Especially now that I’m married with a mother-in-law from Limerick, Ireland, plus numerous gaming friends scattered throughout Northern Ireland and England, I keep wanting to bring up quotes from Hello Internet‘s 2018 discussion.

So today I fully hand-transcribed the two relevant conversations between Grey and Brady about the heatwave, and wow, what a laugh!

Episode 106 – Water on Mars (July 31, 2018)

Grey: Protip for England – if you have a heatwave that happens every year for about …mmm… 2, 2 and a half, maybe 3 months, that’s not a heatwave. That’s summer. That’s what summer is.

Brady: Annual heatwave that they don’t understand.

Grey: Ugh. I don’t know. This year has just been…one of the worst years where I keep..- not the worst year in terms of heat, but the worst year in terms of me having to listen to English people explain that they don’t have summers and this is just a freak occurrence and it doesn’t make sense to outfit any of their buildings with air conditioning. Like, I know I’ve complained about this in the past, but this year, this summer I really feel like I’m losing my freaking mind over this, and just earlier today I was in an argument with an English person who was like, “Oh! What an unusual heatwave we’re having!” I’m like, “Listen. I’ve lived here for a decade. Every summer! Every f***ing summer, it’s just like this since the first summer when I arrived! And I remember laying on the floor of my apartment, sweating and simply not moving, and waiting for what I then, like a fool I believed was, the Heatwave to pass. But it’s not a heatwave. It’s just every summer. And the city’s not built for it. I’ve decided that it’s like some kind of self-propaganda that English people do to themselves, where they just WANT to believe that all of England is like Northern Scotland all the time. Like, they just want to believe it. And so, every year, when the weather is the same in the summer, which is hot in mid to upper 80’s like it is today, it’s, like, pushing 90 in London, which is an ungodly temperature they still wanna believe it’s a freakish occurrence. But it happens every year. Every year for 10 years at least. This is SUMMER, English people. You need to build infrastructure to deal with it.

Brady: Well technically, if you look at the statistics, this has been a heatwave.

Grey: *chuckles*

Brady: I only partly agree with you. But I DO partly agree with you.

Grey: Alright, why do you partly un-agree with me?

Brady: Because we are in the middle of something quite exceptional.

Grey: Are we!? It feels like it’s every summer, though!

Brady: This is the “heatiest” heatwave that I can remember, and I think the numbers flesh that out. I’ve never see the grass so dried out as it is now. It’s like Australia at the moment, all the grass is so yellow and brown. It’s because of the length of it without rain. Like, you do get heat, but normally it gets broken up on occasion, but because it hasn’t been broken up, everything’s dying at the moment. But England is EXCEPTIONALLY poorly equipped to deal with the mildest deviation from what it considers to be normal weather. Whether it’s wind or rain…

Grey: laughs It’s so true…

Brady: …or heat or anything. Like, it’s just the whole country just grinds to a halt. And they always find new things to go wrong. It’s like there’s a government department for coming up with clever things that can go wrong because of weather like melting train tracks and …weird problems with leaves, and like, every year there’s a new thing that I’m like, “I didn’t know there could BE a problem!” And yet because there’s temperatures deviated by 1 degree or the wind has gone 5 miles per hour faster than it should have, like, everything goes wrong. It’s a country living on the edge when it comes to weather.

Grey: laughing It really is. It really is! Like, we’ve built ALL of our infrastructure to handle to handle a plus or minus 5 degree variance and a plus or minus a couple knots wind speed and a plus or minus a couple millimeters of rain, and if it goes beyond that it’s just a total disaster.

Brady: This is a famous trait of English people though. I can’t remember all the details, and I should because it’s a part of Australian folklore. But when the first settlers went from England to Australia, they packed as if they were gonna go to England. The packed warm and cold clothes and all the different types of seeds that they took, and they arrived in Australia, and they planted all their crops based on what they would do in England, even though they were in a different hemisphere, and they went through years and years of hardship because they couldn’t accept that weather changes and like, different things happen with weather, so… it’s just an English thing.

Grey: See? I guess what you’re saying to me is that I’m not going to be able to convince English people that you need to install central air conditioning systems in your retail centers across the country. You don’t think I’m going to be able to convince them that this is a necessary thing?

Brady: No. But also, English people LOVE talking about weather. It’s probably their favorite thing to talk about. Either that or …transport and travel on the roads. They LOVE talking about it. And English people love to WHINGE and complain. So this is like an absolute, perfect storm! Because they can complain about weather. That’s bliss for them! I almost think they don’t improve the infrastructure because it would reduce their opportunities to whinge about the weather. If it was just, like, ah right. It’s hot today, but luckily we’ve all got air conditioners and all the public transport can cope with it, there’d be nothing to complain about

Grey: I’m sure…I mentioned this before, but I can’t let this opportunity pass where, sigh I think you may be right. I do my best to think that people all over the world. I think they’re basically the same. That people really aren’t all that different. I’m not even sure I super believe this idea of cultural differences. But the one that just kills me, that seems so stark, is what you’re saying there. There’s something about English people: that they love to just state a problem and let it sit there on the table, and we’re all gonna sit around it. We’re all gonna sit around the table, and we’re gonna talk about the problem. And when you go to America, there realy is just a can-do attitude like, “Hey there’s a problem! What could we do about this problem? Let’s propose solutions. Maybe someone could take action. At a bare minimum someone could sweep this problem off of the table, and now it’s on the floor, but at least it’s not in our face all the time.”

Brady: Yeah.

Grey: I like to think that people are the same everywhere…and I think that that mostly holds true.

Brady: No.. No.

Grey: …but there is something about English people versus Americans in the can-do-itiveness that is clearly different and sorta drives me crazy sometimes..

Brady: Yeah. I mean I DO think people are culturally different. And that difference you point out is definitely true.

