1. Oh, like the speed limit is anything other than a suggestion. 2. I'd still rather have a reckless driver crash behind me than in front of me. 3. Then let him pass, and back off enough to let him get way ahead of you.
That doesn't even begin to make sense to me. I much prefer a crappy driver to be behind me than in front of me. If they're behind me, they have to catch me before they can fuck up my day. If they're in front of me, there are countless ways in which they can make my life miserable.
I know how I'll work around it - I won't watch cable. Seriously. Fuck that shit. There's nothing so compelling on cable that I feel any need to keep it. I've posted before about how I have a MythTV project in the works and when it's done I'm going to drop my DirecTV service and just stick to over-the-air HDTV. And I haven't done it yet, since real life keeps getting in the way, and right now there's just no pressing need. But as more and more things like this keep happening, I have more and more reason to escape from the deadly clutches of pay TV. For now I can make do with getting the few shows on cable I care about via Bittorrent, but if they somehow close all those holes and goes away, I'll either get a Netflix subscription and get entire seasons of shows at once, or I'll just watch less TV! I've been without a TV before and, really, it's not nearly as traumatic as people make it out to be.
Goddammit, Slashdot guys, bring back the "haha" tag's visibility! Yes, I know it was getting used a lot, but that's because there are a lot of stories posted here that need it! This is a perfect example!
Every time someone asks Slashdot a question like this, the hysteria crowd comes out of the woodwork to scream about how it's absolutely impossible for an "amateur" to do it, and you absolutely must hire a "professional," lest something tragic happen, ranging from the ever-popular "you'll lose your job!" to a bucket of dead puppies or something.
Yes, I realize that professionals are sometimes necessary, especially in situations where life is clearly at stake (pilots, medical, law, etc.) I'm sure some jackass will show up to tell me how this is an industrial furnace and that clearly means that a professional is warranted, but we have no idea what the particulars of this situation are. Just stick to the freakin' question, people.
It used to be the case that "professional" implied not only a degree of competence, but also a certain amount of integrity and experience. But that's just not true any more. All it means now is that someone gets a paycheck for doing something. Often it means that they're experts in nothing more than doing something as cheaply as possible.
For what it's worth, I'm personally fond of the Atmel AVR microcontrollers. Many, many people are also fond of Microchip's offerings in the PIC line. But for rapid development, something like the Parallax BASIC Stamp is probably the way to go. They're cheap and easy (like a good woman) and let you focus on the task at hand rather than the bit-level details of how to read sensors, etc.
Isn't Google one of those "dog-friendly" workplaces, where people bring their goddamned pets to work with them? That alone would be enough to keep me from ever applying for a job there. I'm allergic to dogs, but I also just dislike them. The company I work for now is dog-friendly and around Christmas a couple of people got puppies. It was so obnoxious I wanted to stab myself in the eye with a fork. They made a racket, they stank like ass, and they pissed and shit on the floor, and my allergies kicked into overdrive. There were parts of the office I couldn't stand to be in for more than a minute or two. So, yeah, I'm leaving my current job (not because of this, but this didn't help) and I'll make very sure I don't ever work in a "dog-friendly" office again.
Did I get it right in the subject line? Apparently all Slashdotters are supposed to hate this Roland guy, right? God, I just want so desperately to be loved...
That's only true if the economic environment stays the same as it is today, especially with regards to cheap energy. The "peak oil" crowd claims that energy will get much more expensive in the future, in which case the existing economies of scale are lost and it becomes cost-effective to do more and more of the work yourself, or on a small, distributed, localized scale vs. huge and highly industrialized. Regardless of what you think of peak oil (I have serious doubts myself), it's just one of many possible ways in which the economic environment may change to make your assumptions untrue.
All of this disregards other potential factors, such as personal beliefs and preferences (maybe you want to avoid supporting certain corporations or business practices) or control (various cartels and special interests control the commercially-available hardware, making self-fabrication the only way to acquire certain types of hardware). This all may be hobbyist-level tinkering for now, but there's no telling when it might become very relevant.
