I recently needed to take a raw mpeg-2 file that I obtained from my pvr-250 capture card (pulling from a VHS-C camcorder), and convert it to something that would fit on youtube. Here's the magic mencoder incantations that I used:

$ mencoder 20051204.mpg -edl poker.edl -ovc frameno -oac mp3lame \
> -lameopts vbr=3 -o frameno.avi
$ mencoder 20051204.mpg -edl poker.edl -oac copy -ovc lavc  -lavcopts \
> vcodec=mpeg4:vpass=1:vbitrate=863:vhq -o output.avi -vf scale=320:240
$ mencoder 20051204.mpg -edl poker.edl -oac copy -ovc lavc  -lavcopts \
> vcodec=mpeg4:vpass=2:vbitrate=863:vhq -o output.avi -vf scale=320:240

Using "edl" to cut out the stuff I didn't want was really nice. No need to get avidemux to compile!

Occasionally people reference mailing list messages by Message-ID (i.e., a header such as 'Message-ID: <20061214084820.GA29311@suse.de>'. For lists to which I subscribe, finding a message is as simple as a search in mutt for:

~i 20061214084820.GA29311@suse.de

but what about lists to which I don't subscribe? As usual, agriffis had an answer for searching both marc and gmane. The gmane search requires less processing; it's just:

http://mid.gmane.org/20061214084820.GA29311@suse.de

It's a new, pyblosxom-powered blog, and it was a fair effort to get here.

What happened is that my wife asked me about having a blog. Naturally, I thought: "Hey, Gentoo surely has lots of blog software, I can put together something for my wife". That's true enough, and I took a look at what people are using on http://planet.gentoo.org. I winnowed a good chunk of the field by making an executive decision that I really didn't want to deal with mysql, although sqlite would be fine. I eventually decided upon typo (http://www.typosphere.org/trac/), and I spent some time configuring lighttpd to properly render a typo blog. Typo's a really nice piece of software, and it was fun to play with. I did run into some weird glitches using typo with ecto (on Windows), which is what I was considering for my wife to use, but otherwise I would happily recommend typo to people who want elegant blogging software.

Ultimately, we decided to go with blogger for Sarah's blog. Blogger's web gui for editing posts is really nice, and that bit of usability made Blogger a clear winner for Sarah.

Meanwhile, for me typo seemed just a bit much. It's beautiful, but I'm rather more fond of simple, and besides I'd really prefer to use ReStructured Text (http://docutils.sf.net/rst.html) for markup rather than html. Unfortunately, pyblosxom looks awful out-of-the-box, but Will Guaraldi was nice enough to e-mail his "flavour" and css stylesheet, which helped enormously, and things look much better now. Best of all, I can hack on pyblosxom without too much trouble. (Indeed, I've already fixed the rst plugin, which hadn't kept up with docutils, and submitted a patch to the pyblosxom folks.)