Day: 5 April 2020

My last pebble smart watch… again?

Broken pebble

Today my pebble 2 smartwatch broke while playing with the diabolo in the garden. The screen came straight out the frame. Not sure why but I did put it back but found the screen was dead.

As I thought my smartphone was still connected to the watch via bluetooth and was responding to the button presses and battery charge.

However without a screen I’m forced to use my very last pebble smartwatch. The Pebble time kindly donated from Ahmed, who got a Apple watch. This is why although I did say the previous pebble was my last, I luckily had this backup. However this is the last. Lets hope the hybrid smartwatches are better than Fossil’s attempt.

Broken pebble with last one

Sharing is caring with plex server

My current plex stats over 90days
The last 90 days on my plex server

I always expected an increase in my plex server usage from my friends as the UK enter the Covid-19 lockdown. Especially when I heard all the streaming services dropping back to SD  To be fair its not been as big a demand as I expected but its noticeable compared to last few months of 2019.

Most popular clients

The most popular clients seem to be Chrome & Chromecasts (not sure if Chromecasts sometimes report themselves as Chrome). Thankfully the Xbox has dropped because that client requires everything to be transcoded unlike Tizen which will happily if theres enough bandwidth send the original file and not require any transcoding.

plex concurrent users

I have however hit 3 concurrent streams again, keeping an eye out to see if I can hit 4 or even more. No idea what it would do to my AMD based Plex server? I do have the Intel Xeon based HP Z800 which I recently bought a Nvida Quadro K620 GPU hoping to get hardware accelerated streaming finally working on the HP Z800.

Thats a task for Easter maybe…

Update 13/4/2020

4 concurrent users finally

I noticed my plex server finally reached the 4 concurrent users over the last weekend.

What to do on a birthday during a lockdown?

Me with birthday ballons

I was lucky to have my big 40th birthday last year, I still have the cards up funny enough. I know others who had their 40th birthday in doors.

But one year later under Covid19 lockdown, I’m considering my options. My partner suggested a mass video call which I could cast to my TV. I could buy one of those going cheap cakes or get a nice takeaway from somewhere special. Also been thinking about ordering a very nice steak from the northern quarter butchers and having that with some lovely eggs. Talking of the northern quarter, I would pay some serious money to sit in a coffee shop right now. I’m not the only one…

Talking of coffee, I finally caved in and started having coffee at home after a nice Airbnb left me a bag a while back. Just in the mornings before work.

And the last leap Airbnb, made me a superhost again?!

Airbnb superhost

So weird, because no one is going anywhere right now. I don’t think I could accept anyone if they did actually book my spare room anyway. Maybe I should block out my calendar but theres little point right now.

Anyway back to the point, what to do on my birthday in lockdown.

I’m open to suggestions…?