It’s kind of been a long time since I’ve played with computers like I used to back in the day.
The other day between writing this post and thinking about upgrading some random stuffs, I started tinkering with the old hardware that I’ve had stacked in the spare bedroom since we moved here two years ago. On the downside, it didn’t take long to remember the issues I was having previously because one of the two still won’t output any video at all, but on the upside, I also just so happened to have a junk laptop that my sister-in-law had asked me to fix before she just gave up and bought a new one instead, so I ended up reformatting that one and was able to get a copy of linux (CentOS) running on it to play around with in fairly short order.
The goal with this one is to take another stab at building a media server because I’m not really happy with what I can do with Apple TV and I’ve currently got three boxes of DVDs also sitting in the room next door that aren’t really doing anybody any good! Nobody wants to sift through boxes of movies just to find something to watch and we simply don’t have the room to have shelves upon shelves of DVDs anymore, so right now I’ve been playing around with Plex to see if I can get the thing to work even just a little on that old laptop there before moving to something bigger…
In a way it’s kind of been therapeutic to dive back into circuit boards and jumpers and ribbon cables, even though it’s incredibly frustrating and I’m quickly making a pile of stuff that can definitely get recycled for good this time! Sometimes I need to just step back and take a break from pretty much everything in life and despite all of the other work that I’m not getting done as a result, it’s been fun to poke around inside of these things and hopefully by the time all is said and done, maybe I’ll even have a swell, new way to watch all of my old movies by the time this fantastic, new TV of ours arrives in the next couple of weeks! 😉