Long Bike Ride

Despite being the distance of a reasonable 17 or so kilometres, this morning's bike ride seemed substantially longer.  I was still feeling the effects of a torrid time watching footy on TV the day before and enjoying some drinks with a mate from down south.

In a previous lifetime when we lived in Melbourne, every Saturday during the footy season would see me head to our nearest AFL ground.  The ground was Waverley and I was there for the first ever game and I was there for the last ever game played there.

We were a group of great mates who went to the footy every Saturday and had laughs, drinks and even saw some great footy games as well.

As with all things, especially when we shifted interstate, we tended to drift apart, keeping up with the occasional reading of a blog or even the odd email.  So when one of those mates, Keith, said he was in town for a few weeks it was too good a chance to catch up.

As the damage on the fence below shows, we had a great time.  We watched several footy matches on TV and even saw both our teams win.  In between time we had copious amounts of my home brew, the occasional Sambucca and a few other mixers.

We barracked at the footy on the TV, chatted away reliving old times, caught up on happenings with others from the group and had a great time together.  Keith is in town for another week or two as he sits with his sister who is recuperating after a recent trip for surgery at the new Sunshine Coast hospital.

Trish mentioned to me that the Arts Centre Association was looking for a new laptop computer and could I keep my eye open for something suitable.  On the weekend eBay had a 15% off sale on.  On eBay I found a Lenovo 15" laptop with an i7 processor and 8GB of ram for $799.  With the 15% off, the price dropped to $680 delivered!  Now that is a super deal!  It should be delivered later this week.

I too was a little busy with eBay and I grabbed a couple of refurbished "Powerlinks".  Powerlinks utilize your electrical wiring around the house to transfer files from device to device.

The speed of transfer of files via wifi is limited by the slower speed of the wifi itself.  I would expect files to be moved around the house from device to device using the powerlinks at up to around 6 times faster than via wifi.  And at around half the new price of a new pair of Powerlinks, it seemed a good deal.

So a huge video file of top notch quality, with excellent audio, and stored on my Cloud Drive will soon have a wired connection to the Nvidia Shield in the lounge room ensuring perfect playback.

With the turmoil surrounding some Kodi addons due to legal action and the demise of the largest store of addons, TVAddons, there has been a bit of a backlash as developers now move the addons away from TVAddons to safer places to house their products.  This has kept me busy as well as people report to me they are beginning to experience some problems with their Android TV boxes as addons do not update with the latest links.

It is now a couple of weeks since TVAddons closed down and the dust is beginning to settle with new repositories being found by developers and put to work.  Keeping up with which addon has gone where has kept life interesting!

But it is great fun!