After my Burn Notice epiphany, I was still left in a dumb situation. I still wanted to watch the show. And I would be damned if I didn't find a way to.
Call me old-fashioned, so I went to Google first. Found the show on The Pirate Bay.
Are we back there? Back when there was no other way beyond the high seas? Back in the time before Gabe Newell found that if you treat people well and make things easy for them, they will give you their money.
Not going into the ethics of piracy. Not the point here. But I got a boxset of the show off eBay. Got an external DVD drive off a local store. You can imagine what came after.
I could have ended there - the show in hand, a way to watch it. Done deal, right?
Nope.
I do still think streaming is neat. And I do like little things like "Continue watching", "Next episode", multilingual subtitles. So I went to my French friend Claude. And it proposed Jellyfin. Never heard of it. Google it. Exactly what I want. A local, robust "streaming" service that I control.
But it needs to live somewhere. A machine. A server.
Ok, options include my Mac, my wife's Mac, buying a dedicated machine. Or going to that old box. You know the one. With the random bits and pieces you don't want to throw away cause still might find a use for them.
And in that box I found not one, but 2 things that did help for this - a Raspberry Pi 4 and an old external HDD I impulsively bought on sale almost 10 years ago.
And it even had an SD card in it. No idea what was on it. I assume the remnants of an old project. Doesn't matter. Reflashed Raspbian Lite onto it. Set WI-FI and SSH. Time to boot it.
Flashing lights. Booting seemingly. Time to SSH and set the thing up.
Unknown host my Mac tells me. What do you mean unknown? I see it on the router clients. It's obviously there.
Yeah, it's there. But my Mac doesn't see it. No ping, no traceroute, no ssh, no nothing.
After 6 hours of debugging this "network" issue, I remembered what that old project the RPi was for. That needed a reserved IP. And that corrupted the DNS on the Mac.
One change on the router later, I was SSHed and installing Jellyfin.
Which is honestly pretty straightforward (except mounting the old HDD). Which says a lot about the current state of Linux.
So some shuffling of files around. A bit of a wait for Jellyfin's library to update (at that point I hadn't found the Scan Library button) and we have Netflix at home. With all the bells and whistles. And it even has native clients for all the devices with screens at home. Except my old Samsung TV, but that's a story for another day.
But the engineer in me was twitchy. This is now a server that serves a service. What if it crashes? How will I know?
Obvious answer is if the Jellyfin client doesn't connect, it crashed. But I had an itch to overengineer this.
In that same box I noticed an ESP-32 board. And a small display.
With a bit of Python, both the normal and micro variety, we have a monitoring display that shows some stats at a glance. But the best part - it is neat.
And over the next few days, this RPi, now called The Batcomputer, gained a few more services.
And I do imagine the list will continue to grow.