The Problem

It’s not really a problem. Today most everything on the web has moved from http to https. This is generally a good thing. However, in the case of icecast, all of the services that I could find for pay-as-you-go internet radio services don’t offer icecast+https services to customers.

Ok, wait Mike. Why do I need https on icecast?

Normally, this isn’t an issue. You can (still) happily click through all of the ‘safety’ warnings that web browsers show you when you connect to an http web server. You accept the risks and move on. It’s only an issue if you’re trying to connect to an endpoint service that will refer to your icecast stream point to play your tream THROUGH it’s https web site.

Last Revised: January 2, 2022 22:45

Why

Discussion between Adam and Dave in Podcasting 2.0 Board Meeting #68 on how cool it might be to see dedicated applications on Roku app, for example, in front of a services dedicated to music, or movies, or documentaries, etc. with unique and familiar experiences/interfaces to those types of media, taking full advantage of the Podcasting 2.0 namespace and index.

Then I got to thinking, what excatly is involved in developing a Roku app, and what is that ecosystem like?

Last Updated: 31-December-2021 (editorial, added Resources)

Why write this up?

Surely this is documented elsewhere. Sure, it is, but as I worked through this on my own, I discovered that the official MIAB guide is missing a key point on achieving a successful restore/move of an MIAB instance.

MIAB’s “Moving to a New Box/Testing Backups” is where you start, so that’s where I started this journey. For completeness, I’ll repeat the steps given in the MIAB maintenance guide, but make some notes along the way.

Over the course of 2020, there was much enthusiasum in the Raspberry Pi community over the evolving ability of the Raspberry Pi 4b model’s to boot its operating system ‘directly’ from an external storage device. The ride has been a bit bumpy along the way, but very manageable for the hobbyist to play along.

However, I wanted to bring together four specific components to the equation:

• Ubuntu Server 20.04 LTS 64-bit
• an external SSD as the primary/OS storage device
• and of course, a Raspberry Pi 4b (with non-beta firmware)
• And most importantly, I didn’t want to have to do a lot of ‘afterwork’ to maintain the setup.

Specifically, I didn’t want to have to manually copy a bunch of RPi-specific boot files around to support booting a 64-bit kernel, nor with decompressing the compressed kernel that is generated by default when the Ubuntu kernel is updated in the normal course of maintenance. I believe that I may have waited just long enough for the Raspberry Pi firmware to have sufficiently matured to solve the former concern, while the scripting shown below will solve the latter concern.

The Big Tech Oligarchy has built a rich set of products and services that are available at “no cost”, but in fact the users of these services are in fact the currency exchanged. Google, for example, scans every email message passing through its servers in order to target advertising and train its AI, among other things.

It’s much deeper than just trying to optimize targeting for advertising, it is literally used to manipulate behavior. The 2020 Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, is truly sobering.