Recent content in Index on Michael Cullen
I have a lot of transport stream captures. Over a terrabyte of them. Whenever I stay in a hotel, I pull out my USB DVB-T/C tuner and grab what I can. I have a custom-written capture tool I use for this, which first scans to find any streams it can pick up, then automatically captures each stream. Once I run this tool, I just need to wait for the results!
While working for a long-term client, I was asked to create a new live transport stream input module for their cloud-based playout platform, to replace an existing one which was not performing. Running in Kubernetes either on-site or in the cloud, this platform allows broadcasters and service providers to play out and assemble TV channels efficiently. The video processing engine I worked on for…
Taking Stock I started out by looking at what I had, and figuring out what to work on first. Immediately, I noticed memory usage was a little higher than I remembered. Looking closer, it seems the most likely culprit is simply the libraries being loaded - there’s a few: libjpeg libpng (statically linked into the core dll since the makefile built a static version) libcurl openssl (pulled in…
This tweet says it all really: New RC2022/10 entry from @mich181189 Platform: Windows 2000/XP Project : make a Twitter client for Windows 2000/XP (maybe also Win 98). Maybe Retro Challenge is enough of a motivation to revive this project? It's going to be an awful twitter client, but I think it should work! — RetroChallenge (@retrochallenge) September 28, 2022 So yeah… I signed up for…
For many years, I have wanted to make a USB christmas tree. Not just a USB powered christmas tree, but a USB controlled christmas tree. This idea was floating around in my head for a long time, but this time, I decided to make it a reality, and as a christmas card. The board was designed around 28 WS2812B addressable RGB LEDs arranged in the shape of a christmas tree. The brains of the board was…
This is a project I am working on for London Hackspace The Hackspace access control system uses microcontrollers and a webserver to allow members to access tools as well as the space itself. The nodes are based around TI Connected Launchpad boards, and PN532-based RFID readers . This project is to improve the reliability of the system, by adding a microcontroller next to the RFID reader, then…
I was contracted to develop a system to automatically navigate Android apps and find ads within them. There was an initial system in place, but it was human-driven. My task was to improve and automate it. I started out by using Appium and some relatively simple heuristics to move through the apps and detect ads. The ads, once detected, were fed into a database. The logic was implemented in Scala,…
This started as a late night idea at London Hackspace that I made the mistake of actually building just before everything closed (it was 2020…) To create this, I welded some metal plates to the legs of a desk, then used these to attach a couple of linear actuators to lift the surface up. I then programmed an ESP32 module to turn the motors on when it got a message on a specific MQTT topic.…
Over the weekend, I operated a special event station, GB4LHS to celebrate the London Hackspace reopening in Wembley, and also to demonstrate amateur radio to visitors at the open day. Some things worked really well, other parts of the setup could really have done with improvement. In this post I hope to describe the details of this. Some Statistics Total QSOs: 76 FT8: 68 SSB: 8 By Band: 17m: 20…
In a previous post, I loaded up a bowl of custard with an ATU. I called the post “Custard Antenna” however, really, it should probably have been titled “Custard dummy load” – with both antenna wires immersed in the bowl, the custard was no doubt mostly behaving as a resistor, with any pickup or radiation likely to be on the wires – though removing the wires did also prevent it from receiving,…
Some time ago, someone said of their ex-military antenna tuner “it would tune a bowl of custard if you asked it to” – this got me thinking, could I make my MFJ-971 antenna tuner literally tune a bowl of custard? I’ve always been interested in strange antennas, having stumbled upon the K0S Strange Antenna Challenge many years ago. Sadly, the original website no longer seems to be around, however…
Note: The Pi3 figures in this may be questionable since I have since discovered it was overheating and scaling its clock. A future post will address this. Since I’m interested in real-world performance though, I’m not going to completely discount these results since overheating is a factor to consider! The other day I came up with a slightly daft idea: deploy the website I’m currently developing…
The cool thing about shooting film is the choices! There are so many films to choose from – some are fairly basic, day-to-day films, some not so much. I have tried quite a few films, so here are some notes on them. There is some overlap with the Amsterdam On Film Cinestill 800T I’m going to start with the most interesting, at least for me. I’ve only actually shot one roll of this, but I enjoyed it…
Every year, I leave the country for my birthday. I’ve done this for five years in row now, and I have no intention of stopping this trend. This year, I spent 5 days in Amsterdam. Every year, I take more camera gear than is sane and spend a fair amount of the trip taking photos. This year, I included a film camera in this. I haven’t counted, but there’s a strong possibility that I took more photos…
This post is the first in a hopefully regular series of posts about film photography. Inspired by a combination of Boredom, YouTube videos, and that nagging feeling I should do something with those rolls of film I put through a Holga a couple of years ago, I’ve been shooting a fair bit of film recently. In fact, I have acquired more than one film camera from eBay recently. Mostly inexpensive, and…
I figured it was time to clean up a bit. So I started a new blog site to replace my old one. I might move the posts over, maybe, one day…
Experience