Recently I was looking for a new keyboard for my home workstation. I have a strong fondness for mechanical keyboards, and while there are amazing options available on the market, none of them were exactly what I was looking for. Then it dawned on me, why not build something custom? I had access to the tools, I love to build and create, and (oddly) love to solder. So began the journey to build a custom mechanical keyboard.
With the recent COVID-19 pandemic gripping the world, millions of people are now working from their homes; many with children also schooling from home.
As any parent knows, the presence of little ones while you’re trying to work is … challenging.
For those of us who now spend a majority of the day on video conferences, it would be useful to have a way to let your family know you’re on a call, so that’s exactly what I did.
If you desire a more professional looking image when video conferencing, it turns out that you can use a Digital SLR camera as your webcam. Using a DSLR provides a number of benefits over an off-the-shelf webcam, most notably higher image quality, ability to finely adjust the frame of an image (zoom, wide angle), and adjust the depth of field. The depth of field adjustment is what allows for a nice, smooth, blurred background.
Imagery from the twists and turns of a crazy experiment to hack into a 20 year old TiVo.
If you haven’t yet, I encourage you to read through Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of this series, where we worked to create a disk image of our TiVo drives, and get VirtualBox installed and configured, extracted and transcoded video from our TiVo.
This final chapter of the TiVo hacking series is a listing of the various tool, tips and tricks I picked up along the way. There’s really no other purpose other than to provide the resources I found useful along the journey.
If you haven’t yet, I encourage you to read through Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, where we worked to create a disk image of our TiVo drives, and get VirtualBox installed and configured. For the remainder of this project we’ll be working totally within our VirtualBox VM, using our shared folder to transfer files from our TiVo’s drive to your Linux workstation (for further processing and long term storage).
If you haven’t yet, I encourage you to read through Part 1 of this series, where we worked through getting access to the TiVo’s disk drive(s) and creating virtual disk images which we’ll use from this point forward.
VirtualBox Setup We’re going to use VirtualBox as the platform to create a virtual Linux workstation, into which we’re going to build and install the tools needed to extract data from our TiVo disk images.
I recently rediscovered my first, and only TiVo - a Sony SVR-2000, circa 2000. Pulling this TiVo from storage, the first and most obvious thing to do was connect it’s S-Video output to a RetroTink and fire it up.
Immediately I was transported back in time, reacquainted with TiVo. Program after program, 302 in total. Spanning from 2002 - 2006. It was amazing how familiar the interface was, the ease at which I could command that oval shaped remote.
