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Рекс громко орет в закрытое окно, чтоб его впустили. Войдя, он не летит как прежде на кухню, вниз на первый этаж. Он домогается меня как женщины: ложится на колени и не дает ничего делать. Вес и когти у него приличные – хорошо, что стало прохладнее и на моем пухлом теле одежда. Летом он время от времени пытался пронзить когтями мою кожу.
First coffe
Last night was the first ‘real’ rain in Limassol. The summer is over. Good mornimg.
Этим же днем, в 3 с четвертью после полудня, я с Дэзи заехал в булочную и купил немного вкусностей. После этого, в другом магазине – виноград, и ближе к четырем мы были дома.
Я никак не могу вспомнить, какой у нас был чайник в нашей первой квартире на Кипре, когда появилась Дэзи: и Лана и Ксюха говорят что белый, но как он выглядил – не помню. Нынешний никуда уже не годится, придется добавить к списку наших кипрских чайников еще один.
Когда мы вскрыли пакет, то увидели что Дэзи лежит точь-в-точь в той позе, как она обычно лежала на нашей кровати, отвернувшись от нас. Мы определили ей хорошое место под нашим центральным кустом и закопали в наволочке: глаза ее невозможно было закрыть.
После мы пили чай с плюшками и говорили о чем то другом. Потом смотрели Тегеран-43 (ужасная муть), а потом позвонила Ксюха, и сказала, что ей было шесть, когда появилась Дэзи. В 21 год дистанция в 15 лет – это почти вся жизнь. И еще она сказала, что , слава Богу, этим летом она была у нас и общалась с Дэзи, и что впредь ее теперь уже не будет тревожить то, что в следующий свой приезд она может ее не застать. Неопределенность ушла.
cafepress
Yes, I heard that this happens. But it worth to experience yourself.
I did ordered wrong size of t-shirt on cafepress. I submitted replacement request (from XL down to L size). Below is excerpt from the answer of cafepress:
============================
Dear Dmitri,
I want you to be 100% satisfied with everything you purchase at CafePress.com. I am ordering you a replacement right away in the new size at no additional charge. You should receive the replacement by Oct 31, 2011 – Nov 1, 2011.
There is no need for a return! I don’t want you to incur any additional shipping charges. Please keep the original as our way of saying thanks for shopping at CafePress.com.
If there is anything else I can do for you please let me know.
=============================
Tell me that this is just a smart marketing. Or because Steve Jobs has died yesterday. Or because Barack Obama did say great words about Steve. It all wouldn’t draw away any bite of my first impression that I had upon reading the answer.
Wow.
1st day of playing with Synology DS211j. Wow. I did’n realize that NAS could be so hackable. I am pretty sure that all frustration are simply awaiting me in the future, but at the same time, most of my new purchase defeat my expectations at much quicker pace.
I put below some of my first impressions (it is not full fledged review, there are a lot of them elsewhere).
- It is quiet. Really quite.
- It is cold (there is about +24 C in the room)
- I check power consumption: 12 W as idle, 20 W in active mode.
- It is pleasant to assemble it (well, two back screws are honestly shit, but I is OK)
- There is impressive community hacking with the unit.
- SSH and ipkg.
How to … LVM (Ubuntu):
- sudo apt-get install lvm2 dmsetup mdadm reiserfsprogs xfsprogs
- pvcreate (create physical volume)
- pvdisplay (check what has been done)
- vgcreate group_name /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb2
- vgdisplay
- lvcreate –name lv_name –size 1000T group_name
- mkfs.ext4 /dev/group_name/lv_name
- mount /dev/group_name/lv_name /mnt/z
- vgchange -a y group_name #to activate volume group
- vgextend group_name /dev/sdc1
keyboard icon / gnome
Taken from here:
- in
gconf-editor, check/desktop/gnome/peripherals/keyboard/indicator/showFlags - install set of flags using
sudo apt-get install famfamfam-flag-png - make a softlink:
ln -s /usr/share/flags/countries/16x11 ~/.icons/flags
In addition I had to add ‘Indicator Applet’ to the panel in order to avoid error on start.
