The finest fruit is highest on the tree
Ramblings of
Alex Lovett
RSS
Twitter
Tumblr
Youtube
LinkedIn

Navigation:

Up a Level - error_log - Experiments - Store

Documents:

Unity5 - Reality_2.0 - Math_Art - Lilly - Drawing - GameDesign - Inspiration - XFactor - Valideus - Food - WheelReview - GKN - Lumen - WishList - RoundTree - Painting_with_Light - House - Website - Fridge
Older

Newer

Current

Tags: - Rant - Tech - Misc
Show comments

Plex is quite brilliant ( and free )



If you have your own collection of movies ( say you got from the equally brilliant Yify website yts.re ) or just home videos or photos or whatever. Plex will run thru them and find the ratings, descriptions, poster art and present them to your Tv either via DLNA or via various native clients it has such as for the Roku ( also brilliant if soon to be obsolete due to the new and upcoming Amazon Fire Tv and Android Tv and Apple Tv etc ) and you can get a native Plex client for iPad iOS and Android. And the source code is available, which leads to things like Rarflix which is an enhanced Roku client. And it has plugin support for adding your own channels to navigate various sites, or adding things like omdb support ( also brilliant , a site that gives you an API to access movie information )

So using all this combined with my new 10 megabytes per second internet wooyay, I wrote a script that takes my IMDB watch list and magically downloads all the movies, boom, 300 movies... which naturally I legally own all of them already.. *cough* ahem, I have said this before, the Movie industry needs to be real careful and stop the infighting, I want to pay monthly for access to all tv and movies and music. I do not want to pay £10 per movie to RENT or buy it. I do not want to have to subscribe to 5 different services all with varying degrees of support for my devices and even differing quality or limited availability. And they could do all of that for a reasonable price... but they do not. So apps like Popcorn Hour ( also brilliant if you don't mind the lower quality ) emerge become open source and suddenly people can freely stream almost any movie instantly for free, and then they get no money. Zip Diddly Squat.

I am a paying user of Netflix ( also brilliant ) but it periodically looses films I wanted to watch due to license issues or whatever. And the selection of films in the UK is a joke compared to the US. But it is still the most convenient way to get at most of the Tv series I watch.. well given the 50/50 chance they are even on Netflix anyway. And the Netflix original creations such as House of Cards are significant draws, good for them, as at any point in an instant the film studio can and have pulled significant numbers of films out of greed.



*sigh* all alone

Also after a decade of using Apple Script I finally started using external functions, so you can have common functionality in separate apple scripts and use them from anywhere else.

It is achieved quite simply with:

set SomeVariable to load script POSIX file "/SomePath/SomeFolder/SomeScript.scpt"
tell SomeVariable to someFunction(someStuff)

Embarrassingly simple, yet I never thought to check it could do that till now. Also you can use a property instead of a variable to store the script in, then it is saved with the file. So if you make changes to the originally loaded script it won't effect other scripts you saved that used an older version ( till you open them up and resave them ) this would prevent say you changing something in the loaded script that inadvertently broke many other scripts. The Cons are obviously any improvements you make won't propagate then either.

Also I have implemented some multi threaded type stuff by using this:
set scptf to "theScriptYourWantToRun.scpt"
set arglist to "arg1 arg2" -- A space separate string of arguments you want to send to the script
do shell script "/usr/bin/osascript "" & scptf & """ & arglist & " >/dev/null 2>&1 &"

Which will run a script and send it some arguments / variables. And it doesn't sit around and wait for it to finish ( so you can't have any callbacks as such ) but is good to spit out 100 of processes that are happy to work independently of each other.

-

And in other news I repaired my TimeBomb / Apple Time Capsule, soldered new capacitors onto it and fixed a resistor onto the fan to keep it permanently running and cut a hole in the bottom for air flow. On performing this however I found someone had already changes the capacitors themselves

:-D

then remembered vaguely that I had in fact bought a refurb/repaired capsule off ebay.

Thankfully the new AC capsules do not have the sudden death problems any more. This has all been a huge pain in the ass simply because I cannot use my 3TB in any external enclosures due to legacy bit issues, ugh. Nothing but a nightmare all round.

It is no wonder I never get any work done... I need to work on my priorities, just after I uhm... write a script to remind me to do things

:-P


Show comments for 'Films and Plex'
Tags: - Funny - Misc
Show comments

Note to self, don't sun self in garden then fall up some steps with phone in hand:



On the Plus side new 30"

:-D

woo go team me!