Grey: I mean how do you think Australians rate on the can-do-itiveness scale? They’ve gotta be, like, on the American side. That’s my impression anyway.

Brady: Yeah. Australians are can-do. And Australians are also hard as nails.

Grey: Right

Brady: For example, right? I come from Adelaide. Adelaide can get REALLY, really hot in the summer. Like, in the summer you could have consecutive days in the 40’s Celcius. Like, I’m talking well into the 100’s, Farenheit. And that’s just normal. And I lived there, and I worked there. And when I used to work at the newspaper, I used to have to wear business trousers and a shirt and a tie every day, and I often walked to work. I remember when I lived in the city, I had a 15 or 20 minute walk to work sometimes. And when I went out on jobs and stories, I had go outside and work outside. And wear, like, clothing you wouldn’t ideally wear in hot weather. And I have zero memory of the heat ever being a massive problem or something you would talk about. It was just a thing. But now that I live in England and I’ve been experiencing this heatwave, even I’m talking about it all the time, and I’m lying in bed thinking, “Oh woe is me. I’ll never sleep,” and I dare not go outside, and “what am I going to do?” And it’s infected ME!

Grey: laughs hysterically

Brady: And I grew up in 100 degrees every day. Like, scorching, scorching desert heat!

Grey: I think one of the reasons particularly on my mind is that I happen to have a bunch of American friends coming through London this summer. And I had to prepare all of them with, like, “Listen. Just so you know… it’s going to be what you would regard as a hot day, but nothing unusually hot. But you need to be prepared to the fact that there will be no relief anywhere you go. So you have to bring clothes where you’re really prepared for the summertime. And what you’re saying there, like, I think your memory of it not really being a problem is almost certainly a side effect of that fact that if it gets really hot, you have infrastructure to deal with it. It’s like when I visit my parents in North Carolina which is.. so hot and so humid that to be outside for a couple of minutes in a row in the afternoon is flirting with death. You really, really are. It’s incredible. But guess what? You never need to be outside for more than 20 seconds at the most. Right? Like, how long does it take for you to walk from your car to the building? And it’s crazy. It’s like I’m so much more physically comfortable in North Carolina where it’s lethal outside, than in the UK where it’s uncomfortable, but it’s uncomfortable ALWAYS. Like, and there’s just nothing that is ever done about, and it’s way worse in that situation.

Brady: Fair enough.

Grey: Anyway, we’ve been English-isized for talking about the weather. But, I’m in a nice, chilly room that I have actually, y’know, set up infrastructure so that I am physically comfortable, and it’s lovely.

Brady: Did you buy an air conditioner?

Grey: Yeah, no. We’ve had an air conditioner for years. As long as we’ve lived here. And all our English friends think we’re crazy, but it’s like, I’ve set it up, so I can be recording this podcast in comfort as opposed to being in 88 degree weather as it is right now.

Brady: I do envy you a bit. I’m sweltering in the room I’m in.

Grey: Why don’t YOU have air conditioning, Brady?

Brady: I don’t know. Cause you don’t do that in England.

Grey: NOO!! HAHA! OH MY GOD!

Brady: I did go onto the department store website about a week into the heatwave and looked up air conditioners and they were all sold out.

Grey: Yeah. No. That’s too late. It’s too late, Brady. They’re all being bought by Americans abroad, or other people who are just dealing with it. This whole time we’re having this conversation I just assumed that your house must be air conditioning because you’re a practical Australian.

Brady: No…

Grey: Apparently not. Okay.

Brady: Since when am I practical?

Grey: I don’t know. I just … I thought it would be the culture of your people. That you’d be prepared for warm weather.

Brady: Wow.

Grey: And I really crank it down. If I look at the thermometer in my office, it is currently 65 degrees in my office. I’ve got a 20 degree temperature differential between the outside and the inside. It’s just the way I like it.

Episode 111 – Disgusting Wheel of Filth (October 15, 2018)

Grey: A couple shows ago, Brady, you may remember I was complaining about the heat in the UK.

Brady: Yeah, that was the heatwave.

Grey: Yes, it was the heatwave. Now, the way the timing of recording and releasing our show was, it went up the day a few newspaper articles went out saying, “it’s the biggest heatwave ever in the UK.”

Brady: Yeah.

Grey: It even has its own Wikipedia page, it was such a big heatwave.

Brady: Yeah told ya, told ya.

Grey: Well, you told me and everyone in the world told me.

Brady: Yeah.

Grey: I got a huge amount of comments and tweets and things from people about the heat.

Brady: Grey, it was a Tweetwave!

Grey: Goddamnit, Brady.

Brady: chuckles You just serve me up these….soft balls.

Grey: Ugh. I think when we’re recording the show, you’re there, ready to pounce at a moment’s notice at some terrible pun because you know they cause me physical pain. You’re there like a stealthy leopard, just waiting…watching.. and at any moment you’re gonna leap and tell something like, “A Tweetwave.”

Brady: Tell me that’s no good though! Tweetwave! That’s pretty good.

Grey: Okay, look. I really hate to admit this, but that is definitely one of your better ones. Like that’s a good one.

Brady: Alright.

Grey: And that’s exactly what it felt like. You get hit with a Tweetwave of, “AH GOD! All these people are telling me this THING!” And I don’t understand. Everybody wanted to tell me, “Oh it really was a heatwave. LOL. You’re dumb for thinking that it’s always this way. No, this really was a heatwave. This time it’s different.” Like, I don’t understand how if it really was a heatwave that’s an argument against putting air conditioning in a house, but, whatever. So. Let’s go back in time. Because I did a little bit of Googling before today’s show. We’re gonna go back. Back to 2003. When a much younger, perhaps more idealistic Grey, immigrated to these fair shores. If we go into the time machine, look! Here’s an article about the 2003 European heatwave. Summer that I arrive. It was super hot.

