On Kodi, watches and donations ============================== I've spent the past couple of days mostly offline, so instead of writing, I've been gathering my thoughts -- therefore this post is going to be rather hectic. On Kodi ------- A week-or-so ago I ordered a new television (it is still not shipped, damn you Extreme Digital) and a couple of days later I also ordered my second Raspberry Pi ("Brisbane"). The plan was to set up the Pi as a Kodi Mediabox with the new TV, and I intended to wait until both arrives. The Pi arrived on time, so I did set up the Kodi part on the weekend with the old television (which is not even close to Full HD, so I can't really unleash the full power of having a media box). --- Note on device names: I name my RasPis after coastal cities, mostly because it is fun to say "expect a brief outage on my Gopher server today as I'll move Aberdeen next to Brisbane". Also, I name my computers after gemstones, and my portable devices after famous librarians. I have no excuse for those, it just happened to be this way. --- Setting up LibreELEC[0] with Kodi was rather easy and connecting it with my NAS didn't take long either. The most time consuming part in fact was to convert my storage hierarchy to suit Kodi's requirements[1]. Once it was done, Kodi scanned the whole stuff quite fast, downloaded the cover arts and the episode guides. Also, I've found Kore[2] to be the first remote control app I used that just works without any problems whatsoever. So far my only problem about this setup seems to be is that this configuration (RasPi + LibreElec + Kodi) doesn't support Netflix, as Chromium is not available as an Add-on. I'm sure that there's a workaround for this, but as my new TV (once it finally ships, damn you once more, Extreme Digital) will support Netflix out-of-the-box, I don't know if I want to waste any time on looking for/figuring out such a workaround. On watches ---------- As I already wrote on Mastodon, I was bidding on a vintage mechanical HMT Janata wristwatch -- actually, I was bidding on two, just in case. What makes them really special is that they both have Urdu symbols on their plates instead of the usual Arabic numbers. Sadly, I was outbid on the one with white plate at the last moment, but luckily I won the bidding on the other one. This has black plate like my current HMT Jawan (that is why I wanted one with a white plate), but I am happy with that one as well. It just shipped from India, so I expect it to be here in ten days or so. On donations ------------ pet84rik recently wrote an entry[3] on Gopher about saving money and making donations to different projects each month. I do this for quite a long time now. I have very few recurring donations set up -- after leaving Patreon, I have exactly one recurring donation: a monthly sum goes to the admin of the Mastodon instance I am using. But I donate a certain sum (USD 12-20) each month to a project that seems interesting to me. This month I decided to give my $20 to Jesse, who wants to revive[4] his Lear Siegler ADM-5 terminal[5]. And while I know that I'll clearly have exactly zero profit from this project, I can also see that Jesse has a plan and the necessary commitment to accomplish this plan. And I was happy to make a small donation that probably helps him fulfill his dreams and also helps a piece of tech history to survive, to be saved and restored. --- [0] https://libreelec.tv/ [1] http://kodi.wiki/view/Naming_video_files/TV_shows#TV_Show_Folder [2] https://f-droid.org/packages/org.xbmc.kore/ [3] gopher://sdf.org/0/users/pet84rik/BLOG/JAN18/Jan11-manythings [4] gopher://sdf.org/1/users/jebug29/adm5/ [5] http://terminals-wiki.org/wiki/index.php/Lear_Siegler_ADM-5