Streaming media from Windows 10 to Android

I promise I will go back to writing about technical leadership soon, but for the moment I'm rather enjoying solving real problems. I'm revisiting problems I've worked through at different times in the past few years and it's very interesting to see how things have moved forward, opening new avenues to success and generally blurring the lines between professional-level skills to set up services and just clicking around and seeing Things Work.

More importantly, it's just ... fun. And it really helps to remind me that computers are flexible and interesting tools to solve problems, as well as eternal sources of legacy debt and pain.

Anyway, on the less existential end of all this I want to talk about streaming video. Let's go!

The problem

I have lots of video clips on a hard drive. I can watch these easily on my desktop computer, but I'd like to be able to access them on my tablet without plugging it in there.

The history

In the past, I've created a media server on my network. I've attempted to buy something (utter failure) and made one from a raspberry pi (success, although some serious caveats on that). Neither result kept going and I abandoned them for a long while.

The now

While a separate server would be a better solution, for the moment I'm happy just using my desktop as the server. It's usually on, and that's enough for me if I want to go flop on the sofa with a tablet. So - something on the desktop to act as a server, and something on the tablet to receive it.

If you're totally new to this kind of thing, the important standards here are uPnP and DLNA. uPnP is what allows your media server to be "found" on the network. DLNA is built on top of uPnP and is specific to media sharing, ie it adds in the bit that handles the streaming. These are pretty open (in terms of security) so only suitable for home / other trusted networks.

Server first. I'm running Windows 10 (for the moment... sadness...) and after a bit of poking around the internet looking for something to install to act as a server, it turns out that Windows 10 now does this natively! This was a surprise - back in the day I'd have had to install all manner of media server applications and cross my fingers. Now it's a case of:

• Control Panel -> Network and Internet -> Network and Sharing Center
• In the left pane, "Change advanced sharing settings"
• In the Network Discovery section, turn on network discovery and hit Save

Voila.

Ok, the tablet end, which is running Android. I am pretty sure I could do everything using VLC player, but popular opinion online is that I should use BubbleUPnP for discovering the filestore, and it then launches VLC when I hit play. So I did that. And it worked seamlessly. I had to hunt around a bit through the folder structure offered, but otherwise it just works. Done.

I have dodged a significant amount of the complexity here as I am not streaming to a smart TV (because I don't have one). This means that I can use VLC as the player on my tablet, and that is smart enough to handle more or less anything thrown at it - no codec issues for me.

And there we have it. A few clicks one end, and installing an app the other end and we're away - so much easier than before. One particularly interesting thing I found was that searches for "streaming from desktop computer" leads to information about streaming games, not other kinds of media. Amazing how much game streaming has grown - to the point it's the primary search responses.

I promise I've been doing technical leadership and strategic things too. I'll write about that soon...

Email Three - Email with a Vengeance

"You email isn't arriving at all now" - everyone.

I have spent far too long writing about email and how to set up vanity domains. This really should be easy and Just Work but ... well. Here is the third post. Why do I care? Well, given how important email is as part of our online identities I do believe in taking some ownership of it, hence using a vanity domain. By using my own domain instead of an @gmail.com address I could migrate away from Gmail in the future without losing access to everything in the world. While I don't intend to go anywhere any time soon, Google does have a habit of doing odd things with its services so I'd like to have some options (he says, using Blogger which is far more at risk than Gmail...).

With that in mind, I'd like to use a vanity domain. I'd also like my email to arrive. And I'd like people to be able to email me too. High requirements, I know.

The story so far

So this is the third post on this subject (sigh). In my first post I went into detail on my requirements and the underpinning bits of security apparatus required to make email happen. I set things up using SendGrid but lamented using a marketing company for email as well as a cap on my daily email usage.

In my second post I removed SendGrid as sending / receiving wasn't consistent and switched to using the Gmail mailservers. This removed the restrictions but also made it impossible to set up DKIM and DMARC properly. I helped my setup by setting p=none which is better than nothing, but not by a lot.

Guess what? Email didn't send / receive again. This appears to have gotten worse recently, or I'm noticing it more. When three email vanished over a couple of days I cracked - I can't live with inconsistent email. It's too important.