Brady: Yeah.

Grey: Freakish occurrence, I’m sure. Now. We’re gonna click forward to 2004. Nothing happens in 2004. Just a regular summer. No problem whatsoever. But then, 2005, article from the BBC. UK has experienced the hottest summer on record. 2006 we go forward. There’s a Wikipedia article about the European heatwave in 2006. 2007 there’s a Wikipedia article about the European heatwave. 2008. Now this year, according to the Telegraph, it was merely a MINI heatwave, talking about temperatures higher than they ever had been before. Now, we fast forward. 2009. Britain declares heatwave as temperatures rise. Talking about how the metropolitan office has raised their amber alert for heatwaves in 2009…

Brady: You’re not quoting the Daily Express, I hope, cause that’s a paper famous for hyperbole about weather.

Grey: Uh no. I’m looking at the Guardian now.

Brady: Okay. Okay, that’s alright. Well it says here in this BBC article that 2018’s summer is tied for the hottest since records began with 1976, 2003 (one of these you named) and 2006 (another one of the ones you named). So we have had a little cluster.

Grey: Yeah. I agree. But we’re not done yet, Brady. Bcause now we’re at 2010. UK heatwave causes hundreds of deaths!

Brady: If you’re gonna Google every time a journalist has used the term ‘heatwave’ during a hot spell, you’re gonna win this debate.

Grey: They ALL list the temperatures as being in the 90’s. Like, it’s the same thing. 2012..-

Brady: You know what I thought you were gonna do? I thought you were gonna do something quite legitimate here, and you were gonna call up some met office weather data and make your case. But if you’re just Googling and cherry picking news articles…

Grey: OH!! OH! I’m SORRY, Brady!!

Brady: …what can I do?

Grey: Am I looking at the NEWS!? Like I shouldn’t rely on the NEWS to describe when heatwaves occur. And in all fairness, I genuinely did try to pull up, like, what are the actual metropolitan office ..like I was trying to get…

Brady: Yeah!

Grey: …the MEDIAN temperatures for the summer.

Brady: That’s not hard to get.

Grey: Ok. I found it VERY difficult to find, like, what I’m looking for, which is, I want a 30 year period of, like, the median temperature in August. Like that kind of thing.

Brady: So instead, you just lazily went and cherrypicked a few…just Googled the word “heatwave.”

Grey: I was looking at the news. I thought I could use the news a primary source, but I guess I’m wrong. I shouldn’t have done that. Okay.

Brady: Well HANG ON A SECOND! You’re.. Yeah! You’re the one that’s Mister Anti-News!

Grey: laughing

Brady: And now you’re USING it to make your argument! Is this another bash to the news day..

Grey: NO!

Brady: ..or are are you just arguing about the weather? Make up your mind what argument you wanna have!

Grey: Right! Because my ar–

Brady: You can’t use as a crutch the news that you hate so much to bolster your other argument about the weather!

Grey: My argument is that it’s HOT in the SUMMER and English people always write it off as a heatweave. And so I think the news is a perfect appropriate source to see if, like, do people discuss the summer as heatwaves? And for 14 out of the last 15 years, I have news articles about, like, “It’s a heatwave! There’s an amber alert from the met! Here’s a Wikipedia article about the European-wide heatwave!” Like, it’s a ridiculous number of heatwave stories which I think totally validates my point. That English people deny the fact that it’s hot in the summer, and talk about it like it’s a heatwave. Like, that it’s a freakish occurrence. That heatwaves NEVER happen.

Brady: Oh, what happened was…people were talking about the unseasonally hot weather.

Grey: Yeah.

Brady: You said, this is a beat-up. It’s not that hot.

Grey: No no no!! I was complaining that it’s hot! What are you saying.. I wasn’t saying it wasn’t that hot! The whole point was that I was …

Brady: You’re saying …no. What you were saying, you were saying it was NORMAL. You were saying it was NORMAL.

Grey: Yeah. That it’s hot every summer.

Brady: People pointed out to you that the data showed that in 2018 was equal to the hottest summer since records began in 1910.

Grey: And 2003.

Brady: Yeah, which bolsters the claim. And then you’re, like, you’re not accepting that! Like, “Oh no no! It WASN’T unusually hot! It was just a normal summer!” and people saying, “No, this was not a normal summer!” is what the met office was saying. I have no idea. I haven’t lived in England that long. But the met office is saying 2018 was an unusually hot summer. I don’t know. Maybe they’re wrong. Maybe their thermometers aren’t working.

Grey: No no no! Both of these things can be true! Like, it can be unusually hot, and also hot every summer, and also always described as a heatwave. Like, I just… I don’t understand why I receive this “Tweetwave” of feedback where people were trying to tell me, like, “it’s not hot.” Like, “Oh, this is a freakish occurrence. It’s not hot during the summer.” And it’s hot EVERY summer. Like, it’s not hot enough to require air conditioning EVERY SUMMER for the last 15 years. Which is, totally the case, and like, maybe upon these emerald islands, back, 20 years ago, we didn’t have summers like this, but SPOILER, it’s HOT! It seems like the temperature is going up, and I don’t think the temperatures are going DOWN. Like, things are different.

Brady: CGP Grey doth protest too much, methinks.

Grey: What do you think I’m protesting too much? I’m trying to tell people it’s hot during the summer. And you can’t say it’s a heatwave every single year. That’s what the summer is.

Brady: Alright.

Grey: Were you not sweltering in your office, Brady?

Brady: Yeah, I was! Cause it was a heatwave!

Grey: DOOHHHh!! Damnit!

Brady: Look, Grey. English people always exaggerate about the weather and love talking about the weather. We discussed this the last time. I think, unfortunately for you, at the time you were making this point in a colorful way.

