Pupdate

Cold and dry April gave way to wet and windy May, but at least the bluebells were out and beautiful for scamping around:

Podcast

We’ve had some great guests on the show during May, and some fantastic episodes coming up.

We also added a discussions feature to the web site, and Olivier Jacques came along with a pull request to add per episode discussions. It feels like there’s a community starting to build around what we’re doing, which is great :)

When lightning strikes

I wrote a little while ago about adding by Gigabyte Brix to my lounge media setup, so it was a bit of a head scratcher when I fired it up to watch an Always Be Comedy Tuesday Night Club with Rachel Parris & Marcus Brigstocke, and the screen was blank.

I then tried other inputs to my AV receiver, and nothing was working; and then I remembered the very close, very loud lightning strike earlier in the day – oops :(

The death toll was pretty severe:

• Digital Video Recorder (and Blu-ray player) – HDMI fried – trashed
• Gigabyte Brix mini PC – HDMI fried – now having to use mini DP port
• Raspberry Pi B v1.1 – HDMI fried – seems to still boot, so may live on headless in another project
• AV Receiver – HDMI fried – still seems to work from other input types

Luckily the TV survived intact, along with my Fire stick.

Initially I rigged up the AV receiver to take an optical input from the TV, which meant I could still get surround sound, but only ‘analogue’ Dolby Prologic II rather than proper Dolby Digital or DTS. After a few days I was able to get a replacement (slightly newer) AV receiver on eBay, which is now in place.

BBQ

I had another go at smoking, this time with some pork shoulder along with a larger piece of brisket. It turned out really well:

That pork didn’t need any pulling, it just fell apart.

The cover for my Kamado Joe finally arrived, after being out of stock for many months.

Beating Beat Saber

No noteworthy progress on my Full Combo quest, but I have been able to play mutli-player a few times, which has been fun.

It’s a little annoying though that music packs only work when everybody’s bought them – feels like a missed opportunity for ‘try before you buy’ (even if it was time limited).