Mark's Expeditions in Technology and Life

Just a quick update. About 2 weeks ago, I had a new post almost ready to publish, and then I lost it all. You see, I write the texts of these posts off-line and then upload the text and add the pictures and links before I publish them. Just as I was about to do this, Windows 10 automatically updated itself to the new "Fall Creators Update". The number of problems created by this update, made my computer so unstable, that the only solution was to re-format my hard drive and re-install Windows. Luckily, about 95% of my data was backed up. Unfortunately, the text of my blog post was not among that data. Here are the problems I ran into with the latest and "greatest" to come out of Redmond. Problem - I was required to log into my computer two times. From my research, this was caused by the graphics card driver not talking to the Operating System (OS) properly. So I was logging into the OS with out the graphics card driver enabled the first time and then the OS with t...

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...