Posts By: Τζον Σκάιφ

0Wordpress Logo3 ways to run WP-CRON manually

I’ve recently been look­ing at how best to run wp-cron manu­ally from the sys­tem to avoid a per­form­ance hit when a vis­it­or loads the site. I’ve so far found 3 dif­fer­ent ways to run this. There may be others.
Read Full Article

0Updating cheap SmartPlugs

I have pre­vi­ously writ­ten about modi­fy­ing cheap £10 smart­plugs to run open source firm­ware. Now I have quite a num­ber of them I needed an effi­cient way to update them. In this art­icle I doc­u­ment how to do
Read Full Article

0Old Foscam FI8918W in Milestone XProtect

I’ve recently been on a tool buy­ing spree and decided I now need a degree of secur­ity for my gar­age. I also have an old VGA foscam cam­era sat unused in a box and a func­tion­ing CCTV serv­er sys­tem, so I figured I might as well set the foscam up inside the gar­age — not only would it help identi­fy any­one who was in there who should­n’t be, it will also help me know where I left that tool I just can­’t find, and if the neigh­bours cat has got locked in there again
Read Full Article

2Embed a live RTSP stream in a webpage

I have recently been work­ing on my smarthome setup and one of the things I’ve been mean­ing to get set up is a tab­let with a touch-screen web inter­face to man­age my smart home. One of the first prob­lems I had to crack was how to stream my cctv feed to a web browser…
Read Full Article

0Getting the most out of HikVision Cameras

I have a 4Mpix Hik­Vi­sion mini dome cam­era for CCTV on the house. It provides a pretty reas­on­able pic­ture con­sid­er­ing the price, but the man­age­ment inter­face is a bit rub­bish and get­ting it set up with any­thing is a bit of a nuis­ance, so heres some notes on get­ting it working…
Read Full Article

0Setting up an XBee ZigBee repeater

As part of the gradu­al expan­sion of my smarthome (might as well do some­thing dur­ing lock­down right?) I decided to set up an XBee to improve the reach of my SmartTh­ings hub. Good inform­a­tion for total begin­ners is a bit of a mis­sion to find so I thought I’d put togeth­er a basic sum­mary to start with.
Read Full Article

3Media Player Classic - Home Cinema LogoComparing madvr GPU performance

My cur­rent HTPC has an nVidia GeForce GTX 1050Ti 4Gb with which I am able to upscale all con­tent to 1080p with fairly high qual­ity set­tings, and am also (just) able to play­back 8k 60fps con­tent down­scaled to 1080p. How­ever, I have long wondered what the bene­fits of a more power­ful card might be on the abil­ity to use high­er set­tings. Sadly, no-one seems to provide any bench­marks for mad­vr, so how can cards be compared?
Read Full Article

0windows 8 logoscript to create and name network shares

When updat­ing or repla­cing a home PC I use Win­dows Deploy­ment Ser­vices (WDS) to rein­stall Win­dows. It means I only have to main­tain a single up-to-date source for all the little free apps I use (Fire­fox, 7zip, Kodi, etc) and makes a new setup much more pain­less. One of the few bugs that has irrit­ated me for ages is the net­work drive map that I cre­ate has always had to be renamed manually.
Read Full Article