Lake Erie Thunder Logo

After being involved in the Erie drum corps scene for awhile, a new all age drum and bugle corps was formed. I was approached with doing the branding for it. Taking a cue from the uniforms that were given to them and thinking what would look good into the future, I... Read More

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National Courier Service FAA Certified CAT II/III Training

This was a series of e-Learning courses for pilots of a National Courier Service that took them through a CAT III checklist and was a cockpit simulation of the events that happen during it. The courses were to be taken by pilots for the courier on a yearly basi... Read More

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BladeRunners Harmarville Inline Hockey Website

After playing in the Adult Inline Hockey Leagues at Harmarville for a few sessions, I had quite a few dialogues with the Inline Director about his intentions of having a website devoted to the Inline side of the programs that BladeRunners offers. We both decided to... Read More

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Genericized e-Learning from National Greeting Card Company

This was a RFP for a national greeting card company. It was to teach their district sales managers how to use the new proprietary software that was being implemented. Due to the non-disclosure agreement with the Abreon group, I am not allowed to post logo... Read More

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Penguins Breakout 2011 / AIHL Finals

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Old news for most, but this years American Inline Hockey League finals will be held at BladeRunners in sunny Harmarville, PA on Memorial Day weekend. It will be side by side with the 2nd annual Penguins Breakout tournament. Last years Breakout was a phenominal success, with teams coming in from NY, VA, OH, PA, and MI to compete in it. This year will be adding an Adult-Rec division and possible an 8U division.

The website for Breakout should be going live in a few days. Help spread the word to make this event even larger!

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How To Record Cable Over Firewire on MacOS X (Part 1)

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Checklist

Introduction

On April 1, 2004, the FCC mandated that on request, cable companies would provide their customers a set top box (STB) with a FireWire port on request. I decided to test that theory with Comcast and got a pretty nice box in the Motorola DCX-3200. Did a bit of Googling to see how to do it on OS X and there is no easy explanation. The funny part about that is, it pretty much can’t be easier. The only real snag that I’ve found is that the channel-changing portion does not work for me. I’m guessing that it could be fixed using AppleScript tuning, which is a bit more complicated than I care to get into. The DCX-3200 guide can easily be set to change channels at a certain time; I just hook it up to a TV quickly to accomplish it.

Step 1

Install FireRecord and VLC Media Player. FireRecord is the software that is the “DVR” on the Mac. VLC is what plays back the recorded files.

Step 2

Hook up the cable box to the Mac using the FireWire cable. This step is pretty much plugging in the plug that fits. You might need to disconnect all of the other cables on the back of the box for the FireWire to work, I know I could not have both HDMI and FireWire connected at the same time on mine.

Step 3

FireRecord has a pretty straightforward interface. Pretty much you can start recording immediately (⌘-Shift-N) or you can schedule an event (⌘-N). New Immediate Event starts recording whatever channel the STB is on. I generally use this, because I have an HD-DVR in the living room. I pretty much only use the FireWire port if I want to archive something or share it online. When you use FireRecord, it creates an m2t file. An m2t file is just a different wrapper around an MPEG-2 file.

Step 4

Open the created m2t file in VLC. Seriously, it is that easy. You don’t even have to wait until it is done recording. It can be used just like a normal DVR.

Steps 5+

Coming Soon, this part will be on how to archive the shows to a much smaller format (DivX) for archival purposes or for uploading clips online to sites like YouTube and DailyMotion (Remember to respect Copyright laws with that)