Current Events 02-18-2015
New Picture of England’s Own Monica Lewinsky Found Possible Anne Boleyn portrait found using facial recognition software
This Is Not News Millennials ditching their TV sets at a record rate
We are not talking talking about the abandonment of the television screen, but how it is used. If you want any kind of home theater, you need a large screen, preferably wall-mounted. If you want to game, gaming looks cooler on a larger screen. However, the idea that you need a 3rd party to charge you to organize your viewing schedule remotely, package it with a liberal spritzing of advertising, and deliver this to your home via cables, is a dinosaur. I personally have not had “television” for years. Once I discovered Usenet and built my first UnRAID server, I was free to download all my programming via the internet. If you happen to live in North America, there are multiple streaming options available, if you’d rather not have to learn how to use any new technology.
I have an UnRAID server, an array of five SATA hard drives and one SSD used for caching. This holds all the data for our family (pictures, home videos, TV, movies, music, and miscellaneous data). This is connected to a MacMini, which runs Plex. This connects to our TV and speaker system, which thanks to a Harmony remote to tie everything together, provides a very user-friendly GUI, similar to what you see when you browse video on Netflix. All of us have iPads. The Plex app transforms all of them into portable televisions, so each child can (when we allow them screen time) watch what they want when they want to see it. Gone forever are the scheduling conflicts that my generation had to endure (the old Knight Rider vs. Dukes of Hazzard debate). The server handles downloading of new shows as they come out. It also runs Madsonic, which streams our immense music library to these same devices. With the use of a UE Boom, we can have pleasant music playing in any room of the house, and the kids can listen to whatever they like via headphones. Most recently, I set up a Calibre server on the MacMini with nearly 800 books and short stories, so the kids have a vast digital library of reading material which, once again, they access on their tablet. I have moved us to pure, localized, digital content, versus the old analog models that were once your only choice. It’s efficient. It’s convenient. And it’s very, very cool.
America Needs Competent Leadership. That’s It. We Have Not Had it For 8 Years, And It’s Killing People. What a Statesman would do Today