Exploring Plex, or Trying To

UPDATE (31 August 2026): Maybe I misunderstood what the problem was with getting Plexamp to stream from my servers. I’m able to stream the music now even when I’m not on the household wifi network, so maybe I don’t need access to the router after all. (I think maybe my Plex server was just down at the time when I tried to test it.) That’s positive news. I’ve even set up a couple of small Plex servers for use in the classroom, assuming I can stream there, because I’d prefer to use that than to be dependent on whatever media …

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The (Great?) Restoration, and Looking Forward

So, one of the things I’ve been doing behind the scenes, a few posts at a time, is restoring posts and comments that ended up with garbled text. Something was set up incorrectly with this blog’s database, and I had a bunch of UTF-8 text stored in the database, except the database was set to latin-1 encoding. This worked, until it didn’t.  So anyway, I hired someone to fix it, and he was able to repair most of the database, but there were a couple of hundred comments and posts that had garbled text even despite the fix. (Presumably they …

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Another Kind of Return

I recently wrote about our return to Korea, and about the return of some manuscripts I’d thought lost. But I’ve had another return recently, and I thought it’s worth commemorating in a post. That is: I’ve returned to fiction writing.  I haven’t written a new story in several years—since well before the pandemic—and most of that had to do with having a kid around, and a (more than) full time job, and translation work on the side. I did some RPG writing, including publishing a couple of books over the past few years. But I’ve wanted to get back to …

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What I’ve Been Up To Since Getting Back

Here’s what I’ve been doing lately:  Reading Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. I brought a copy with me to Canada, thinking I would have time to read on the plane, and here and there during the trip. Turns out traveling with a kid eats into one’s reading time severely. My copy (the Penguin edition of Robin Buss’s translation) of  is about 1200 pages long, and I only hit about page 150 by the end of the trip. (I’m just past 300 pages now, though, and briskly making my way beyond that. Working on edits for a novella we’ve translated. …

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Returns and Recoveries

So, I was in Canada with our son for about ten days from the end of July until early August. A lot happened, and it was nice to see my sisters and their families, who gave us a warm welcome, as well as my friend Ian (who drove up to Vancouver to see us). It was also nice to properly give our son a little experience of Canada. We did a lot of things: aside from family time, which was most of our time in Saskatoon,  we visited the Forestry Farm and did some shopping in Saskatoon, played mini-golf and …

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