geek-instructions – Page 5 – unliterate.net, sans-confusion since 2004

Flash Flashcard to HTML5

April 22, 2021April 22, 2021 Matthew Heick Leave a comment

One of the awesome things about hoarding old images and video from the “good old” days is having the ability to bring new life to them. In 2018 I had re-released a friends work that he did for me in April 2013 by re-posting the flash videos that were made. Little did I know that flash would go the way of the dodo bird and browsers would shun files.

As an 8th-year “octoversary” I decided to dig down into my old files and grab the original images and audio and bring new life to them. I spent a small, but worthwhile, amount of time generating some reusable code to convert flashcard-style flash presentations to HTML5. This is now done over on T.C. in 2013, and the result is somewhat magnificent.

Earlier in the course of the project we happened across a person who did voicework. She went by the name of “Shawty Luv” and was able to provide us some starter voicework with our fairs. It was initially proposed to her to do our “tutorials”, and she happily did it for 2500 rays ($175 USD at the time). She subsequently delivered goods in zip fashion on 26 Feb 2013.

I decided to compile them together and bring them new life here:

How I made Plex work for me

March 14, 2021March 14, 2021 Matthew Heick Leave a comment

As I’ve written before, I run a Plex Media Server at my home, and have run many different configurations of set ups for almost 4 years. We originally ran the client off of our XBox 360 until the App was obsoleted, and now we enjoy it on desktops, mobiles, and on our Samsung TV, delivering high-quality content to our family.

Our current Plex Media Server is run on a 4-core/4GB laptop with an external USB-attached 6TB hard drive complete with a library of 1708 Movies and 111 TV Shows. It’s not an expensive set up and has paid itself off time and time again.

For the longest time i’ve used plex.tv to access my Plex Media Server remotely, and painfully have had to endure poor quality streaming because I wasn’t really aware about how Plex works behind the scenes. After some time I’ve learned the “why” and the “repairs” to be able to take my remote Plex Viewing up a notch.

Smaller mkv with ffmpeg

March 10, 2021March 10, 2021 Matthew Heick Leave a comment

When you run a Plex Media Server you know that family and friends ask for specific content to be placed on it so they can watch it. It comes down that a “popular” series just finished up all 9 of their episodes and the wanted it to exist on our Plex. I was able to find the asked content, but was a bit surprised when the video content was a spectacular 1080p but the audio content defaulted to Brazilian Portuguese.

Lucky for me there was an English audio stream as well, but I felt it annoying that if I wanted to start watching this and have to swap to the secondary audio track every time. With the power of ffmpeg[static] and a couple smart command-line parameters I was able to re-make my videos with English as the default language and cut out all the unnecessary data.

Learning Docker: Take 1

January 25, 2021January 25, 2021 Matthew Heick Leave a comment

It was time. I’ve been waiting for enough time to learn Docker and begin to get familiar with it. I’ve heard of it, seen it in action, and thought it was the coolest thing in the world and I had to learn it. I decided to take the dive off the actual Docker ship and descend into the depths.

So, I found a YouTube video from the Docker YouTube video channel (link: https://youtu.be/iqqDU2crIEQ). Albeit it provided me some terminology and knowledge, it didn’t really tell me everything I wanted to know, like some under-the-core or how docker did the docker thing. I learned how to build, ps, port forward, docker hub, and a Dockerfile, but then they went to docker-compose and I got lost.

So, after sitting on that video and registering all the information I decided to set a goal: Load minecraft in a docker container. This shouldn’t be difficult, as it requires java, some source files, and that should be simple.

SimpleSAMLphp / quick&ez

October 26, 2020October 26, 2020 Matthew Heick Leave a comment

Background: For about 5 years at my place of work we have used a software called SimpleSAMLphp to help offer identity solutions to TVE (TV Everywhere) customers. In essence I have been one of a team of 20th century cable people.

This software, in it’s current version has been heavily customized to offer quick deployment solutions for new customers. All I can say is that it’s awesome running an Identity Stack with 50+ IdPs and 5000+ SPs.

I decided to see how quick I could set up a SAML SP -> IdP relationship between two Centos 7 Virtual Computers: