Mark's Expeditions in Technology and Life

I am a tinkerer. Especially when it comes to computers. No more so than in my early days of computer usage. At the time, I would spend hours typing in Basic programs from magazines into an Atari 800 and later an Apple IIe. Only to end up troubleshooting syntax errors because of my poor typing skills. Little did my 8 year-old brain realize that I was learning not only how to troubleshot computer problems properly, but gaining a passion that has followed me ever since. When I built my first computer in 1996, a Pentium 200 with 16mb of RAM running Windows 95, this need to tinker came back with a vengeance. Soon afterwards, I heard about this operating system called Linux. At the time, I did not give it much thought because I was content creating custom boot menus to maximize the performance I getting on the games I was playing. However, Linux remained in the back of my mind, and in 1999 when on a trip to New York City, I purchased a retail copy of SuSE Linux 6.1. Little did I know that th...

In order to use Kodi, you need to add media into its library. Sometimes when you add media to your library, the information displayed is incorrect or the media doesn't scrape at all. As discussed previously, this can be fixed by using a simple nfo file. Sometimes, even with this basic nfo file, the media doesn't scrape properly or it is not even added to your library. This can be fixed by using a more advanced version of the same nfo file. These files contain the information necessary for Kodi to add media to its library. These files can be especially useful for adding custom videos such as home videos to your Kodi library. In order for Kodi to read the information in these files, it needs to be in an XML data format. This uses "tags" to tell Kodi what type of data the information is. For example, the "title" tag will tell Kodi the title of the video. Because an nfo file can contain different information depending on the type of file being added, I will disc...

Since the early days when people started to connect a PC to a TV, the question of "how do I control it?" has been asked. During that dark time, around 2002, many of us ran a set of extra long USB cables to a keyboard and mouse that sat on our coffee table. If you had a little more money, you had a wireless keyboard and mouse. Soon Microsoft released a version of Windows XP called the "Media Center Edition" that came with a remote control. While this was a step forward, this remote control required that you use Microsoft developed media programs. Configuring it to work with non-Microsoft programs such as Kodi was complicated and not always reliable. As these home-built Home Theater PC's became more popular, companies started to make a wireless mini keyboards with a laptop type track pad. While these worked great, it tended to be intimidating to use for non-computer users. Why? Too many buttons and it did not look like it belonged in the living room. In 2011, Moto...