Guides

Guides, DIY, and How-to’s
Welcome to the guides section of our blog. This catagory is reserved for a lot of the technical things of what we love doing throughout our day to day existence. Some of these deal with some DIY projects we’ve done while others is just our own experience with certain pieces of hardware. Feel free to browse around as there may be something of interest to you.
Accuracy and update CRC.
As a kind note: Many of these guides are based around the personal experiences of those who run s-config.com and may not reflect the correct way of doing something. If you have any problems with what you are reading you can drop a comment in the article or contact us for any modifications or corrections.

DIY Lighting.

November 23, 2023October 8, 2023 by S-Config

DIY Lighting for the camera, for the home, and for the lulz.

We tried LED commercial lighting. It was a mistake for the most part. We think the very first bulb we purchased was one called “Switch” from Batteries Plus. It was an LED bulb that was liquid-cooled using some type of oil inside of it that was non-conductive keeping the entire assembly cool. It was promised to last up to 10 years.

Guess what? That didn’t happen. So after watching some YouTubes, give it a few tries. I have something that’s far superior and frankly wish I had done it sooner in my life. Read on if you wish to know more of my diatribes into DIY.

Previously.

ChatGPT Web Crawler

October 2, 2023August 14, 2023 by S-Config

Block dat ChatGPT Web Crawler.

Let’s keep things short and sweet kids. If you run a website. Open your Robots.txt with your favorate text editor.

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

Source documentation for reference.

Save. Profit? Not sure at this point. But I can ramble some more about this topic.

Would you like to know more? seriously? Okay, it’s your funeral.

SVG fun in WordPress.

March 14, 2023August 13, 2022 by S-Config

Using SVG’s within your website.

To some that have been reading for a while now you may be thinking that I’m going to introduce something new or revolutionary that will change the landscape of website design. When the truth is. This is actually an old standard that’s been around but should have been implemented a long time ago. It’s just for security reasons WordPress blocks this format by default.

So, we’re going to unblock it on our site and use it. To those who have visited my front page and/or art section chances are a vector has been uploaded and presented to you on your browser like the icon on the right.

read on if you want to know more.

JXL – JPEGXL and the web experience here.

August 30, 2023September 23, 2021 by S-Config

Addressing the JXL or JPegXL format floating around the internet.

We’re going to do something we usually do not do for ANY of our blog articles. We’re going to purposefully STOP all optimization of our files in this entry and only use ONLY PNG files (Blog article only, navigation, footer, and backgrounds will still be processed. It may sound totally counterproductive to do when making an article about a new format that the developers insist that you use. However, in order to graphically demonstrate my points about the “New kid on the image war block,” we must go totally lossless with a codec we trust, and has been proven for almost 20 years.

Now, for those users running nightly builds of Chrome or Firefox that want to test out JXL Good news! Every article EXCEPT this one has already been encoded thanks to the scripting mentioned in this blog article. So once you’ve enabled JXL in your browser (details described below) you can explore this site with it and see if it’s really all of the hype it’s meant to be!

Read on if you care about my rants and opinions of this format.

Nginx and the Image format wars.

September 8, 2022September 21, 2021 by S-Config

We’ve talked about the videos, we’ve talked about the images. Now we talk about the web server, Nginx.

In this entry, we’re going to get crazy technical with how we deploy all of these new image formats that are being introduced in what feels like “The Great Video/Image War” to finally put GIFs, JPEGs, PNGs, and MP4s to bed. But instead, we’re going to talk about a section that seems skipped a lot. How do we actually implement these new formats? Because if we do a review on an image format, it’s good. Then as bloggers, it would be hypocritical to not apply these formats to our site. It however opens up questions. How do we maintain the security of our readers while at the same time giving them the very best image with the lowest bandwidth conceivable? Thankfully since we have a VPS a lot of the encoding is handled via CRON. While a lot of the deciding factors of which browser gets served and what file are all in the hands of NGINX web daemon.

Read on if you want to know more.

Original Xbox DVD Remote to – EVERYTHING.

September 5, 2023June 13, 2021 by S-Config

Yes, in 2021, we’re staying topical as fuck with the Original Xbox DVD remote.

A long time ago, we received a commenter asking if I could provide instructions for the DVD remote control that was optional with the Xbox Original. RedCloud DID actually have drivers for this as well as the XBCD driver that we published in the past for getting our Xbox Duke controllers running in Windows 10. I, however, did NOT want to use the RedCloud drivers. In part, because they are actually OLDER than XBCD and harder to get working in a Windows 10 environment. Instead of fighting with Windows security. Fighting with aging drivers. It was easier to just make a new receiver with an Arduino.

Read on if you want to know more.

AVIF and WEBP is now being hosted here.

August 26, 2023January 30, 2021 by S-Config

First there was AV1. Now there’s AVIF

A while back during my video encoding sessions, I toyed with the concept of serving AV1 videos on my site. The results were not great out of respect that we could not find a great way of detecting the client’s capabilities of video decoding without writing some shitty JavaScript system to snoop around and break privacy rights all the way. However, there’s a branch of the Av1 system known as “AVIF” which is designed to use for still images. It boasts about getting better compression ratio’s to that of even WebP images that we discussed a while back.

Why did we implement AVIF here? Read on if you want to know more.

Windows 10 build 2004 vs. The China Xbox 360 receiver.

June 4, 2023June 6, 2020 by S-Config

Windows 10 build 2004 vs. china xbox receiver.

Or should it be “Windows 10 vs. the world?!?” build 2004 edition?

Back in April 2014, we published a little blog about this cheap Chinese receiver and how we managed to get it back online. Now, back then we were completely aware there were videos on YouTube, Forums, and other sources so such an article was nothing new even back then. As end-user, we found ourselves downloading from garbage share sites that only lead to either misleading links or infected files. It was at this time we used our blogging capabilities and power to make an official tutorial along with all software sources in one place. 190k downloads later, Yeah, we call it a success.

Fast forward to May of 2020, suddenly we were getting rained upon by users who were a part of the Microsoft partner program saying that the build 2004 version of Windows 10 disables their China Receiver. Common sense would be to direct those energies towards Microsoft and maybe they would fix the issue.

It appears that’s simply not the case. Read on if you wish to listen to my diatribe of corporate hate.

Drifting analogs – The return of the shield controller.

May 23, 2023May 29, 2020 by S-Config

It has landed back on my bench once again.

It pains me whenever something we fixed lands back on our bench once again. Perhaps we should’ve seen the warning signs the first time around. Perhaps we did not test this controller thoroughly enough. Regardless of the error in our ways, the Nvidia controller is back on my bench and this time around it’s finally un-fucked while learning some things around the way.

Care to listen to my multi-thousand-word diatribe? Buckle up and keep on reading!

Nvidia Sheild TV – Controller teardown.

May 23, 2023November 28, 2019 by S-Config

One of these controllers is now on my bench.

It was bound to happen!

Considering that we have three of these Nvidia Shield TV systems that were given friends it’s a no-brainer that a few of these controllers were to end up on my repair bench. This time around dealing with a very common issue. Sticky buttons. Maybe it’s just coffee?!?? Maybe too much PornHub! You never know as a repair tech! We should probably wear gloves for this one!

As always everything on s-config.com is on an AS-IS basis and is designed for educational purposes. Read our FAQ for more details.. We are not responsible for any damages that occur if you carry out such a repair on your hardware.

Would you like to know more? Continue to read onward!