Plex is quite brilliant ( and free )
If you have your own collection of movies ( say you got from the equally brilliant Yify website yts.re ) or just home videos or photos or whatever. Plex will run thru them and find the ratings, descriptions, poster art and present them to your Tv either via DLNA or via various native clients it has such as for the Roku ( also brilliant if soon to be obsolete due to the new and upcoming Amazon Fire Tv and Android Tv and Apple Tv etc ) and you can get a native Plex client for iPad iOS and Android. And the source code is available, which leads to things like Rarflix which is an enhanced Roku client. And it has plugin support for adding your own channels to navigate various sites, or adding things like omdb support ( also brilliant , a site that gives you an API to access movie information )
So using all this combined with my new 10 megabytes per second internet wooyay, I wrote a script that takes my IMDB watch list and magically downloads all the movies, boom, 300 movies... which naturally I legally own all of them already.. *cough* ahem, I have said this before, the Movie industry needs to be real careful and stop the infighting, I want to pay monthly for access to all tv and movies and music. I do not want to pay £10 per movie to RENT or buy it. I do not want to have to subscribe to 5 different services all with varying degrees of support for my devices and even differing quality or limited availability. And they could do all of that for a reasonable price... but they do not. So apps like Popcorn Hour ( also brilliant if you don't mind the lower quality ) emerge become open source and suddenly people can freely stream almost any movie instantly for free, and then they get no money. Zip Diddly Squat.
I am a paying user of Netflix ( also brilliant ) but it periodically looses films I wanted to watch due to license issues or whatever. And the selection of films in the UK is a joke compared to the US. But it is still the most convenient way to get at most of the Tv series I watch.. well given the 50/50 chance they are even on Netflix anyway. And the Netflix original creations such as House of Cards are significant draws, good for them, as at any point in an instant the film studio can and have pulled significant numbers of films out of greed.
*sigh* all alone
Also after a decade of using Apple Script I finally started using external functions, so you can have common functionality in separate apple scripts and use them from anywhere else.
It is achieved quite simply with:
set SomeVariable to load script POSIX file "/SomePath/SomeFolder/SomeScript.scpt"
tell SomeVariable to someFunction(someStuff)
Embarrassingly simple, yet I never thought to check it could do that till now. Also you can use a property instead of a variable to store the script in, then it is saved with the file. So if you make changes to the originally loaded script it won't effect other scripts you saved that used an older version ( till you open them up and resave them ) this would prevent say you changing something in the loaded script that inadvertently broke many other scripts. The Cons are obviously any improvements you make won't propagate then either.
Also I have implemented some multi threaded type stuff by using this:
set scptf to "theScriptYourWantToRun.scpt"
set arglist to "arg1 arg2" -- A space separate string of arguments you want to send to the script
do shell script "/usr/bin/osascript "" & scptf & """ & arglist & " >/dev/null 2>&1 &"
Which will run a script and send it some arguments / variables. And it doesn't sit around and wait for it to finish ( so you can't have any callbacks as such ) but is good to spit out 100 of processes that are happy to work independently of each other.
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And in other news I repaired my TimeBomb / Apple Time Capsule, soldered new capacitors onto it and fixed a resistor onto the fan to keep it permanently running and cut a hole in the bottom for air flow. On performing this however I found someone had already changes the capacitors themselves
:-D
then remembered vaguely that I had in fact bought a refurb/repaired capsule off ebay.
then remembered vaguely that I had in fact bought a refurb/repaired capsule off ebay.Thankfully the new AC capsules do not have the sudden death problems any more. This has all been a huge pain in the ass simply because I cannot use my 3TB in any external enclosures due to legacy bit issues, ugh. Nothing but a nightmare all round.
It is no wonder I never get any work done... I need to work on my priorities, just after I uhm... write a script to remind me to do things
:-P
