Weeknotes 203

Still no closer to getting my parcel. Can you believe I’ve placed a third order because I’m just sick of waiting and there’s no way to retrieve my parcel. I’m aware it will now almost certainly be delivered.

A quick look at LiveView’s LiveDebugger! – cool project.

Quite unbelievably I’m still working on updating my addresses.

so I can start updating my address all over the place

On Companies House this is easier said than done. I think it’s universally understood that GDS have done an incredible job on gov.uk. It’s fast. It’s easy to use. Something to be proud of even. However, there are lots of government departments who are still clinging onto the past and you know you’re in trouble when you click a link and end up looking at a completely different website with an early 2000’s vibe.

Companies House has some of the most confusing, bug-ridden, forms I’ve ever had the misfortune to use. World-class bad forms. They’re not even complicated, we’re talking address fields with a few buttons. How are they messing this up?

Eventually I pressed the buttons in the correct order by some miracle and it seems to have worked now. I hope this will be the end of it.

Another long awaited mini-project got done this week. Moving my Plex installation to run under Docker. Docker is my preferred way to run software on my home server these days, especially as I gradually move my config into git piece by piece.

We heavily rely on Plex in our house, so I did not want to break this. These are the steps I took.

• Create a directory to store Plex config files.

  sudo mkdir /opt/appdata/plex
  

• Disabled the “Empty trash automatically after every scan” in the Plex settings.

• Turned off the existing Plex server

  sudo systemctl stop plexmediaserver
  

• Backed up my Plex installation directory just in case

  sudo tar -czvf ~/plex_backup.tar.gz /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/
  

• Found out what the plex user and group IDs where from the host system. These need to match what we’re going to put in the docker-compose.yml config file to stave off any potential permissions issues.

  $ id plex
  uid=113(plex) gid=118(plex) groups=118(plex),44(video)
  

• Created this Docker Compose config

 version: "3"

 services:
+  plex:
+    container_name: plex
+    image: plexinc/pms-docker:latest
+    restart: unless-stopped
+    network_mode: host
+    environment:
+      - TZ=Etc/UTC
+      - PLEX_UID=1000  # `plex` user on the host
+      - PLEX_GID=1000  # `plex` group on the host
+      - PLEX_CLAIM=<yout-token> # Claim token from https://www.plex.tv/claim/
+
+    volumes:
+      # Config
+      - /opt/appdata/plex:/config
+
+     # Media directories
+      - /movies:/movies¬
+      - /music:/music¬
+      - /tv:/tv¬
+
+    devices:¬
+      - /dev/dri:/dev/dri # Intel QuickSync support

• I copied over my existing Plex Library directory to /opt/appdata/ which is where I’ve chosen to store Docker container state.

  sudo cp -r /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/ /opt/appdata/plex/
  

  I knew I’d need to move some files to be accessible to the new Docker container, but it wasn’t clear to me which parts needed to go where. This worked for me.

• Get Plex claim token from https://www.plex.tv/claim/ and add it to the docker-compose.yml config. This automatically connects the new Plex server to your logged in user account.

• Start the new container

  docker-compose up -d plex
  

• Profit!

All this procrastination and fuss and it worked first time.

Late posting this week because we went to the Scottish Highlands for a long weekend. I’ve only been to Edinburgh and Glasgow before now, so this was a different side of Scotland I hadn’t seen before (with the exception of a 9 hour bus tour starting and ending in Glasgow during which I saw a lot of the inside of a minibus).

Living further north certainly affords us the opportunity to drive to Scotland now whereas I would never have considered before. And drive we did, through some of the most beautiful countryside in this country. We passed through or near the Yorkshire Dales, Pennines, Lake District, and Highlands. And some cracking services too 😉

We stayed in a lovely Airbnb outside of Inverness and visited several local tourist attractions, of which there are many, including Loch Ness (a little-known small lake), Urquhart Castle, Clava Cairns (a load of rocks), Culloden Viaduct (a load of better organised rocks), and Fort George.

On the way we split up the journey by staying in Perth overnight, but we did the whole trek in my go on the way back, which is a long way, but not nearly as bad as I’d feared.

Completely unrelated but remember that if you run out of pants whilst on holiday you can get them sent to an Amazon Locker somewhere along your journey route 👌

Back to it. Whatever “it” is.