Category: Tech

Putin continues his mad destruction of Ukraine, and I can only hope that Trump is collateral damage. Having reaffirmed that he is still Putin’s boy, I don’t know how any American can favor Trump’s return to elected office. But of course many do.

Meanwhile, extreme weather rages a path of destruction across Tornado Alley, and well beyond. People are being killed and, in an instant, families are losing every physical possession. With all of that going on, my trivial concern was… can a piece of home audio equipment be jealous?

The A/V receiver’s Music Server application for UPnP/DLNA is barely acceptable. I needed something better, and I found it with an Android application called Hi-Fi Cast. I think my purchase set a new personal record for the shortest time between trying and buying. The fact it’s only $9 helped.

Thanks to Hi-Fi Cast, I now understand why casting SiriusXM from the phone wasn’t working with the receiver. A feature called Eventing Mode, “for efficient monitoring of the renderer status,” needs to be disabled. None of other casting-capable apps on the phone offer control over Eventing Mode. Once it’s disabled in Hi-Fi Cast, it works with the receiver, without relying upon the Google Home app.

Hi-Fi Cast takes control of the Music Server renderer in the receiver, as dutifully reflected in Onkyo’s own controller app. Very nice.

Giddy with success, I went upstairs to try Hi-Fi Cast with Chromecast Audio and, uh oh, the screen on the Logitech Squeezebox Touch for LMS (rather than DLNA) looked very wrong. A quick check revealed that not only was it off the network, it thought it didn’t have a network interface. WiFi was completely dead, and cycling power didn’t bring it back. From happiness downstairs, to despair upstairs!

My immediate suspicion was the Touch was mad at me for adding Chromecast Audio to the stereo receiver. The timing was too coincidental. After ten years of loyal service, it was like a child being jealous of a new baby in the house. I sternly informed the Touch that if it didn’t start working again, then Chromecast Audio wouldn’t be supplementing it, but replacing, and the loss of gapless playback wouldn’t stop me!

I took the Touch downstairs, where I could put it on Ethernet. Before doing that I started it up again and confirmed it was still helpless. I warned the Touch it had better behave, or it would find itself back in its original packaging. I plugged in the Ethernet cable and WiFi came on! Everything was working! Ethernet hadn’t even been selected as the network interface, but it too worked when tested. Good boy!

Back it went upstairs. Properly chastened, the Touch further redeemed itself by continuing to work.

Perhaps the Touch is just trying to tell me it’s sincerely feeling its age, and needs help rather than discipline. With that possibility in mind, I have ordered a WiFi-to-Ethernet adapter.

IoT. Internet of Things. Not something that holds a lot of interest for me. If package thieves were a concern, then I could see getting a webcam for the front porch. But as I recently learned, Google has rolled streaming media into its Home concept.

This is the Cast tab in the Google Chrome browser on my desktop PC when I am not using Chromecast.

This is the Cast tab when I am casting. Not from the PC, but from my Pixel 4a phone, going to Chromecast Audio on the upstairs stereo.

So of course this is how it looks when casting from the phone to the Onkyo A/V receiver downstairs.

When Google Chrome is running it finds compatible devices on the local network and maintains connections to poll for changes.

TCP 192.168.1.179:63387 Chromecast:8008 ESTABLISHED
TCP 192.168.1.179:63388 StreamingStick4K:8060 CLOSE_WAIT
TCP 192.168.1.179:63390 RokuStreamingStick:8060 CLOSE_WAIT


It makes sense to check casting devices, but it raises thorny questions. What else might Google be monitoring, now that it considers everything to be part of an IoT Home, and are there vulnerabilities in the casting protocol that hackers could exploit?