Lighthater.com

convertFLV 2.0

cbarrett — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 17:08:50 +0000

I’ve updated my script to convert AVI to flv. It’s free to use. All I ask is that you give credit to the author, which is me.

Click HERE to download convertFLV

Converting AVI to flv in Ubuntu 8.10/9.04

cbarrett — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 01:52:10 +0000

I routinely upload flv videos into Gallery2 to post videos of my family. Flash Video is smaller and easier to stream than the AVI files my camera makes. So I thought I’d share my process with others who may be looking to do the same. For this, I use ffmpeg to do the conversion.

Here is the command I typically use:

ffmpeg -i file.AVI -ar 22050 -ab 32 -f flv -s 640×480 file.flv

You can tweak the settings to your liking, these just happen to work for what I do.

This can be a bit tedious when you have a lot to convert, so I wrote a simple script to do batch processing. Copy and paste this one line into a file (I call mine convertFLV.sh) and make it executable (chmod 755 convertFLV.sh).

for i in `ls -l`; do ffmpeg -i “$i” -ar 22050 -ab 32 -f flv -s 640×480 “$i.flv”; done

Maybe this will help someone else out there save some effort with conversion as it has me.

UPDATE:

I’m now using Ubuntu 9.04. I’ve switched my script to use qscale now. It seems to give much better results.

for i in `ls -l`; do ffmpeg -i “$i” -ar 22050 -qscale 13 -ab 32 -f flv -s 640×480 “$i.flv”; done

I use a qscale of 9 for my personal site, but I would recommend nothing below 13 if you care about quality. I went for loading time over high quality.

Making an Intel 3945 Wireless card work in Ubuntu 8.04

cbarrett — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 20:39:07 +0000

I found this on the Dell linux wiki and it did the charm. These are the steps I took, your results may be different.

First, I disabled the wireless via the switch on the side before loading Ubuntu.
Next, I did the follow step:

Create a file called /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-ipw3945 and add:

blacklist ipw3945

Add to /etc/modules:

iwl3945

Then, I enabled the wireless card and enabled the restricted driver.

After that, I was finally able to connect to my wireless router.

How to clear stored network passwords

cbarrett — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 13:23:10 +0000

In the start menu, select Run (or Windows + R)
In the Run dialog box, type: rundll32.exe keymgr.dll, KRShowKeyMgr
Browse the stored passwords, remove the offending password.

Fixing a REALLY slow Windows Picture and Fax Viewer

cbarrett — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 12:36:22 +0000

I was having trouble with Windows Picture and Fax Viewer taking upwards of 1 minute to open. I noticed that this was only happening when I tried to open an image from the Desktop. I googled around a bit, but didn’t really find anything concrete (must have been my excellent search skills). I tried running the Desktop Cleanup tool and amazingly, it resolved the problem. I did some more searching and I discovered that dead links to programs/shortcuts in the same directory as the image, will cause the Viewer to hang until it times out on that link. Simply removing the dead shortcut will resolve the problem.

How to run a script at login

cbarrett — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 19:57:51 +0000

I use synergy to control multiple computers with a single keyboard and mouse. I recently built a hackintosh and wanted to run the synergy server on it and connect my linux box to it. I had already set Vista up to be a server, so the linux configuration didn’t need to change much. The problem is that synergy on OSX didn’t have a gui like in windows and I didn’t know how to autorun it like I did in linux. So I began digging in. I’ll use synergy as the example, but this should work with just about any script.

First, I created file called synergy.command with my command to start the synergy server. The contents of the file are:

nohup /Applications/synergy-1.3.1/synergys -f –config /Applications/synergy-1.3.1/synergy.conf &

Now I have a way to start synergy up, but how would I get it to start when I logged in. A quick google found exactly what I was looking for.

Open System Preferences

Then open Accounts

Select your account, then click on Login Items

Click the + at the bottom of the window.

Browse to your synergy.command and click on Add.

That is really all there is to it. Next time you login, Synergy will be started. If the terminal window comes up, you can close it, since the nohup command is there.

Backing up Putty Settings in Windows

cbarrett — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 14:33:58 +0000

To Export:
regedit /e putty.reg HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SimonTatham\PuTTY\Sessions

To Import:
regedit /s putty.reg

Clearing Remote Desktop History

cbarrett — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 13:32:55 +0000

Clearing Remote Desktop History

1. Open My Documents and delete default.rdp
2. Open the registry editor (regedit):
Clear (delete) the MRU’s in the following key (these are the hosts):
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Terminal Server Client\Default

Clear (delete) the username hints in the following key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Terminal Server Client\UsernameHint

Replace wget with Prozilla

cbarrett — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 04:00:10 +0000

A quick and simple wget replacement to speed your downloads.
wget has long been a great tool for downloading from the commandline. Its quick, easy to script and very simple. But if you’ve noticed that it can be really slow, you aren’t alone. Here’s how to get all the greatness of wget, with a little added speed.

First, you will need to install prozilla (proz). If you have yum or apt, this should be really easy. I won’t get into the gritty details, but in Fedora Core 5, its in the extras repo.

$ yum -y install proz

$ proz http://ubuntu-releases.cs.umn.edu//6.06/ubuntu-6.06.1-desktop-i386.iso

All Done: Download Successful!

As you can see, it couldn’t be more simple to use this app.

What about scripting it? I won’t get into all the possibilities, but here’s a quick bash trick to download multiple items.

for i in `seq 1 5`
do
proz http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/openSUSE-10.2-Alpha3/iso/openSUSE-10.2-Alpha3-ppc-CD$i.iso
done

It’ll look similar to this when its downloading:

Connection Status Received
1 Downloading 3452.0K of 160425.0K
2 Downloading 3987.8K of 160425.0K
3 Downloading 3426.8K of 160425.0K
4 Downloading 2781.0K of 160425.0K

http://suse.mirrors.tds.net/pub/opensuse/distribution/SL-10.2-Alpha2/iso/SUSE-Li

nux-10.2-Alpha2-i386-CD1.iso
File Size = 641700K
Total bytes received = 13647.6K (2.13%)
Current speed = 1184.27Kb/s, Average D/L speed = 1049.82Kb/s
Time remaining 9 minutes 58 seconds

Resume Supported

Ctrl-R to exit and resume later
Ctrl-X to exit without resuming later
Ctrl-L to repaint the screen

Connect OK!

Whats best, proz supports resume, which to my knowledge, wget does not (don’t scream if I’m wrong here).

IPB Skins

cbarrett — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 18:53:52 +0000

I’ve posted one of the skins that I did for IPB. You can find it by clicking on IPB Skins at the top. I hope to post more soon.