If you have access to a satellite receiver or DVB-S card in your PC, you can find Russia Today on the Galaxy 25 satellite (formerly known as Intelsat Americas 5, or IA5) in the 97W orbital slot. It's an English-language news show in a format similar to CNN Headline News. It used to be a pretty decent news source, too, but it's been quite a while since I watched it (over a year, I think). Since it's beamed free of charge to English speakers and financed by the Russian governemnt, I always assumed it was a sort of propaganda tool, but on issues the Russian government didn't care about they seemed to do a reasonable job of reporting.
Good point. There's a world of difference between an intelligent prank like this, which is not only funny but makes a serious political point, and the usual 15-year-old prank. "Oh, dude, we totally fuckin' spread dog shit all over the doors of the school! It was fuckin' awesome, hey! People were all, like, 'Eww, that's so gross!' Seniors rule!"
It's good to know I'm not alone. Heh... I will block text ads, too, if it's easy to do (Adblock Plus handles Google ads by default, which covers most sites with text ads).
I still have a TV, but I get the impression that I watch a lot less of it than other people, and I'm ditching cable/satellite soon and going with over-the-air only. I couldn't deal with TV these days without a DVR. I have Tivo/DirecTV now, but I'm building a MythTV setup. I'm looking forward to trying out the auto-commercial-skip feature, even if it's not 100% effective.
You guys all seem to be operating under the assumption that everyone runs Windows. I'm a Kubuntu guy myself. And once addons.mozilla.org starts working correctly again, I'll still grab that PDF extension, since what I really want is the option to choose whether to save a PDF to disk (which is usually what I want) or view it in a browser window.
Seriously. I don't often cry "worst evar!" but this qualifies. I'm going to be installing that PDF-downloader extension just as soon as I'm done mocking this list for sucking so hard. And while I do agree that NoScript just breaks too many sites (and it's only going to get worse as the web gets all AJAXy and buzzword-compliant), I don't think I'd bother with the web without tools like Adblock Plus. What can I say - I'm sensitive to noise, both visual and audio. I find it harder than most people to filter out extraneous crap from my sensory input. Maybe it's because I grew up muting the TV audio during commericals (it got to be reflexive in our family) but advertising grates on my nerves like nobody's business. I'll tolerate Google-style text ads, but I find anything with graphics distracting and want it gone.
And yeah, some of it is my significant anti-consumerism bias, too. I block ads on principle, as I consider them an ever-increasing intrusion into my life. Yes, people have the right to create and use advertising, but I have the same right to use any legal means to keep them away from me. And for those who ask, as this article did, "what would happen to all the great ad-supported sites if everyone used these tools," well, they'd be replaced by something else - subscription-driven services, smaller clusters of free services, etc. I love the web as much as the next guy, but it's not like I'd be lost if the entire web went dark tomorrow. I have other interests. But that's not going to happen anyway.
Programming basic web functionality is ten times harder, more time-consuming, more error-prone, and less rewarding than desktop programming.
Seriously? 'Cause I've found the exact opposite to be true. The last time I took a serious crack at desktop development, Windows 3.1 was the OS du jour and Borland C++/ObjectWindows Library was my best friend. So that was, what, 1993? And it was hideous. I moved from that into web programming in Perl and then PHP, and it all made such good sense to me. It was easy and fast (like a good woman), and after a while I gained enough experience that I could even do it well (i.e. not terribly inefficient and full of security holes).
Now, years later, I've barely touched C++ or any other "real" (non-scripting) languages for years, and the idea of learning even one GUI toolkit seems an almost insurmountable obstacle. I'd actually like to get into desktop development, but the learning curves are sharp enough to even put off someone like me, who constantly learns stuff for fun. I'm sure I could manage, but I find myself questioning whether the massive ass-ache involved would be worth it. I don't really deal with the Windows world, so I find myself trying to choose between GTK/GTKmm, QT, WxWidgets, or finally learning Java and using Swing. And do I freshen my now-extremely-rusty C++ skills, learn Java, or go with something like Python (which I've been meaning to get into for a while now)? It seems that no matter what path I choose, I'm destined to spend a long, long time just getting up to speed before I can write anything approaching useful.
If anyone has any suggestions on where to start, I'd love to hear 'em.
