About 12 hours ago or so I made a post on the XBMC Forums in regards to my current status in the HTPC Community. So far there have been no replies after my message so I was unsure if anyone bothered to read it (or care) however after doing some things on my laptop that required a restart, when Windows 8 booted back up I noticed above average hits to my blog from yesterday and although I haven’t actually checked where the hits came from yet, I’m going to assume at least a chunk of them were in regards to that post.
For those of you confused about the above, the jist of it is as follows: I’ve been part of the HTPC Community (mainly for XBMC) for a number of years and have always tried to help out where I can… I was one of the co-creators of the original XBMC BlackMarket (back in the days when XBMC was on the original Microsoft Xbox), I’ve hosted numerous forums/wiki’s dedicated to some of the third party applications/services used in conjunction with XBMC and lately I have (with permission from the developer) created a forum dedicated to “XBMC Constellation” (created by Dawid of FSS.cc) and have provided a majority of their tech support via the XBMC and Constellation Forums. All of this… past and present has been done in my spare time with me eating any costs that has incurred for these activities.
Pretty much everyone (regular blog readers and even members that frequent the XBMC Constellation specific threads) knows that I have had a lot of medical issues for the past few years and because of this, I don’t have a job, therefore I’m on a very limited income with disability… Sadly, the main computer I used for my HTPC, as well as the debug/test system for a lot of the tech support I provide decided to die and I have yet to figure out the cause of it. Partly because of the ‘holiday season’ just getting over and mainly because disability doesn’t pay much of anything, I can’t afford to outright replace the computer (as far as I know, all the hard drives did survive, at least I hope they did) and since I don’t have a system to run XBMC, any of the third party apps/services, or to house any of my media I have decided to temporarily leave the HTPC scene and concentrate on my health. I believe this option is best since I wouldn’t feel right about giving out tech support/advice when I’m forced to guess most of what I’m telling the user to do because I can’t check my system to look up the exact procedure they’d need to fix their issue.
A friend and fellow HTPC enthusiast that I talked with briefly before writing the XBMC Post stated I shouldn’t feel bad about asking the community for help, especially with all I’ve given back when I can and he recommended setting up a donation which I will provide the link at the bottom of this post.
Before I post the donation link I wanted to explain exactly where all the money would be going, how it’s determined, etc. so I don’t have users thinking this is some form of scam or “Hey, I didn’t give you money for that…” type of things.
The first important thing I want to point out… Yes, the donations are going to ME personally, not some group, not some company… after PayPal (the ones processing the donations) take any of their applicable fees, 100% of the remaining donations will be going towards me building a new HTPC/Server. If I get enough donations to cover the cost of building the new system, any money left over will be going solely to help cover my medical costs… I will NOT be ‘blowing the money’ on stupid stuff, I wont waste it on random things… it will be going either in my gas tank for my trips to/from doctors, or go towards paying my medical bills. Once the Server is paid (by myself and/or donations) I will update the post with that information and let people know that if they continue to donate via the link it will be going solely to medical at that point and no longer towards hardware (again so I don’t piss people off or make them think they are donating for the wrong thing).
Anyway, it’s 1:34am here and I have to be awake kind of early in the morning so I’ll make another post sometime over the weekend if I can.
Read above for more information on this donate button before clicking:
I also wanted to thank everyone ahead of time that is willing and able enough to donate, I really don’t want to leave the HTPC Community, I just can’t foresee the ability to do this on my own any time soon.