Found Item: Fisher Price Adventure People Opticon

I’m a sucker for my old toys. I never throw anything away and I still have a huge amount of my toys from the late 70’s through the 80’s. That is what makes this find so interesting.  I had a few of these “Adventure People” manufactured by Fisher Price, and I played with them a lot, but I had all but forgotten about them until I pulled this one, the “opticon”, out of a box my oldest son and I were looking through.  I had no memory of this whatsoever because it was so obscure, until I saw it.  Memories came rushing back, I clearly remembered getting it in Bloomington, IL at what I believe was Montgomery Wards.  There is surprisingly little on these toys on the ‘net, but they are readily available on ebay and there are collectors out there still able to find carded figures(!!)  The Opticon was pretty cool because of the large crystal in its back and the fact that it folded over into what I always called a “sleep” mode.  IMG_4040

This find drove me to spend far too much time researching these toys, which triggered a few more memories.  I realized that I had possessed a few more toys from this series.  Most notably, I had the space alpha interceptor and the pilot and the opticon (shown above).  I played with that interceptor quite a bit.  It had a really cool design that came apart into a smaller ship or spun around in the middle of the larger chassis and the guy, even though he didn’t move much, was very neat with his enclosed head and weird eye goggles.  interceptorMy belief is that the interceptor is in a box in my parents basement but the guy is probably long gone.  I’ll blame my brothers for that (sorry Mike and Chris, blame rolls down hill).  I plan to dig around next time I’m down in 61727 and see if I can find it.  until then, I’ve handed over the Opticon to my boys to add to the arsenal of other vintage stuff for hours of adventure.

*interceptor image courtesy of a random ebay listing

Scanning a Plex library manually

I recently had a weird problem with my plex media server in that it would crash upon trying to scan my library.  After a great deal of debugging, I finally found what the problem was (a file that was named in such a way that it caused the scanner to crash).  prom-scanIn order to debug this problem, though, I came across some great under-the-hood tools within plex (which is all python, very cool).  After reading this link, I moved all of my Movies out of the main folder.  At that point I moved the files back in, one letter at a time. My Plex server is a CentOS 6.5 VM that mounts a ZFS NAS.
I moved the files one starting letter at at time

mv -v /path/to/src/A* /path/to/dest/

Once that had finished moving I ran the scanner manually using the following command:

sudo su - plex -c "export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/plexmediaserver; \\
/usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Plex\ Media\ Scanner -h"

Thankfully, the plex platform is really well documented and has a great community around it, so searching for the errors I was seeing led me down the right path to solving the issue.  I’m still not sure what caused the file names to become corrupt or unhappy, but I suspect that it had to do with the disk failure I had in my ZFS raid.