3/15/2020

Everyone Was Kung Flu Frightened!

Today the wife and Mother-in-law decided we should go out for a drive. We headed to the north scottsdale/Phoenix area. On the way back we headed down Cave Creek rd. and since we were in need of some items we had forgotten to get on previous trips to the grocery store we stopped at a Fry's on north Cave Creek rd.

Here what it was like:
it goes without saying that there was no hand sanitizer or medical alcohol.
No bottled water
 No Bread
 No Canned Foods
No Pasta
 No Rice and Beans
 Not much in the way of soap
 and of course the one item that makes you invulnerable to viruses...
NO Toilet Paper!
Now the rest of the aisles were mostly normal. I figured that rich people would just order their stuff from Zanzibar and not worry about it.

2/02/2020

LG's Scare mongering


Watch this video of Louis Rossman's evaluation of the scare mongering campaign by LG regarding 18650 batteries
#LithiumionBatteryCells, #18650, #StaySafeBattery

Way to blame the consumer LG!

How is not selling legit good batteries going to prevent this LG?

It is apparent from the video that LG thinks the average consumer is a complete moron.

It's too late there are tons of products on the market with consumer replaceable 18650 batteries. The cat is out of the bag. So instead of throwing gasoline on the fire how about finding ways to make LION batteries safer?

Rossman is right again.

12/29/2019

Stop cats from chewing on an oxygen line

Purchase a small bottle of orange scented anti bacterial dish soap, and a bottle of Angostura orange bitters. if the bottle of soap is completely full use or dump out 1 or 2 tablespoons of the soap. Add 1 to 2 tablespoons of Angostura orange bitters to the soap bottle and shake. Using a paper towel or small rag pour a generous amount of the mixture on to the rag and run the oxygen line through it adding more soap if needed. The oxygen line should be slippery when you are done. Coat every bit of Oxygen line the cats can get to unobserved.

Repeat every couple of days. Add more bitters for stubborn cats.

Cats do not like the taste of orange, the anti bacterial agents also have a bitter taste to them, and the bitters contain bitter orange. The combination should keep them from chewing on the Oxygen line. I do not know if it will work for other animals.

 

12/10/2019

Fixing the Hobbit Cartoon DVD

Some are aware that the DVD (and later releases) of The Hobbit (Rankin Bass) have a problem. Sound effects are missing from key moments in the DVD. Plate clinking in the beginning, The spider death sound, some of the sounds made by Smaug when attacking, and other sounds.

What I did was obtain the 1991 release of The hobbit on VHS. This version has all the correct sound effects but the quality of the video is not as good.

Later releases on VHS possibly have the same sound issue.

I had to rip the DVD version, then play that back and record it using OBS Studio.

I had to load the OBS MP4 file in to goldwave and pull the audio out to a wav file as Sony did not see the audio.

I replaced the DVD audio with the one I pulled using goldwave so I could have reference, and I had to align that audio to the DVD which was mostly easy.

I could not use the DVD ripped files as there is some weirdness from the VOB files that playing the DVD does not have.

I then loaded both videos in to Sony Vegas.

turned off the audio from the DVD and the Video from the VHS.

I split the VHS video at the silence in the fade in and out for the commercial breaks and realigned the VHS audio to the DVD video at each break.

the first part of the movie before the commercial break was particularly messed up, there appears to have been an edit in either the DVD or the VHS version.

Once I was satisfied with the alignment I re-encoded everything as a 720x480 mpeg2.

The results are pretty spot on.

12/01/2019

Importing video from a Sony HDR-XR150 Camcorder without using PMB

I have a Sony HDR-XR150 camcorder and up until recently the only way I had to get video off of the camera was using Sony's PMB (Picture Motion Browser).

PMB is fine if you are Joe Average but for me it was sometimes very slow to import video.

I found that the reason it was sometimes slow was that if your video was larger than 2 gigs the camera breaks the file up. When PMB imports it, it somehow knows this and it re-encodes the video to a single file instead of just copying the files over. This takes as long or longer than it took to shoot the video in the first place. I don't care if the files are split as I can re-join them in my editing software. I decided to write a batch file to copy the videos over from the camcorder, and to make it even more difficult I decided to keep the PMB name format. What a pain in the ass that was. You can just copy the .mts files over and rename them manually to m2ts.

If you want to use this method you will need:
a batch file in c:\windows called imp.bat
a batch file in c:\windows called impmts.bat
a folder called c:\temp
the camcorder when connected through USB connect as drive L:
The destination folder of Z:\videos\pmb

or you can edit the batch files to whatever drive letters and locations you use.

