Setting up the ultimate automated home media center

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.

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?

Creating an installer for Windows from your JAR file to easily distribute your Java project

Your first Java project finally runs from the command line and you want to share it with your friends to show the spectacular progress you made. All you need to do is to create a compressed jar file and send it to them, right? Not quite as in case they have no Java Runtime Environment (JRE) installed or have a different version from the one you used, all they will get is a criptic error message.