There are a lot of ways to “do” media in a house. Plex seems popular. Jellyfin, too. In the end they all do vaguely the same thing, it’s just a matter of picking the one(s) that will do what you want it to do.
I’ve been a long term Kodi user for TV and Movies, which I believe started life as XBMC – Xbox Media Centre. It
I loved Logitech Media Server (LMS) too. LMS would run on my first NAS that I bought, and would serve music to Raspberry Pi players that I scattered around the house. Then an update happened, and I couldn’t run it on the NAS directly, so I moved it to its own Raspberry Pi. I could use a Spotify plugin. Then the plugin misbehaved. Then Daniel Ek showed his true colours. I moved to Tidal. Players were flaky. Raspberry Pi audio quality wasn’t great and I looked at buying a HAT for the Pi for better audio and then I gave up. Last I heard LMS was being shut down – Logitech had had a gutfull and weren’t interested any more. Turns out it was handed over to the Community, and it is now Lyrion Music Server. I’ve not tried it, because I rejigged some things. Which is what this is about.
Switch the TV on, and amp switches on because of magic signals over HDMI. Cool. Until you want the amp to stay on to always be able to play audio. That was change number one. The setup is now simplified to be:
Raspberry Pi/KODI -> Amp -> TV
and all the media sits on a NAS that has a simple CIFS/SMB share.
The amp is always on, and doesn’t care if the TV is or isn’t. It will always play the audio that it receives from the Raspberry Pi.
KODI handles everything. All of the media library stuff, grabbing movie posters, TV episode details, and music.
You can drive it from the TV remote control over CEC (which comes default embedded into KODI), or using a pretty snazzy remote control app on a device connected to the network. There are versions for Android and Apple.
I was standing right here, in one of my favourite places in South Australia. This is Razorback Lookup in Ikara–Flinders Ranges.
Standing right there when my OM-1 jammed. I’d fired off one shot and as I went to wind the camera on, I got partway through the wind then everything stopped. It felt stuck-stuck, too. Nothing flexible about it at all. I took the film out and put the camera away. I’d forgotten to charge my SLR, too, so all I had to document this place was my mobile. It did a passable job, I guess.
I’d had a jammy idler-gear with this OM-1 previously, but this felt different. And my patented percussive method of jiggling the idler-gear into the right spot wasn’t working. I took the film out of the camera, and set it aside in a bag. I actually thought it might have been the end of it for the camera. Curtains for the shutter curtains, you could say.
Feeling inspired today I began to pull the camera apart. I managed to get the camera un-jammed by jiggling the idler-gear. I was surprised.
The arrow shows the idler-gear, completely in the wrong position.
Here’s a video (with the lens off the camera…FOREBODING)showing the idler-gear in action.
I adjusted the little spring that keeps the idler-gear in the right spot, to make it a bit tighter. Tested the camera and it jammed again. I went through some basic trouble-shooting steps and it would sort itself out with the lens off. Fire perfectly with the lens off, and then not work again with the lens back on. The aperture lever felt fine – there was no way that it was causing enough resistance to jam the camera. Lens off: fine. Lens on: not fine.
Was it the lens? I put a different lens on and it worked perfectly. So it must be this 50mm f/1.8 lens causing problems somehow. The aperture levers felt the same on both lenses.
I played with the aperture ring. I played with the shutter speed ring. No better. Didn’t matter if it was set to 1/1000s or bulb. Then I changed the focus of the lens and when it wasn’t focused at infinity it was fine again. Tested it a few times. Back to infinity – no good. Away from infinity – good.
Turns out the rear element of the lens had come loose and was protruding a few millimetres further out than it should be and was getting hooked up on the mirror as it was trying to move out of the way. A quick tighten and we were back to normal.
The troublesome lens with the rear element no longer protruding out the back.
I love plain text files for documents. They’re future-proof, past-proof, and completely platform agnostic. I’m sure someone has written a text editor in Minecraft or something more outrageous. Text editor for Gameboy Colour? Text editor for a Casio F91W.
But sometimes text files need a little more oomph. Some va-va-voom. And this is where Markdown comes along. It’s still a plain text file, but you can format the text with some markup that ranges from very simple, to slightly less simple.
Like this:
# Heading 1
## Heading 2 - The headening
This is the body text.
1. This is
2. an ordered
3. list
and
- this is
- an unordered
- list
and
- [ ] these
- [ ] are
- [x] checkboxes
This then ends up looking like this:
when viewed through an interpreter. The themes can be tweaked, but you can tweak individual bits of the style. You can’t suddenly decide that your ordered lists part way through should be twice the size or something.
And it just works. The files don’t bloat. There is image support. Table support. All manner of things.
And because it’s plain text files, it works perfectly with your preferred version control system (git, most likely, right?) in a way that Word Documents don’t.
I recently stumbled upon Typora and it’s just bloody great. You can either type in code, or use the wysiwyg interface, or kinda use both at the same time where the styles update as you type in the code. It’s not free, but why should it be? It’s very well priced at AU$22. It’ll probably never stop working – and if it does, there are dozens of other text editors out there that will pick up your file and open it without any issues.
Start writing in Markdown. You’ll like it. I think.
I can plan things in advance, but it’s not my natural way of doing things. I enjoy spontaneity. The last minute “hey are you up for…” call or message. But it can be a bit unmanageable if you don’t have a group of similarly minded people around. This is where the Last Minute Adventure Club steps in.
It was an idea I had (probably not technically original, but whatever – I thought of it myself) of a chat group where you can post if you want to do something and want company. Simple, really. You have to be prepared for not getting any bites. And you have to be prepared for getting too many bites. But the flexibility of it is what makes it appealing to me. It’s zero pressure. Ideally you don’t bail if you’ve said you’re going to do something, but in reality – what’s stopping you?
My Last Minute Adventure Club chat has about 15 people. I would like it if it had more, and if others posted more activities in there. But like with my cinema nights and pizza rides – these things take a bit of time to build, and consistency is key.
Start your own Last Minute Adventure Club. Join mine. Just get outside and do things.
