dotfiles VS dizquetv

I'm slightly embarrassed that in terms of building personally relevant things, my proudest (digital) work is always shell scripts I use daily. Most of my personal projects are non-technical meat-space things like building with wood and the like. Here's some that I've open-sourced:

- A git interface using fzf that works pretty nicely and is very composable. https://github.com/bigH/git-fuzzy

- An interactive evaluator, perfect for interactive `sed`, `grep`, `jq`, etc. If properly configured, it'll keep history per command or using whatever key you give it. I find myself using it often with `jq`. https://github.com/bigH/interactively

There are many other shell functions/scripts that are interesting from my `dotfiles`. Particularly interesting snippets for anyone who wants them:

- A recursize `which` that follows symlinks and stops at a real file. https://github.com/bigH/dotfiles/blob/3d48792b4e910d2fc82504...

- A `watch` alternative that runs in the current shell. https://github.com/bigH/dotfiles/blob/3d48792b4e910d2fc82504...

In my experience, modern entertainment takes too much cognitive load to get up and running. With streaming/on demand, I have to make pointed decisions on what show I'm watching. I don't always want to make a decision right now of what to watch, I just want to watch something that's good enough or fits a certain theme. TV Channel creation programs, like DizqueTV[0] or ErsatzTV[1] have taken the load off, or at least lets me do that cognitive work in advance when making the channels.

You still need some way to get input to swap between these digital channels (I use Plex to surface my shows and schedule), but if you have existing local content it really feels like the "old" way of doing TV. You can even add commercials between episodes if you wanted!

I'm not sure if I'd call this foolproof for a 94-year-old, especially since sometimes the software needs to restart, but it's a step above modern streaming IMO.

[0] https://github.com/vexorian/dizquetv

Check out https://github.com/vexorian/dizquetv

For those interested in doing something similar there's a Plex add-on for making custom TV channels:

https://github.com/vexorian/dizquetv

Personally I want almost this. I want to rotate the TV shows my kids watch in the morning but I don't want to start part way through a show (the one part of the old analogue experience that I don't miss at all). Difficult to square that circle.

My idea is for each screen plugged in to its own Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 4GB running at the CLI. The Pi would have its own instance of dizqueTV and its stream viewed through some type of custom program running SMPlayer that is also on the PI and outputting the to hdmi port. DizqueTV would have FFMPEG disabled and the content directly accessed per this guide: https://github.com/vexorian/dizquetv/wiki/Raspberry-guide

I have a potato (J4105) Plex server and tried DizqueTV, ErsatzTV and Jason's DizqueTV fork very recently. But I couldn't get it stable unfortunately. When one series would work great, another one wouldn't, or even refused to play. Or certain program boundaries made the player crash from time to time. And watermark overlays were another story of it's own.