ubuntu 11.04 / laptop sony vaio vpcy11S1E: wireless
- Wireless doesn’t work from the start. Here is the solution, which is that:
gksudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/acer-wmi options acer-wmi wireless=1 sudo modprobe acer-wmi
- The control buttons for brightness of the display [Fn - F5, F6] do not work. The solution remains the same (i’ve lost the source, from where I did steal this): two files shall be created in /etc/acpi/ directory:
/etc/acpi/sony_brightness_up.sh:#!/bin/bashCONST_ADD=32 #get current value and convert it from hex to decimal BRIGHT_VAL=$((0x$(setpci -s 00:02.0 F4.B))) #increase it BRIGHT_VAL=$(( $BRIGHT_VAL + $CONST_ADD )); if test "$BRIGHT_VAL" -gt 255 ; then BRIGHT_VAL=255 fi #convert in hex HEX_VAL=$(dc -e "$BRIGHT_VAL 16 o p") #set new val #echo $HEX_VAL setpci -s 00:02.0 F4.B=$HEX_VAL
… and /etc/acpi/sony_brightness_down.sh:
#!/bin/sh CONST_ADD=32 #get current value and convert it from hex to decimal BRIGHT_VAL=$((0x$(setpci -s 00:02.0 F4.B))) if test "$BRIGHT_VAL" -le "$CONST_ADD" ; then BRIGHT_VAL=$(( $CONST_ADD + 1 )) fi #decrease it BRIGHT_VAL=$(( $BRIGHT_VAL - $CONST_ADD )); #convert in hex HEX_VAL=$(dc -e "$BRIGHT_VAL 16 o p") #set new val setpci -s 00:02.0 F4.B=$HEX_VAL
… and two files in /etc/acpi/events directory:
/etc/acpi/events/sony-brightness-down:# /etc/acpi/events/sony-volume-down event=sony/hotkey SNC 00000001 00000010 action=/etc/acpi/sony_brightness_down.sh
… and /etc/acpi/events/sony-brightness-up:
b/s/README ~/b/s/e/sony-brightness-up X # /etc/acpi/events/sony-volume-down event=sony/hotkey SNC 00000001 00000011 action=/etc/acpi/sony_brightness_up.sh
… then restart.
Nine eagles vs S107
It is really disappointing: on more expensive Nine Eagles Solo Pro V2, with 4ch remote, the overall quality of body structure is a way inferior to the design of S107. Landing sledges (right upper corner) were broken quite soon. The frame is so weak that I am in doubt, whether it worth to repair it at all. Compare it to the great looking metal construction of s107, which withstood all drops I’ve committed during my very beginning learning course.
Other observations:
Charger: S107 – two way charger, USB and in-remote, which eats AA batteries (the latter being impractical in long term, IMHO); Solo Pro – in-remote only.
Battery: S107 – non-removable, there is external DC port (look at the picture, just above the front sledge stand) to connect charging wire; Solo Pro – the battery must be extracted for re-charing from the flimsy compartment within the landing sledges construction (see above, upper right corner).
As of flying experience – that’s true, 4 ch heli is quite different from 3-channel. I definitely overestimated my experience!
PS.
On the second photo is fixed landing gear. While not very aesthetically appealing, but cheap and dirty.
rip dvd 2 matroska (ii)
This continues my previous experience disclosed earlier over here. I start here at the point, where I extract one temp vob file out of standard DVD VIDEO_TS folder content:
mplayer dvd://1 -dumpstream -dvd-device ~/temp/my_moovie/ \ -dumpfile ~/temp/dvd_dump.vob
I take ‘manual’ approach here, except final muxing with “MKV file creator” utility. Before I say goodbuy to the original DVD, I will extract chapters and look at the audio streams (though the latter is probably not that necessary).
The text is intentionally brief. For more detailed instructions please consult full fledged guide, referred to at the end of this post. Particularly, the video encoding did not involve fine tuning parameters. This is mainly because the result was pretty good without extra hustle.
ffmpeg
Make sure you have ffmpeg compiled with x265 and mp3 support (here is the instruction).
