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.

Travel cases.

April 23, 2025 by S-Config

Perhaps we travel too much.

One of the things that writers tell you if you have writer's block is to write about what you know. Now, we know there are plenty of pretentious articles about airports and how to survive them. One item that we bring a lot is a hardened case for tools. Tools are one of those things that TSA prefers that you go through the bag-check. Which, upon checking your bag at the airport. It then goes down the conveyor, where we'd like to believe there's some angry 800-lb gorilla that picks up your case and whips it into the walls a few times before someone snipes that gorilla with a tranquilizer. Cleans up the mess and loads it into the belly of an airplane. Only for it to be removed and put into a pit of even more gorillas to use on each other as weapons before it slowly comes up the carousel to meet you once again.

Would you like to know more? Read onwards into my diatribes of destruction.

IntelliMouse lives again.

August 18, 2024 by S-Config

We got some e-mails about our previous Logitech post of people showing their love of the IntelliMouse, but someone contacted us directly asking what happened to that IntelliMouse that was used in the pictures?

Well! Good news! It's back up and running! Read on if you want to see all the gory details. As well as occasional ranting too!

Privacy PSA time!

July 28, 2024July 27, 2024 by S-Config

Hello Twitter/X and Firefox. You're on the naughty list!

Outside of becoming the old man that shouts at the clouds. Or listening to the wind, like grandma told you never to do. The OTHER thing we like to do when we can is help readers during these times. Where enshittification is magnified due to companies getting way too thirsty for their own good.

*Puts on shitty YouTuber impersonation*

LET'S JUMP INTO IIIIIIt*cough-coughcough*

Read more

Stupid Android time – Ads on Startup.

August 6, 2024July 6, 2024 by S-Config

Simple post time.

This week on stupid Android games. We talk about the game of "Advertisement" and how Google in particular has been playing stupid games with everyone in the world for fun and profit. We've used a similar statement about content creation. It's not just a person coming up to you to take a shit in your home and giving you ad money. This individual (and/or) company is going to the manufacturer to pay them money to shit in the households of millions of people. Those millions of people will be FORCED to like it because these silicon valley companies use the excuse that any rapist would use.

They obviously wanted this. Why else would they be buying something so expensive? It's like they're begging us to give it to them! - Rando tech company executive

Would you like to know more? Read on to continue the diatribe!

DIY Lighting.

April 27, 2025October 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

December 18, 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.

September 27, 2024September 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.

December 18, 2023September 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 27, 2024June 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.