Continuing on from my previous post about building a home media server, this time, I’ll tell you about a brilliant piece of software called PLEX.

So what is Plex? Its a media player system that automatically organises your media in a very lovely and intuitive interface. So say you got a folder of all your media (iTunes for example) and its jumbled up all over the place. So you would like to easily watch episode 5 of  season 4 of Game of Thrones? Good luck with that, you need to find the folder, then the subfolder wherever it was saved in, find the season, and then the episode. Now imagine that you are off at your  mate’s place and you wanna watch the episode together with him, well then you are out of luck.

Not with Plex. Plex has a number of irreplaceable features:

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• Organisation by show
• Synch with the theTVDB database for:
  • High-res images of the shows, seasons, and even episodes
  • Info about each show/season/episode
  • Actors, creators, studio, etc
• Language selection for the show info
• Keeping track of what has been watched
• Prepares the next episode once the previous has been finished
• Subtitle support
• Streaming and transcoding
• etc…

And of course, allows you to easily access it anywhere you may be, from any device you may own.

If you own a lot media and would like to have it all neat, tidy and easily accessible, well this is what you have been missing all your life.

PS: And you know what makes Plex even more epic? A smart TV like AppleTV or Chromecast. That way you can stream all your media to your TV and control it with the smart remote or your phone. And of course installing Plex on a NAS is the best, as then you can de-stress your PC and not worry about having it running all the time.

Ever since I got my own computer and started watching movies, cartoons and anime, I’ve wanted to have a great collection, and back in the day the only way to do that was to save them on your computer hard drive and view them on that computer. Then I learned about the these really convenient little things called portable (external) HDDs, so I could store my media on that and then view it on a different device, and that worked great… at the time.

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Its 2016, and I in this day and age, the cloud is all the rage and there are servers all over the place in the backend for every little app. So why can’t I have one? Well of course I can.

So I decided to improve my media library by upgrading the storage, setting up a RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) and of course turning a bunch of HDDs into a full fledged server: NAS (Network-Attached Storage), which I called Accelerator. So a 1.something k$ later, I have the Synology 415+ and 18TB of storage I have a beautiful server sitting in my living room, which can be accessed from anywhere in the world with an internet connection.

Funny story, while on a highway in the middle of Malaysia, during my last adventure, I could easily download and access my music, anime or Russian TV shows from my iPhone. Thats what made me realise just how much our lives have changed with the development of the internet and smartphones.

I’ve set up my server with all the in built server features and set up all the users and permissions. The Synology DSM OS is very easy to use and has a lot of options for whatever you would like to configure.

But you might be asking: “How do you browse the media on the server? You can be just using the file system and playing it with a flash player on your browser?” And you are correct. There are amazing media server management programs out there, but the king of the all has to be PLEX.

Let me tell you about PLEX, and amazing features it has… in my next blog post.

Ever since I got a new DSLR and lenses, I have been intrigued by the opportunities it has given me in terms of my photography. I have been trying out various angles, lighting, scenery (whenever I travel) and try get photos that would leave my viewers amazed. And I thought I was doing pretty well. But as with anything, there will always be someone who is better than you. Even though that sounds discouraging, I believe that its important to befriend that person and ask them to teach, to mentor you until you acquire skills similar to theirs.

That is exactly what I have done with my photography. First, my Singaporean friend Darrell showed me the ropes, taught me the basics of manual shooting. Then in Japan, our Turkish gaijin Burak showed me some tips and tricks with night photography, moving objects and just refined my skills overall. While I was away, my potato friend Seb learned a lot about photography and pretty much taught me how to post-process photos in Lightroom to make then even better. Now after starting my new job at WiseTech Global, I have met yet another person who has amazing skills, that I would love to learn - Anton. Please check out his photos on his website FotoForge and Facebook Page. He loves taking photos of the environment: landscapes, seascapes, buildings, anything. And he invited me to take photos of the sunrise at Maroubra beach. And as you can imagine, the views were stunning. Take a look:

And so I find myself in Kuala Lumpur International Airport, sitting at my gate, having waved another goodbye to my parents, on my way back to university and work life in Sydney. The holiday is over, even though it feels like it has only just begun.

Malaysia is a great country, with very calm and kind people, good food and interesting places. Over the pas week and a half we have explored KL and its surroundings, visited the new “capita” Putrajaya, and even went to good old port town Malaka. Oh did I mention we fed monkeys? We fed monkeys! All this before setting down in a beach resort on the tropical island Langkawi. We spent a good week in Langkawi just laying on the beach/by the pool, playing games of Uzhgorod style “Hungarian Joker” and shopping around the local boutiques.

Alas the holiday is over and now I must catch my flight back to my home down under. See you space cowboy.

Photos on my:

You have probably heard about this case, but for those that haven’t: the FBI have ordered Apple to create a version of iOS that would allow the FBI to access a terrorists smartphone in hopes of finding some valuable clues to the case and possible links to other terrorists. What they affectively want is for Apple to compromise their own security “for this one case” and then “un-compromise” it again. Let that sink in.

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The debate over encryption is a long one, and as John Oliver points out in his Last Week Tonight episode (video below), the government has long wanted to be able to access our information in order to protect us, or so they claim. Not to sound completely biased here, I believe the that the government of any state should do everything in its power to protect their citizens from harm. However that should not come at the expense of the citizens privacy, ala 1984 or V for Vendetta.