Grey: It was the week before it was the hottest week ever, yeah.

Brady: Unfortunately for you, some data was released that let people do a little bit of a wrong on the internet moment. But I hear you. Yes. Yes. British newspapers, to sell more papers, love exaggerating about the weather. But this was… 2018 was hot. I actually went over .. I went to an island in the Bristol channel right in the middle of the heatwave. And it’s an island where lots of birds breed. And the island was covered like a carpet with dead birds…

Grey: Eww..

Brady: …because the birds couldn’t handle all the heat and the lack of water. And the people who, like, run the island said this is really unusual, and it’s because of the weather and stuff, and I feel like I was seeing, not just, “I was hot in my office.” I was seeing carnage. Nature carnage being caused by this unseasonal weather. So, I think it’s legit that 2018 was a bit unusual. But…y’know…

Grey: I’m not saying wasn’t unusual, Brady. You know I’m not saying it wasn’t unusual.

Brady: What’s your point, then? Summer happens. I don’t think anyone.

Grey: You’re about to say you don’t think anybody disagrees that summer happens, but I’m telling you! The English people disagree with Summer Happens! Like, I feel like that is my fundamental point here!!

Brady: Alright.

Grey: English people disagree with Summer Happens.

The post Heatwave appeared first on PPSStudios.

In June we (Daniel Powell and Helen O’Connor) have been given an opportunity to travel to Mexico City with a team of up to 15 people from Southgate Church in Fort Collins, Colorado to assist a local church, Restauracion Nueva Jerusalen Church , in renovating a local orphanage run by Ministerios de Amor . This project is a team effort from Southgate Church and is being spearheaded by Daniel’s sister and her husband, Andrea and Andy Rudy.

While there, the team will be helping with some major, long-overdue renovation of the orphanage compound which is extremely run down from constant use, as well as cooking, cleaning, and ministering to around 50 girls who have made their home there.

The trip will last one week from June 21 to June 29, 2024, and we are asking for support to cover the cost. In total, Southgate estimates a need of $1250 per person ($2500 for the both of us) which will cover travel, accommodations, and a financial gift for Nueva Jerusalen Church. Any abundance we will include as our donation to Nueva Jerusalen.

Thank you so much for your prayerful consideration and support!

GoFundMe

Here’s a link to the PDF of the trip schedule

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And we’ve kept it up! It’s been really amazing.. There are four of us that manage to meet daily (DAILY) for this exercise, and one other individual that will join in but as he’s a commercial driver, doesn’t join in on the conversation, and instead uses it as a sort of live podcast to listen. Plus a few other people have popped in periodically, most of whom attend Rez.Church, my church. We started by meeting in a WhatsApp call every morning, which was rough at first, but quickly smoothed out into a nice routine.

Around the end of May we were inspired to try capturing and uploading our daily conversations to YouTube. Again, this was a bit of a rough start just because me getting the tech worked out on my end (I was as far as I know the only one in the group who knew how to live-stream at that point). But we got that worked out and like the morning meeting itself, I found a nice rhythm and routine.

Then, just recently Damian got the inspiration to try and expand, to reach more people. This involves a lot more than just our morning Bible Study. So he came up with the Remain Community, built out of a social media engine he found called Mighty Networks. So far we’ve been meeting there for about a week, and have transitioned our video calls from WhatsApp to Zoom. Not my first pick, but Mighty Networks DOES have options for offering other video conferencing platforms as well. We were excited to find that a WhatsApp call could be linked to ahead of time. However we decided that a few weeks to burn-in Zoom would be prudent, just so we wouldn’t jerk our 5-6 regulars around too much too fast.

I guess what’s been a little confusing to me and something I need to codify in my own space is – Remain.Community encapsulates a group of small groups. The idea being any large number of people could join this community and subsequently join their own space which would serve to facilitate online meetings with others of similar bents. Essentially, it would do what Rez’s Church Center subscription does, but also offer everything that something like Facebook would have – walls, chatrooms, event calendars.. And it is FAIRLY clean and customizable.

Granted, I find it a little redundant at this point, but since we’ve shifted away from WhatsApp to Mighty Networks, it’s not been too big of a leap in my thinking. Yeah, it requires its members sign up with a site they know nothing about, but since we can gate keep who comes in and what they can access, it is reminiscent of something like Discord. I initially would have preferred a platform like Discord, but I also know Discord has a directory of ‘other popular groups you can join’ and most of those do not foster a clean, Godlike community and would be completely available and advertised without restriction to our membership. NOT something I want to ignore.

Additionally, yesterday and today we live-streamed to YouTube rather than just recording and posting later as we’ve been doing since May! Saves on the processing time and lets us work on the nicer details. Plus Damian, being a complete API programming nerd, decided to start writing automated scripts on Heroku to set up future livestreams combined with his current, favorite obsession, ChatGPT, to generate summaries and things for said livestreams. Combining all these resources has the potential of being (and is proving itself to be) a giant time-saver overall. I just have to learn to let go a little, since I’m a bit resistant to offloading work that would give me a sense of worth.

Anyway, writing all this out has been nice. Kinda just had to get it down into text form.

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I have a lifetime subscription to Plex. I’ve had it for at least eight years. It’s cool! It lets me watch IPTV (built-in) and even has the option to connect to digital tuner+antenna combos on my network. I mean, I saw this “HDHomeRun” device I could buy on Amazon a couple of years ago and got curious, but not enough to buy one. Especially since there were the usual statements of, “Oh and you’ll need a separate subscription to some electronic TV guide for $5-$25 a year or something, blah blah blah.”

