Author: Roo

Home Theatre Seating – Octane Contour HR (Review)

It’s been a while (apparently 7.5 years) since I’ve written something about home theater here. To be honest, not a lot has changed in my setup. I’ve moved from having satellite TV and watching (buying) lots of DVDs to primarily streaming content – Netflix or Amazon Prime. We still enjoy the occasional Blu-ray, but the quality of streaming is good enough and the convenience factor is high. I think there is also a social aspect to keeping up with what your friends are watching as well.

There are many many options out there for seating. We’ve had two rows of couches from the start, but while couches are comfortable if you want to stretch out you either end up with some sort of foot stool – or you’re lying sideways. Honestly couches are a great solution, but they don’t have that fancy feel to them. Recliners are fancy. Many (all?) of the movie theaters today in our area have fairly nice recliners now.

This got us looking at recliners. Ideally we’d go for Canadian made, but after searching around buying local drives the price up to double or more (and the quality). The couch we had in the front row was really showing it’s age and needed replacing. Specifications I was looking for: leather with power reclining, Jenn also wanted to make sure they looked ok because quite honestly many options are fairly ugly.

With leather there is a lot of variation. You want to avoid any of the gel or bonded leather, these tend to be in the very low end of the market and simply won’t last or feel all that great long term. Sadly, leather appears to be completely unregulated and ‘top grain’ leather has a huge range as well. The other gotcha here is that the selection is nearly 100% online (at least in the price range we were looking at).

This is what we ended up getting:

BestBuy had a fairly good sale on, and they seemed to have real leather. When you go digging there are not very many reviews of these, and the result vary quite a bit. You can find Octane Seating – the company that makes these (in China). If you dig around, you find out that Octane allows for orders with custom fabric, and they have quite a range of grades they support as well. I think this explains why there is such a variety of reviews for products that are described similarly.

I think we bought a day before the sale ended. While I was waiting for the delivery, I couldn’t help but check the website – and I wasn’t very surprised to see this.

Ok, so the 3 day sale didn’t really end after 3 days, it was extended. Maybe they are trying to drain stock or something.

Yeah, at this point it’s starting to get a little bit silly. It’s the sale that goes on forever. I was wrong, on the 17th it returned to normal full price.

But… other models were now on sale. It seems there is always a sale for entertainment furniture, in fact – while I was writing the post they were back on sale for the same discount.

We’ve had them a few weeks and have really enjoyed them. Going for the power recliner was absolutely the right choice, it was worth the price increase for that. The Octane Contour HR have motorized headrests which I would recommend, as a feature it seems like a gimmick, but it is really useful (and comfortable).

The leather is not as nice as the love seat we bought a couple of years ago for basically twice the price. That said, the product that we received felt like it was worth the sale price. I wouldn’t pay the full price for these, or at least not what BestBuy is asking as full price. While these exact chairs may not be on sale, there seems to always be some of the models on sale. I’d also consider CostCo as another source.

The motors are audible, but quiet enough that it’s not too intrusive if you adjust while watching. I’m basically 6′ tall, and I fit but I suspect a taller person may not be as comfortable.

Oddities. The two seat pair, ships in 4 parts. Both back rests come off (and are easy for 2 people to put back on). You get 1 full chair (two arms) and 1 with a single arm. You simply place them together on the floor – and the weight keeps them in place. I expecting there to be some sort of locking / connection mechanism but no, it’s just placement.

Overall very happy with the purchase, already thinking about converting the 2nd row of seating to recliners too.

Pros:

  • Power recline and power headrest
  • Much more comfortable than the worn out couch they replaced
  • Fancy looking, premium seating at home

Cons:

  • Seats are not physically attached
  • Kids play with the controls
  • Leather quality is ‘ok’ and may vary from vendor to vendor

Footnote: We initially tried to buy a set of seats that EastPorters carries, but was sold / shipped by Staples. The ordering process seemed to go off the rails, so a week later we assumed they had just cancelled the order. Weeks later, a shipping company calls to arrange drop off of our assumed cancelled order. They ended up leaving seats on the front step with no signature. They did come get the unwanted delivery and we eventually got a 100% refund, but only after chasing them a bit. I wouldn’t recommend Staples for this type of purchase

Returning a Nexus 5 to ‘stock’, including re-locking bootloader

Hmm, I had a bunch to say about used phones and my history with different models, skip to about halfway down to find the actual details on returning a phone to stock.

