I picked up an old Roku at a garage sale recently. I was interested in it because it has composite video out on it in addition to the HDMI, so I would be able to hook it up to some of my older TVs that I have around the house. The owners had lost the remote, but since there’s what appears to be an IR window on the front, I figured I could probably use one of the numerous universal remotes I have. Unfortunately none of my remotes have built-in codes for the Roku. Since at least one of my...

As I continue working on digitizing old VHS tapes , I decided I wanted to at least partially automate the VCR control so I set about building a computer controlled universal remote with an old Arduino Duemilanove with an ATmega168. It didn’t take much to start running up against the 1k RAM limit. I purchased a ton of ATmega328s for cheap without a bootloader several years ago since I knew I could use another Arduino and a bunch of parts on a breadboard to burn the bootloader, but I...

As I’m continuing to build a collection of cartoons, TV shows, and movies on my plex server, I’ve put together several scripts to make converting and splitting video easier . For the most part though I’ve been working with digital copies of things. While I have been working on digitizing old home movies shot on 8mm video tape, I’ve been using a digital 8 camcorder which has a FireWire interface and handles the digitization, so on the computer I’m working with...

This past holiday season nostalgia took over and I started collecting old animated holiday TV specials. It wasn’t a very big leap to go from animated specials to classic cartoon shorts and TV series. Soon my mailbox was stuffed with discs to rip and place on my server. Messing around in Plex I discovered a little shuffle button over on the side (the one that looks like criss-crossed tracks) which will randomly select a show and start playing it. When the show ends it’ll...

One of my favorite channels on YouTube is Steve Ramsey's Woodworking for Mere Mortals . At the beginning of December he did a video showing a game called Quoridor and showed how to make the board and the pieces for it. It looked like a really interesting strategy game, something that both my nephew and I would enjoy playing. But if I make something for him, then I've got to make something for his little sisters too. Plus I was concerned that Quoridor had a lot of small pieces that...