Month: May 2023

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DC5

When you dig a bit deeper than the usual, you find that some bands have very interesting histories. Take The Dave Clark Five, for instance.

The DC5 were the Tottenham Sound. They were founded in Tottenham, north London and not so far from where I live. At their height they were regarded as at least equal to The Beatles, but only by Clark himself. They were certainly rivals to the fab four, in the sense that they were around at the same time in a similar musical area and appealing to the same age group.

They had success in the UK, the USA and many other countries.

When you think of the band, you remember a five piece (!): keyboards, guitar, bass, saxophone, drums. Clark played the drums, and main singer Mike Smith was keyboards.

There are rumours going around that Clark himself did not really play drums. I have no idea if it’s true. He was certainly always front and centre of the band, hogging the limelight. Clark managed the group, produced the records and owned all the rights.

The band also made a film, as bands did in those days, Catch Us If You Can. The plot involves Clark and Barbara Ferris having various adventures. The others do appear, but briefly.

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Video

There are times when you may need to record on-screen video, either for instruction or as a record of conversations or whatever. There are many solutions for this.

There may be times when you need to download, with permission, videos from YouTube etc for future reference. There are multiple solutions for this.

Here are the two things we choose. This is not advertising, paid or unpaid, or a recommendation, just a record of what we use. We have tried others, which for various reasons were rejected. These solutions are free, at the time of writing at least.

If you try either of these and have problems, we do not accept responsibility. Beware fake, scam sites.

Downloading from YouTube

After trying others that failed, we settled on this. Each time we use it, there is one advert for some kind of video editing thing, but it’s not intrusive and we delete it.

Copy the url for the video you want, paste it into the program, it will be ‘analysed’, then you can download it. You can enter more than one at a time, even whole queues for videos and just leave it to get on with the work.

In the settings, you can choose to shut down your computer when it is done.

Download times can be very short, or long depending on number and size of files and speed of connection.

Screen recording

We went for ShareX.

It’s free, and it does many things were are not interested in, We just use Capture|Screen recording.

To get sound, you may have to install a plug in, but it’s easy.

Select the region of the screen to be recorded and let the program do its work. At the end, click Stop. It may take a while for the video to be processed and saved.