October 17,

juggling computers

I had some trouble with the VPN client on my work laptop this week, and (long story short), it turns out that I can’t RDP into my work laptop from my home PC and connect to VPN anymore. That’s the way I’ve been doing WFH since 2020 (and probably earlier): I boot up both my home desktop PC and my laptop, then remote into the laptop from the PC, so I can use my full-size keyboard, mouse, and monitor.

But that doesn’t work anymore, and apparently is also a violation of our AUP. (Oops.) Luckily, I have a 2-port KVM here, which I bought when I got my new Windows 11 PC a few months ago. I’ve been using it recently to switch back and forth between the Win 11 PC and the old Win 10 PC, which is now an Ubuntu PC.

So, for now, I’ve got the Win 11 PC on port 1 and my work laptop on port 2. That’s only slightly less convenient than my old method of connecting, but now I need to think about upgrading to a 4-port KVM, so I can have all three machines hooked up at once.

I can’t say I’m thrilled about that idea, since I only just recently bought the 2-port KVM. And I’m not thrilled about all the extra cords I’ll have dangling all over the place. Maybe I should go back to thinking about discarding the old Win 10 (now Ubuntu) PC. I don’t really have a good use case for it; it was just something to do with the old box, for fun. Maybe I should be looking to simplify things, instead of making them even more complicated.

Old Media

I went down a rabbit hole over the weekend, and I thought it might be fun to write up some notes on it. I had decided that I wanted to watch Magnificent Butcher, a Sammo Hung movie from 1979. I have it on DVD, so I pulled it out of my random DVD pile and stuck it in my Xbox.

The Xbox appeared to boot up, but I couldn’t get anything to show on the screen, and I couldn’t eject the DVD. Long story short, I eventually got the DVD out and the XBox working, but it was stuck in 640×480 resolution. I eventually got it back to normal 4K resolution, but that’s another long story.

So back to the Sammo Hung DVD: I decided that this might be a good excuse to experiment once again with DVD ripping, and watching ripped DVDs on my Apple TV. I have HandBrake installed on my PC, with libdvdcss, but I haven’t used it in a long time. Well, it still works, and I ripped the DVD with no problems.

Next issue: how to watch it on the Apple TV. First, I decided to hook up an external USB drive to my new router. My old router supported an external USB drive too, but I tried it once and found it to be slow and unreliable. So I thought I’d give the new one a try and see if it was better. Well, it was. I hooked up an old 500 GB SSD, formatted as NTFS. The router recognized it, no problem. It automatically exposed it via Samba. I had no trouble accesssing it from my Mac or PC. And it’s pretty fast! So I copied the .mp4 file for the movie up to it, along with a few other random .mp4 files I had on my PC.

Next, I had to decide how to access that shared drive from the Apple TV. I already had VLC installed on the device, so I tried that. It connected to the Samba share, no problem, and let me watch the movie. So I guess I have a pretty good way of watching random .mp4 files on my Apple TV now.

So maybe I should go buy Ladyhawke from Rifftrax and watch that! I’ve been tempted to buy videos from Rifftrax before, but I’ve always held off, since I didn’t have a simple way to watch them on my TV.

I also remembered that I’d copied a few Akira Kurosawa movies from my TiVo to my MacBook several years ago (2016, apparently), via cTiVo. I gave one of those a try, and it works with VLC on the Apple TV too, so now I can copy those files over to the drive and watch them from Apple TV.

And that got me curious about whether or not cTiVo would work on my current MacBook. Well, it does. It was updated earlier this year, and should keep working for a while longer, though I guess it’s on its last legs.

So now I’m copying a few more Kurosawa movies up to my Mac, and I’ll copy those over to the drive tomorrow, so I can have a little Kurasawa marathon at some point in the future. (Of course, there’s no reason I can’t watch the ones that are still on the TiVo, on the TiVo, but…)

I also took an old scratched DVD that wouldn’t play on my Xbox and ripped it on my PC. It didn’t give me any errors, though that doesn’t guarantee that the .mp4 is perfect. I’ll try watching that soon, I think. (The movie is Syriana, and I’ve had the DVD for years, and just never got around to replacing it. So now I can finally watch it! Probably!)

As an alternative to VLC, I’ve considered Infuse, which is probably better, or at least prettier. And of course there’s Plex, which I’ve tried before, and was just too much of a hassle.

Looking at the Plex web site right now, they seem to be de-emphasizing their original purpose as a way to stream your own media, and are now touting the ability to watch free live TV via their app. Most of what they have seems like the same kind of stuff you can get via Pluto, so I’m not sure why anyone would be too excited about it. But OK.

So, anyway, I now seem to have a relatively hassle-free way to watch .mp4 files on my Apple TV. I don’t think I’m going to go on a bender, ripping a bunch of my old DVDs, but I may take some of the more questionable ones and rip those. (Maybe some more old Kung Fu movies that might be a little scratched up.)

NJ Transit

I stumbled across this headline in the NY Times yesterday, and briefly thought that they’d actually come up with a deal to replace or repair the Portal Bridge: “This New Jersey Bridge Will No Longer Sabotage Rush Hour.” But no, they’ve only come up with a deal to avoid opening it during rush hour. So it’s still going to sabotage weekend riders like me. (The NJ.com headline is more direct: “The rusty, commute-killing Portal Bridge will never open during rush hour again.”) The current status of the Portal Bridge replacement project is still, basically, stalled and going nowhere, as far as I can tell.

Meanwhile, the North Jersey Coast Line 2606 has been declared “the Very Worst Commuter Train in America” in a NY Times article. And NJ Transit has canceled as many as 29 trains in one day, due to a lack of engineers. But, hey, they added seven new engineers yesterday, so that’s a good sign. But, as the article points out, “they need a staff of 400 qualified engineers to avoid service interruptions. The current complement is 343.”

Veep Head Writer David Mandel Builds a Private Museum

Mr. Mandel […] now has two homes in Los Angeles: one where he lives with his wife and two children; and another, his former bachelor’s apartment, that houses his extensive collection of comic-book and “Star Wars” memorabilia.

Source: The ‘Veep’ Head Writer David Mandel Builds a Private Museum – The New York Times

I read this article, and now I’m super-jealous of this guy. He has the best of both worlds: a nice house, with a wife and kids, and a spare apartment on the side, filled with comic books and toys! Meanwhile, I’ve still got just the apartment: no house, no wife, no kids. And I donated most of my comics to charity, so I don’t even have them to keep me warm at night.

I’m also jealous of his original art collection, which he started putting together in the 90s, at San Diego cons, when prices were (relatively) low. I, too, spent some time at those cons, but, for me, original art was always outside my budget. He was writing for Seinfeld at the time, so his budget at SDCC was likely a bit larger than mine. He talks about spending $5000 at the show on art; my budget for a given con was never more than $500. (I usually came home with a big bag full of discount trade paperbacks and random single issues out of the dollar bins.) Of course, if I knew how much some of that art would appreciate in value, I would have taken a loan against my 401(k) and bought a bunch of it. I’d be selling it about now, and taking early retirement.

I get a kick out of the fact that this was published in the “Men’s Style” section of the Times. (Not a section I would normally read; it only surfaced for me due to my keyword search on “comics.”) I’m not sure when having a spare apartment full of comics and toys went from “disreputable eccentricity” to “admirable lifestyle choice,” but I’m glad it did.