I'm just north of Tampa in Spring Hill and I have Bright House (RoadRunner) both at home and at work. In my opinion, they're excellent. My connection almost never goes down (it's happened maybe a handful of times since I moved here almost 4 years ago, once because of a hurricane), they never hassle me about bandwidth issues or BitTorrent downloads, my third-party (non-Bright House) VoIP service works just fine, and they keep increasing my downstream bandwidth without charging more for it (I think I'm at 8 megabits down, 512 kilobits up). I used to run a personal SMTP server, too, for which they never hassled me. The very few times I've ever had to call tech support (available 24/7), they've been very helpful. For $50 a month, I'm very happy.
At the office we have roughly the same bandwidth, but we also have a block of static IP's and 24/7 business-grade support, which is absolutely top-notch. Not only do the corporate support guys know what they're doing, but the hold times are usually close to zero and they even call us when they notice our connection unexpectedly drop for any length of time. They call us well in advance for planned outages, too. All this costs us less than $100 a month, I believe.
I just finished doing exactly this sort of thing, so I'll describe what I did, how, and why.
Some caveats: 1) I like working from the command line. 2) This was not a project for which I wanted ultra high quality - "good enough" was good enough for me.
I have a Hauppauge PVR-500 (a hardware MPEG encoder/TV tuner card - basically, this card is a pair of PVR-250's on one PCI card). This card is well-supported on Linux by the IVTV drivers. I decided to use its composite and audio inputs to convert some old VHS porn (gotta love that 80's-era stuff) to modern digital file formats so I could finally toss out the old VHS video tapes, some of which were quite degraded (they were formerly rental tapes, and some were nearly 20 years old). I used an old-but-decent-quality Sony VCR as the video source and fed its outputs straight into the PVR-500's first set of inputs. Capturing video was as simple as:
cat/dev/video0 >filename.mpg
How's that for simple? Heh... I "retensioned" the tape beforehand (fast forward all the way to the end, then rewind all the way to the beginnig) and made note of how long the tape was. I used a kitchen timer to let me know when the tape was nearly finished playing so I could stop the capture at the approprite time.
After the capture was finished, I used mplayer to find the exact end point (just after the credits faded to black, for example) and to find where to crop the video (most analog captures will end up with black bars on the left/right sides, and old tapes often have distortion at the top or bottom). mplayer's "cropdetect" feature was invaluable for that. I would play the file with a command like this:
gmplayer -vf cropdetect filename.mpg
To use cropdetect, you have to fast-forward into a part of the video where the picture doesn't have any black at the edges (no dark scenes, transition fades, etc.) Then you just look at the terminal window to see what cropping parameters to use (it spits them out continuously). I found that sometimes the default setting wasn't sufficient to eliminate the black bars completely, so I would occasionally use cropdetect=50 to make it a little less conservative about what it detected. That value of 50 was chosen by experimentation, so feel free to experiment yourself. 50 seemed to consistently work well for me. There are no units on that number, it's just a scale from 0 to 255. In the end, I'd have a set of cropping parameters that looked like this:
-vf crop=704:476:12:0
Those numbers are: X dimension, Y dimension, X offset, Y offset. Offsets are measured in pixels from the upper left corner.
Cropping the distorted crap at the top and bottom isn't quite so easy. It's not all black, so cropdetect doesn't detect it. So I had to manually adjust the parameters. The tricky part is the way mencoder/mplayer wants its dimensions specified. It would be much simpler if it used a format of startx:starty:endx:endy rather than the size/offset described above. As it is, if you want to crop pixels off the top or left side, you have to shorten the appropriate dimension by N pixels and then add N pixels to the offset. This sounds like a pain in the ass, but in practice it's not so bad. You get used to it very quickly.
Now that I had my crop values, I'd use mencoder to resize, deinterlace, and transcode the whole thing into h.264 video and variable bitrate MP3 audio. I experimented with AAC audio, but for some reason I kept having much better results with VBR MP3. I think the FAAC codec (the one bundled with Ubuntu Dapper) I have is just too old to be efficient. When Feisty comes out this month and I get around to upgrading, I'll try AAC again. Anyway, this is a complex command line, so I wrapped it in a script:
#!/bin/bash
# Bit rate at which to encode # Formula for h.264: X * Y * FPS * 0.125 # Common
It is for the vast majority of computer users. Sure, I can do something like: ifconfig eth0 hw ether DE:AD:BA:BE:B0:0B but even the "power user" types I know usually don't even know what a MAC is, let alone how to change it or why they'd want to.
