Ranjith.INFO

VPNbook received the editors choice award from PC Magazine for the free VPN service. I've been using VPNbook for a while now. The PPTP VPN is easy to setup in windows but my ZoneAlarm firewall was blocking it without any warning. I have to disable the firewall to use the PPTP connection on windows. I even added the ip address of the VPNbook to trusted sites of the ZoneAlarm firewall but that didn't fix the issue so I end up installing Open Vpn client and it works great. I've only used the US server so that I can watch American shows like SNL or Family Guy.

I've been using Owncloud for a year now. One of my co-worker gave me his  Pentium-4 IBM desktop from 2002, I installed Ubuntu server 12.04 and Owncloud server. I have a client running on my Android phone backing up all the pictures to the Owncloud server as well as desktop clients syncing folders. I also share pictures folders with my family and friends.

Owncloud came a long way and it has tons of apps. One of them i like is adding an external drive. This will allow the user not only add external hard drives but also internal folders, in case you decided to add 2nd hard drives. Also you can make owncloud secure by adding https / ssl.

Adding a 2nd hard drive to Owncloud server

Serviio DLNA server supports MKV streaming to Sony SMP-N100 network player.

According to Sony Manual, MKV playback only supported from USB. But I was able to stream all my MKV 720P movies using Serviio DLNA server.

After downloading from Serviio and installed in my Windows 7 desktop, I opened the Console to set the profile of the player to Sony BD Player / SMP and under Transcoding, change number of CPU cores to use to 4 (My CPU is i7).

UnixStickers.com   is shipping Linux OS stickers worldwide. I bought few Linux Mint and Ubuntu stickers.