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And that should do it. After a fair bit of disk-churning, you should have a Matroska file containing all of the elements from the original DVD title.

Some emphasis added. Also, although I recognize this would be considered anecdotal evidence I've in the past encountered MKVs engineered to work this way, with title screens, commentary, multiple audio streams, etc so I do know they exist and that it is possible to do so. While the article is intended for people who want lossless quality, I'm sure it is possible to adjust parameters when encoding to bring about the file sizes you want without ending up with junk. I've seen anime (yes I know anime is different, but still it worked so the files were) encoded to be a mere forty megabytes in file size while retaining their high definition quality.

So, yeah there's some work involved in it, but it is possible.

Also if you need a player and don't want to just use a PC hooked up to your TV with XBMC then you could always try popcorn hour, or some of the machines listed here. You might have to research for awhile but you should be doing that any way, right?

--bornagainpenguin

One of the reasons I haven't bothered to try and rip my DVD collection is that no format will *preserve* those menus (and all the content they provide access to), save for a straight ISO rip, which has the problem of immense size.

I believe it is possible to do exactly this with Matroska, as described here.

--bornagainpenguin

Multi-user screen: http://aperiodic.net/screen/multiuser Gobby (multi-user text editor): http://gobby.0x539.de/trac/

Use your favorite text editor (like vi or emacs) and share a terminal using GNU screen in multi-user mode.

Google documents or Zoho or some other gratis (but typically proprietary) "cloud" solution might be reasonable.

If you're fine with text-only, you have a lot of options. VIM and EMACS both allow collaborative editing, you can share a screen session, or you can get a specialized collaborative editor (such as Gobby and ACE) or a specialized framework, such as DocSynch

If you need light-weight word processing, Abiword has a plugin for real-time collaboration.

Heavier weight word processing of DOCX can be done with Plutext.

If you need more graphical documents & the above doesn't seem to fit AND if you have a small group of friends who you trust, I'd just go "simple" & host with VNC or some other remote desktop protocol.

As far as other pieces, there is a lot of good F/OSS voice/IM/whiteboard software. Coccinella and ekiga are good examples.

"And screen works even better!"

I'll stick with bash or ksh, thanks very much. But thanks for trying.

I live in text mode. Here's a selection of my preferred apps. Most of these are still in active development (though some are more active than others).

screen. Simply indispensable. It slices and dices console sessions. Pretty much everything I do, I do in screen. I've a page elsewhere that describes everything screen does for me.

zsh. My shell of choice. Think of all the good features of bash, ksh, and tcsh rolled together. (Without much of the ickiness, particularly the csh heritage.) Personally, the killer application of zsh was that fact that not only did it have context-sensitive completion but (unlike tcsh) it shipped with hordes of completion definitions right out of the box. Type 'dpkg -L fo<tab>' and zsh will autocomplete on the Debian packages currently installed on your system. With an ssh-agent running, type 'scp otherhost:fo<tab>' and zsh will ssh to the other system and autocomplete on the files available on that host.

irssi. The best IRC client I've come across, certainly beating out IrcII, BitchX, and even epic. Multiple windows, extensible, tons of plugins available.

bitlbee. This is actually an IRC-to-Instant-Messaging gateway. It allows me to use irssi and the IRC environment with which I am so familiar to also deal with those of my friends and family who insist on using the various IM services.

snownews. curses-based RSS aggregator. I shopped around a bit before finding an aggregator that I liked. snownews does everything I need.

mutt. Possibly the best mail client around, GUI or not. While pine is okay (and simpler to use), mutt is much more customizable and scales better to large volumes of email.

procmail. Again, not exactly command line, but essential to my email usage.

Emacs. My text-mode editor of choice. Feel free to substitute XEmacs or vi (preferably vim) at your own preference. I prefer emacs to vi, though I know a decent amount of vi, as any sysadmin should. I actually like XEmacs a little better than GNU Emacs, but GNU Emacs has better UTF-8 support.

w3m. There's also links; I'm not tremendously familiar with it because w3m fills all of my needs and it used to be the case that w3m had better HTML support than links, but I don't believe this is any longer the case. Of note is the fact that w3m can do tabbed browsing, though it's not multithreaded, so you can't read one tab while another is loading. Also, if you run w3m with a valid $DISPLAY, it can even show images in the pages it displays.

moosic. This is a music jukebox. The features that distinguish it from other such programs are twofold. First, it runs as a standalone server; you interact with it via a command line client. (In theory, a curses or GUI client could be written, but to my knowledge none yet has.) Second, it's customizable with regards to how it plays music. It has a config file where you tell it what programs to use to play various music formats (it does come with reasonable defaults). Someone elsewhere in this article pointed out mpd; I'll have to look at that, but it at least doesn't appear to support the various MOD formats.

mplayer. It does more or less require some graphical output (X, framebuffer, whatever), but it's run and displays it status in text mod

A quick look at the screen manpage indicates you might be able to kludge screen as your login "shell" (having screen spawn your actual shell), although it would create the problem of reconnecting to existing screen sessions instead of creating new ones.

If screen is run as a login shell, it behaves as if it had been run with '-xRR', which means that it will attach to an existing session or create the session if it doesn't already exist. This is, however, not recommended. Lots of programs expect to be able to run your login shell non-interactively, and screen cannot do that. It's better to use a normal shell and just attach to screen as you need.

I have a simple shell script that I wrote to manage a few things and attach to screen. Most of the time that I ssh into my computer, I run 'ssh -t host attach-screen' (indeed, I have menu options that run 'xterm -e ssh -t host attach-screen' :). Unless you want to do relatively complicated things, you should be okay with just 'screen -xRR'

A quick look at the screen manpage indicates you might be able to kludge screen as your login "shell" (having screen spawn your actual shell), although it would create the problem of reconnecting to existing screen sessions instead of creating new ones.

If screen is run as a login shell, it behaves as if it had been run with '-xRR', which means that it will attach to an existing session or create the session if it doesn't already exist. This is, however, not recommended. Lots of programs expect to be able to run your login shell non-interactively, and screen cannot do that. It's better to use a normal shell and just attach to screen as you need.

I have a simple shell script that I wrote to manage a few things and attach to screen. Most of the time that I ssh into my computer, I run 'ssh -t host attach-screen' (indeed, I have menu options that run 'xterm -e ssh -t host attach-screen' :). Unless you want to do relatively complicated things, you should be okay with just 'screen -xRR'

You can look at my macros for spam classification. (Linked instead of posted directly because slashcode kept inserting unwanted spaces in them.)

With these, "S" will classify an email as spam. "H" will reclassify a false positive--it's designed to operate on an email that SpamAssassin has munged as spam and won't work on regular emails. I haven't bothered to write a macro to train regular emails as ham, though I probably should.