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Mostly I wanted to do the DIY part with a motive to back it up 
GCS d--(d+) s-/++ a C++++ U+++ P- L+@ E-- W++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
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My Home control system for heating is easy 
I wrote very little server code, used an RTL software radio dongle, to find and lock into the 400Mhz radio signal my thermostat in the hallway uses to talk to my central heating boiler, then started to intercept the comms and provide my own smart control from one of my servers.
Eventually, I just put an rPI in a box, with the dongle, set up GNU Radio on it to do the intercept, then stuck it on the wall right next to the thermostat.
I turned off ALL the auto management features of the thermostat, switched it all to manual, and now it's my box that controls it.
Everything else, sensors in the rooms etc was all installed when the house was built (We bought a new build) so all I needed was already in place, I just needed to figure out how to hack it.
Most of the honeywell systems communicate on a 400Mhz radio signal, and most RTL SDR dongles can easily scan that range these days.
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So yesterday, a friend tells me he has a bunch of TV episodes in MP4, but they are stuttering when he plays them in VLC. A quick check, and they aren't indexed, so a quick run through Avidemux to copy the video and audio streams to a new file will fix that.
So ... Rather than drag and drop, build index, save, wait, ENTER, unload, rinse-and-repeat I knock up a quick app to do them for me: and it works: opens AviDemux, loads the file, indexes it, saves it, closes Avidemux. It even shows progress on a DataGridView by removing each file as it's processed. And that's the bad bit - since this was a quick and dirty one-off app, I ... well ... I ... used Application.DoEvents. Sorry.
And it nagged at me all night. "Shouldn't have done that, you know. You know better than that, Griff. Jerk move, Griff".
And it was right. So I wasted half an hour this morning to convert it to a BackgroundWorker, with proper progress reporting via the DGV and a read-only textbox, complete with a "Stop!" button, and folder(s) persistence via the settings file.
For an app I'll never use again ... I hate it when that happens ...
Does anyone else get this, or is it just me?
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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It's not just you. I've also been known to waste time in the same way. 
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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I'm worse. I'll put in a heck of a lot of time in an application I'll never use again, and then I'll grow tired of it and abandon it when it's 95% ready...
Anything that is unrelated to elephants is irrelephant
Anonymous
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The problem with quotes on the internet is that you can never tell if they're genuine
Winston Churchill, 1944
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Never argue with a fool. Onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.
Mark Twain
modified 18-Feb-19 7:03am.
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Keep the ROI in mind. Do it like pure psychopaths  .
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You could have just used a console app with a simple command line?
But no, you had to have a fancy pants UI with buttons and stuff.
modified 18-Feb-19 6:20am.
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 I didn't want to have to type the folder paths ... and I'd have to test it, which means I have to write a .BAT file to test it ... and then test that ... 
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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No one off, quick and dirty, app is complete until it has some fancy animations.
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Would an animated gif do?
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They say that OCD and perfectionism are good friends...
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge". Stephen Hawking, 1942- 2018
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I had to read that a few times before it sank in.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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It is just you, and I cannot even imagine how you could waste your time like this. We all are approaching 99.9% of efficiency in all our tasks.
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Rage wrote: We all are approaching 99.9% of efficiency in all our tasks.
Some more closely than others. 
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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OriginalGriff wrote: Does anyone else get this, or is it just me?
Me too. But I never remove ON ERROR RESUME NEXT. The program should never crash.
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I'm not rising to that bait!
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Did something like that a long while ago. Excel Spreadsheets and VBA (sorry, the only thing available) to do scoring and generate nice looking results for a golf league I played in. Used Excel 99 at the time. The whole time I'm thinking, why am I wasting my time on this, people have been doing this on paper for years. Took a couple of weeks. But I kept up and finished it. Fast forward 20 years, I no longer play in that league but they're still using the stuff I created. Get a question about it every once in a while. Moral: if it works, its worth doing. You never know how it will end up getting used.
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OriginalGriff wrote: [...] TV episodes in MP4, but they are stuttering when he plays them in VLC. A quick check, and they aren't indexed, so a quick run through Avidemux to copy the video and audio streams to a new file will fix that.
I need to learn more about that.
Last weekend I watched a 2+ hour music concert, ripped into MP4 format, and VLC would stutter and then lose the audio at some fixed times (as in, not random spots; if I restarted, it would lose the audio again at the exact same place). I could get the sound back by stopping/restarting the video, then skipping over the problematic spot. It just got progressively worse and worse, until I switched to Media Player to play back the file. But, everywhere VLC would stutter then lose the audio, I'd get a 1-2 second pause in Media Player. Could be just some bad encoding somehow, I have no idea.
Does this sound like the sort of thing that could be fixed by what you're describing? What's the process exactly? Just a straight copy of the audio and video streams through Avidemux without re-encoding?
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Exactly that problem!
Just drag'n'drop the MP4 onto Avidemux, and it'll build a .IDX2 file automatically if there is no index available. Make sure the video and audio streams are set to Copy, and the output is MP4 (so it won't re-encode the video and lose quality) and CTRL+S to save it as a new file (just in case, but I've had no problems).
Works beautifully for me!
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Does this IDX2 file now need to forever live alongside the MP4, or is it just some temp file that gets created while the new MP4 gets built?
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Just a temporary file, you can delete it when you delete the original MP4.
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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If no such file was created...is that a sign the original was already properly indexed? (and, presumably, the stuttering is something unrelated...)
The output file actually came out slightly smaller - by roughly 3MB.
I suppose the real test will be to determine whether the stuttering is gone...and I don't have the 2+ hours for it right now.
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Probably - but if it's shorter then it's worth checking if the problem is gone. If you remember where it started stuttering, you could fast forward to the point on the original and new and see if they are different?
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Yeah, that's the problem...I didn't write any of these time references down. It happened at many "random" point (minutes apart), but playing the file back showed the problem still existed at the same locations every time, so it wasn't some temporary glitch with VLC.
I'm probably gonna have to sit through the original again until at least the first instance occurs, and then jump right to that location in the reprocessed file. But when it comes to these sorts of things, I don't take anything for granted...
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