HOWEVER, the tax return paid out well this year, so I decided to spring for one last week. A HDHomeRun DUO and a $25 antenna to go with it. It arrived last night, and I got to start playing around. TURNS OUT, it has its caveats, but it isn’t so locked down that I can’t use it for free (ignoring 1) the cost of buying it in the first place and 2) my Plex Pass, which I would say has all but paid for itself by now).

Now, first off, I don’t have cable TV. I have cable internet, but I don’t want to opt into Comcast’s lineup of 1000-9000 channels that I’ll never watch because I have Plex and all the stuff I like already physically and digitally owned. The only thing I have as far as live, over-the-air TV are 18 local channels, 12 of which are accounted for on any sort of TV Guide, electronic or otherwise.

The setup of the HDHomeRun was pretty straightforward. Ethernet to connect it to my network, RG6 and USB to connect and power the antenna. Powered it on and after a minute or so I was able to connect Plex via their pretty decent instructions. At first glance, though, the HDHomeRun website was threatening to charge me directly for recording shows. I wasn’t happy to see it, but I also wanted to just play, so I moved forward with the setup.

Turns out, if you’re running on Plex, and have the Plex Pass subscription, recording is handled directly within Plex. No need for the HDHomeRun subscription or whatever.

However, a few problems arose during setup:

Problem #1: The initial channel scan only found 3 channels, 1 with 3 sub-bands, so 5 total. I didn’t initially understand this, selected what I THOUGHT were channel selections to this list of checkboxes (EPG channels isn’t the same as Tuner Channels. No. EPG (Electronic Programming Guide) is a required directory of TV programming, like the good ol’ TV Guide magazine, that must be matched to those channels in Plex. Thankfully Plex provides one built-in, and it’s good enough, but it wasn’t THAT straightforward until I did some research.

On initial matching, I’m trying to watch what I think is PBS Kids and I’m seeing FOX. Very confusing. And only 3 channels? Also confusing.

Then I thought, “maybe this EPG thing isn’t what I think it is. Oh! I bet I know. I’m MATCHING the channels on the left to the ones on the right. Not picking the ones I want to BE in the listing at all.” So FOX became FOX, PBS Kids became PBS Kids, and all was well.

Except 3-5 channels? Then I found the high gain switch on my new antenna. It was tuned to “long-range.” If I switch that to “short-range” what happens? My detected channels jumped to 18. NOW I was able to see the stuff I had hoped to find.

And Plex said, “Click this button to record future episodes.” I did, and SURE ENOUGH!! In a half hour, I had a new MP4 in my library. A day later and I have a good dozen.

Problem #2: This morning I discovered Twitch2Tuner, a self-hosted Plex-discoverable emulator that uses a developer application on Twitch to read your artists, will pipeline the live streams into Plex AND generate a dynamic EPG (known as an XMLTV file) which Plex can read to enable them (remember, the EPG is required for a channel to function. Plex will disable a live TV channel if it isn’t matched with a programming guide).

Well, turns out Plex can’t use the built-in EPG listing based on ZIP code and an external, XMLTV programming guide generated by someone else simultaneously. And if you want to use an external one (like Schedules Direct, for example) for your actual broadcast TV, you usually have to pay for it.

While Schedules Direct might be the best one (or at least the most recommended) for XMLPG generation, I had to do some extensive searching, and found a script by Zap2it that can take its own TV listing or that of good, ol’ TV Guide and parse the channel listings pretty far into the future to generate that mystical XMLTV file directly!! Of course, being 2 years out of date, zap2xml, the script in question, was taken down, but some angel on Archive.org managed to capture it before then, and it still works!!

Yes, you must create an account on either Zap2it or on TV Guide to use it and set your location on either, but once that’s done, the simple execution of the script with your login info will parse all the returned javascript and translate that into a giant 16MB XML file that can be imported directly into Plex via the Tuner/DVR configuration.

(Though now that I look at it, zap2xml has an option to run based on mailing address rather than a login… I may not even need the free account!)

Once that was done and data was downloaded and all my channels were showing proper stuff, I added my second Twitch2Tuner emulator, also listed. It detected that the DVR setting was set to external XMLTV, and now prompted for the location of the Twitch2Tuner XML file. Which was at http://<ip>:22708!

Aside from a few frustrating connection issues with live-watching remotely, I am very happy at this point!

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A Poetry Prompt from @JoeHills
written by Daniel Powell

When I was a child, the snow would fall
all pure and deep and white.
We'd keep it just so, unblemished and bright,
only prints of deer and rabbits and animals so small.

Who knows how far down we would sink?
The knees? The ankles? Just the soles of our feet?
Later our dad would push it up deep
And we'd join in to slide and throw and shriek.

Now I live alone in a suburb of a small city.
The snow never falls so deep.
And before I get up, whether weekday or end
Some guy with his 4-wheeler that's fit with a shovel
will scrape up the sidewalk and put forth a struggle
and rid the street of that nasty, slick trouble
before I can see it like when we were kiddies.

And because I’m actually quite proud of this one, here’s a half-baked proof of authorship:
Text
PGP Signature (Public Key F044CAEF)

The post Untrodden Snow appeared first on PPSStudios.

I had a thought – how about something a bit new to play with? Let’s see how far it’s come in 3 years since I updated to the twenty-twenty theme back in probably 2019?

Sure ’nuff. It’s not fantastic, but it’s interesting! I may fiddle around with it, too, and instead of a neon-green on black color scheme, tone it down to something a little more palatable.

Oh and those stupid ads (which I have had active for a while (I know, hypocrite that I am)) should be less intrusive and also align better with things if possible. We’ll see!

The post New Look appeared first on PPSStudios.

