Changes in Life, Location, and Focus

Wow, it has been a long time since I last wrote here. Since then, there have been many changes in my life. The biggest of which is I got married!


While still in the Marine Corps, I went to Thailand on an exercise. While there, I ended up meeting the woman of my dreams. After dating for a couple of years, I decided that I should marry her. Luckily, she agreed with me about the marriage part! Getting a Visa for me to stay in Thailand was easier than getting a Visa for her to stay in the United States. So once I retired from the Marine Corps, I packed up my stuff and moved to Thailand, and started a new chapter in my life.


With these changes in my life, comes a change in focus for this blog. While I will still talk about the places I see here in Thailand and the interesting food I find, I will also be writing some guides, reviews, and other articles about technology and gaming on the PC. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fixing an Over Heating Android TV Box

Image
I must apologize for the lack of content lately. In the last month I had problems with my Android TV in the bedroom overheating and then my home server decided to go on a permanent vacation. The server was an easy fix, but the Android TV took some time. Today, I would like to talk about my Android TV fix. While the solution I came up with was not as elegant as it could be, it was fun to do and a learning experience for me. In my previous post link , I talked about my Home Media Center setup. In my bedroom, I stated that I was using a Memobox Q-Box Android TV that I had purchased from Aliexpress, link . This little piece of hardware is pretty good for the price that you pay. The only problem I was having with it was heat. The box would get very hot during use. Hot enough, that the quad-core processor would slow its speed to try and cool itself off. This is called "thermal throttling". Thermal throttling is normal with modern processors. Both desktop and mobile processors use...
Read more

Setting up Plex to work with a Panasonic Viera HDTV and Kodi Comparisons

Image
Like many people I know, I have a television in my bedroom. In order to watch programs from my Media Server, I have an Android TV attached to it. After playing around with some of the options on the TV, I noticed that I had another option to stream content from my Media Server. Smart televisions from Panasonic and other manufacturers have the ability to stream media from servers that use the DLNA protocol. I was intrigued to see how this protocol worked. Since I needed some DLNA server software, it gave me an opportunity to try out Plex. Little did I know it at the time, but was I in for an interesting ride. Plex and the Panasonic Viera HDTV The first thing I needed to do was install the Plex Server software on my Media Server. This was accomplished quite easily on my Linux Mint 18.2 by using the provided deb file. It installed and configured itself without any noticeable hitches. Since at this point I was just experimenting, I added only one of my media hard drives to the server...
Read more

Kodi and the Disappearing Text - Tweaking Kodi to display English and non-Latin characters together

Image
In previous posts, we discussed the basics needed to get Kodi up and running from scratch. While Kodi works well out of the box, some tweaking is involved to use it to its fullest potential. One thing I really like about Kodi is that it is available in multiple languages. The interface and many of the official add-ons have been translated by the community into languages other than English. While displaying Kodi in your native language is great, the problem comes when you try to mix languages. This is especially evident when you try to mix languages that do not use the same style of alphabet such as English and Japanese. Kodi will display the non-Latin characters of the Japanese language as either boxes or gibberish. Since I live in a multi-language household, Thai and English, tweaking Kodi to display non-Latin characters, whether in media titles or subtitles, is a must. The reason why Kodi will not display languages such as English and Chinese together properly is due to fonts. Font...
Read more