The contents of the IMP.BAT file is:
set startdrv=%cd:~0,2%
dir %1 | find /I "MTS" > c:\temp\x.x
set /P finfo=set stripped=%finfo:~0,17%
for /F "tokens=1-8 delims=::./ " %%A in ('echo %stripped%') do set FileDateTime=%%C%%A%%B%%D%%E
for /F "tokens=1-8 delims=::./ " %%A in ('echo %date%') do set dirdate=%%B-%%C-%%D
if exist Z:\videos\pmb\%dirdate%  goto skip else
md Z:\videos\pmb\%dirdate%
start Z:\videos\pmb\%dirdate%
:skip
if exist Z:\videos\pmb\%dirdate%\%FileDateTime%.m2ts goto oops else
@echo on
copy %1 Z:\videos\pmb\%dirdate%\%FileDateTime%.m2ts
@echo off
:oops
del c:\temp\x.x
  The contents of the IMPMTS.BAT file is:
echo off
CLS
Echo Importing Files...
for %%Z in (L:\AVCHD\BDMV\STREAM\*.mts) do (
call c:\windows\imp.bat %%Z
)
It is quite probable that using 2 batch files is not necessary but I did it that way to fix some problem I was having.

The batch files work basically like this(if I remember correctly):
impmts looks to the location on the camcorder where the MTS files are stored and for each file there it runs the IMP.BAT file which sets the drive letter of drive where it started from (usually c:) to an environment variable called startdrv.

A directory listing of the MTS files is written to a file in c:\temp\x.x
information from that file is fed to more environment variables.
The MTS file date and time is retrieved and set to an environment variable FileDateTime.
The current date is set to a variable called dirdate.
The batch file then looks to see if the folder is already there, if it is it skips creating it, if not it creates it.
It then opens the new folder in a window.
It then looks to see if the new file it wants to write is already there if it is it skips copying that file from the camcorder.
If the file does not exist it copies the mts file from the camcorder to the destination with the correct name format of YYYYMMDDHHMM.mt2s
Then it deletes the x.x file from c:\temp
Control returns to IMPMTS.BAT and repeats until all files are processed.

There is not much error handling.

you may find strange characters in the batch file at the end of lines that are not in my code on this page, if those characters are there the files will not work right until they are removed. I am not sure where they come from and they are not always there. Just letting you know it might happen.

If you use these batch files and your videos are lost I am not responsible. They shouldn't be lost because it does not delete anything from the camcorder.

Usage is simple from a cmd prompt (not administrator) run impmts.bat "nameoffolder"

I cannot, and will not provide help on editing the batch files to work for your system.

11/27/2019

Slow Transfers QNAP NAS on a Gigabit Network

For several months or possibly years transfer rates from my QNAP nas TS-231 have been very slow about 12.5MBps to 15MBps (that's megabytes per second). I have a gigabit network and transfer rates should be above 50MBps.

I won't go in to all the ridiculous things I tried based on other people having the same issue, here is what fixed mine:

After opening a ticket with qnap 2 months ago and dealing with their SLOW response times I finally got a resolution to my problem.

The last thing they asked me to do was to disable server signing. No explanation of what exactly they were referring to, no information on where to find this setting. nothing useful.

I spent a couple of hours googling how to disable server signing on a qnap with nothing useful being found. I tried editing the smb.conf (this appears to be where the setting is), but the qnap changed my settings back upon a reboot of the server.

after much more googling I kept finding references to server signing with windows, which led me to try something.

My qnap was set as an Active directory domain controller, I did that because I kept having problems getting access to my own files.

I turned off AD domain controller and of course that broke access to my files.

I also had to disable Windows ACL support since I could not access my files, take ownership of them or anything, I enabled Advanced Folder Permissions.

I did manage to join the qnap to the domain, something that never worked before. I do not know why it is working now.

I was then able to set permissions of my files in the qnap webpage and finally access them.

I noted that server signing is now disabled in the smb.conf file (not by me).

I tested copying files and wow look at that transfer rates of about 60MBps.

It only took over 2 months and countless hours googling the issue. Was it server signing? was it my qnap being a domain controller? not sure but it's working now.

9/16/2019

EnGenius Wireless Access point stops working

If you have an EnGenius Wireless Access Point wifi that stops working properly and has to be reset frequently this may solve your problem. You may login to the device and everything appears to be fine yet nothing will connect to it or it may not even show as a device to connect to.

The cause:
Many EnGenius WAP's have a problem where after several days or even hours of use the access points are not freeing up some resource internally. I do not know exactly what. I found a forum post many months ago that explained it but I cannot find it again.

The solution:
Upgrading the firmware does not help and on some models they are End Of Life and updates are not available. You can put them on a timer that disconnects power for a short time every night when they are not used, or you can write a script that reboots them.

You will need:
TST10.EXE
A folder under C:\windows called script
put tst10.exe in C:\windows\script\
Create a text file for each device you want to reboot.
C:\windows\script\ecbcom.txt

the contents of the file should be:
x.x.x.x 23 replace the x's with you devices IP keep the space and 23
WAIT "Name:"
SEND "admin\m"
WAIT "Password:"
SEND "youradminpassword\m"
WAIT "cmd>"
SEND "reboot\m"
WAIT "cmd>"

Create a batch file in C:\windows\script called tst.bat
the contents of that file should be:
c:
cd\windows
cd script
call tst10 /r:ecbcom.txt

Create a task schedule to run and execute the tst.bat file at the time you want to reboot the access point. I tried the timer method but that was causing problems with my "smart" thermostat, the batch file method is faster and my thermostat does not complain as the reboot happens very quickly. Since implementing this (9 months ago) I have only had to physically power off and on the access point once. My reboots happen every Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday at 4am.