I thought that, too, but after looking into it, that's only true if you have exclusive control over an appropriate place to mount it. Basically, they can't prevent you from installing a dish on a tripod on a balcony (which I did at another apartment), or on a patch of ground that's considered part of your apartment vs. common space. They can prevent you from doing things like mounting a dish to an exterior wall, a roof, or in the ground in a common area, etc.
I'm just glad I'm done dealing with crap like that. I'm a homeowner in a non-deed-restricted neighborhood now. I can install a 12-foot satellite dish in my front yard and tell the neighbors to kiss my ass if they don't like it. Heh...
I lived in an apartment at one point which didn't allow my DirecTV dish, but one of my windows had a clear view of the southern sky. OK, I decided, I'll just set the dish here on the floor and point it out the window! Well, that didn't work. At first it was the metal screen blocking the signal, but the apartment complex manager was nice enough to have it replaced with a non-conductive fiberglass screen when I asked. But it still didn't work. With the window open so the dish was only looking through the screen, everything was fine. Close the window, though, and my signal dropped to zero. Signals at those frequencies are known to pass through ordinary glass, so I'm guessing that the windows were coated with some type of glazing, possibly metal-based, that blocked the signal. Heat was included in the rent at this place, so the apartment complex had a direct interest in energy efficiency.
My solution was to build a double-paned window out of two sheets of clear acrylic separated with spacers and insulated all the way around with foam tape. I cut it to fit the open window perfectly and unless you looked very carefully, you'd never notice that the "real" window was wide open and the "fake" window was filling the space. It was well-insulated enough even in the winter that the heat loss was no problem. But the important thing was that the satellite signals passed through the acrylic with no problem, and I was probably the only person in the whole complex to have satellite TV. Plus, I earned geek points for having a working satellite dish on my living room floor. Yes, I was single at the time; why do you ask? Heh...
Slashdot Mirror
1. Oh, like the speed limit is anything other than a suggestion.
2. I'd still rather have a reckless driver crash behind me than in front of me.
3. Then let him pass, and back off enough to let him get way ahead of you.
Drive the speed limit
Blasphemer!!
That doesn't even begin to make sense to me. I much prefer a crappy driver to be behind me than in front of me. If they're behind me, they have to catch me before they can fuck up my day. If they're in front of me, there are countless ways in which they can make my life miserable.
I know how I'll work around it - I won't watch cable. Seriously. Fuck that shit. There's nothing so compelling on cable that I feel any need to keep it. I've posted before about how I have a MythTV project in the works and when it's done I'm going to drop my DirecTV service and just stick to over-the-air HDTV. And I haven't done it yet, since real life keeps getting in the way, and right now there's just no pressing need. But as more and more things like this keep happening, I have more and more reason to escape from the deadly clutches of pay TV. For now I can make do with getting the few shows on cable I care about via Bittorrent, but if they somehow close all those holes and goes away, I'll either get a Netflix subscription and get entire seasons of shows at once, or I'll just watch less TV! I've been without a TV before and, really, it's not nearly as traumatic as people make it out to be.
Goddammit, Slashdot guys, bring back the "haha" tag's visibility! Yes, I know it was getting used a lot, but that's because there are a lot of stories posted here that need it! This is a perfect example!
Every time someone asks Slashdot a question like this, the hysteria crowd comes out of the woodwork to scream about how it's absolutely impossible for an "amateur" to do it, and you absolutely must hire a "professional," lest something tragic happen, ranging from the ever-popular "you'll lose your job!" to a bucket of dead puppies or something.
Yes, I realize that professionals are sometimes necessary, especially in situations where life is clearly at stake (pilots, medical, law, etc.) I'm sure some jackass will show up to tell me how this is an industrial furnace and that clearly means that a professional is warranted, but we have no idea what the particulars of this situation are. Just stick to the freakin' question, people.
It used to be the case that "professional" implied not only a degree of competence, but also a certain amount of integrity and experience. But that's just not true any more. All it means now is that someone gets a paycheck for doing something. Often it means that they're experts in nothing more than doing something as cheaply as possible.
For what it's worth, I'm personally fond of the Atmel AVR microcontrollers. Many, many people are also fond of Microchip's offerings in the PIC line. But for rapid development, something like the Parallax BASIC Stamp is probably the way to go. They're cheap and easy (like a good woman) and let you focus on the task at hand rather than the bit-level details of how to read sensors, etc.
Corollary to that statement: it is not the job of a soldier to die for his country, but to make the other guy die for his.
Isn't Google one of those "dog-friendly" workplaces, where people bring their goddamned pets to work with them? That alone would be enough to keep me from ever applying for a job there. I'm allergic to dogs, but I also just dislike them. The company I work for now is dog-friendly and around Christmas a couple of people got puppies. It was so obnoxious I wanted to stab myself in the eye with a fork. They made a racket, they stank like ass, and they pissed and shit on the floor, and my allergies kicked into overdrive. There were parts of the office I couldn't stand to be in for more than a minute or two. So, yeah, I'm leaving my current job (not because of this, but this didn't help) and I'll make very sure I don't ever work in a "dog-friendly" office again.
Did I get it right in the subject line? Apparently all Slashdotters are supposed to hate this Roland guy, right? God, I just want so desperately to be loved...
That's only true if the economic environment stays the same as it is today, especially with regards to cheap energy. The "peak oil" crowd claims that energy will get much more expensive in the future, in which case the existing economies of scale are lost and it becomes cost-effective to do more and more of the work yourself, or on a small, distributed, localized scale vs. huge and highly industrialized. Regardless of what you think of peak oil (I have serious doubts myself), it's just one of many possible ways in which the economic environment may change to make your assumptions untrue.
All of this disregards other potential factors, such as personal beliefs and preferences (maybe you want to avoid supporting certain corporations or business practices) or control (various cartels and special interests control the commercially-available hardware, making self-fabrication the only way to acquire certain types of hardware). This all may be hobbyist-level tinkering for now, but there's no telling when it might become very relevant.
If you have access to a satellite receiver or DVB-S card in your PC, you can find Russia Today on the Galaxy 25 satellite (formerly known as Intelsat Americas 5, or IA5) in the 97W orbital slot. It's an English-language news show in a format similar to CNN Headline News. It used to be a pretty decent news source, too, but it's been quite a while since I watched it (over a year, I think). Since it's beamed free of charge to English speakers and financed by the Russian governemnt, I always assumed it was a sort of propaganda tool, but on issues the Russian government didn't care about they seemed to do a reasonable job of reporting.
Good point. There's a world of difference between an intelligent prank like this, which is not only funny but makes a serious political point, and the usual 15-year-old prank. "Oh, dude, we totally fuckin' spread dog shit all over the doors of the school! It was fuckin' awesome, hey! People were all, like, 'Eww, that's so gross!' Seniors rule!"
It's pointless, wasteful eye candy for kids who think that the desktop experience should be more like a video game.
It's good to know I'm not alone. Heh... I will block text ads, too, if it's easy to do (Adblock Plus handles Google ads by default, which covers most sites with text ads).
I still have a TV, but I get the impression that I watch a lot less of it than other people, and I'm ditching cable/satellite soon and going with over-the-air only. I couldn't deal with TV these days without a DVR. I have Tivo/DirecTV now, but I'm building a MythTV setup. I'm looking forward to trying out the auto-commercial-skip feature, even if it's not 100% effective.
You guys all seem to be operating under the assumption that everyone runs Windows. I'm a Kubuntu guy myself. And once addons.mozilla.org starts working correctly again, I'll still grab that PDF extension, since what I really want is the option to choose whether to save a PDF to disk (which is usually what I want) or view it in a browser window.
Seriously. I don't often cry "worst evar!" but this qualifies. I'm going to be installing that PDF-downloader extension just as soon as I'm done mocking this list for sucking so hard. And while I do agree that NoScript just breaks too many sites (and it's only going to get worse as the web gets all AJAXy and buzzword-compliant), I don't think I'd bother with the web without tools like Adblock Plus. What can I say - I'm sensitive to noise, both visual and audio. I find it harder than most people to filter out extraneous crap from my sensory input. Maybe it's because I grew up muting the TV audio during commericals (it got to be reflexive in our family) but advertising grates on my nerves like nobody's business. I'll tolerate Google-style text ads, but I find anything with graphics distracting and want it gone.
And yeah, some of it is my significant anti-consumerism bias, too. I block ads on principle, as I consider them an ever-increasing intrusion into my life. Yes, people have the right to create and use advertising, but I have the same right to use any legal means to keep them away from me. And for those who ask, as this article did, "what would happen to all the great ad-supported sites if everyone used these tools," well, they'd be replaced by something else - subscription-driven services, smaller clusters of free services, etc. I love the web as much as the next guy, but it's not like I'd be lost if the entire web went dark tomorrow. I have other interests. But that's not going to happen anyway.
Programming basic web functionality is ten times harder, more time-consuming, more error-prone, and less rewarding than desktop programming.
Seriously? 'Cause I've found the exact opposite to be true. The last time I took a serious crack at desktop development, Windows 3.1 was the OS du jour and Borland C++/ObjectWindows Library was my best friend. So that was, what, 1993? And it was hideous. I moved from that into web programming in Perl and then PHP, and it all made such good sense to me. It was easy and fast (like a good woman), and after a while I gained enough experience that I could even do it well (i.e. not terribly inefficient and full of security holes).
Now, years later, I've barely touched C++ or any other "real" (non-scripting) languages for years, and the idea of learning even one GUI toolkit seems an almost insurmountable obstacle. I'd actually like to get into desktop development, but the learning curves are sharp enough to even put off someone like me, who constantly learns stuff for fun. I'm sure I could manage, but I find myself questioning whether the massive ass-ache involved would be worth it. I don't really deal with the Windows world, so I find myself trying to choose between GTK/GTKmm, QT, WxWidgets, or finally learning Java and using Swing. And do I freshen my now-extremely-rusty C++ skills, learn Java, or go with something like Python (which I've been meaning to get into for a while now)? It seems that no matter what path I choose, I'm destined to spend a long, long time just getting up to speed before I can write anything approaching useful.
If anyone has any suggestions on where to start, I'd love to hear 'em.
I'm just north of Tampa in Spring Hill and I have Bright House (RoadRunner) both at home and at work. In my opinion, they're excellent. My connection almost never goes down (it's happened maybe a handful of times since I moved here almost 4 years ago, once because of a hurricane), they never hassle me about bandwidth issues or BitTorrent downloads, my third-party (non-Bright House) VoIP service works just fine, and they keep increasing my downstream bandwidth without charging more for it (I think I'm at 8 megabits down, 512 kilobits up). I used to run a personal SMTP server, too, for which they never hassled me. The very few times I've ever had to call tech support (available 24/7), they've been very helpful. For $50 a month, I'm very happy.
At the office we have roughly the same bandwidth, but we also have a block of static IP's and 24/7 business-grade support, which is absolutely top-notch. Not only do the corporate support guys know what they're doing, but the hold times are usually close to zero and they even call us when they notice our connection unexpectedly drop for any length of time. They call us well in advance for planned outages, too. All this costs us less than $100 a month, I believe.
I just finished doing exactly this sort of thing, so I'll describe what I did, how, and why.
/dev/video0 >filename.mpg
Some caveats: 1) I like working from the command line. 2) This was not a project for which I wanted ultra high quality - "good enough" was good enough for me.
I have a Hauppauge PVR-500 (a hardware MPEG encoder/TV tuner card - basically, this card is a pair of PVR-250's on one PCI card). This card is well-supported on Linux by the IVTV drivers. I decided to use its composite and audio inputs to convert some old VHS porn (gotta love that 80's-era stuff) to modern digital file formats so I could finally toss out the old VHS video tapes, some of which were quite degraded (they were formerly rental tapes, and some were nearly 20 years old). I used an old-but-decent-quality Sony VCR as the video source and fed its outputs straight into the PVR-500's first set of inputs. Capturing video was as simple as:
cat
How's that for simple? Heh... I "retensioned" the tape beforehand (fast forward all the way to the end, then rewind all the way to the beginnig) and made note of how long the tape was. I used a kitchen timer to let me know when the tape was nearly finished playing so I could stop the capture at the approprite time.
