Happy Birthday Em!
It’s my niece’s 8th birthday! Happy birthday, wonderful Em. I hope you know that you are awesome, and interesting, and imaginative, and artistic, and creative, and SO KIND, and strong, and brilliantly intelligent, and incredibly beautiful, and a genuinely excellent person. I’m so glad to be in your life. Love forever!
I’m so tired today. Woke up way too early, couldn’t fall back asleep. Took Em out for a birthday ice cream cone and then just lay on the bed with her while she played on her iPad and we watched the antibiotics/antivirals episode of Steven Johnson and David Olusoga’s new series Extra Life (based on Johnson’s book of the same name which I need to request from the library).
Then she drifted away to do other things and I’ve just been resting and amusing myself in one way or another.
As previously mentioned, I keep all my media on an external hard drive, which I have plugged into a Raspberry Pi (wee bare-bones computer) that has media software (Kodi) that talks to my TV. I almost never actually USE the TV unless someone is in my room with me, because I need one pair of glasses to knit/play video games and a different pair to look across the room at the TV, and I prefer to curl up with my laptop anyway. Today it occurred to me that it might be possible to stream from the Kodi software to my phone, for Ultimate Coziness. A tiny bit of googling and I had my answer: tell Kodi to turn on UPnP and install the free VLC app on my iPhone/iPad. Boom. Works like a charm. Couldn’t be easier. Now I can watch my gigantic media library while cozily curled up!
Gonna get myself a cold drink and get back to series three of Taskmaster, streamed right from my hard drive to my phone :D