The Week In A Bad Education Towers #21

Not going to lie, nearly forgot today

You know what I did this morning? Woke up (kinda) early and watched the Royal Rumble. Well, I say watched, I watched the men's Rumble then a couple of other matches.

Spoilers ahead if you haven't watched the show yet!

But thats an improvement right? Especially considering last year's show was well known to be really properly rubs. This years? It was good! At least the bits I watched; the Rumble match opened the show and it was very fun. You had big beefy lads smashing each other, bit of intrigue between several ongoing storylines and a great finish. Was it brilliant? Nope, it didn't have a real proper surprise person to really get the blood pumping (no Jay White, no Matt Cardona but Booker T?) and a couple of bits that fell flat. Plus, Kofi tried to do another of his great Rumble escapes but wasn't able to so that was a bit rubs.

So that was good, so I skipped to the Pitch Black match, which was a match with black lights on apparently. Which, frankly, is a big step up from the red lights you'd have with The Fiend. You had a great visual of Bray Wyatt walking to the ring all normal(ish) then when the lights change suddenly he had face paint and red eyes. And, you could still follow the action so well done.

Then I skipped right on to the end to catch Roman Reigns versus Kevin Owens, which ended with one of the nastiest spots ever. I've seen plenty of bodies through tables off ladders and light tubes and all that. But the sight of the back of Kevin Owens' head being slammed onto the metal steps topped all that. And then we had all the shenanigans after with Sami Zayn finally turning on the Bloodline.

Now, I've not been watching WWE properly for ages but I still follow whats going happening on the news sites and its clear that this story has been one of the best for a long time. Hell, since Roman came back as a vengeful paranoid mob boss he's been doing the best work of his career. Mix in Sami Zayn and you have gold. Sami has been a brilliant heel, but the connect he has with the fans as a babyface is insane. His original NXT run culminating in him winning the belt is still one of the high watermarks of wrestling.

The question, of course, is if we'll have Sami vrs Roman at the top of the card of WrestleMania. My gut says no, especially with the story of Cody Rhodes and his claim on the belt. It feels like we'll have Sami and KO versus the Usos with Roman dealing with business elsewhere, but we'll see.

You know what? It feels good to be interesting in what WWE are doing in the build up to WrestleMania as it's still the number one big event of wrestling. When thats rubbish its like having a rubbish Christmas, so fingers crossed everything works out even if there are dark clouds on the horizon.

So for a while I've been trying to trying to sort my retro capture setup out for a while as my laptop has started to struggle running an emulator and recording, which I think is down to recent OBS updates. I have a Raspberry Pi 3+ but it’s also the Plex server so needs unplugging and all sorts if I want to use that. I have a NES and SNES Mini but to hack them it's a windows only program and it's a faff to setup a virtual windows setup.

So I hit on the idea of using my eldest's old Chromebook as an emulator and then capture off that. Great!

So I spent an evening a few weeks sorting out Retroarch on it and moving roms onto an SD card only to realise that it doesn't have HDMI out. But it does have USB-C ports so I can plug in my dongle that has HDMI out, then plug that into my Elgato then into the monitor on the desk. Only no audio is showing in OBS, because the monitor has no audio so the Chromebook won't output audio into HDMI. So I plug it into a USB monitor I got from work and what do you know, that works.

But its a pain and the Chromebook is getting on so struggles, so this weekend I had a thought about using Batocera as an OS for it, as you can boot into that from a USB. Only, turns out in order to sort it out so that you can boot a Chromebook from a USB drive you have to open the thing up and take a screw out to turn off part of the security. I mean, I have screwdrivers and that but come on.

So I decided to do away with the Plex server as I haven't really used it for ages and just have the Pi as a games setup as I have a decent case for it. So I stuck with Batocera and its all setup, plus the capture works which means that I might actually get some videos done and dusted now.

As a postscript, after unhooking the Plex server from the back of the TV I had a hard drive full of movies and TV shows, so I thought "Maybe I'll just plug that into the PS5 and use that to watch stuff" but, of course, the PS5 can't read the drive because the file format is wrong. So if anyone knows of a quick way I can move nearly 1tb of files from an Ext4 format drive onto a Mac formatted APFS drive so I can reformat the original into an ExFat file format drive that the PS5 can read please leave a comment. Or just call me a fool for even thinking about trying.

Yep, maybe this is good for mobile phones

Well thats like 1000 words on a couple of things but its been a busy week of work and not much else so that'll do for now.

Anyways, bye!