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
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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).

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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.

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[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