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I've had my Kodi install running on a Raspberry Pi for a while and have been happy with it.  But when a Mac Mini freed up I wanted to move my setup over to it and free up the Pi for other uses.  I was not prepared for the shoddy state of Kodi packaging. First off, if you're about to install Fedora 25 on a box you want to run Kodi on, stop.  As of this writing there are two places to get Kodi for Fedora: RPMfusion and United RPMs.  You can't enable those repositories concurrently,…

Call me silly but I like to see work being done.  There are many times when I've stood back at the end of a large project with visible results and said "man, I wish I had a recording of that".  I keep saying that I wanted to setup a webcam to take pictures for a time lapse and today I finally did. The What: Logitech Pro 9000 Old laptop running Linux Tripod The How: Hook up the webcam to your laptop and point it where you want to take the shots.…

Modern Linux distributions typically have LVM resting between physical storage devices and the file system.  This is great for your OS and other data drives that are installed in your system or otherwise "permanently" attached.  The ext file system is designed to allow resizing as the underlying block devices are grow (or even shrunk in the right scenario).  But this does require that the file system reserve space to allow what's called the "block group descriptor table" to grow.…

Searching for "os x wireless connection timed out" will bring up 100's of unique posts about people having issues getting their Mac's wireless card connected to a new (or just different) router.  Most answers start with the typical knee jerk "I wanted to be the first post" responses of reboot your router, reboot your Mac, change the wireless channel, check your SSID and passphrase... Because, you know, when stuff that was working minutes ago breaks it's because you typed your password wrong.…

There are quite a few great articles on the Internet about how to make your Raspberry Pi into a a digital picture frame from a hardware standpoint, but I haven't found a good set of end-to-end instructions for the software side.  I decided to go down that journey myself.  I didn't want to have to keep a copy of my images on a USB drive (or the Pi's SD card).  I just wanted the frame to pull images from our desktop where the wife has already spent time organizing and touching up the photos.…

My WIndows 7 desktop has a 75G SSD for a boot drive and a 1TB RAID1 array for a data drive.  That's a lot of stuff to lose if your computer goes tango uniform.  I've been hobbling along with a 1.5TB external drive for backups, but as my data drive fills up my backup drive is having difficulty keeping up.  About once a month Windows will tell me that the backup drive is full (which is funny considering that I have the "Let Windows Manage The Space On The Backup Drive" option selected).…