• 5 Posts
  • 211 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
Cake day: June 9th, 2024
  • sem@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•How can I play videos downloaded from my computer on a TV without network connectivity features?
    11·
    3 days ago

    I have a few devices that serve this purpose. The one I’d recommend is Kodi. This is a non-commercial media center program that has one purpose in life: play media files on the TV.

    IIRC you can buy some commercial devices that come with Kodi pre-installed, with a USB port. You could also set up a shared network folder. I haven’t researched any of these.

    What worked best for me was a raspberry pi with libreelec installed – an operating system that makes it easy to run Kodi. You can even control it by default with the TV’s remote control, just through the HDMI connection. Make sure you have a good quality power supply.

    The other thing I’ve used is a steam link, but it is a little clunky to get it to play smoothly over the network.

  • sem@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•What are your experiences with homestays?
    5·
    3 days ago

    I’ve done it a few times way back with wwoof, met some people doing helpX, and there was one more common one I can’t remember.

    I met some really cool people and got to travel to some really interesting places without having to spend a huge amount of money. For me it was a working holiday – I was on vacation from my real life, doing farm work outdoors, working at a BNB, etc.

    First place I worked at was a small organic farm in Florida with vegetable produce and chickens, right up against a commercial orange grove. The people I met came from all walks of life from friendly drunks who had steel reserve for breakfast to big city liberals to religious fundamentalists to nature lovers, and everybody was united by the fact that they loved fresh, good food, and you couldn’t get it any fresher than picking it yourself.

    We had oranges all the time from the commercial grove, and used wild hybrid oranges as salad dressing (sour). One of the best meals I’ve ever had is when we made mashed potatoes with some spuds we found while preparing a row for planting, and they turned out to be Japanese sweet potatoes. For a while, raccoons were figuring out how to steal our egg allowance and that sucked but we straightened it out. We were usually done with our farm chores by the afternoon and could drive down to the beach, nature reserve, or karaoke (the drunks’ favorite). One guy bought us all drinks at the bar because we looked like we were in a band, but we were like, no we just work on a farm. One night it got pretty cold - below freezing - and we were camping at this normally warm place - but everyone found a way to survive, bunking up with friends, staying with the farmer or the neighbors.

    That was by far the best experience I had doing it, and it was my first. I had gone there with a friend who had researched and planned it out.

    Other places were an avocado orchard/homestead in NZ that was switching from conventional ag to organic, and the host had run a hostel previously, so loved the company of travelers working around the place - and she was up really early doing all the chores. We had our own shared housing separate from their house, but we’d go over there for family dinners or to play card games or watch movies after the work day. On our days off, they were fantastic in recommending local nature spots to check out and things to do.

    There were two places I can remember nope’ing out of. One was a spot on a mountaintop some of our wwoof friends had worked at and recommended, but our car broke down on the way up, and one of his neighbors came out with an axe to grind and warned us that he was weird around women, etc, and we didn’t entirely believe her but didn’t want to be in the middle of that argument.

    Another time we were going to work at a berry farm, and they all seemed pretty stressed there, so I decided not to work there, but my friend still wanted to, so we did our own things for a few days.

    Another cool spot was the bed and breakfast - it was run by a scientist guy who was renovating his old family homestead, and he had a small army of wwoofers helping him. Lots of interesting work, lots of home diy and cool history, and a beautiful property, but there was a big music festival happening that my friend and all the other wwoofers were going to, but I wasn’t interested in. So they all left and I stayed on for the busiest time of the year for his BNB. I was cooking omelet breakfasts for the guests and doing loads and loads of linen laundry to make the beds fresh, and really got to know the host and his sister who was visiting to help out. Iirc they were both also very nice about telling us locally known spots to check out, and I took some surfing lessons while I was there with some of the other wwoofers, and we went to a big natural waterslide place which was a blast.

    Last place I remember doing was kind of a bummer. It was a small farm in NY state, but a decent sized operation with 15+ people all told, including a full time mechanic for the farm equipment. And it was really close to some great rock climbing, with beautiful fall foliage. They had me working in the washroom which was pretty cold and wet, and sometimes gross, and got colder and wetter as the fall got on. I was living in a plywood shack that shared a wall with two other workers from Jamaica who were nice guys – they actually worked for a tree service, but just lived there on the farm with their friends the other farmworkers. But it was unheated and not great to breathe in the plywood fumes, and listen to their conversations all night, etc. This place also had the hardest work, and was the most downtrodden, with the most difficult personalities, especially the washroom manager and to some extent the farmer. We didn’t work together on communal meals or keeping common areas clean, which was unpleasant, and I ended up eating a lot of PB&j on admittedly very good bread, and frozen (homemade) pizzas the farmer traded for produce from a local restaurant, but not much of the great produce we were shipping out. Besides tomatoes, they had great tomatoes. I stuck it out for a good part of the fall season, and climbed a lot on my days off, but I ended up leaving early when it started not being such a healthy place to be.

    All in all I definitely recommend it, especially the work holiday visa in NZ. I learned a lot, and it was a great experience.