paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors

Twitter Updates for 2008-08-06

admin — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 23:59:59 +0000

back at work hoping all goes well for his wife at the midwife. #
waiting patiently to go home..... #
is going to the hospital monday to try and have the baby turned, wish us luck #
testing gwibber with pounce, twitter, identi.ca and digg. #
well that seemed to work fine Gwibber is good..... #

Ubuntu - DVD from MPEG

admin — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 11:38:05 +0000

I've been creating DVD's recently from my DV camcorder, it turns out it's quite easy, but on my laptop [due to it not having much processing power] takes ages. So here are the steps.

1, i'm port your video into kino, export it to MPEG [8 DVD]
2, make sure you have dvdauthor and mkisofs installed on your pc, a simple apt-get install will do it for you
3, run the following commands from the folder where the MPEG is
1, dvdauthor -o dvd -t
2, dvdauthor -o dvd -T
3, mkisofs -dvd-video -o dvd/
4, burn off your ISO using your fave burning app [i use k3b]

Watch and Enjoy

Picasa - Ubuntu

admin — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 09:16:11 +0000

Picasa is software that helps you instantly find, edit and share all the pictures on your computer. Every time you open Picasa, it automatically locates all your pictures (even ones you forgot you had) and sorts them into visual albums organized by date with folder names you will recognize. You can drag and drop to arrange your albums and make labels to create new groups. Picasa makes sure your pictures are always organized.

Download it here - http://picasa.google.com/linux/download.html

I downloaded the 32bit deb for Ubuntu and it works a treat

Babies, Cameras.

admin — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 11:49:10 +0000

As most of you know, my wife and i are expecting in a few weeks, which to be honest i'm excited :). However i wanted a camera to take loads of pictures. My current camera is a single shot wait 5 mins then take another type [yes i'm exagerating a little] so i decided to move to the next level, a digital SLR.

What type? Well a few friends and a lot of reviews have told me about the Nikon D60 and to be honest this looks like it's a nice camera. I was a little worried about the images it produces until i looked on google and most of them are stunning for what i need it for, then i noticed this page, it was exactly what i wanted to see, family images using the D60, after all that's mostly what i'll be using it for.....Thanks mate....sold :) [oh great he's a Architect Evangelist for Microsoft:)]

Easy Configuration

admin — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 10:46:13 +0000

One of the projects i've noticed and liked the look of is the rapache project, to quote from the site

"Rapache is a simple tool for remotely managing and configuring an apache2 instance without having to hassle around through configuration files."

Brilliant, now what about a silimar thing for exim, proftpd et al, yes i know there are programs out there like webmin, plesk etc but i don't want to install these systems when one program would be perfect. Is there anything like this out there?

Ubuntu + Video Editing

admin — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 07:59:36 +0000

At the moment my main machine is a 1.75ghz laptop running heron, i had a DVD to make from a movie on my camcorder, not a hard job at all, but my god, don't do it on a laptop it takes aaaaaaaaaaaaaaages :).

1, use dvgrab to grab the video from the camcorder

2, import movie into kino and add a few text items

3, Encode the video using the DVD settings which output it to an mpeg file [this took 3 hours]

4, use dvdauthor to make the vob files and various other things.

5, use mkisofs to make the dvd into an .iso file to burn with your fave application.

Did all that and 3.5!!!! hours later had a dvd to watch, surely, apart from the obvious and get a faster machine, there has to be a better way? I'm seriously looking into macs.

Vmware console

admin — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 08:17:03 +0000

Mental note, don't try to install the windows version of the vmware server console under wine it b0rks your system. Well it did mine :( Always try and go with the native install no matter how rubbish the installer is.

Create Tomboy notes from Firefox

admin — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 08:17:09 +0000

Discovered this today, thanks to John M Anderson for the heads up

Car Drivers and the Rain

admin — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 07:55:25 +0000

Dear Lazy web

To the prick that cut me up this morning, "fuck you" and don't ever let me find you.....

Ubuntu - CLI

admin — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 15:29:43 +0000

I've been playing with a minimal interface on my Ubuntu Laptop lately. I've been using the ion2 window manager, and becuase of this i've wanted to find decent command line applications.

The first one ive found is Opheus, it's a command line audio player, take a look here for a screen shot [apologies to the author, if you let me know your name, i'll credit you with the link]

To read more about it, check out the website

The hunt continues.....