It’s a beautiful summer day, your daughter just graduated high school, she’s all ready for college and you did your part too – you filed your FAFSA and you’re all excited and supportive about her going to college. And then you get the letter in the mail. Your “Expected Family Contribution” is $30,000 and so she isn’t eligible for any financial aid. But how can you afford to spend $30,000 a year on college when you only make $80,000 and still have three other kids at home?

I thought it would be wise to digitize my family’s collection of home videos stored on VHS. The first step was to try to research existing tools. I had gotten tvtime to display the video, but unfortunately, numerous threads (link) mentioned that there was no way to record from tvtime, and running a screen capture utility would be extremely inefficient. xawtv was mentioned in a few places (link), but it maxed at 384×288 and only supported AVI output, with minimal configuration available.

 I have a cousin that lives in a community where Internet access is extremely controlled and having unrestricted Internet access is taboo. She has a special dispensation so she can work remotely, but her access is heavily restricted. She recently asked if I could find a way to repair her iPod, as it didn’t boot and needed a firmware update, but she couldn’t update the firmware through iTunes, because of the Internet filter.

Many Jewish people have heard of Step It Up, a Dance Dance Revolution clone that is pre-packaged with Jewish music. Fewer are aware that it is a rebranded version of StepMania, which is freely available—and they even release the source code. As such, if you already own the included songs, you can create the simfiles (the files used for each song in StepMania) yourself with DancingGorilla and buy dance pads from Ebay for roughly $15 each.

This was originally published on the OSIRIS blog Note: This is all written for Python 2.7.3. These details might be different in other versions of Python - especially 3+! Attempting to escape a sandbox is always a fun challenge. Python sandboxes are no exception. In a static language, this is usually done by analyzing the code to see if certain functions are called, or wrapping the dangerous functions with code that does validation.

Like many others my age, I grew up on listening to cassette tapes. Tapes can get easily tangled and damaged, have a background hiss, and can only be listened to sequentially (you can’t jump from song to song). There’s one relatively new problem - nobody has tape players anymore. Repurchasing every tape you owned as an MP3 might not financially feasible at $15 per CD and some are simply unavailable.