I am a: Quirky sysadmin. Geek. Gamer. Comic fangirl. My little space, my home on the interwebs. I blog about personal stuffs, work, various coding projects, and anything else I feel like.

Happy New Year, everyone!

I dunno ’bout y’all, but this still feels like 2020 to me. Are we sure 2021 is actually here?

My Christmas was … heavy. But at least it’s finally passed. I can breathe again, and finally move forward. I won’t elaborate, let’s just say family drama was at an all-time high, and had we all been together it probably would have been a lot worse. My folks had a “drive-by” Christmas with me, then my brother and his family. I hate that I didn’t get to see everyone open what I gave them, but the feedback I got was well-received.

The holidays this year felt lonelier than ever, but I mean, what can ya do? My relationship with the love interest has been on hold since COVID’s shitstorm hit his house pretty hard. I’m really hoping we can reconnect in a few months or so, but I’ll be honest … I’m not going to hold my breath. I mean, I’m upset over the loss of the relationship because things were going really REALLY well and we had future plans. But I’ve had time to grieve, and I’m just chillin’ for now. Maybe we’ll hit it off again, or maybe we won’t. I’m not in a hurry to find someone right now. Lord knows the dating pool around here could use some chlorine. I still have fools hitting me up on social media sending me all sorts of shit they shouldn’t. Kinda makes a woman not want to even try.

So anyways, Cyberpunk 2077 was finally released. Love it. I think I’ve spent more time in that game than anything else lately, even GW2. Love it. There’s so many features that I love from other games (such as GTA, Saints Row, and even VtM:Bloodlines). Love it. Plus there’s the exceptionally lovely Keanu Reeves in it too, which is also nice. LOVE HIM! Heh. That was part of my Christmas gift to myself (well, late anyways). Plus I also bought myself an nVidia Shield TV device. It’s kinda like my Roku and AppleTV, but a bit more. I can also run a Plex server on it, which was the main appeal. I’ve been wanting to setup a Plex Media Server for some time, and this gives me a chance to set it up the way I want.

It’s been a bit of a learning curve figuring out how to do the things I want to do on it. There’s no real way to remote into the box GUI and control it (spoiler alert: TeamViewer does NOT work!), but I was able to find the command line interface to allow me to do what I want, which has made me happy. :)

First I had to enable adb (Android Debug Bridge). To do this I had to enable the dev options. While in the Shield GUI, go to Settings, Device Preferences, About. Scroll to the bottom and tap the Build number 7 times. Yes, seriously. Once you see a “You are now a developer!” message on the bottom of your screen, press back on the remote, and hit Status. Make a note of your IP address listed there, you will need it in a minute. Now go back and open the Developer options at the bottom of Device Preferences. Scroll down to Network debugging and make sure it’s enabled.

OK, so doing this allows us to connect via adb without having to hook up the Shield to our machine via USB (I dunno about you, but I ain’t got time for dat). Also: If you don’t already have them, download the Android SDK and extract to somewhere on your PC. Open up a DOS prompt, navigate to your extracted SDK, and connect to your device (obviously substituting your device’s IP):

adb connect 172.0.0.1

The very first time you connect, the Shield device will ask for authorization, so be sure to grant that!

Once connected, you can verify by using:

adb devices

If you wanted to reboot your device, you’d use:

adb shell reboot

To sideload (install) third party applications, you’d use:

adb install “C:\Path\to\Application_name.apk”

I hope sharing this here helps someone. It took me 2 days to figure all this stuff out via bits and pieces here and there on Reddit and the Plex user forums. I’m not Android-savvy, which is probably part of my problem, but once I installed a file viewer and examined the guts and OS, it didn’t look all that different from my iPhone.

So now I’m spending my time moving files from my backup drive onto the new external drive that will be feeding my Plex server. I’ve already finished moving music, and will have to fix some tags here and there tonight, but plan to move movies and TV shows a bit at a time every night this week (around my PVPing in GW2) and hopefully be finished this weekend.

I can’t wait! :)

Here’s a screenshot of the first import attempt. There’s a lot more coming once I fix tags: