Home › Archive for Offtopic

Offtopic

Get your videos ready for iPhone and iPad!

Posted on by

Ever tried to play standard videos with your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad? Well, in most situations those videos don’t work on iOS devices although they work using VLC, Kodi or even Windows Media Player.
Some say it’s because Apple wants you to buy/rent those videos using iTunes and not getting them through other legal channels, and that’s why they make it harder to playback video files with another origin than the iUniverse. It doesn’t matter if that’s the real reason or not, the question is, “How can I make my videos play on iOS?“.

Well, you have two options:

  1. Jailbreak your iDevice and use Kodi (which is a very good Media Suite also available for Mac, Linux and even Windows)
  2. Re-encode your video files
Read more Get your videos ready for iPhone and iPad! ›

OS X Lion and Mountain Lion Recovery for Proxy-Users

Posted on by

A Mac’s Recovery HD is a good solution to reinstall OS X. If your Mac is a Mid 2011 or newer model and you are running OS X 10.7 Lion or 10.8 Mountain Lion you can boot into the recovery system by holding down the option key at boot.

The recovery system which will be booted is very lean and downloads a macOS Image from Apple’s servers, this works for Ethernet and even WiFi connections. The big problem is, Apple did not add an option to set a proxy server! So if you are behind a proxy you won’t be able to use the recovery feature. That’s why I searched for a solution and found an easy one even for guys not that familiar with IT.

Read more OS X Lion and Mountain Lion Recovery for Proxy-Users ›

Cryptocurrencies – Monero Mining

Posted on by

As some of you know back in August AMD released a driver which is optimized for mining of cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies, though they’ve been in the news several times, mostly Bitcoin, are still used only by a very small group of people. You can buy and sell cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Monero at a cryptocurrency exchange like kraken.com. But there is one fact which some of you might not know – you can also mine some cryptocurrencies. What does that mean?

Very short, you submit a part of your computing power, which is measured in hashes per second (H/s), to a mining pool and get paid in a cryptocurrency when the pool solved a very complex calculating task. Monero (currency code is XMR) is one of the very interesting cryptocurrencies for mining right now. If you use your AMD/Nvidia GPU or your CPU you can get easily 50 to 100 USD a month when running the mining software 24h. If you have several computers this adds up to more, always depending on the combined hashrate of your systems. As most of you should have a powerful system you could give it a try but keep in mind that you also need to pay for electricity which can lessen your profit.

To get started you can read the Howtos some mining pools offer, for example SECUmine.net. If you want to see a list of other Monero (XMR) mining pools you can look some up at moneropools.net. For profitability calculations you can use this calculator.

For questions and discussion please use the comments section.