Writing on Andrew Naylor

How to Fix Plex Transcoding on OS X

Sat, 12 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

After buying a new Apple TV last year I have been trying to use the Plex App for all my media needs outside of Netflix. I run the Plex Media Server on an old Mac with a very small SSD and lots of External HD space which contains my media. Because of this I needed to do some tweaks to get it to work.

On OS X, Plex keeps all its metadata in ~/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server. I shouldn’t have been surprised when shortly after firing it up I got a low disk space warning as the downloaded metadata for my library quickly ate through what little space I had remaining on the boot volume. Fortunately this was quite straightforward to fix:

Git Localizable Strings

Mon, 21 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0100

When using git I’m a believer in small, meaningful commits – as my colleague says: “Little commits, pushed often”. In many cases though, this doesn’t necessarily match how I – or I’m sure others – tend to work. While debugging a problem you may find yourself fixing other things or making tweaks which are important but not necessarily related. Personally I may find myself looking at a diff, ready to commit, realising that the changes within are part of separate stories.

Beatboxing

Tue, 30 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0100

My first exposure to beatboxing was many years ago, my earliest memory is finding the video of Beardyman doing “Kitchen Diaries”

I’ve never followed the musical genre particularly closely but this performance always stood out as my prevailing memory and I don’t think I’ve come across a video that has entertained me as much.

Thoughts on Tempo

Tue, 15 May 2012 00:00:00 +0100

I can be quite an impatient person. Not in the angry sense, rather I prefer to get useless interludes (such as walking somewhere) out of the way as quickly as possible - as a child I earned the nickname “Running Boy” - even now I find myself running to my car most evenings. Fortunately for my driving license I enjoy driving and tend to stay around the speed limit.

The modern technological world doesn’t help my impatience. Why would I buy a CD and wait for it to arrive when I can just buy it on iTunes? In fact, why wait for iTunes to download it when I can, more-often-than-not, just search on Spotify and listen immediately.

Google Glass

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Today Google announced their augmented reality project Google Glass. Essentially a wearable Heads-display, which, according to their concept video will provide a seamless interface for Google services to improve your day-to-day life.

There were rumblings of such a project back in February, supposedly coming out of “Google[x]”, their far-future looking lab and it seems that everything mentioned then has been confirmed, though estimates of late 2012 availability are apparently ambitious.

Home Computing

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0100

I mentioned in a previous post about the launch of the new iPad that I had decided my money was safe. At university I became very strict with myself to leave my laptop on my desk, connected to external KVM and as such I used the iPad extensively elsewhere. When I graduated last year, I moved back to my parents house so I could save more effectively for a house deposit. As a result of this I found myself using my laptop as a portable machine again my iPad fell by the wayside.

Amazing Street Dancing

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The first time I can recall seeing someone dance to dubstep.

Resolutionary

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The new iPad has been announced and it looks pretty nice.

The thing I’m most pleased about is the name. Pundits reached fever pitch this week over what it was going to be called. With the media coverage of the “disappointing” iPhone 4S, complaining that it wasn’t the “iPhone 5” that everyone was expecting, I’m glad Apple seem to have abandoned the idea of incremental naming of their products.

I think Apple, having realised they were on a slippery slope, are beginning to remedy their mistake. Every other product (except the iPhone) has survived with a simple name; iPod Touch, MacBook Air. Each product has an identifer such as “4th Generation” or “Late 2009” but they aren’t used in marketing and that is the key. People don’t want an “iPad 2S 64GB Wifi+4G”. They want an iPad. Everything else is secondary.