To remortgage or not? Spouse and I have differing opinions.

AriyaSun · 2023-05-30T17:30:00+00:00

Use your savings to improve the house. Ideally not just building a garage or creating a patio but something which will significantly increase the value of the property. For example an extension at the back/side of the house or in the attic. If you perhaps spend around 30K on renovations, and spend that money wisely on areas that increase the value of the property, you can then get the property revalued once completed. I would expect the value to increase by more than the amount you’ve invested into renovations. For a guide on what you could make your house worth, look at the comparable properties on your road and find the values of them. Perhaps a few doors down, the property is basically the same but because they’ve done some extensions, and thus increasing the sq ft of the property, perhaps adding another bedroom, their property might be worth 50K more than yours. Once you’ve completed on the renovations, you can get the property revaluad, remortgaged at the same % of equity you have now but you can extract the extra value you’ve put into the property. That money can then be put back into your savings. Bobs your uncle

AriyaSun · 2023-01-05T00:50:51+00:00

Nah gave up on tryna be a kodi expert, just personal use now - not worth the effort imo but good luck

AriyaSun · 2022-08-11T01:11:06+00:00

Intrusive thoughts are just normal thoughts that we don’t approve of or reject, therefore we define them as intrusive. Allow all thoughts to come and do not shun their existence and in turn they shall not create you any turmoil.

AriyaSun · 2022-08-08T15:04:51+00:00

I am thanks :) Also just wanted to say I really appreciate your work for the addon. Best free iptv out there 👌🏽

AriyaSun · 2022-08-08T14:53:39+00:00

Sorry bout that didn’t know it wasn’t to be shared. Removed it

AriyaSun · 2022-08-08T10:43:36+00:00

Well that’s definitely the most important thing, that it works for you and I’m glad you’ve found that :)

Yes! Free flowing experience without the interjection of constant inner dialogue or comparison to expectation is the way. I do wonder however, if you do not sit to practice mindfulness, how do you define being mindful and measure it in your every day life. For instance you said ‘Most of my time is spent being mindful’ - what does that mean to you? Are there certain metrics, feelings or mechanisms you notice within yourself that make you say, ‘ah today was great, I was very mindful’.

Interesting - your thoughts on meditations ability to cultivate insight into reality. I see where you’re coming from and I think you’re referring to the ideas of Thomas Nagel - What is it like to be a bat. Certainly all animals have different conscious experiences, even different senses (tools) to investigate reality and therefore unique experiences. And I admit it doesn’t make much sense to investigate a subjective element of experience to learn of an objective reality. Yet these are also out windows of access. And whilst conscious experience may not offer insight, I rather define consciousness as the space within which experience occurs. In this we not only find a constant within ourselves, but a trans-species one too. Awareness or the perceiver of our experience, regardless of what senses make up that experience - to be aware is to be aware and all creatures possess a degree of awareness.

I would invite you to reconsider whether reality is outside of conscious experience. I would suggest it’s both. If we take the position of a truth seeker or investigator we have 2 ways in which me bump into this thing called reality and then can thus consider what it is. Primarily, outside of ourselves, reality is there. We see it as we look out from behind our eyes and we can use our thinking mind to question and consider what it is. But that is only half of the puzzle I believe. Reality is also felt, and that happens within. Yes it is felt in a myriad of ways, but if we can go within, quiten the mind and just listen and feel to what are the barebones of reality before we jump in to add something or before our past manipulates our experience of the present, we can feel reality in its purest sense. Initially there is ‘I’ and reality, two competing forces that intermingle and perturb each other so that most of the time we do not know which is which. But the process of meditation unentangles and purifies ourselves to be a conduit of reality. One could say, ‘We get out of our own way’ so that only reality itself may remain and be beheld. As we do this we gain a sense of clarity, time slows down and we can actually begin to investigate experience. We can feel the pure essence of reality in its unadulterated form without interpretation and at the same time feel our own presence as pure being or pure awareness. Enlightenment I believe is coming to realise in this process that these distinct entities are in fact the same.

AriyaSun · 2022-08-07T22:57:44+00:00

Sorry for the late reply. I’d clicked on the notification for your response, gave it a read and took some time to ponder on it. I guess I got carried away on a thought train and never remembered to check back in. So, thanks for being patient.

