Friday Five 21-January-2022

First, questions from thefridayfive

1) What sort of alarm wakes you up in the morning?
I do have a morning alarm - it's a midi style melody of a game music (Seiken Densetsu 3, Closed Garden, if you realllllyyyy want to know). But, usually, the growth lights that turn on at around 6.30am are what really wake me up nowadays.

2) If you can sleep in, how late to you sleep?
Not late at all. We have dogs and we have to take them out for their morning walkies.

3) What's for breakfast?
Recently it's a soft boiled egg and a protein shake.

4) What makes you late to your next big thing?
I'm usually early to everything LOL

5) What's your favorite caffeinated beverage?
Don't like them. IF I really have to choose, and affogato! Tiny bit of espresso coffee with a huge scoop of vanilla ice cream.

Followed by questions from F.riday5.com

1) How long have you lived in your current residence?
All my life!

2) What changes have you made to it since you got there?
In my memory, there were 3 big renovations, the most recent one some 2 years ago or 3 maybe, and I finally got my own room.

3) What surprised you about living in your place or in your neighborhood?
Same old place so no surprise!

4) If someone were considering moving in next door, what would you warn them about?
This is actually a very good area to live in. The only thing that's a little not good is the rainwater drainage pipes, which seem to be taking forever to get resolved.

5) If you have to move in the next 45 days, what are you definitely not taking with you?
Ah... that's not gonna happen so I don't have to think about it LOL

Harry Potter

Well, well, well! What does a fandom do to people?

My Mom bought a new Xiaomi TV. Xiaomi is China stuff. The TV came with a Netflix-like or AppleTV-like platform. I saw the Harry Potter 20th Anniversary Reunion listed there. I felt it was time I watched the Harry Potter 20th Anniversary Reunion thingamajig. It was HBO only, and a few other-countries restricted platforms... so I was perplexed that it was listed on the Xiaomi TV listing.

So since I didn't want to give business to a China platform, I started researching.

There are things such as a VPN. I masked my location as USA, but HBO still doesn't work because I need a proper USA address. I tried the Canada Crave, it doesn't work because I need a proper Canada ID. Finally, I tried the UK Now TV. It worked. HOWEVER. I needed the Now TV app to stream it, and because on a mobile device, Apple apps are geo-location locked as well, so I tried to use my 2010 MacBook Air.

OS 10.1.... I had to update it to 10.12 or something to use the VPN. But since I had to update the OS anyway, i might as well update to a newer one. But my MacBook is old, does it work? Check the specs, it should work. I do the update, it takes forever to update... and... finally done.

And then, again I need an app on the MacBook to be able to watch anything on Now TV. Geez. It was midnight when I got everything set up. And with a 7-day free trial on the Now TV, I didn't want to drag it out. I wanted to just watch the darn thing, then cancel the membership and all that.

I went to bed around 2am LOL.

The Reunion itself? I felt like I'd already watched the whole thing from the snippets here and there on YouTube, IG, and FB. The "new" parts was really just Emma Watson walking through into Hogwarts. Shouldn't it be Daniel Radcliffe doing that? And the part about receiving invitations? It was just Emma Watson, Matthew Lewis, and maybe Robbie Coltrane if I remember well (late night TV watching doesn't help with memory LOL)............. it just felt that a lot of things were missing. AND, I had already seen those parts from the snippets as well, so...

I spent the whole night, updating and risking laptop death, going on VPNs and trying out different TV streaming platforms, for nothing really............ At least my laptop is now updated and compatible with a lot of apps that I had been thinking "do I need to buy a new laptop for that? good, no need now!"

I suppose the only good thing is now with a VPN my Netflix looks a lot more exciting. Many shows on Netflix are geo-location locked as well, so when I was on the USA location, my Netflix just exploded with shows that I actually want to watch (Criminal Minds! But I've forgotten where I've stopped last)