It’s interesting to look back over my personal smartphone ownership history. All of them have been purchased ‘used’ but some were barely used, where others saw heavy use. For the most part I’ve not had any real problems with the phones, but there have been a few exceptions. My price point has generally been under $200, but I’ve scored a few at the $150 mark too.

Resale of the phones hasn’t been a strong point of mine, I usually keep them (sometimes idle on my desk) to the point where I’m getting less than half what I paid for them. Still I think I’m ahead in terms of the diversity of the phones I’ve had, and my total layout in cost.

The Nexus 4 was a great phone for me, I used it for almost 2 years before swapping to a Nexus 5. It wasn’t without problems, something went wrong with the charging circuitry (part of the motherboard) and it was destroying batteries by mis-charging them. I went through a couple aftermarket batteries before finding a donor phone that had a good motherboard.

I flipped the donor phone with now bad motherboard and ended up $20 out of pocket to fix my Nexus 4. I ran with this fixed phone for nearly another year.

In the Nexus 4 ownership phase, I ended up having Jenn switch from iOS to Android, and so I started getting 2 of the same phone. Late in 2016 the Nexus 5 (32GB) came below the $200 price point. I ended up buying 3 within the span of a couple of weeks.

Of the 3 Nexus 5’s, it turns out one of them had something wrong with it. After a little while that bad phone started to randomly reboot, and sometimes even turn itself off and refuse to power back on. You could get it back, but had to fiddle with it for some time. I ended up taking this phone and using it as my daily driver to see if I could isolate and fix the issue. It felt like it might have been the very common power button problem, but a local repair shop didn’t think it was. Instead of trying to fix it myself, I just upgraded to the Moto X Play and sold the bad Nexus 5 (with full disclosure on it’s issues) as a parts phone for $50.

Oh yeah, and that gets us to the returning to stock story..

Continue reading “Returning a Nexus 5 to ‘stock’, including re-locking bootloader”

Server Upgrade Part 5: rsyslog

Now that mail is running in a container, logwatch is a lot less interesting because log data is not visible on the host (the container has the logs). One option is to map the log files from the container into the host logs, but this might get messy. It seems like a better idea to build out an rsyslog setup to flow logs from the container into the host.

To start with I needed to understand rsyslog a bit better. Then I came across a post that does pretty much what I’m trying to accomplish, docker containers sending logs to the host with rsyslog.

Before we configure the container, we need to get our host machine accepting rsyslog input. We’ll need to turn on one of TCP or UDP remote access on the host. I’ll stick with just TCP for my initial setup.

Edit /etc/rsyslog.conf, you’ll find a comment near the top about TCP reception, uncomment the pair of lines below it

and then restart the service to pick up the new config

I’m using a firewall on the host so I’ll also have to open up the firewall so that things can see this new port. When we do firewall stuff, we should always pause and think about the security implications here.

In my case, the machine that has the port open will be behind my router, which also runs a firewall. So while we’re punching a hole in the firewall, we actually have another firewall protecting us from the big bad internet.

At this point our host machine has rsyslog running and waiting for traffic. Now let’s take a look at the mail server container and change it to flow logs to the host rsyslog.

It turns out the client is really easy, but you do have to be aware of UDP or TCP.  Inside the container – we modify our Dockerfile to create an /etc/rsyslog.d/10-rsyslog.conf file that looks like:

If you are using TCP, use both @@ – for UDP just a single @. You also need to use the actual hostname of the host machine (the one we configured with rsyslog just above). We need rebuild and restart the container to activate the rsyslog configuration.

Back on the host, we see data showing up with the container hostname in the logs. If we look on the host machine in /var/log/syslog we see rsyslogd startup from the mail container:

 

There are plenty of other log messages related to the mail container start up as well.

We could manually emit some log messages from the client inside the container, by shelling into the container and running logger.

and in /var/log/syslog on the host we see..

Logwatch should be a lot more interesting