;-)



On the down side I have the wrong display connector lead so I get to enjoy all of 50% of my new monitor

:-D





My 'Command Center' while I was waiting for the 30" to arrive, Thought I'd try Portrait and enjoyed it a lot for coding... what a huge nerd I have become



Though I still got nothing on this guy:



And he's got nothing on this guy:



And here is a horse enjoying a helicopter ride in McGuyver:





Possibly the greatest thing I have ever witnessed on tv is McGuyver escaping on horse back and being air lifted mid stride

And while I'm in a random mood been watching StarTrek TNG from scratch as they re-released in HD:



And turns out my style choices or lack thereof have led me to become a perfect imitation of Inspector gadget

:-/







One has to be able to take the piss out of ones self *sips tea*





Great sadness, I dropped my bake well *sobs*




My Kitty likes the smell of Brioche it would seem, silly Sasha:


Also some truths







And screw the person who invented Menu Bar Icons and didn't set up a governing body to regulate it:


And why.. why so many tabs, what is wrong with me:


And lastly I made this graph of relative time scales, each pixels was something like 1000 years If I remember right. So for example you can see Fish and Plants in total have been around 4x longer than dinosaurs, and that the entire transformation it took from Lemurs to Modern Human beings was similar to the amount of time Dinosaurs evolved and were alive for entirely. And that for a huge chunk of time we just had single cell life, but that single cell life sprang up relatively quickly and it took AGES to get to multi cell, but once it had... everything got started then

:-)



Your entire life and that of everyone you have ever known is also on that graph, It's an invisible smudge too small for the naked eye to see though, like a mustard burp, momentarily tangy and then forgotten in the air




Show comments for 'Unproductivty'
Tags: - Misc
Show comments

Ok it is apparent writing to this journal of randomness is not something I do often enough, in fact add that to the long list of things I don't do enough

Exercise, Travel, Work etc etc

And all the things I haven't done, checked off, got round to reading, watching, listening to and playing

Vast, easily 1000's of times greater than the usable years in a single life

Life very much is becoming more apparently stream like, where you dip in, versus a list of things you check off and 'achieve'

Still this realization helps me little, either in figuring out what I am to do tomorrow, or the equally bewildering question of what on earth it was I even did yesterday

Ah but how the last 12 months have been fun, so so fun

---

LetterPress = TimeVampire





























Igloo is no more






Aww my moms diet dinner on the right... very sad:


Sadness ensued:





Show comments for 'Time Flies 3'
Tags: - Photoshop - Rant - Apple
Show comments

wow
looks like ebay changed It's logo
amazing
its not often companies are this bold

Old:


New:


They say it 'reflects a dynamic future' whatever the fuck that means

-_-
it feels so boutique now
creative use of color again also, reminds me of past masters in logo design:


And MSFTS 'new' logo, inspired:


It's like a terribly boring conspiracy, the year of the ANTI logo

I still love how deftly MSFT joined the f and the t, it really changes it from just a bunch of letters taken directly from a boring font, and turns it into a work of art, week labouring over the exact shade of grey to infuse the type with.

At least google has a good excuse for having a shit logo, it was free

-

Lol looks like I'm not alone in making this granted rather obvious connection:




*starts to hyperventilate* *breaks glass and takes an emergency look at the one true logo, one to rule them all*







Yah I'm a fan boi, what evs



Here are some other logo's getter better:












And best logo ever:



What did you see, I saw a temple in front of a big red sun....






Show comments for 'Lame Logos'
Tags: - Photoshop - Rant - Games
Show comments




This is a Logo I recently designed for my new company... which will just be me.. for now

:-)

And of course by company I mean I thought up a name and made a logo nothing official yet

I have been tossing around various concepts for games for ages now, along with learning real programming languages for the first time unless you count Flash AS3 which is close really.

I didn't mean to design a logo before I even have a game or even a wireframe of a game, but one thing lead to another and out it popped one day.

I guess I have just been so utterly bored of writing code (AS3 with this Topps Tiles job) and studying the manuals of Unity 3D and C Sharp without having produced anything tangible or visual in forever.

I am swinging between incredibly apprehensive and eager to start making games by myself. I just know It's going to turn out to be way more difficult and wrought with disaster that I expect, and I already expect it to be the toughest thing I have ever done. I think I have a relatively unique edge over most people though, it been a long time coming; things have guided me down this path for my whole life I feel, it is my destiny!

I would really love to work with a small team of people instead of it just being me, but to start off it really has to be just me. If it works out, if at some point I prove I have got the taste, the broad skills to pull it off even on a small scale.. then I can start thinking about investing in people to work with.

Right now It's early days, a delicate and fragile thought that could poof out of existence unless carefully nurtured and then fiercely executed.

I have learned a tremendous amount of skills especially over past few years that go nicely towards this, sadly not much in the way of physical evidence to show for it, but It's in my head all right.

If I can just nail execution, and work hard, I can do it

And if I can just stop thinking about how incredibly over saturated the market is and how I could just as easily make $100,000 as I could drift off in the wind and make nothing...

:-|



And that's even if I can pull my shit together and execute 50 hour work weeks for 6 months and not implode, creating your own deadlines and sticking to them is tricky stuff. Creating your own inertia with no guarantee of payoff.

Ok heres the various historical progress / messing about:

Link: helios.mine.nu --- Y2011-Mo11-RoundTree








Show comments for 'Time Flies 2'
You have reached the end of this page - But there's more! Click Older for more
Older

Newer

Current

Subscribe to my News Feed.. or screw you then!
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind -- Dr Seuss
Copyright © 2006 - 2024 - Alex Lovett
Site and content designed, built and massaged by
Alex Lovett
( HD6 / HeliosDoubleSix )
contact me by email:
Page Rendered in: 0.032 seconds, like a boss