(not so much)
I had noticed that the frequency of updates to the Intel NUC that powers my Plex Media Server had tailed off (it ran Ubuntu 18.04 LTS) an indication that there was a new version of the long term support OS coming.
(more…)Category: Tech
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Finally took the plunge – Airpods
I have been using wireless headsets for over 4 years, most of the time using a set of Plantronics behind the neck that worked well, until I lost them that is.
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Plex Maintenance – Futurama
A couple of weeks ago, I got a hankering to watch some Futurama. Fortunately, I have copied all my discs to my Plex server for ease of access.
But there was a flaw. The in season order from the original broadcast is not how Plex see them, In particular, they screw up seasons 2, 3, 4, and 5 particularly badly, and I needed to do a lot of file manipulation to get them all to show up properly.
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The Drobo is back online
It took almost 6 weeks from the first support ticket, but yesterday afternoon (July 28, 2020) the RMA unit arrived from Drobo. Ironically, it shipped from their office in Sunnyvale 4 days before via FedEx, and the total distance from their facility to my house is about 16 miles.
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Drobo @#$%
My first exposure to Drobo was when I bought a firewire version with 4 drives wayyyyyy back in 2011. Billed as the hassle free external storage, it uses proprietary algorithms (more than just RAID) to ensure that data isn’t lost when a drive goes bad.
Prior to this, I had just used external drives to store stuff (way back in the 1990’s I used tape, but then in the early ought’s it became far cheaper to just buy bigger disks).
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Mailing lists
As I consider a move from G-Suite to a less spying laden provider, I am cleaning up my massive pile of email (a lot less of a mess than my significant other, I might add) I stumble across a lot of messages from mailing lists I have subscribed to over the last 15 – 20 years.
As an example, in 2008, I was considering buying a Mini, and during my research, I signed up for updates. I never did buy it, instead buying a far superior Honda S2000, but the emails kept a comin’ (I signed up for it so long ago, it was still an @mac.com address!)
So, when these come in, I am now going through the unsubscribe process.
Mini, GlassDoor, Seeking Alpha, and many many more were unsubbed. And the process continues. I did whittle my total email count from ~16k messages to less than 7,000 emails. By deleting rafts of messages that are not interesting. It was truly astounding how many of the daily NY Times headline emails I had in my archive (answer: Almost 1,000 that I hadn’t deleted.)
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Email Migration – baby steps
I have mused lately that it is time to move away from my G-Suite account(s). I have several of them, most are the old, no longer offered “basic” accounts (for a period of time, Google offered 8Gig accounts with 2 users, and totally free. These are no longer offered, but I had three grandfathered), and the real account that houses my personal email (my wife and I are the two users).
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Time to move from g-suite?
The tale of this domain (actually, the sister domain, tralfaz.org) has been told, a few times in these pages.
However, one tale I haven’t told is how when Google Apps became available, I moved from the creaky old email platform (hosted on a local Bay Area ISP, BEST Communications (an ISP that is so dead, I couldn’t even find an archival reference) probably in the 2005 or 2006 time frame.
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Plex Server Migration
A couple of years ago, I took the plunge, bought an Intel NUC, a ton of external storage, and built a Plex server for all my media (literally hundreds of DVD’s and Bluray discs). It has been chugging along well, dishing up what I want, when I want it.
But, I took the easy route when I set it up originally. I installed Ubuntu desktop on my then new NUC, as that made the configuration trivial. Setting up Wifi? Easy peasy. All the published tutorials on getting Plex up and running. Boffo.
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Tivo – getting to the end of the line
I first bought a Tivo when we moved to Tucson 16 years ago. Prior to that, I used a Dish network DVR that was OK, but nothing spectacular. I knew the Tivo was a better user experience, as I had a friend who did UI/UX work for the company way back when they were in their infancy.
That original Tivo graduated to a Series 3 HD when we brought home a plasma TV, and a few years ago, when Comcast (correction: Xfinity) stopped supporting the MPEG2 format for broadcast, it was time to upgrade. Fortunately, Tivo had an offer for an all in subscription to a refurbished Tivo Romio for a reasonable price.
That had been working well for a number of years, but had become flakey recently. Sporadic, spontaneous reboots were driving me nuts. Finally, last Saturday, it died. Caught in a reboot cycle, it seemed dead.
Fortunately, some internet sleuthing identified that the problem was most likely caused by a bad disk, so off to Weaknees, and to order up a replacement HD.
But…
The reality is that I do not watch much live TV anymore. Sure, I enjoy recording Full Frontal, new episodes of Rick and Morty, and the occasional The Daily Show featuring Trevor Noah, but since Comcast stopped carrying BEin Sports, I can’t tune in to MotoGP races anymore.
Almost all my viewing is streaming. Netflix (decreasing), Amazon Prime (cautiously, as it sucks bandwidth), and Hulu are my go to’s with my Plex server for my home library of movies, I am pretty much good.
If it were up to me, I would cut the cord, buy an Apple TV to stream, and be done with it.
However, my wife is a sports nut. She needs her college football fix. She craves women’s collegiate volleyball. And when the olympics are on, well, I don’t get to watch TV for 2 weeks solid.
Summary
The Tivo lives on, probably for a few more years, but the reality is that we are not too far from being able to cut the cord. Sling and Hulu both have live sports, and if I can convince the boss of that, then perhaps we can go from an Xfinity triple play for a stupid amount of money each month to just their fattest internet connection will be sufficient, and save money to boot!