Inevitably, right after I decided to mention here how I like Plex as a platform for a personal jukebox, I went and had problems with Plex. It’s a basic fact that these systems are far from perfect, and while they’re designed for consumers, they require a certain amount of not only technical orientation but also patience — and perhaps the sort of tinkerer’s mindset, which is to say that the tinkering is a feature, rather than a bug.
What happened was I updated my Mac mini to macOS Tahoe 26, and suddenly the way I used to be able to screen share to it from my MacBook Pro (also running Tahoe) didn’t work seamlessly anymore.
Why do I need screen sharing? Because the whole point of having the Mac mini server is that it’s “headless”: it just sits on/in my living room console with my speakers and amplifier and turntable and so forth, and though while it’s wired into all that, it’s also, of course, networked (locally and when I’m out and about). But for some reason, the networking suddenly doesn’t work the way it used to.
I was able to find a vnc:// URL I can use to access the mini, and now everything seems to work fine, but the hassle does make the whole system feel sort of fragile. Which didn’t keep me from ordering a larger hard drive. We’ll see how this goes.
And then again, of course, nothing’s quite as fragile as an LP record that I watch slide across the floor after I accidentally drop it — not that I’ve done that since my teens.