Given that I like random name generators (even “analog” ones like this) a whole lot, including the stupid back-of-the-kids-menu story creators that ask you for a noun, verb, adjective, another adjective, a second noun, and so forth before spitting out a ridiculous short story about a panda and a pencil that ate cake and knives together under a pink and yellow sunset, I went on a fun search for name generators. Most that you find are pretty lousy, but a few stand out to me:

• Donjon’s Markov Generator
• Orteil’s Name Generator
• Any “Travesty” generator.
• A Pirate Ship Naming Generator that I decided to make last night

Thus, in the name of “giving our band a new name”, I present to you, previously known as “Powell Production Studios Studios” a NEW name known as….

Pickl Pledra Shopio Studios!

Using Donjon’s Markov Generator with the following seed values Pristine Powell Pavel Parked Prince Pickle Pants Play Pleased Poop Phendravi Studios Starry Spicy Slick Snake Shrug Schtik Sigh Stamped Shoopdawoop, I came up with some pretty nice results.

Someone just put me out of my misery.

The post Alternates appeared first on PPSStudios.

Time to play around with the Minecraft splash screen!!

I found this tutorial on PlanetMinecraft.com which is good at detailing the small, finicky nuances of creating a resource pack to change the Minecraft splash screen. HOWEVER, I found that a lot of the details written there were unclear and slightly overkill.

Also reverse-engineering any of the Menu Panoramas from Vanilla Tweaks revealed everything needed for the file structure of the final images.

Plus, as I run mainly on a self-hosted Spigot server, the actual commands to perform perfectly-aligned teleports did not work. So here I will create a simple step-by-step tutorial.

The Idea

• Create 6 square images that can be stitched together in a psuedo-spherical panorama.
  • South
  • West
  • North
  • East
  • Straight Up from South
  • Straight Down from South
• FOV must be set so that image edges blend together perfectly.
• Minecraft must run in windowed mode, ideally in a square at 1027×1027 resolution or re-scaled after the fact to this output image size.

Caveats

• Especially if run manually, it takes time to take six screenshots at six specific angles, meaning clouds and the day-night cycle will shift.
• If FOV is off or the view is shifted after teleporting, the image edges will be misaligned.
• An especially high render distance may not load immediately after teleporting, meaning partial builds further away may be janky and half-rendered on one side.
• I run on Spigot for Minecraft 1.18, which dramatically changes the teleport and requires more complicated /execute as commands.
• I’m assuming a basic resource pack with pack.png and pack.mcmeta properly configured for your version of Minecraft is already known.

Step-by-Step Instructions

1. Open Minecraft. In Settings configure to Windowed mode.
2. Open the screenshots folder in the file explorer.
3. Take a screenshot using F2 in Minecraft. Click the output .png in the file explorer and check file properties for output resolution.
4. Carefully adjust the window size and take screenshots until the output resolution of said screenshots are as close to 1027×1027 as possible. If the monitor resolution is too small to accomodate this, simply expand the window to the screen height available, then adjust the width until the output screenshot is perfectly square.
5. In Minecraft Options, adjust FOV to 90.
6. In Minecraft Options > Video Settings > Details, set clouds to Off.
7. Enable cheats/commands if not already (in Singleplayer, open to LAN, and in Multiplayer, /op yourself from the server console).
8. Run /gamerule doDaylightCycle false
9. F1 to turn off the interface. Make sure the F3 debug screen is also off.
10. Run /execute as @p at @s run teleport @s ~ ~ ~ 0 0
11. Without touching the mouse, take a screenshot with F2.
12. In the screenshots folder, rename the new image to “panorama_0.png”.
13. Run /execute as @p at @s run teleport @s ~ ~ ~ 90 0
14. Take a screenshot and rename the new image to “panorama_1.png”.
15. Run /execute as @p at @s run teleport @s ~ ~ ~ 180 0
16. Take a screenshot and rename the new image to “panorama_2.png”.
17. Run /execute as @p at @s run teleport @s ~ ~ ~ 270 0
18. Take a screenshot and rename the new image to “panorama_3.png”.
19. Run /execute as @p at @s run teleport @s ~ ~ ~ 0 -90
20. Take a screenshot and rename the new image to “panorama_4.png”.
21. Run /execute as @p at @s run teleport @s ~ ~ ~ 0 90
22. Take a screenshot and rename the new image to “panorama_5.png”.

The rest is easy:

1. If necessary, resize all six images to 1027×1027 (VanillaTweaks stores images at this size, and upscaling from the PlanetMinecraft tutorial of 1024×1024 caused some noticeable blurriness once rendered).
2. If you don’t want an overlay haze, such as the ones VT packs with theirs, create a fully transparent 16×128 image called “panorama_overlay.png”. You MAY also be able to simply omit this completely from the resource pack file structure.
3. ZIP all six (or seven) png files along with the metadata into the following folder structure:

pack.mcmeta
pack.png
assets/minecraft/textures/gui/title/background/panorama_0.png
assets/minecraft/textures/gui/title/background/panorama_1.png
assets/minecraft/textures/gui/title/background/panorama_2.png
assets/minecraft/textures/gui/title/background/panorama_3.png
assets/minecraft/textures/gui/title/background/panorama_4.png
assets/minecraft/textures/gui/title/background/panorama_5.png
assets/minecraft/textures/gui/title/background/panorama_overlay.png

Copy the new resource pack to .minecraft/resourcepacks/ and enable it within the game, then exit to the title screen to observe the new rotating imagery of awesomeness!

The post Custom Splash Screen for Minecraft appeared first on PPSStudios.

Now I live under the umbrella of Xfinity/Comcast where this thing is. I have had many issues, namely with connectivity and a flaky cable, an old Netgear N300 router/modem and a few other things.

I also have been a Plex customer/lifetime Plex Pass holder for over 11 years. But only with the purchase of this NAS have I been able to finally get a server that actually works reliably up and running.

