Wednesday's News

From the heat and humidity of Bali to the cold and unseasnally wintry conditions in SE Queensland.  It is around midday and the temperature outside is a little over 18°.  It is cold, grey and very wet.  The rain began around 10pm last night (Tuesday) and today there is well over 30mls in the rain gauge.  The long sleeves have been dug out, the warm slippers have been dusted off and even the 'trackie dacks' have made a reappearance.

It was fine though coolish yesterday when the temperature got to 24.  I did get a bike ride in for over 23k's but that won't happen today when it won't see the 20's.  Less than 20° is cold for this time of the year here with low to mid 20's being the norm.

Things are slowly slipping back into place.  A brew went on on Monday around lunchtime (as the photo above shows) as my supplies require some replenishment. Nowadays I do around 40% of the filling up in the kitchen before carrying it to the garage where I top it up with water.  It saves carrying 23litres of home brew mix through the house to the garage.  That is becoming too heavy for me to carry nowadays.  I will put another brew on early next week to get things back to normal.

We did a little online investigation into fridge problems yesterday.  The freezer on the Samsung beer fridge seems to be working fine but the fridge part just isn't getting cold.  One online cure suggested the vents between the freezer and the fridge may have become frosted up not allowing cold air from the freezer into the refrigerator section.  The suggested cure was turn the fridge off overnight, allow it to fully defrost and then see how it goes the next day.

I started the fridge up again around 8 am this morning and now around 4 hours later, the can of soft drink inside it sure feels cold enough to drink!  Possibly the problem has been fixed but we will give it up to 24 hours and see how it goes.  Things are looking positive.

Android TV Boxes look like taking up the rest of today.  A couple of friends bought Minix X8 H Plus boxes like the one I had bought.  It now seems these will only ever be able to run Android 4.4 while the latest version of Kodi requires a minimum of Android 5.1.  As new addons get developed and updated they too require 5.1.

Money isn't a hassle for the people I am helping so they too ordered and have had delivered Nvidia Shields and now they want me to go around and set them up.  I am doing one this afternoon.

In the meantime some very clever people have written a new version of Kodi 17 which runs on 4.4 boxes and runs 99% of all the addons.  It is called MyGica Media Centre and works fine for most people.  So I will install this on the older models as well as setting up their shiny new Nvidia Shields.

I don't know who will have the more fun!