Three tasks Done and the Smart TV

This morning we wandered back into Nantwich for a few more supplies from Morrisons supermarket.  Whilst walking down Welsh Row a large white delivery van passed us and I happened to notice the large decal on the rear doors.  It was a large plate of fish & chips with words to the effect of finest supplier of quality fish & chips to the industry.  Well that’s another of my beliefs blown out of the water.  The damned fish & chip shops don’t make their own chips or batter their fish.  It’s all bought ready made for the second cooking.  Bloody lazy cheats! 

The battered looking kiwi flag has been replaced with a new Silver Fern flag.  By this afternoon the new flag was already starting to fray at the end!  The major problem with the old flag was the red stars.  The external edge of each star had started to separate from the main flag creating a star shaped hole.

We’ve been replacing them every year.  The last two were provided by dear old mum but we won’t get any further replacements from her unless they are purchased out of my inheritance!

The second maintenance task was to check the 12V socket in the bedroom.  Jan thought there might be something loose inside.  I carefully removed the faux chrome bezel to expose the four mounting screws before removing it from the wall and extracting the 12V cylindrical socket.

After closely inspecting the socket I realised there was nothing wrong with it.  The module was then reassembled and tested.

The last task was to test the Raspberry Pi with the dumb TV.  I don’t have the equipment to setup a network access server which meant I could only test the “client” setup.  I randomly chose a few recorded TV series and copied them to a USB thumbstick which I insered into the RPi.  I then used the Samsung remote control through AnyNet+ to access the RPi which automatically loaded the main screen of the Kodi media player.

I don’t particularly like the default Kodi ‘skin’ (think blog template) but it’s easily changed. The next step was to check whether RPi and Kodi would display the TV series.  There are three display options. Large or small icons, or a list.

Large icons

Small icons

So we now have a smart TV. The one remaining RPi task I can do without having the media server is to configure it for remote pc access.  But I can’t do this until I download some software directly onto it and that requires the RPi to have direct internet access.