2016 — 24 July: Sunday
Another flurry of emails1 and my understanding of how best to proceed in my case with the "Kodification" of all my non-movies data — namely, box sets of DVD and Blu-ray TV shows, and one-off items recorded over the years and (occasionally) burned to DVD — is now crystal clear. So I shall add that niggling little task back on to my little list and find a little time for it.
As one problem...
... goes away, of course, another rears its head. In fiddling with the camera on my "smart" phone yesterday I captured another one or two seconds of inadvertent selfie video. My understanding is that any such data goes shooting up to my linked Dropbox folder. Firing up Dropbox this morning to take a look-see before deleting the file is consistent: it repeatedly invokes the Clementine music player! Visiting the Dropbox web site reveals no new data2 in any of my folders. I naturally have concluded that Life's too short to worry over-much about this.
In with the cuppa...
... and on with the show. It's a deliciously cool-seeming 23.9C down here. I have the patio door flung (slid, actually) wide. And I've just been ticked off and called a "pest", if you please, for publishing "intellectually challenging material" too late at night for one of my more insomniac readers. Said reader was referring to yesterday's Feynman extract, and asks that I "PLEASE" reserve such items for the morning.
What can I say? I can barely manage my kettle most mornings...
Further contemplation...
... of the sorry state of the planet is just too upsetting. Does anyone at the G20 understand that global growth is undesirable and unsustainable?
Cut to Theresa May crossing out "snooper's charter" on her to-do list. Scribbling in "mandatory Pokémon Go". (Link.)
I shall adopt the mythical stance of the ostrich and think about other things.
You can have...
... too many3 choices. Consider my video library, and my options for wrangling it.
- My DVD Profiler system in the Cloud is a zombie snapshot of my library when my Windows system defenestrated 17 months ago. It can "probably" run on Linux under Wine, and I'm assured it doesn't crash "very often".
- Kodi is my current choice, accommodating all my films, and listing them as a 'molehole'-compliant web page courtesy of Brian's Python-charming skills.
- Or...? I could take my simple master ASCII data, stuff it into a SQLite DB, and regurgitate it in the HTML form I actually want. A retrograde step that would make incorporating the IMDB title links much more tedious.
Having disambiguated all the mis-identified film titles I face a fresh skirmish as I turn to my so far un-tackled TV shows and varied assortment of one-off odd recordings. Today I kicked off with "100% Humain" which is only known to Kodi under the title "Real Humans":
Brian's KodiPhy tool generates the data stubs needed for feeding into Kodi — and it's trivial to discard the stubs generated for Season #2 (which I neither have nor wish to see). However, Kodi transmogrifies "Real Humans" into some American TV martial arts nonsense called "Bellator". I don't mind the odd glitch but it's curiously discouraging to stumble thus at the very first title. I've been advised to try something a little less outré to regain my confidence. "Northern Exposure", for example.
OK. Back we go, therefore, to 1990!
After adding the remaining five seasons, each with a different CaseLogic folder "start point", price, and date of purchase... I'm a little aggrieved to find that only Season #1 has any of Kodi's "Extras" (artwork, cast lists, etc) associated with it.
[Significant pause]
I'm delighted to see that I was utterly wrong. When I'd added details of some further TV Shows, I realised I now needed to take the "Update Library" path — via the "TV Shows" choice that now popped up. When I did, Kodi shot off to do its DB-scraping business against a TV Shows DB (rather than against the Movies DB). So far, all the missing TV Show artwork and data is now in place. Including all six seasons of "Northern Exposure" with all episodes present and accounted for.
This is getting much better.
Last Friday's book...
... "The first fifteen lives of Harry August" turned out to be most enjoyable (if a tad gruesome in places), and very well-executed. I shall certainly now be seeking out "Touch" next.