The Rant According to Deringer

How to join two video files

This is a simple howto explaining how to merge two (or more) avi into one. First get the necessary software. Open terminal (alt+f2 thentype gnome-terminal) and type: 

sudo apt-get install mencoder

Next navigate to the folder where your video is located (for simplicity keep all of the files you want to merge in the same folder) and type:

mencoder -ovc copy -oac copy video1.avi video2.avi -o completevideos.avi 

Replace video1.avi video2.avi with original videos you want to merge and replacecompletevideos.avi with whatever you want your merged video to be called.

Here’s a little explanation of what mencoder do:

-ovc copy - tells the mencoder to keep the original type of video, no encoding
-oac copy - tells the mencoder to keep the original type of audio, no encoding
-o - specifies the output file name (and location if writen as /location/of/the/merged/video/merged.avi)

Copy files from a text file to directory

My brother brought me an NTFS formatted drive to copy some… files… for him. The only non-server I have is running OS X, so had to mount the portable drive on my headless server. I thought I was in a world of sadness copying files one-by-one but I discovered some magic with xargs.

Essentially, I chuck a newline separated list of files (full path) into a file in /tmp/files_to_copy

/path/to/file_1.ext
/path/to/file_2.ext
/path/to/file\ 3.ext

Then pipe the text file through xargs:

xargs -a /tmp/files_to_copy mv -vt /path/to/dest/

This will then copy the files, one by one to /path/to/dest

Note that the files in /tmp/files_to_copy need to be valid, so escape any special characters / whitespace etc.

Then, just sit and wait for it all to finish.

A Taliban (or is it Jewish?) Joke

A fleeing Taliban, desperate for water, was plodding through the Afghan desert when he saw something far off in the distance.

Hoping to find water, he hurried toward the oasis, only to find a little old Jewish man at a small stand, selling ties.

The Taliban asked, “Do you have water?”

The Jewish man replied, “I have no water. Would you like to buy a tie? They are only $5.”

The Taliban shouted, “Idiot! I do not need an over-priced tie. I need water! I should kill you, but I must find water first!”

“OK,” said the old Jewish man, “It does not matter that you do not want to buy a tie and that you hate me. I will show you that I am bigger than that.

If you continue over that hill to the east for about two miles, you will find a lovely restaurant. It has all the ice cold water you need. Shalom.”

Cursing, the Taliban staggered away over the hill.

Several hours later he staggered back, almost dead & said, “Your f@#*ing brother won’t let me in without a tie!”

Friends, let’s talk food

As most of you know, I like food. I like cooking and I like trying new food. I try to avoid the same foods and to avoid food boredom, will often buy an ingredient or two, then go looking for something to cook with it.

While I was getting dinner ready for tonight, I had a thought. Are our seemingly endless choices of ‘convenience’ food so great that we’re sacrificing good food for it? Does it have more to do with the fact that we don’t have time? More people are turning to frozen meals, instead of cooking real, good and tasty food.

So many people know how to cook four or five different things and hit the spin cycle with them. Don’t you people get bored eating the same thing over and over? Lots of people don’t even get that far.

What are people’s thoughts on this?

Comparing directory contents

Recently I had a hard drive fail on me, so spent quite a bit of time recovering the data to put onto a new drive. During this process, I also decided to retire my Windows Server 2008 box in favour of an Ubuntu Server 11.04.

Doing so meant that it was time to ditch my NTFS drives and replace them with ext4. To make sure that I don’t lose any data (failed copy, missed directory etc), before blowing away the backup, I needed to find a way to verify my backup matched my final content. Here’s the process in a couple of quick commands:

First, I list the contents of the directories and pipe them to a file

> ls -R /media/eps1 > /tmp/eps1
> ls -R /media/movies1/eps1 > /tmp/eps1_backup

Then, I compare the two directory structures

> vimdiff /tmp/eps1 /tmp/eps1_backup

vimdiff gives me a pretty, colorised view - side by side - of my backup and final data, making it easy to tell if anything is missing.

The colours vary from system to system but the gist of it is as follows:

• The pink rows indicate differences between file a (/tmp/eps1) and file b (/tmp/eps1_backup). The highlighted portion of the pink row - in this instance movies1 - indicate what is different between file a and and file b. The difference here is due to the file list being pulled from different locations.
• The purple / blue combination indicate something is missing. I have removed AlbumArt* from /tmp/eps1.

This way, when it comes to running that scary command:

rm -rf /media/movies1/eps1

You can be safe in the knowledge you haven’t lost anything.

Disable the accented character picker

1. Open up your terminal
2. Enter the following command: defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false
3. Restart your computer. Bummer, I know. The press-and-hold functionality is immediately disabled, but you can’t hold down a key until you fully reboot.

WAIT FOR MEEEEEE

animalsbeingdicks:

Jake wasn’t about to let Earl pass his speeding Ford Explorer. He decided to take the competition out with a well timed rolling tackle. 

ARE YOU FAMILIAR WITH SQUIRREL TECHNIQUE?

animalsbeingdicks:

Master will be so pleased with our progress.