After an irritating day of buying B-day presents and then wrapping them for the wife, trying to find time to do our income taxes, and fighting with terrible drivers around town (half of which were stoned out their birds on pot) - it's 9pm and of course my wife's totally not technical friend decides to share out her boyfriend's Plex Media server........GREEEEEAAAAT! I get to spend the next 45 minutes fixing all the shit I'd been avoiding for the last two years just to get all this working. Rokus were easy enough.....got a 93' Magnavox CRT with a Roku stick on it, and a $345.00 Sharp 52" roku TV in the bedroom.....but the REAL problem is our sad bastard television in the livingroom....well...first.....
It's a 2017 Samsung 52" smart tv - god I hate that !($!#%$(&U!#(% thing! It's slower than a 386 SX trying to run Windows 95 on 4MB of RAM, it's buggier than Windows Vista after visiting 1000 porn and warez sites and skipping updates for 9 months, and basically - for an $800.00 set - I'm rather dissappointed with it, thankfully it was a gift when 4K was all the rage.....so a certain family member could watch Football while here (sigh, I hate sports). Anyway, this P.O.S. had Plex on it from 2 years ago when I started dabbling in running a Enterprise Class, CentOS loaded server in my apartment, hehehe, one of the higher ups from our Dev team gave it to me. Of course, it did not work, of course it had to have Plex installed 4-5 times then uninstalled, then reinstalled to fix it. Not sure why this TV has so many problems, it's been kepts up to date, anything we don't use that can be removed has been....just seems sad but hilarious a $800 TV is being outshined by a Best Buy Sale-Day Special and a 1993 Magnavox 27" CRT with a Roku stick that overheats on the norm and still keeps going (the stick, not the TV).
So I get that going, and of course, I decide to mess with my server. As it's got a 2 year old install of CentOS 8, decided to run updates, and of course, that broke Grub. At least I was able to back up some of the super-rare movies I ripped from DVD and put on there. That said, did find a way back into CentOS, so I guess when I'm in the mood to tinker next time, I'll mess with Grub and getting everything running happily again.....maybe just remove that first Grub entry that's causing it to go into recovery mode shell.
Meanwhile, been trying to upload a vintage PC Youtube since noon, damn Mac OS decided to update in the middle of it (shakes fist at Mac). That's why I'm dabbling in all the different ecosystems right now, to find the one that fits me best. So far Linux Mint is winning. MacOS is a bit limited in what I can do but makes a great dedicated music/video editing machine. FreeDOS really is a close second runner-up to Linux mint if not for the lack of WPA for WiFI or the inability to stream on a 27 year old NEC Versa laptop running FreeDOS (yes I have e-mail and interwebs on those and I use it, a lot).