Media Library Redux

I've been collecting movies on DVD and Blu-ray for many years. Years before I started this collection I amassed a little over 400 VHS movies (which I donated to a small local video shop that I'm happy to say is still in business today). If memory serves me correctly I was pretty happy with this VHS collection for awhile, despite the fact that DVDs had come out several years before. There was no reason at that point for me to move to DVD since the televisions I owned were not great quality.

My Linux bookshelf on January 19, 2021

Like so many people my collection of books has mostly gone digital. When we moved to our apartment 12 years ago we condensed two apartments into one. At the time I had about 10 small boxes of mostly tech-related books. Most apartments don't have the storage space a house does. Ours in particular has one small storage unit. Merging two families into one of the first things to go was my book collection. It was an easy choice to make in order to make space for more important family items (mostly Christmas decorations).

Piper, configure your Logitech G502 Hero mouse

Several months ago I bought a Logitech Hero 502 mouse on sale ($49.99CDN was $99.99) at Canada Computers. Recently I discovered Piper, a program that provides a graphical way to configure the Logitech Hero 502, and several other Logitech (and a few other brands of) mice. For a full list of Piper supported mice see the libratbag list of devices here: https://github.com/libratbag/libratbag/tree/master/data/devices. Piper is a graphical front end to libratbag.

Diablo III on Xubuntu 20.04 Linux brief overview

It works, not as good as it does on Windows 10, but it's very playable with some changes. I had to make some changes for to increase performance, but this might not be as much of a factor if you have a better video card.

Here's my /etc/samba/smb.conf file:

#======================= Global Settings =======================

[global]
   workgroup = MEDIA
   client min protocol = NT1
   server min protocol = NT1
   server string = %h server (Samba, Ubuntu)
   security = user
   map to guest = bad user
   name resolve order = bcast host
   log file = /var/log/samba/log.%m
   max log size = 1000
   logging = file

#======================= Share Definitions =======================

LIRC is a software package that lets you use common remote control with certain programs like KODI. Ubuntu 18.04 used to use LIRC version 0.9x. LIRC was recently upgraded and the new version is vastly different than the previous version. When LIRC was installed in earlier versions it specifically prompted the administrator to select which remote to use (usually something like Windows Media Centre Edition (MCE) remote). This doesn't happen with the new version, 0.10x, in Ubuntu 20.04. This problem seems to be one that a lot of people have. Here's what worked for me.