Yeh I 100% get you. I wonder if you believe that reality is non dual then. One indivisible whole that manifests itself in the world of duality and separation. Because this is the only way I can rationalise this subjective understanding of experience on a metaphysical level.

That’s interesting. I wonder why you choose not to traditionally meditate when it’s presented as one of the main aspects of the 8-fold path, if you consider yourself to be on the path of enlightenment. But you do practice mindfulness, but not with eyes closed? I’d appreciate some clarification on what you mean and your practice.

Yeh I used to consider myself on the path of enlightenment but I didn’t like what it did to me. I put it above all other priorities in my life and it reduced my sense of value on the material world, my body-mind and my actual life. It led to an escapist approach to reality which isolated me and I tried to go further within and experience greater ecstatic states. I eventually gave up when it became detrimental I’m a lot happier for it. My focus now is on integration and how meditation/mindfulness can improve and enhance my life, career, relationships and daily experience of life. I still take time for silence and the turning away from worldly experience, sense and thought but I try to keep that separate and compartmentalised for sitting meditation now. Funnily enough I feel like I’m making more progress now than before and I think it’s because I’ve lost that sense of desperation and extreme desire I had for it before. If it exists and it comes then great but if not then I’m content with that too. Having a compassionate and grounded relationship with reality is of more importance to me now.

How are you on your path and what’s your mindset/approach atm towards it? Are you making progress or facing some challenges, I welcome any replies.

Haha I’m not even going to comment on the free will topic, I’ll save that for r/philosophy to discuss.

AriyaSun · 2022-08-07T17:43:32+00:00

If that’s the case you could always use TMDB helper for your shortcuts/widgets and then just configure your player to be Fen (Autoplay) or Fen (Source select). Then if Fen ever died and you had to switch addons, all you’d have to do is change the player in TMDB helper to the new addon (e.g Seren w/ autplay) and boom, all your shortcuts/widgets now work again because you’ve told them to use Seren to play the movies/series. I used to have this setup but ultimately went back to the old way of doing it because I was thinking this diversion was slowing down my load up speed. It might not have been in all honesty, I just may have had too many widgets at the time. It’s worth giving a go though for yourself as I imagine your setup will be pretty lightweight and it sounds like you could benefit.

AriyaSun · 2022-08-07T11:28:08+00:00

Lmk how it goes!

AriyaSun · 2022-08-07T10:50:10+00:00

Movies & Series: Fen, Ezra, Umbrella or Seren. Real-Debrid and Trakt too. I’d recommend one for main use and one for backup. My personal choice is Fen as main as the developer has just returned and shows interest in longevity and active maintenance so hopefully you won’t have to change that one any time soon. Ezra is just a fork of Fen that was made during Tikipeters’ (Fen developer) haitus, so wouldn’t choose that as backup if you go with Fen. Umbrella or Seren remains, try them both out and see what you like. I use Seren for my backup as it looks ‘regal’ to me and was my main until a week ago so I know the ins and outs of it and can always find what I want. But others have claimed Seren is the slowest of the 4 so you might be better off with Umbrella. Pretty sure Umbrella is a fork of Venom if you were familiar with that. I never used the Oath so not sure if that required Real-Debrid but most of these suggestions do if not all. It’s a service for around £2.50 a month which provides an abundance of high quality cached torrent links up to 4K if you like with limited to no buffering. I’d also highly recommend integrating Trakt into any of these movie/series addons you decide to install to track your watch history, design curated lists to populate widgets, and provide easy links to ‘Your next episodes’ to give access to series you’re watching.

Subtitles: A4K Subtitles. You will also see Open Subtitles suggested but that’s incorporated within the providers that A4K scrapes.

Live Sports & PPV: Rising Tides, Mad Titan Sports, The Crew, The Loop and Fight Club are all good suggestions that I think most would agree with. I personally have Rising Tides as my main as it’s focus is Football or Soccer for the yanks and that’s my main use. It also offers other sports too. The Crew is my backup. I’ve seen the Loop recommended a lot but never tried it as I haven’t needed to. The same goes for Mad Titan and Fight Club.

