2016 — 27 February: Saturday

Yesterday's intended crockpottery session went the way of many such retirement intentions, leaving it as a task for later this morning. The chances of fingertips being accidentally added to the mix during any slicing and dicing conducted much before 06:00 are too high. And I know it's about that time¹ since BBC Radio 3 is still on its (perfectly acceptable) "Through the Night" material.

Having listed...

... my neatly-Kodified films yesterday evening, in reverse location order, I spent a merry 30 minutes or so physically sifting systematically through my CaseLogic folders (that is, 264 disks at a time) to pinpoint the actual location of three Misplaced Sheep, all of which were starkly revealed (by said listing) to be living in folder "T" when I know perfectly well — after the major cull of titles a year (a year!) ago...

... that I have now not yet (quite) re-filled folder "R". (That's "Baraka" on the end, by the way, if you can't quite make out the title.)

The life of an obsessive completer/finisher, heh? Sooner or later I shall now start feeling compelled to "do something" about the two actual Lost Sheep that — for reasons that passeth all understanding — have drifted off into the limbo occupied by "gaps" in the disk numbers. So, if you happen to have borrowed either of these titles...

Recount
Religulous

... perhaps you'd be kind enough to let me know, before I find myself mildly² inclined to replace them? [Pause] Nurse! Is it time for my next meds yet?

I have a low opinion...

... of the innate value of economists and their dismal science. Nine years ago to the day, I quoted one of them:

[...] by 2010, the annual growth in combined national income from Brazil, Russia, India, and China — the so-called BRIC countries — will be greater than that from the United States, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Italy combined; by 2025, it will be twice that of the G-7 (the group of highly industrialized countries).

Daniel W Drezner, in "The New New World Order"

That page has long since vanished, of course.

"Property wealth"...

... has always struck me as a ridiculous concept. This chap agrees:

The British electorate has become obsessed about "death taxes", imagining that their three-bed semi in Surbiton, worth £1m, will be snatched off their kids by the taxman when they die. It won't. For one thing, the "kids" will probably be in their 60s. And the house will have been long sold, the money used for care home fees or spent topping up a meagre company pension.

Patrick Collinson in Grauniad

"I concur," as we used to say in IBM. [Pause] Time to tuck into my tasty crockpot.

My cognitive deficit...

... with respect to Kodi stubs and .nfo files has finally been overcome. I can thus now create entries in my Kodi DB to represent all the DVDs I have that, for whatever reason, cannot be found, and thus "data scraped", by Kodi from its usual online sources. So, for example, I have a DVD-R that I recorded in 2008 of a BBC "Storyville" documentary about events in 1968. This DVD-R is in CaseLogic slot "N069". To get this recognised by Kodi I must create two files. It seems sensible to name them both "N069" since that is unique³ in my CaseLogic system:

1. A "stub" file

"N069.dvd.disc", containing:

<discstub>
   <title>1968 - Storyville (BBC 4)</title>
   <message>Media is located at N069</message>
   <purchasedate>2008</purchasedate>
   <purchaseprice>Â£0.00</purchaseprice>
   <medium>DVD-R</medium>
</discstub>

2. A matching ".nfo" file

"N069.dvd.nfo", containing:

<movie>
   <title>1968 - Storyville (BBC 4)</title>
   <sorttitle>1968 - Storyville</sorttitle>
   <year>2008</year>
   <outline>BBC 4 documentary</outline>
   <filenamepath>'home/david/Kodifiles/Movie/0/N069.dvd.disc'</filenamepath>
</movie>

Then all I have to do is point Kodi at the directory containing these files and tell it to "Scan for new content". DVD added. Next? Well, should I ever succeed in tracking down any online DBs with more details of some of these fairly obscure TV programmes I can easily add a hypertext link to them in the .nfo file or even directly into Kodi's SQLite DB (in the table where it currently holds an IMDB link).

Of course, one doesn't wish to be obsessive about these things :-)

Case in point is here — thanks, Len!

Footnotes

¹  What with (as they say) it still being "pitch black" out there, and nary a pre-dawn tweet to be heard...
²  I've watched them both, enjoyed them both, and at some point decided that someone else might also enjoy them. (Some point being in the five years since I bought them.)
³  I will re-think this naming system if and when I have to deal with multiple items on a single DVD. I expect a suffix letter will be more than adequate.