Chapters
Dvdxchap is the tool. It is fairly simple to get chapters with it:
dvdxchap -t 1 /dev/dvd > chapters.txt
Audio
I encountered numerous problems, attempting to encode everything in one go. So, for now I decided to keep it simple and encode audio and video separately.
Decide, what audio tracks to keep, to save space and avoid extra encoding. The tracks can be identified from both, original DVD files and our temp single VOB file, extracted as above. However, I can get much more descriptive information from the original DVD:
mplayer -frames 0 -identify dvd://1 -dvd-device ~~/temp/my_moovie/ \ 2>/dev/null | egrep -i "^audio stream" -A1
NOTE: ffmpeg do not honors aid (audio id) of audio tracks. I use simple
ffmpeg -i tmp.vob
to check the content of vob file from the ffmpeg viewpoint. It is easy then just to get sample of each audio track to identify them. For this, add to the next script ‘-ss 160 -t 90′ to encode only small part, starting from 160 sec with 90 sec length.
Then, I encode audio tracks in one blow (here I encode 2 tracks, that are 1 and 3rd stream in the tmp.vob, using mp3 encoder):
ffmpeg -i tmp.vob -map 0:1 -map 0:3 \ -ac 2 -acodec libmp3lame -ar 48000 -ab 192K first_track.mp3 \ -ac 2 -acodec libmp3lame -ar 48000 -ab 192K second_track.mp3
Video
Next, I apply 2-pass h264 encoding to our temp VOB file.
ffmpeg -i tmp.vob -pass 1 -an -vcodec libx264 -vpre slow_firstpass \ -b 2800k -bt 4000k -threads 0 -f rawvideo -y /dev/null ffmpeg -i tmp.vob -pass 2 -an -vcodec libx264 -vpre slow \ -b 2800k -bt 4000k -threads 0 -y final.mp4
Subtitle
I found it easy to steal subtitles from free sites such as opensubtitles.org, so no extraction of subtitles was undertaken. Some information on the process can be found over here. I fetched srt file for subtitles, available on opensubtitles.org
MKV
It surprised me that no additional working was required. No audio sync problem. So, as soon as I put everything in container, everything work, including subtitles and chapters. As I mentioned before, I like GUI utility “MKV files creator”, which was used for the final muxing. For audio and subtitle tracks don’t forget to define the language. In case the number of tracks is more than one, define the default one. All that will add to the resulting mkv file usability.
References:
http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Ripping_DVD_to_Matroska_and_H.264
dv 2 h.264
First, I tried to encode DV files by mplayer / mencoder / faac and x264, inspired by this article . I didn’t get much further than successfully encode audio, because with video I failed to get good video after few attempts. So I switched to ffmpeg which seems much more easier to operate, since it works on both audio and video in one command.
First, I had to compile my own x264 and ffmpeg: those that available in ubuntu repo are lacking some features. Here is excellent instruction for this.
Second, here is excellent introduction on the matter, short but enough to start do things.
And here is my little script, which I use to encode a file to h264/aac. Usually I have a bunch of files, but I prefer to code a loop by hand in console ad-hoc, calling this script within each iteration.
#!/bin/sh
#ONE (COMPULSORY) PARAMETER - input file.
#two pass encoding with ffmpeg (compiled with avc / aac support)
#optimal resolution for youtube: 640x480
FL=$1
PRE="slow"
RES="-s 600x480"
bit_B=2M
bit_BR=4M
A_BIT=128K
COMMON_ATTR="-threads 0 -y $RES"
SUFF="MP4"
FL_OUT=${FL%.*}.$SUFF
if [ ! -f "$FL" ]; then
echo "no file $FL found"
exit 1
fi
echo ""
echo "working on $FL"
echo ""
ffmpeg -i $FL -vcodec libx264 -vpre ${PRE}_firstpass -pass 1 -b $bit_B \
-bt $bit_BR -an $COMMON_ATTR -f rawvideo /dev/null
ffmpeg -i $FL -vcodec libx264 -vpre $PRE -pass 2 -b $bit_B -bt $bit_BR \
-acodec libfaac -ab $A_BIT $COMMON_ATTR $FL_OUT