com/support/iphone/enterprise/

Now you install this and are set to go, with this software you can create configurations for the iPhone (or iPad) and by connecting the device to your machine you can transfer the settings directly, this is easy enough but as mentioned you can do even better – you can send the configuration over the internet – the latter however require a web-server and maybe a little more skill that the average home user.

Anyhow, if you are an IT administrator etc. and need to setup a log of iPhones, then this is interesting for you..  You create a configuration with “iPhone configuration utility” and upload this to a web-server, eg. as http://www.webserver.com/iphonesettings.mobileconfig and now you can just sms the link to this page/file to new employees or BOD “bring your own device” users.  Now one word of caution though, if you publish your config this way you MUST omit ANY sensitive information like email, domain name, username and passwords, this however is not a problem – any information not entered will just be prompted – so if you omit the username and password the user will just be prompted for this when installing the configuration (information like this is likely known by the user, or could be included in the sms).  That some outside user may be able to read what mailserver you use is not really a problem, this information is already public knowledge via eg. NSLOOKUP – so there is really no security issue with this unless you include passwords etc. which you should avoid as mentioned.

The settings set this way are entered into the phone as a “Profile”, you can configure that this “Profile” can be removed “Anytime”, “Via Password” or “Never” (never mean that you need to reset the device to remove), if you remove the “Profile” it will also remove all data related to the profile (eg. if email settings was part of a profile, it will also remove the emails as part of the removal – but if you setup additional email’s manually these will be left alone).

What can you configure;
Almost anything, just to mention a few things; Email, VPN, WiFi, Policies (you can enforce password etc. etc.).

See my walktrough here for more details etc;

 

Ps.
If you upload the configuration to a webserver, you may need to set the mime type and remember to NOT change the extention of the file (.mobileconfig).

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New logo

As part of the redesign of my site (this blog) I stumbled across something that looks promising, a site where you can order a new logo for as cheap as $19.

So I have ordered the package with three logos and I am quite interested to see what they come up with, judging from their logo portfolio they appear to be capable of creating quite competent logos.

So, more to follow once I get my new logo 🙂

http://www.19dollarlogos.com

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Microsoft Lync for iPhone

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Found an interesting mention on the Microsoft Lync client for iPhone (Lync is more or less a corporate version of the MSN-Messenger).

Sadly it won’t work on my iPhone as I have jailbroken mine and is FAR behind in iOS version 🙁 but then again, if I were to install this I would propable get IM’s from work all the time so guess I can live with it 😉

—————————————–
From Bink.nu
—————————————–

http://bink.nu/news/microsoft-lync-2010-for-iphone-and-ipad-released.aspx

Microsoft Lync 2010 for iPhone requires a Lync Server or Office365/Lync Online account and will not work without it. If you are unsure about your account status, please contact your IT department.

Download for iPhone: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/microsoft-lync-2010-for-iphone/id484293461?mt=8

Download for iPad: http://itunes.apple.com/dk/app/microsoft-lync-2010-for-ipad/id484222449?mt=8

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Ghostery – privacy help

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Concerned about your privacy, who and what is tracking you during your internet browsing?

Take a look at Ghostery, it is a util that will show (and enable you to block) who is tracking you..
http://www.ghostery.com

Works on most popular browsers.

How to install guide (IE);

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Clever password -> website -> password salting scheme

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This is quite clever (as long as you are vigilante);

http://supergenpass.com/

You know the deal, you need to create a new account and have to supply username, email and password to do so.  You may have learned or heard that it is NOT a good idea to use the same password for different sites (if one gets compromized ALL your logins would thus be vaunerable), but also you really can’t remember 1031 different passwords…  well SuperGenPassword.com CAN help you with this!?

What is does is quite simple you enter sitename (the url/site you are creating the login for) and password (your generic/master password) into SuperGenPassword and viola it provides you with a “unique” password for the site – the clever part is that you wont have to remember this password!?  You simply remember the generic/master password, and next time you visit the site you use SuperGenPassword to generate the password you need for the site..  This is done simply by hashing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_function) the site/url salted (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_(cryptography)) with your generic/master password.

Lets take an example;

Password on url test.dk become l5zuZo0qa2
Password on url test.com become eipalNBj0T
Secret on url test.dk become nY8BEihJsR
Secret on url test.com become dXt1E8tILH

As you can see the same password makes a different hash depending on the url.