After the capture was finished, I used mplayer to find the exact end point (just after the credits faded to black, for example) and to find where to crop the video (most analog captures will end up with black bars on the left/right sides, and old tapes often have distortion at the top or bottom). mplayer's "cropdetect" feature was invaluable for that. I would play the file with a command like this:
gmplayer -vf cropdetect filename.mpg
To use cropdetect, you have to fast-forward into a part of the video where the picture doesn't have any black at the edges (no dark scenes, transition fades, etc.) Then you just look at the terminal window to see what cropping parameters to use (it spits them out continuously). I found that sometimes the default setting wasn't sufficient to eliminate the black bars completely, so I would occasionally use cropdetect=50 to make it a little less conservative about what it detected. That value of 50 was chosen by experimentation, so feel free to experiment yourself. 50 seemed to consistently work well for me. There are no units on that number, it's just a scale from 0 to 255. In the end, I'd have a set of cropping parameters that looked like this:
-vf crop=704:476:12:0
Those numbers are: X dimension, Y dimension, X offset, Y offset. Offsets are measured in pixels from the upper left corner.
Cropping the distorted crap at the top and bottom isn't quite so easy. It's not all black, so cropdetect doesn't detect it. So I had to manually adjust the parameters. The tricky part is the way mencoder/mplayer wants its dimensions specified. It would be much simpler if it used a format of startx:starty:endx:endy rather than the size/offset described above. As it is, if you want to crop pixels off the top or left side, you have to shorten the appropriate dimension by N pixels and then add N pixels to the offset. This sounds like a pain in the ass, but in practice it's not so bad. You get used to it very quickly.
Now that I had my crop values, I'd use mencoder to resize, deinterlace, and transcode the whole thing into h.264 video and variable bitrate MP3 audio. I experimented with AAC audio, but for some reason I kept having much better results with VBR MP3. I think the FAAC codec (the one bundled with Ubuntu Dapper) I have is just too old to be efficient. When Feisty comes out this month and I get around to upgrading, I'll try AAC again. Anyway, this is a complex command line, so I wrapped it in a script:
#!/bin/bash
# Bit rate at which to encode
# Formula for h.264: X * Y * FPS * 0.125
# Common
The image killed Firefox 1.5.0.10 on Ubuntu Dapper, too. I saved a copy for... uh... "future reference."
It is for the vast majority of computer users. Sure, I can do something like:
ifconfig eth0 hw ether DE:AD:BA:BE:B0:0B
but even the "power user" types I know usually don't even know what a MAC is, let alone how to change it or why they'd want to.
I thought that, too, but after looking into it, that's only true if you have exclusive control over an appropriate place to mount it. Basically, they can't prevent you from installing a dish on a tripod on a balcony (which I did at another apartment), or on a patch of ground that's considered part of your apartment vs. common space. They can prevent you from doing things like mounting a dish to an exterior wall, a roof, or in the ground in a common area, etc.
I'm just glad I'm done dealing with crap like that. I'm a homeowner in a non-deed-restricted neighborhood now. I can install a 12-foot satellite dish in my front yard and tell the neighbors to kiss my ass if they don't like it. Heh...
I lived in an apartment at one point which didn't allow my DirecTV dish, but one of my windows had a clear view of the southern sky. OK, I decided, I'll just set the dish here on the floor and point it out the window! Well, that didn't work. At first it was the metal screen blocking the signal, but the apartment complex manager was nice enough to have it replaced with a non-conductive fiberglass screen when I asked. But it still didn't work. With the window open so the dish was only looking through the screen, everything was fine. Close the window, though, and my signal dropped to zero. Signals at those frequencies are known to pass through ordinary glass, so I'm guessing that the windows were coated with some type of glazing, possibly metal-based, that blocked the signal. Heat was included in the rent at this place, so the apartment complex had a direct interest in energy efficiency.
My solution was to build a double-paned window out of two sheets of clear acrylic separated with spacers and insulated all the way around with foam tape. I cut it to fit the open window perfectly and unless you looked very carefully, you'd never notice that the "real" window was wide open and the "fake" window was filling the space. It was well-insulated enough even in the winter that the heat loss was no problem. But the important thing was that the satellite signals passed through the acrylic with no problem, and I was probably the only person in the whole complex to have satellite TV. Plus, I earned geek points for having a working satellite dish on my living room floor. Yes, I was single at the time; why do you ask? Heh...
Hey, buddy, this here's AMERICA! We go to bars, not pubs! And trains are for queers! GOD BLESS THE USA!!
Uh... sorry. I think I've been in the South too long.
"SLACware" jokes in 3... 2... 1...