Looping a section of a DVD

October 4th, 2008

My contribution to ACF is small this year, but practical:

  1. Play the DVD from which you wish to create a loop using DVD Player application in OS X.
  2. At the starting point of your loop, select Controls > New Video Clip  (Fig. 1)
  3. This action opens the New Video Clip dialogue with the starting point you selected marked as the beginning; the video is paused (Fig. 2)
  4. Set the clip name and press play (Fig. 3)
  5. When the endpoint of your loop arrives, click the Set button to mark the end of your loop (Fig. 4)
  6. Now be sure to click save or your effort will be wasted (Fig. 5)
  7. Now select Go > Video Clips (Fig. 6)
  8. Double clicking your clip from the Video Clips menu starts playing the given clip (Fig. 7)
  9. To make it loop select Go > Video Clips > Repeat Clip (Fig. 8)
  10. Enjoy chilled or over ice.
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Zone File

January 3rd, 2008

I found and fixed a problem in one of my DNS zone files today, and I thought I might take a moment to have a line-by-line discussion about what is in a zonefile and why. Ok, at least an overview with a clear example…

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My MySQL cheat sheet

August 23rd, 2007

How many times have I set up MySQL? (gobs) And how many times have I slogged through finding the handfull of commands I needed to get things made orderly (each). And how many times have I bothered to document it so I didn’t have to do all that again? (none)

Let this be the last time I have to scour the web at large for this information, because it will be here

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Screencapture while playing a DVD

April 22nd, 2007

For some reason or other, Apple made the Grab screen capturing disabled when the DVD player application is open. That’s not to say that you can’t use another DVD player or screen capture application, but really why should external software be necessary? Thanks to the tip off by Random Tech I learned that there is a command-line function to execute a screencapture that will work even with the DVD player open.


usage: screencapture [-icmwsWx] [files]
-i capture screen interactively, by selection or window
control key - causes screen shot to go to clipboard
space key - toggle between mouse selection and
window selection modes
escape key - cancels interactive screen shot
-c force screen capture to go to the clipboard
-m only capture the main monitor, undefined if -i is set
-w only allow window selection mode
-s only allow mouse selection mode
-W start interaction in window selection mode
-x do not play sounds
-S in window capture mode, capture the screen not the window
-C capture the cursor as well as the screen. only in non-interactive modes
-t [format] image format to create, default is png
files where to save the screen capture, 1 file per screen
[droplet:~] earlax% screencapture -S ~/Desktop/GFL-rock.png

Of course, that requires a crop to trim off the rest of the screen or the window decoration, but it works well!



That’s Ione Skye from Gas, Food Lodging

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opsec update

April 10th, 2007

Yay! Over a month after the previous draft expired, we’ve posted a new version of our Internet Draft document.

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/etc/ntp.conf

March 8th, 2007

I don’t exactly know why it was so hard to get right, but I’m glad it is finally done. For the last couple of days I’ve knocked against a frustrating problem getting my network time protocol (ntp) server and clients to work together. I had worked it all out once before and that config carried me for something like six years. Now that I’ve done it again I want to save these notes and hopefully save someone, maybe me, some time (no pun intended) in the future. What follows are my quick notes on what works and maybe a pointer or two and maybe a bit about what doesn’t work.
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FreeNAS 0.68

March 6th, 2007

These are my notes on my NAS, your mileage may vary.

1 ea. Adaptec 2610SA 6 port SATA RAID card
6 ea. Samsung HD501LJ SATA-II drives
1 ea. Old PC (AMD 1200 + SOYO SY-K7VTA PRO motherboard, could probably use a NIC upgrade)
w/ CD-ROM drive
w/ Floppy drive
1 ea. image of the latest FreeNAS
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SSL-Explorer

November 7th, 2006

Last week I accidentally learned of the existence of SSL-Explorer: The World’s First Browser-Based, Open Source SSL VPN. This looks like a relatively easy way to set up a VPN for almost no cost, plus they have commercial support if you get stuck. Cool!

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Chaosreader

November 2nd, 2006

Chaosreader is a perl program for taking tcpdump logs (pcap files) and beating them into a readable, usable format. HTML, for example. If you ever work with tcpdump files this is a must see.

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