Now SuperGenPassword even offers some clever scripting shortcut so you can generate these passwords automatically and insert them into the password field on web-sites, I would advice against this as the scripting they use has been proven to be vaunerable to interception by malicious sites/scripts which can thus obtain your generic/master password.  Instead use http://supergenpass.com/mobile/ their mobile solution and generate the password manually in a different tab and paste the password into the site you wish, a bit more work but a lot more security..  also a good trick is to pad the password with a “pin”, lets say the hash from the data you entered into http://supergenpass.com/mobile/ become dXt1E8tILH – then normally you would use this as the password – however if you add padding to the start eg. added TOAD to the beginning the “final” password would thus become  TOADdXt1E8tILH, thus even if someone found out you were using SuperGenPass and somehow got hold of your password then it would be useless for them as only you would know to add TOAD to the password generated by SuperGenPass.

Here is a YouTube video that explain a bit about SuperGenPass, note that he is USING the scripting which I advice you do NOT.. But you may get the idea a bit better though..

So DO NOT use the script, use http://supergenpass.com/mobile/ instead..

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Dropbox – major security breach – what to do?

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As you may have heard Dropbox suffered a major security breach this weekend, for almost 4 hours ALL dropbox accounts (including data) was accessible to ANYONE without password (or rather you were asked for a password, but it would accept anything)..

The major problem here is that ANYTHING in your Dropbox is unencrypted, and thus anyone that gets access to your Dropbox has access to your data…

This is, besides a major concern for Dropbox users, a wakeup call for users of cloud solutions – I totally have to agree with Steve Gibson (www.grc.com/securitynow) that we need PIE – Pre Internet Encryption, everything we store in the colud really NEED to be encrypted before it leave our servers/lan.

Obviously this Dropbox breach was not good 🙁  but never fear there is a solution, still in Beta but still very promising..  The solution is called SecureSync, it creates an encrypted folder in your dropbox and anything stored here is encrypted (you HAVE to access the folder via the “SecureSync” shortcut in MyDocuments though, if you look directly in the encrypted folder you will only get encrypted data – this however is quite clever as you can still syncronize with machines that do not have SecureSync installed, for Dropbox the encrypted data is merely data and is thus synchronized just as other data – however once you instal SecureSync on the target machine you can suddenly read the encrypted data via the “SecureSync Shortcut”.

SecureSync is free (at the moment at least) and still in Beta, but it seem to work fine although especially the install routine obviously will be improved.

Get it here;
http://getsecretsync.com/ss/getstarted/

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Filter bubbles

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A very interesting ‘webcast’ on what could be named “Filter bubbles”, it is an interesting observation on how Google and Facebook automatically filter certain information away for you (all in good faith I hope, but still)..  Your search on “Egypt” may thus bring very different results than the same search done on a friends computer, good or bad?  well it is hard to tell but it offers some scary prospects.  Take the 9 minuts and listen to this, it is interesting stuff.

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SugarSync – another cloud service

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Just found an alternative to www.dropbox.comcalled SugarSync, it offers a free version as with Dropbox and from what I can read with more space to begin with.

Comparisons made by various reviewers on the net seem to suggest that Dropbox is slightly easier to get started with, however pricing on SugarSync appear cheaper.

Had Dropbox been 1-3$ and not 10$ a month I had been a paying customer, but 10$ for 50gig is just too steap 🙁

Check out SugarSync here;
https://www.sugarsync.com/free/

a few oter alternatives here;
http://techpp.com/2010/07/05/dropbox-alternatives-sync-files-online/

And finally (note the price is per year not month);
http://emea.trendmicro.com/emea/products/personal/safesync-solution/

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HTTP watch – see what’s going on

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Have you ever seen those warnings from your browser “The HTTPS content you are…..” stating that the page you are loading contain both HTTP and HTTPS?  The answer is most likely yes, sure you can disable these warnings (which due to their frequency may even be necessary) but for the sake of security or even just curiosity you may wish to know just what it is on the webpage that is HTTP and not HTTPS (often it’s simply an image, however if it should prove to be a java-script it might be a good reason for a raised eyebrow).  Anyhow, how do you get this information?  Well I found a mention of something called HTTP Watch in a forum somewhere (can’t remember where sorry), this is an add-on to IE/Firefox that will allow you to see what’s going on when loading a web-site, simply install – rightclick on the web-site and choose HTTP Watch – record and re-load/load the page and get the complete list of objects loaded..

Cool, and better still the Free version is quite sufficient 😀

http://www.httpwatch.com/

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