Over the past week, and even sporadically since I’ve imported my media library in January, I’ve had weird connection issues, namely the remote kinds, or the kinds that only crop up when you use the Android app (which forces you to resolve through app.plex.tv). I did manage to get my custom domain’s certificate changed over (the one this very blog uses). Additionally, I managed to get remote access turned on with a bit of port forwarding, and it seemed to work okay for a while. However if I were to stay on Plex’s “Remote” settings tab, I would see the connection very sporadically drop out and then resolve itself a few seconds/minutes later.

All in all, I haven’t noticed enough problems to really start to complain. I’ve been able to watch and listen to my stuff on my phone and laptop, and that’s all I want. New media I can upload via Samba from the laptop, or over the network using the extraordinarily slow Synology file manager via the web interface.

However, today was the clincher.

I have the entire collection of Harry Potter audiobooks, and in lieu of my normal podcasts during the commute to and from work, I’ve wanted to listen to these instead. Additionally, it’s nice to pull them up from anywhere and listen when I’m working on stuff. All of this on the Android.

Yet this week, PlexAmp, the audio-only client for Plex was unable to access my server at all, even on the local network. Additionally, pulling up the audiobooks through the regular Plex app would work, but shortly after the screen blacked out due to lack of visual content, the audio would pause between tracks, forcing me to unlock the phone after which play would resume almost immediately.

I decided to try and “fix” it today. I figured a good first step was to delete all authorized devices from my Plex account. Except, even despite the warnings, I also deleted the Plex Media Server from my account. Mind you, the server itself was okay. Still running, no problems, but it was no longer tied to my account, and I had no way of recovering it because, well, it’s a NAS.

I found a way to reset the login token in Preferences.xml and did so.

Then I couldn’t even access it via the custom domain connection. UGH..

So I found out how to simulate a connection to the media server as localhost via PuTTY’s SSH tunnels, since an unauthenticated Plex Media Server still lets you access it from localhost. From here, I was able to get to all of my media and, more importantly, the server settings. I was asked to log in, did so, and then received a big orange “Your server is unclaimed. Remote access is not available until you claim the media server.” I found this to mean that I was essentially still locked out, even though I was, in my browser, still logged into Plex.

A click of the claim button sat there for a few minutes, then timed out. At one point, I was able to see a barely distinguishable “Unable to claim server” error which quickly disappeared.

Over and over I tried this, tweaking settings, removing my custom domain certificate, replacing it, completely uninstalling Plex from the NAS, reinstalling an old version, all to no avail.

All online resources said that there were essentially three things that could be wrong:

• Bad/expired user token
• Improper port forwarding
• DNS Rebind Protection on the router or ISP

Well, the first two were easily tested and already verified. Just plain removing authentication strings from the Preferences.xml file was what caused this issue in the first place, and I know that port forwarding was working fine on my router, so it had to be something with the DNS.

Besides, whenever I logged into localhost:32400 (via the tunneled SSH remotely), I never saw my profile pictures or anything show up, and all server logs seemed to indicate that during the “claim” process, Plex itself was unable to contact the authentication servers.

I know they were having upstream problems earlier this morning, but https://status.plex.tv indicated that this was working just fine when I checked it. Must be something on my end.

Unfortunately this “DNS Rebind Protection” is not a thing in my N300 router. There is no place I can enter rebind-domain-ok=/plex.direct/. I have no internally running DNS server; I do everything through Cloudflare and my registrar, and Cloudflare doesn’t offer Rebind Protection as far as I know. At least, not for free.

My router does have a standard “manually configure DNS” settings section, though, and months ago I had configured it to 1.1.1.1/1.0.0.1 (Cloudflare).

Yet this was not working, and doing the same “Claim” process over and over with endless tweaks to Plex and the settings file was getting frustrating.

That’s when I decided to step out just one level and look into the Synology network settings and found… Network > General > Manually Configure DNS Server.

What could it hurt? I’ve been seeing warnings and errors all over Plex for the past 2 hours, and if, for some reason the NAS is contacting Comcast directly even though it’s SUPPOSED to resolve directly with the router and on to Cloudflare, that may still be the issue.

So I switched it to Manual, entered the Cloudflare nameservers there as well, clicked Save, and switched back over to localhost:32400. Back to the General settings tab and lo and behold….it was suddenly Just Working!

I must also note that I’ve been spending the past 3 days adding old DVD rips to my library, none of which had automatically grabbed correct metadata, and which could not be manually matched with an online title for grabbing proper metadata, but instead gave an immediate “nothing found”. All my old media was okay, but none of the new stuff had updated itself like I saw it doing the first few weeks of my running this thing.

Now with the NAS DNS settings properly pointing to Cloudflare, I had no issues matching the new titles.

So if your router doesn’t have access to this DNS Rebind Protection business, but you’re still seeing the “Unable to claim” error and you’ve tried everything, see about manually setting the DNS configuration of your actual server machine; not just hoping it will use the ones in your modem or router like it’s supposed to.

FORCE your stuff to contact Cloudflare or Google or something that won’t screw with you.

The post Plex, Synology, Xfinity and Me appeared first on PPSStudios.

However, care must be taken when upgrading to Minecraft 1.16. Lots of posts and videos have been made on how to upgrade a singleplayer world, but even more care must be taken for multiplayer, as you have a lot of other players depending on you, the sysop, to maintain their builds, their contraptions, their stuff.

I myself run a Spigot/Paper server for myself and my inlaws, and the question came up today, “So would you guys like to go explore the new nether biomes on Saturday?”

I had to remind them that, “Hey, Minecraft 1.16 may be out, but Spigot usually takes a few days and Paper is going to be behind THAT, so we may not be able to make this Saturday work. We’re relying on the punctuality of those developers. And even if we do get Spigot or Paper by Saturday, chances are very high that our favorite server plugin, EssentialsX, which gives us the /tpask, /home, and /spawn commands will not have been updated on top of that. I will do everything I can to make sure we can have some fun with new, cool things on Saturday, but I can’t guarantee it.”

