The Goat Pen

I'm gonna start with goon. Looks like my kind of TV.

I've been caught up in Ken Burns' "The Civil War," on PBS again this week. Can't believe it's been 25 yrs since it first aired. I could listen to Shelby Foote talk all day.

Shelby Foote attended UNC but never graduated. He made that documentary...

More bad news for the bear camp...

More bad news for the bear camp...

Hunter Escapes Attack by Shoving Arm Down Bear’s Throat

http://flatheadbeacon.com/2015/10/05/hu ... rs-throat/

hedge wrote:More bad news for the bear camp...

Hunter Escapes Attack by Shoving Arm Down Bear’s Throat

http://flatheadbeacon.com/2015/10/05/hu ... rs-throat/

and people laughed when I said to gouge their eyes out.

Bears don't take to eye gouging

I watched the Martian last night. It does a good job of giving you that America, Fuck Yea feeling.

Also, almost everything is plausible in the movie - all the science shit that he does is entertaining and it has alot of humor.

FWIW, I'm giving everyone in my family the same thing for Xmas

I've talked about it before on here but I'm giving them a $35 android streaming box. The box has 3 usb ports, HDMI out, a basic remote, an ethernet port, built in wireless 8.01G and an SD card reader.



Basically on the surface it turns your TV into a SmartTV that has the google play store. So you can download apps that your smart phone uses and use them on the TV.


For another $14 you can buy a wireless keyboard with mouse which greatly enhances the usability of it



Now on the surface you probably wouldn't care about this unless you just wanted the novelty of turning your old HDTV into a smart TV and to be honest, I don't use it for that, but it allow you to add a cheap hi def $20 camera and use it for Skype which is kinda cool


but what do I use it for and why am I giving it to my family

Primarily for an app called Kodi (previous version is XBMC).
Kodi is a media streamer that organizes media both external and locally into a format - kind of like your own personal Netflix - except it doesn't cost anything.

So with this box, you go out to google play store and choose the free app Kodi and let it install.

Kodi by itself is kind of like the old Napster or Limewire. Somewhere out in the ether - there are hundreds of video repositories that people are sharing and Kodi , given you know how to get to them wraps them up in a neat little bundle for you.



I have a zip file that contains the location of some of them - the file is called a mashup which is just a bucket of listings out there. By telling Kodi to look at this one zip file, I had 1,249 channels to choose from - movie pirate sites, porn, network channel DVR sites (no live television but a respository of everything that has been on TV in the last 3-7 days), international channels from just about every country, music, etc - basically if you look hard enough you can find whatever you want.

But I also ripped all of my DVD's into video format and I copied them onto a cheap 2 tb external usb hard drive that will hold about 300 720p format movies. I have people at work that are also into this and we copy movies over to increase our local library collection. They like mine because I have about 40 movies that they used to show at Drive -In's when I was a kid - titles like "Vacation with the babysitter" and "Teacher's Pet" - really bad poorly made T&A movies from our youth. At any rate, you tell Kodi that you have movies on this local hard drive, and it goes out, finds the IMDB information on them, downloads the movie poster, links to the movie trailer and other various information and creates a localized database of all your stuff.

Here is a screen shot from mine


and it lets you search for movies (where the usb wireless keyboard comes in handy)



and has a built in Android media player that has subtitles, surround sound and chapter skipping features


so adding up the costs

$35 for android streamer
$14 for wireless keyboard
$20 for 720p webcam
$79 for 2tb external hard drive

its about $150 for the setup - but with it they're getting about 300 local movies, access to more internet channels than they'll ever have time to watch, the ability to use Skype or some other video conferencing android based software and a quad core android processor that's on par with maybe a Samsung S3 to run apps (not compatible with some apps like ones that require GPS)

Its going to take me all the way up to Xmas to get my DVD collection ripped and copied over for them, but I think they will appreciate it.

I'm posting it here because if any of you are interested, I'd do it for you to since I'm kind of assembly mode.

Did you watch Driving Miss Daisy and Rambo III back to back?

I thought you would enjoy my diversity of movie options. It even does mainstream porn movies

Hey, brother, will you set it up, too?

I would have it configured,

setting up would be just plugging in the stuff to the usb ports and the HDMI to the TV

Those directions are worse than opening my kids xmas presents after they unwrapped them

I'd like to give you directions to Hell...

I'd like for you to show him the way.

So 50 for the streamer and keyboard? If so I might know someone.

I'm sure you've paid more than 50 for a steamer...

BigRedMan wrote:So 50 for the streamer and keyboard? If so I might know someone.

yep

[youtube]69UwVX6Riv8[/youtube]

this xmas