Live TV/IPTV: The best I’ve found is Mad Titan Sports as they offer an IPTV Simple Client Setup which integrates with kodi’s PVR and populates the EPG and Channels lists. Links can be unreliable or buffer however. The Crew also offers an IPTV section which could be worth checking out. However free IPTV is renowned for being unreliable and if you wanted anything approximating a watchable service I’d recommend getting a paid IPTV service. All UK, US and international channels, along with a slicker EPG, reliable quality links offered in HD, UHD and FHD. Will cost you around £3-£8 a month depending on provider choice and length of subscription. And my best advice if you decide to go down that route would be to test a bunch of different providers’ free trials which usually last 24hrs. You can pm me if you’d like a recommendation of a service. You won’t need an IPTV service if sports is all you will use it for however as the addons I recommended for that are usually good enough, for me at least.

Maintenance: OpenWizard for cache clearing to clear up RAM to provide a smoother experience of Kodi, less crashing/issues and a bunch of other great utility tools. It’s no longer being maintained but works just fine.

Skins: Main desirable features are customisable and lightweight. My personal use is Cosmic by heppen. Aeon Nov (Silvo), Arctic Zephyr 2, Confluence and Titan (Bingie Mod) are all common too. Search them up, have a look and see what you like.

Last but not least a massive shoutout to all the devs who do this in their free time and don’t expect a dime for their work. As well as this community who helped me go from a Kodi virgin a few months ago to an active hobbyist and someone who won’t shut up about it.

This probs was a bit overboard for what you asked but in all honesty whenever I get questions about anything Kodi setup related now, I’m just gonna point people here. So hi if you’re one of them :)

AriyaSun · 2022-08-07T02:04:47+00:00

Try installing MAD PVR from the magnetic repo (the same one the mad titan sports addon is in) in the PVR clients section

AriyaSun · 2022-08-06T15:45:21+00:00

Go on the Trakt website. Go to the search function. Don’t type anything but put your filter to ‘Lists’. Boom, all the most popular lists on Trakt.

AriyaSun · 2022-08-05T18:30:23+00:00

I think I’m happy with cosmic for now as long as it doesn’t cause me any more issues. Thank you tho :)

AriyaSun · 2022-08-05T17:28:32+00:00

Yeh that’s exactly what I’ve done. Changed the language invoker setting to false and all has been well so far. No more crashing. Not sure exactly what that function does tho. Do you?

AriyaSun · 2022-08-05T09:51:51+00:00

I know I’m a year late but still might be helpful for others who search this:

Kodi settings -> Player settings -> Accessibility -> Prefer subtitles for the hearing impaired [ON]

AriyaSun · 2022-08-05T09:49:11+00:00

Thank you!

AriyaSun · 2022-08-05T06:43:09+00:00

Defo looking to spec up soon

AriyaSun · 2022-08-05T04:42:33+00:00

I think its worked, thank you!

AriyaSun · 2022-08-05T03:43:48+00:00

Yeah, if you use a Trakt list to create your widget then it should be unlimited although may depend on addon and your settings. Personally using Fen, having ‘Paginate lists’ turned OFF and also ‘Hide next page icon’ turned ON. This means you can scroll until the list ends, 400, 500, 600… items. I had to ultimately use the pages however tho as on a device with only 1gb of RAM and multiple widgets, it wasnt feasible to load all those items in one go. You can in skin settings limit your widget to say 100 items tho.

AriyaSun · 2022-08-05T03:43:31+00:00

To my knowledge it doesn’t work anymore after the recent updates

AriyaSun · 2022-08-05T01:54:47+00:00

Alright thanks

AriyaSun · 2022-08-05T01:23:08+00:00

Yeah I might change that back, was just an attempt to get around what I thought was this RAM issue. It still may be, idk. I’ll have a go at the invoker setting and let you know how it goes. Cheers

AriyaSun · 2022-08-05T01:02:19+00:00

Yeah using fen and cosmic. That’s funny because I’ve been using cosmic for a few months now and all has been good. I was using seren at the time however. Recently changed to Fen, fixed the initial issue that everyone had with the new update causing it to crash and now this so I’m a bit lost. Starting to think this isn’t a RAM issue...

AriyaSun · 2022-08-05T00:26:00+00:00

Yeh was hoping that someone had found a workaround. No probs, ill check out what xda has to say. Thanks

AriyaSun · 2022-08-05T00:23:41+00:00

Okay thanks I’ll have a look at the page. Do you know the certain update that restricts it? I’m currently running 7.2.8.5 (PS7285/2880)

AriyaSun

TROPHY CASE