Good Morning! 63F @ 6:45AM. Lots of sunshine. High 73F. Winds light and variable.
Ordered a carpet kit for the van yesterday morning, and started a conversation with the paint supplier about how to do the stripe along the outside. Should learn more about that today when he calls back. Also returned the trailer, and found my neighbor well over his elbows into replacing valve covers on his old Ford pickup with the 6.2L (I think) Diesel engine. A whole bunch of parts needed to come off to even get to the covers, and he wasn't happy to have spent so much time digging them out. And with almost 300,000 miles on the thing, it was plenty dirty in there and so was he! Then back to the house to find that the LED bulbs I'd ordered had been delivered, and shortly after that FedEx brought by the AppleTV. I was pleased to learn it used the same power cord as the old one, and even used the same remote control commands so the programmable remote worked with it, too. But the functionality it promised with the Network Attached Storage (NAS) system wasn't there, so I called Apple who told me it needed an operating system upgrade. Why would something delivered new from Apple need an upgrade right out of the box?
But as is, it did find a couple movies on the laptop, one being the Hank Williams biopic "I Saw The Light", so I watched that with dinner and enjoyed it. Even though I'm not a real big country music fan, and the ups and downs he went through were unfortunate, as was his early demise, I was shocked at how good the music sounded, and how well Tom Hiddleston sang William's old songs. I think a big reason I never took to country music is how it sounded when Porter Wagoner or Midwestern Hayride came on the old black'n'white TV and AM radios of my childhood. Like a bag of mashed cats coming through a wall.
ullinghair: It's a real shame that the recording equipment available back in the day wasn't better because Hiddleston's voice was just plain beautiful. That soundtrack might be worth adding to the collection.
Anyway, set an alarm for 1AM ("Hey Siri, wake me up at 1AM") to get into the "Free Zone" when data caps were lifted, downloaded the AppleTV upgrade, then downloaded something called Plex which is a media server for the NAS. Then a Plex client for the AppleTV, and presto, the AppleTV can now see the movies stored on the NAS and play them over the network. Also downloaded a remote control app for the iPhone, and now it can be used to control the AppleTV as well. And a Plex client for it so I can supposedly watch movies on the iPhone, though why anyone would want to do that when there's a perfectly good 60" TV and a stereo system is entirely beyond me. Then got out a stack of DVDs and fed one into the computer to start converting it to the mp4 format for the NAS, and set it to write directly to the NAS during the conversion. When I got up this morning it had finished, and "Independence Day" had joined "I Saw The Light" on the NAS. "Why We Ride" is in there now, and I'll keep feeding them in as I get the chance.
That's all well and good, but the main reason for the new AppleTV was the Home app that runs on it, which allows control of lights, thermostats, and cameras remotely, and through Siri, voice commands. So it should be possible to say things like "Hey Siri, dim the lights and play "Independence Day" on the living room TV". There are also motion, temperature, light, and humidity sensors that allow changes to be triggered by different stimulus, opening the possibility of a home brewed burglar alarm and more convenient monitoring from anywhere. I had a pretty extensive setup for that at the old house, but found the X10 technology it used to be far too unreliable to be used for security purposes. So I'll get a few light switches and maybe a camera to try, and gradually build up if they turn out to live up to the promises.
Off to town for groceries and a swing by the mechanic's to install a relay up under the dash while it's off. It'll be used to power the new headlights directly off the battery for brighter beams.
Have a good 'un, gang!