The problem

Reading around suggests that the problem is to do with how email forwarding works. No-frills forwarding essentially throws the email at the receiving server. The receiving server then figures out what to do with it. This is fine, until one factors in load - and that all spam needs forwarding in case of false positives. The system needs to decide what to do when it is overloaded, and it seems the Gmail servers drop email in this case. Then the forwarding service needs to decide what to do and the simplest approach is to also drop the email - else they are then storing email which has its own overheads and problems.

This is a crude explanation - here is an expert explaining it far more accurately.

Considering I've been using free options, I can see why they've taken this approach but it's not good enough for me.

The solution

The solution is to use something which holds incoming email temporarily and retries if the forwarding fails. There are a few ways to do this, including some approaches using scripting and free services but as noted above I'm really bored of fiddling with this ecosystem then gaslighting myself into thinking it's working when there are a few, but notable, errors. No scripts, time for something a bit more thorough.

Enter Gmailify. Apparently Tim O'Neill suggested this to me the first time around, but either I didn't note it or I got confused with the Google feature of exactly the same name. Either way, I am now giving it a go and the pricetag ($7 / year at time of writing) is very reasonable.

Gmailify works as a forwarding / mailbox service. It controls the incoming / outgoing mail on your domain and temporarily lets the email rest in a mailbox. Gmail then uses POP3 to pull from that mailbox which then erases all trace. It also enables all the DKIM / SPF / DMARC setup that was missing before.

Setup is really straightforward if you know how to edit DNS settings and tbh should be easy if you're just confident clicking around. It gives you exactly what you need at each step, and an option to verify each step has gone in properly. The interface for routing different addresses on your domain is really easy to use too, at least for a simple setup.

Couple of things that took me a moment of thought. First, you need to set up the primary email address then configure the catch-all email address if you're used to *@domain.com. This is easy in the Email Routing submenu. Second, Gmail doesn't automatically prompt for outgoing email any more (could be because I was migrating a config?) and when modifying an existing outgoing mail rule it doesn't perform a full validation which will likely create problems down the line. I got around this by deleting my existing outgoing mail rule and setting up from scratch again. Don't forget to reset your default outgoing email address if you do this!

Oh, and if you're migrating rather than setting this up for the first time don't forget to clean up your DNS config when you're done.

All done in less time than it took me to type this up. I sent some email to Tim's overly-fussy email account and it all got through which is a first. I also ran it through this awesome tool for learning and testing DMARC settings which is worth a play if only to see how education tools should be designed. All the tests now light up a pleasing green - another first.

I've had this set up a few days so I'm keeping my fingers crossed this is the last time I have to write about this...

Looking back and remembering

I intended to start this year with a post about what might be coming in 2025, filled with enthusiasm and excitement. Instead, with the passing of a friend, I want to write a few words about remembering the important people in our working lives and what makes them important.

Over my career I've met a lot of people - some have been great at what they do. The people I remember are the ones who are more than competent, they are decent, authentic and overall nice individuals. "Nice" can sometimes be a little derogatory - a substitute for anything more positive to say. But, for me, the people who properly exemplify "nice" show off the traits we claim we value the highest. They encourage and provide positivity. They create non-judgemental space, while offering constructive feedback. They support without coddling. They make time for people and help build up those around them, usually managing to do so without making themselves the centre of attention. They usually do this somewhat unconsciously - it is their natural way to help, build and encourage. Nice people have a positive impact on their world.

Truly nice people are rare, but they are out there and should be valued. Even more so, we should value the people who remember those who have passed out their immediate sphere (say, changed job or moved away) and keep those connections going. A friend of mine refers to these folk as "glue people" - people who bring others together, often with as simple a thought process as "you're a decent person who has a problem, I remember person X who could probably solve it - you should talk". In this world of networking and personal brand, these glue people are surprisingly rare and those who do it authentically and honestly (ie not attempting to become some kind of power broker) are even rarer. They help hold extended groups together and create new connections through truthful endorsement and recommendations and lots of people owe personal and professional change and development to them - often without even realising it. We are collectively poorer when we lose them.

I don't like naming individuals on this blog, especially when I know they can't ever respond or correct or ask me to take it down, so I'm not going to do this today but I know we have lost someone decent, authentic and nice and I know they have made a huge difference to my life, and the lives of others. We may not fully recognise it. Frankly, this person probably didn't realise it either and that is both wonderful and intensely sad.

Life is short and frail. I'm starting this year thinking about who I want to be, and what I'd like people to remember me for.