A Damp Start To Friday

The sky appears to be clearing at 9:30 am here after some quite strong south easterlies have blown in off the Pacific Ocean which meant great surf for surfers for much of yesterday.  I began yesterday's bike ride in blustery conditions and sunny skies but didn't hang around on the bike for long.  The wind made bike riding very unpleasant.

Then clouds began to blow in off the ocean later on Thursday afternoon and we even had a sprinkle of rain. It remained windy overnight and the sprinkles changed to showers which have continued throughout the night and into the morning.  We have had around 14 mls of much desired rain during the showers, a much needed top up for the pool and the lawn.  There were large areas of yellowed grass yesterday and hopefully with the showers the green will return.

Trish has forgiven me over fixing the dishwasher. It has been operating perfectly the last few washes.  It is doing well for around 13 years old.

I continue to play with the Android TV Box via a lot of trial and error. I have completely re installed "Kodi" once and added a "Build".  A 'Build' is a fully repackaged addon for Kodi with its own theme, preferred downloaded add ons and a considerable re working and integration of the these addons.  If you get the right build, you probably won't need anything else.  I have only added some Aussie TV backup addons

I have then 'modified' some aspects of the 'Build' to get it to do more for what I want it to do.  Kodi seems to be designed to access online video and audio streaming sources from the internet.  I still prefer to download my own files and use Kodi as a media player to play them back.  The program Kodi allows you to do both.

Kodi will go anywhere on your home wireless network to find files to playback for you. So you don't really need to have a hard drive connected directly to it to playback movies and TV Shows.

This model of android box does have a slight playback issue as I have discovered from personal use and from the comments of other owners.  There can be a one second 'stuttering' of the playback which may happen once or twice over a 4 hour period of viewing.  I moved the hard drive containing all the playback files to a direct connection to the box  to see if that eliminated the stuttering.  It didn't work.  So I have now returned the drive to the old media player where I can directly access it as a 'network drive' from the PC over the wireless network.

The advantage this has is that I have just downloaded an episode of a new English TV detective series.  I can just drag and drop the file onto the network drive and can easily add it to the Library of the Android TV Box.

The biggest advantage of the Android TV Box is it plays ALL files, including the new HEVC file type.  This file type is HD quality in a SD File size!  So is super quality in extra small file size.

I did a brew on Wednesday and it is bubbling away nicely.  I now have the awkward job of ensuring I have enough empty bottles for the upcoming bottling, a job I reckon I can handle OK!

The pool is slowly but surely warming up.  Most mornings the pool temperature is around 22º.  It gets up to almost 25º by late afternoon.  I swim most mornings after my bike ride.

There is a heap of domestic one-day cricket now on TV so there is always something to watch and fill in time if required.

Trish is at Quilters this morning and the sun is just beginning to pop its head through the clouds!

I hope this post gets online OK as Blogger is doing a few strange things.