I have been watching a lot of Netflix and other online streaming media last year. Well lot is relative. Definitely not as many as the books.
But what I realise, is that I just spend my time endlessly browsing through what I want to watch rather than, you know, actually watching something.
I also realise that most of my watching is mostly stuff I already watched. I want my old Holmes, or Yes Minister, or Suchet’s Poirot.
Stuff I already have, offline.
But not easily accessible, since it lies on an external hard disk, which I need to plugin to my desktop and then watch.

Then I realised that my trusty little Raspberry Pi was always there, in the corner, running away silently, currently serving as a repository for podcast episodes.
I also had an external thunderbolt ssd, that I could no longer plug into my Mac, because my Mac is dead (sob)
The LaCie did however also have a USB interface too.

Lightbulb moment!

I formatted my external disk on the desktop with the ext4 filesystem, copied all the stuff that I always watch or have running in the background and connected it to my Pi.

Then went to the Plex site and got the armf distribution.
Copied it over to the Pi and installed it with a dpkg -i.
There are better ways to do it. Check the webz if you need better directions and handholding.

Decided that I did not need a Plex account to do what I needed.
Which basically was just reading a folder full of videos, presenting them and playing them.

The web interface is beautiful and functional.
It keeps pushing you to get a Plex account, which you might want … or not.
Added my folders as video sources and then after a few minutes, they showed right up.

I downloaded the Plex apps (on the iPhone and the iPad) and paid for the option to stream files and play them.

And that was that.

It works beautifully, if it is just a couple of devices.
More than that, and it struggles.
But most importantly, Plex handled darn near every video format, I had.

And so, every evening for the past week has been bliss, with an hour, solving crimes Poirot and his “littel gray sells” as I go off to bed.

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And now I realise why he asked me to do this.
The program itself is trivial.
Here’s the code on my code repo, Gitlab, and Github.
It just consists of me using GitPython to access the current folder via a GitPython Repo object.
And then querying it for its branches.

The important work was done yesterday, when I pored over the documentation and figured out how GitPython actually works.
And I realised that is what Kushal wanted me to do.
Read something and figure out how I could adapt it to my situation.

The other thing I realised, was licensing.
I want my programs to be used, played with and adapted.
So it makes sense for me, to make it as easy to use as possible.
This is why I have decided, that until circumstances dictate otherwise, I shall use the MIT License.
This led me to check if I could then actually license my software as such, if the software that I depend on (in this case GitPython) have different licenses.
My arbitrary and random research suggests that I can do so.
If I learn otherwise, I shall think about what to do next.
If you have anything to suggest, please let me know, by mailing me at jason at this domain.

One other (painful) thing, that I realised is that I cannot focus at all when I am writing code.
This post has come out in a blur of focussed writing.
My academic studies are also something that I can focus for hours on.
Apparently that focus does not translate to programming.
I need to build up this skill for this domain seperately.
Hopefully, this will come with showing up daily.

This was fun to do.
Here’s to writing my way to fluency.

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P.P.P.S. Update, 7pm the same day, The answer to focus, lies in this serendipitous Seth post

A third might be, just for an hour, to turn it off.
All of it.
To sit alone and create the new thing, the thing worth seeking out, the thing that will cause a positive change.

I love it when the universe speaks to me :)

This is a tiny little niche thing, I built all for my ownsome.
It all started, when I got hooked on reading the daily poem, on the Poetry Foundation page.

Learning Python as I am, I wondered if there was a way to have it come to my RSS reader.
And so Poemfeed is a tiny little utility that does just that for me.

It looks up Poetry Foundation’s, Poem of the Day for a new poem.
If there is one, it follows the link to the complete poem, and then gets the link to that page and writes that into an simple RSS entry in an xml file.

I then wrote a simple cron job that executes the python script twice a day, and if an xml file is generated, it moves it to a place that my RSS reader can access.
Et voilà, a brand new poem everyday! (or as often as they publish :))

The code’s here, on my repo, on Gitlab and on Github, if you want to have a look see.

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Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe!
P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.