As a failsafe my plan is to temporarily run the vanilla Mojang server straight-up. We’ll lose performance, and we’ll definitely lose support for the few plugins I run, namely EssentialsX, Dynmap, and DiscordSRV, but we won’t be dead in the water without those.

But this is multiplayer. I can’t magically wave a hand or flip a switch and suddenly we’re playing on 1.16 and everything works still.

Rather, I will need to spend time taking the server down temporarily (which, with only four of us is not a big deal – sometimes we go days without anybody logging in).

Once the server is down, the plan is to make a full folder backup, archive it away as “Final 1.15.2 Save.zip” or something.

Verify Backup Integrity

Optionally I can also take the world, world_the_end, and world_nether folders from the save, create a new 1.15.2 instance with my launcher and copy the save file in as its own world. There are some folder finagling steps that must be done, though.

• Copy world/ in as .minecraft/saves/worldName
• Copy world_nether/DIM-1/ in as .minecraft/saves/worldName/DIM-1
• Copy world_the_end/DIM1/ in as .minecraft/saves/worldName/DIM1

Through some testing, the playerdata/ and level.dat files in the world_the_end/ and world_nether/ folders seem to be either unused or duplicates.

Loading up the server world in singleplayer 1.15.2 should prove that yes, the server save was backed up correctly.

Verify Upgradeability

Once this is confirmed, exit and copy the entire save directory to the 1.16 saves location (if using the Vanilla launcher, this may actually be the same folder and can be loaded with a different version. But if you’re like me and using something like MultiMC, this is an entirely different instance of Minecraft so as to avoid version clashing, and so the save must be copied in full to the v1_16/.minecraft/saves/ folder).

When loading, the warning that “This world was saved in an old version of Minecraft. Upgrading is irreversible. Are you sure!?” Well we’ve already created the backup, so like with every other Minecraft Backup tutorial out there, we just say, “I know what I’m doing! Proceed with upgrade.”

Now the world is loaded in 1.16.x. Open it to a LAN with cheats, fly around, check out key builds and contraptions and confirm that they’re working.

Next travel to the Nether. If you’re like me and have only explored out to, say, (500,500), (-500,-500) that entire area will be deemed nether_wastes, and no ancient debris will be generated down at lower bedrock because …there is nothing to generate. HOWEVER, as I tested and confirmed, generating new chunks by flying past these borders do generate new nether biomes properly.

Upgrade the Server

So with the key builds listed out to re-verify, run the upgrade. For Spigot and Paper, this should be as simple as

wget -4 -O BuildTools.jar https://hub.spigotmc.org/jenkins/job/BuildTools/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/target/BuildTools.jar
java -jar BuildTools.jar --rev latest

or downloading paper-<version>.jar and changing the startup script with the new version number, and then just starting up the server like normal.

HOWEVER, if you’re like me and don’t have any essential plugins that will break your entire world if you were to leave them out, consider, at least temporarily downloading server.jar direct from minecraft.net and changing the startup script to load that directly rather than the Spigot or Paper variants.

Once this is done, it will definitely be prudent to log in, op the player or switch into creative and fly around to those various key builds and verify that they’re still functional and uncorrupted.

Vanilla back to CraftBukkit/Spigot/Paper

SpigotMC has not updated to 1.16 yet. Nobody knows how long it will be. It’s lead developer is like so many others – aloof and mysterious. However, it will be presumably updated quickly. It may be today, it may be tomorrow, it may be next month. It’s hard to gauge based on historical evidence.

And PaperMC, while known to be quick with updates, also has to wait for Spigot before it can move forward. However, Paper is also known as a drop-in replacement for Spigot that overlays on top of Spigot’s config files VERY well and only adds its own tweaks for performance. Therefore, reverting to Spigot can likely be done immediately and the re-migrating back to Paper, if there is any delay from their release after Spigot’s, will be extremely straightforward.

That said, Spigot plugins are ALSO subject to waiting for the SpigotMC core release. And plugins are even less predictable than Spigot itself! With no sarcasm, it may be months of waiting for something like Dynmap or EssentialsX to become available. A bit of hunting for some hidden beta ore pre-releases of these plugins may be available somewhere, but it will be prudent to re-add them carefully.

So as soon as Spigot updates, the plan is to carefully follow the previous backup plan. One cannot be too careful with these sorts of things. It would be wise to first revert to Spigot/Paper, making sure the server is up to date, and starting it plugin-free. Once everything is started, it will be a fairly straightforward, though possibly lengthy process to re-download new versions of plugins, load them in one at a time, restart the server, verify that they work, all of that.

Dynmap with the new Nether

This is gonna be nasty. With so many new blocks and new terrains I have very low hopes that Dynmap’s developers will be able to get something out very fast. From my sketchy knowledge of how Dynmap works, they will probably want to generate new shaders for the nether, and possibly new perspectives given that the nether is now more honeycombed than ever before, what with “vertical biomes” having been introduced.

The v0.3 branch is their default, and there seems to be no other one that has any recent developments or any telltale naming that would indicate one could self-compile it for 1.16. However, when it does finally become available, I’ve written a gist that explains my techniques of mapping the Nether Roof which also has a few steps on how to re-render an entire map from scratch, make changes in situ, cancel and re-start a render again.

Conclusion

Not much of a conclusion, as I’m only halfway through this process at the moment. I want to give SpigotMC a chance to become updated before I go whole hog and run this thing from Vanilla for the next week and a half. If they I don’t have a good, solid server version from Spigot or Paper, I will plan on switching temporarily to Vanilla.

The post Minecraft – Upgrading to a 1.16 Server appeared first on PPSStudios.