Having a home media center is really handy. It can do a ton of things besides just storing and playing your movies and TV series. You can also use them as network-accessible storage or an automated backup system or can even set them up as emulators to play vintage arcade games. The really amazing thing is that you can automate some tasks that you didn't even know wanted to be automated. In this article, we will explore one such automated workflow.
Force Janitor to work with your upgraded Kodi installation
Janitor is an addon for Kodi that will automatically scan your library for watched movies, TV show episodes and music videos based on criteria such as age, rating or free disk space. I set it up to delete what we already saw after 2 days except if it is in a protected folder. It is a great tool to free up disk space on your device, but if you upgrade to a version of Kodi that is not supported, it will be disabled and you will have to delete stuff manually again.
How to fix Kodi black screen after upgrading to a new version
Just had this happen to me. I didn't really watch what I was doing and issued the "sudo apt-get dist-upgrade" command which for some weird reason removed Kodi from my system. After reinstalling it with "sudo apt-get install kodi" all I got was a black screen instead of the Kodi user interface.
Skipping YouTube ads in Chrome, Firefox, and Android
Ads are pretty annoying when you just want to look up something really quick on Youtube. Not as if they aren't annoying all the time, but when you are looking up instructions on CPR, you definitely don't need a long advertisement on hamburgers.
Using Barrier to control multiple computers regardless of operating system
I don't often use multiple monitors at once, but when I do, I'm using multiple computers too. I'm mainly doing this to test websites on multiple operating systems as my desktop machine runs Linux Mint and my work laptop has Windows 10 on it. Of course I could use Virtualbox to run any number of operating systems, but having a separate device makes things a bit more simple for me. What I despise is using the laptop keyboard and the trackpad. Wouldn't it be nice if I could use the desktop keyboard and mouse on the laptop too?
Time to ditch macOS for Windows 10 with Boot Camp
Though the MacBook Pro hardware is simply put amazing, I could not learn to love macOS in the last 3 months and its quirks started to greatly impede my productivity. By no means am I enamored of Windows, but it fits my usual workflow way better than macOS ever did. I’m a linux fan in my heart, but for work I am often required to use MS Office products so this need for seamless compatibility left only one option.
Forward and back mouse buttons in macOS
Did you know that one of the most frequent mouse actions is clicking the back button of the web browser? If you use Windows, this can be achieved without aiming the pointer if your mouse has dedicated buttons for the forward and back functionality. Unfortunately, if you plan to use your non-Apple budget gaming mouse with macOS, you are gonna have a bad time as macOS doesn’t support this handy feature by default.
macOS shortcuts cheat sheet for beginners
Imagine my surprise when I realised that I have to re-learn a ton of shortcuts I used constantly in Windows and Linux. Why? Because in macOS going to the start of the line in a text editor is not as simple as pressing the [Home] button...
Hungarian macOS keyboard guide to newbies
Switching to Mac from Windows should have been a joy - and if I used the standard US keyboard layout it probably would have been less of a nightmare. In that case I only would have had to re-learn about 20 shortcuts to be effective again.
Using a Hungarian Windows/Linux-like keyboard layout on a Mac
I was really excited that I would be able to use a Mac for the first time in my life at the new job I landed. After using Windows and Linux for more than 20 years in parallel this seemed to be a great opportunity to try something new.