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Goodbye Stitcher App

Stitcher AdI have been using the Stitcher app on the iPhone for about 4 and a half years now. Among other things, Stitcher aggregates multiple podcasts into a single place and lets you subscribe and listen to shows back to back like a radio station. I used the app primarily at work just to have something going on in the background throughout the day.

Over the past several months, Stitcher has been steadily increasing their rate and annoyance of ads. There are, of course, ads in each podcast but switcher will also insert its own ads on top of that. It started off gentle enough with a ad here or there between podcasts that could be skipped. Then, I could no longer skip the pretentious Jaguar ads and had to listen to at least 10 seconds. Even that was acceptable to me but now they have stooped to new lows. Without being touched, when the app’s open then mid podcast, it will automatically launch the Apple App store and take be the page of some crappy game. This happened to me 3 times at work yesterday.

Back in 2010, Stitcher was the best (maybe only) game in town for downloading and listening to podcasts without syncing with a PC. Apple would let you subscribe to podcasts but you had to let them sync to your iPhone from iTunes through a computer. It was not a good process at all. Stitcher, however, let me browse, subscribe, and listen to shows from anywhere and that was fantastic.

Now, Apple had separated Podcasts out from the Music app into its own app. I can do all of the things I did with Stitcher but without any additional ads. It was a no brainier.  The only thing I can even think of that I might miss is the news functionality of Stitcher. I never used that though and all it ever did for me was get in the way of my podcasts.

Also, there were some podcasts that were not available on Stitcher, like Bill Burr’s Monday Morning Podcast. Now I have everything I want in a single location and am glad I ditched Stitcher for good.

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Installed a new FreeNAS this week

FreeNAS Box

After months of not wanting to spend the money or burn the extra power, I pulled the trigger on building a new NAS for the house. I had thought about going with a turn key solution with 5 bays from Synology but ended up going with a build your own approach instead. For one, this option was slightly cheaper, but it also has much more potential. The Synology solution does a LOT right out of the box but it does not have much processing horsepower. I wanted more power for PLEX transcoding of multiple HD streams at one time.

My brother recommended that we go with an AMD A10 CPU for its built in video processing acceleration. Whether or not this is actually working, I have no idea. I do know that while streaming HD media the load average does not even come close to 1.00.

For hard drives, we opted for (5) 4TB Western Digital Red drives. The Red drives are supposed to be better for NAS operations. I am always skeptical though of any drive that advertizes itself as more resilient as another. The cynic in me says that they all use the same components inside with a different mounting apparatus or something.

We ended up using FreeNAS for the OS. I have some Linux experience as we use CentOS quite a lot at the office but FreeNAS is based off of FreeBSD and uses ZFS for its filesystem and it has some rather large differences. I am really liking ZFS as a technology though. It takes a hardware RAID card out of the equation and combines the fault tolerance into the file system. This removes an addition layer of abstraction that can cause problems. Having a file system that is directly aware of the striping and parity can theoretically reduce the chance for corruption.

Another big difference between FreeBSD and Linux is the concept of jailing. When you install a plugin on FreeNAS, it runs in its own jail. Each jail has its own network stack and filesystem that runs parallel to the main OS and other jails. I think of jailing as a step below virtualization in that a jail runs much like its own system but with less overhead than a fully virtualized system. You get the security and separation benefits of a VM without having to have lots of VMs taking up space and begging to be updated all the time.

I setup the disks in a “RAID5 like” configuration called Z1. That means one drive’s space is not usable for storage and instead is used for parity to protect against a single drive failure. We have ~16TB of usable storage.