June 1, 2017

Capturing and restoring video from VHS tapes losslessly

Filed under: Technical — Tags: , , , , — James Bunton @ 12:00 am

Back in the 1990s my family recorded some home videos using a VHS camera. It’s pretty hard to play these on modern equipment, so back in 2013 I digitised them all.

Of course when using an analogue source like tape it’s not really possible to do a lossless copy. However I wanted to do the highest quality capture with the equipment available to me, and I wanted to be able to redo post-processing in the future in case I have the time, motivation and technology to improve things further.

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May 1, 2017

Caching reverse proxy for Linux and OSX software updates

Filed under: Technical — Tags: , , , , , , , — James Bunton @ 12:00 am

I have lots of computers in my house, all of which receive regular software updates. I get tired of waiting for all of these to download the same data, sometimes at the same time! I decided to use nginx to cache this data on my router to save time.

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April 1, 2017

Back to base alarm monitoring using VoIP

Filed under: Technical — Tags: , , , , , — James Bunton @ 12:00 am

The new FTTN NBN is rolling out my area pretty soon. Switching over from my current ADSL2+ connection will mean disconnecting my analogue phone line, so I’ll need some other for my back to base alarm to contact the monitoring station.

I’ve managed to set this up with the Cisco SPA112 ATA and Nodephone.

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March 21, 2017

Using colon filenames with Samba 4 on Arch Linux

Filed under: Technical — Tags: , , — James Bunton @ 12:05 pm

A little while ago I upgraded Samba from 3.14 to 4.1. I’m using Arch Linux on the client and server. This upgrade broke the ability for the client to access files containing colons, that is I could not read files with names like 2016-01-01 10:42.txt.

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