The people in the FBI firmly believe that it is possible to create a ‘backdoor’ that would be ‘safe’ in the hands of the government. The US government, who’s data got breached multiple times by international hackers. The US government that got its classified documents leaked from the inside… twice… I don’t know about you, but I personally would not want the US government to safe keep a key that could allow people to break into my devices.

There is a fine line between protection of the population and privacy invasion. And it seams that some countries would rather lean more on the former then the later.

And one more thing, they fail to realise that even if they succeed in this particular case, they can not outlaw all methods of encryption, they can not prevent people form communicating privately and securely. This is beyond them.

Lets see how this case plays out, because its outcome will set a precedent for the future of security and privacy.

Last time I updated my visit country list, it was at 47. Well as of today, I’ve passed the 50 mark. Now I shall enjoy my holiday in unique country that is Malaysia. Expect photos!

The full list of countries is right here:

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1. Canada
2. United States of America
3. Mexico
4. Cuba
5. Venezuela
6. Brazil
7. Argentina
8. Spain
9. France
10. Great Britain
11. Germany
12. The Netherlands
13. Italy
14. Monaco
15. Switzerland
16. Lichtenstein
17. Austria
18. Czech Republic
19. Slovakia
20. Hungary
21. Croatia
22. Greece
23. Poland
24. Ukraine
25. Belarus
26. Lithuania
27. Latvia (original home)
28. Estonia
29. Norway
30. Sweden
31. Finland
32. Russia (motherland)
33. Turkey
34. Egypt
35. Kenya
36. Botswana
37. Zambia
38. South Africa
39. United Arab Emirates
40. Maldives
41. China
42. Thailand
43. Singapore
44. Indonesia
45. Vietnam
46. Cambodia
47. Japan
48. South Korea
49. Australia (current home)
50. Fiji
51. Malaysia

For my family travels this year, we decided to head over to Malaysia. However, on the way there, I got a great opportunity to visit my friends in the small island-country-city - Singapore.

After arriving there and meeting up with my good buddies from urbanest - Wilmer and Darrel. I checked into the Ruck Sack Inn in Little India, which got refurbished recently, so it was a rather pleasant environment for me to stay for 2 night, plus it was cheap. We met up with Mr. Schumacher - Nian, and proceeded to a traditional Singaporean chilly crab restaurant and then drinks afterwards. Man, what can I say, the chilly crab was amazing, but it made me realise how bad I am at eating crab.

The next day was fully packed as well: Gardens by the Bay, walking around downtown and CBD, Funan Centre, Bay area at night and some great satays for dinner. And finally the last day was spent in Little India, Chinatown and just out and about the area, all the touristy stuff.

Huge thanks to Wilmer, Darrell and Nian for the warm welcome in the 30° hot Singapore. And now I am off to see my parents in Kuala Lumpur.

Photos here:

Today I would like to introduce you to a browser extension you never knew you would need, but will not be able to live without. Its called WikiWand and it will change the way you interact with WikipediA forever!

Basically whenever you open a wikipedia.com article, it will automatically style it with high res images, body margination, a great navigation pane on the left, and just general improvements all over. There is a shortcut for searching (ctrl twice), settings for text size/serif font, favourite language options and more. These additions might sound like not that big of a deal, but when combined together, they make for a much more refined wikipedia browsing experience.

So if you use wikipedia a lot, or even once in a while, I would highly recommend you get yourself this extension and enjoy a new way of wiki-ing.

As you all know, Blizzard has made a lot of great games in the past. Memorable titles such as Warcraft III, Diablo II, Starcraft and of course currently WoW have all been hugely successful in their genres. One of their latest games (well it came out in 2014) is Hearthstone. It is a collectable card game, where you fight one on one against opponents from all over the world. Hearthstone is based of the Warcraft universe, so for people who have played Warcraft III and/or WoW, the characters/minions/spells will be very familiar.

Like any other card game out there, you have a deck, which contains minions, spells, and weapons. Each hero has 30 health and your objective is to bring down the health of your opponent to 0. Its a lot of fun, and you gotta give props to blizzard for making a f2p game for the masses, that can be played on mobile and doesn’t require much skill in order to play. Of course if you want to reach legendary rank, then you need skill, luck and a whole heap of cards.

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Well since I started playing it more often in December, it has become my goal to reach Legendary as soon as possible. So I started reading up on decks in the current meta, watching pros play in competitions and stream games, and just play more to practice and climb up the ladder. Last season I reached rank 7, which I think is very decent for me, who only started properly playing in December. So now its time to take that extra step and achieve something worth telling people about. Also very recently I have been turned into a hearthstone card myself! I am MC aka John Cena aka Dr. 6 - the staple of secrets paladin. My friend made a card that perfectly represents me! I am the Latvian Paladin. I charge my way to victory. I taunt all the lowly people on my way. And I will definitely reveal all my secrets when I die (my hard drives can guarantee that). But unfortunately these great stats did not make it to print, and I my great 2/3 for 3 mana became 2/3 for 7 mana, thus rendering the card useless and unplayable. But it will always live in the deck in my heart <3

Want to learn about the history of Japan in less than 10 minutes? Well here is a video for you.

PS. Beware of memes.