merging firefox bookmark files

I started to use google bookmarks. But syncing with it is rough, if not dangerous. The gmarks extension was not very helpful, though it could be used at points.

I wanted to merge my windows and linux bookmark files. Foxymarks is currently down, so I couldn't even try that. And I didn't like the fact that I HAD to sign up for their service. Just let me do it via the FTP option, and I'll handle it myself.

Finally I decided to make copies of each file, import them both into firefox, then using the duplicate bookmark detection extension in firefox, I was able to week out the dups quite easily. Still need a solution for syncing with google tho.

Rockbox database woes on the sansa; tagtool

Adding songs to the sansa with rockbox currently still has to be done via the original firmware (OF). But, everytime I would plug in the usb cable, (with the unit off to have it automatically start up and boot to OF), the OF would insist on "refreshing the database". This could take several minutes. The latest version of the rockbox bootloader fixed that. It now prevents an OF database refresh when the unit is powered up via usb. Great. Just had to run sansapatcher -d, then sansapatcher --install.

Now, the next issue was that sometimes the files loaded from linux would show up in the rockbox database, sometimes not. Turns out that many of the music files didn't have ID3 tags. So, in RB I changed it such that I could at least temporarily browse to the files to play them.

So, enter audio tag tool for linux. Excellent tool for updating/modifying ID3 tags en mass. Yet still the files didn't show in the database. I fiddled with various settings in RB to re-initialize, update the database to no avail. Finally I just deleted the database files in the root RB folder, restarted and all was well.

JanusVM, tor, privoxy, etc.

The need for anonymity and privacy lately has risen. The JanusVM vmware virtual machine is a simple entry into this area. This small vmx runs a whack of privacy things like tor, privoxy and squid. Just run the thing, and set your browser to http proxy localhost:8888. There are a myriad of other things that can be done with it, but this is usually sufficient.

general desktop and server news

well, it's been a while....

Dumped PCBSD as a desktop because after several upgrades I realized I was really only running FreeBSD with KDE on top. I wasn't using any PCBSD "benefits" and a somethings had gone screwy with the upgrades - particularly the Xorg updates that were broken along the way.

I also realized that I just didn't want to spend time configuring and playing with distros....this occurred to me because I attempted ArchLinux because it looked to be perfect for me....optimized for 686, and oriented much like BSD. However, it took some thought and maintenance to keep going.....so I abandoned that.

My requirements are few....firefox, python, and a shell. Add on top of that vmware server because I wanted to abandon the separate server and use just one machine. Has to be fast and light.....my desktop has a mere 8MB on board video RAM. Enter fluxbuntu.

I ran fluxbuntu for a while....it's quick and already has my fundamental requirements save for vmware, but that was pretty easy to install. However FB was based on dapper and the subversion client for dapper was too old for my repo. Two months into FB I decided to try the upgrade to Feisty and it failed in various ways. FB also had some annoying issues. There was supposed to be a Feisty release of it but that didn't happen. They are anticipating a Gusty release....maybe I'll try that.

For now I'm on Xubuntu, with vmware running my server. Having the server on vmware makes for simple backups of the entire vmware images onto dvd.

JVC Everio and making a DVD

Last year when I was looking to buy a camcorder I discovered that there was basically three kinds on the market - miniDV, dvd, and hard disk. I didn't want to have to spend hours on end transcoding video from a miniDV cam as well as having to deal with adding a firewire card, etc. Nor did I want to have to waste a lot of money buying the dvd-ram media that a dvd camcorder would require. For me it's all about making the most of my time. So I bought a JVC Everio GZ-MG20 hard disk camcorder. The everio records video in mpeg2 format and audio in ac3. Perfect - already in dvd ready format. As well, the fact that the transfer mechanism is USB and the hard disk shows up as a mass drive, makes it even simpler.

Now - when the hard disk almost filled up I decided it was time to make some dvds. So, I installed the windows software that came with the unit - power producer I think. I fed it the whack of files....created some menus, and expected it to simply author a dvd structure for me. But instead it started transcoding the video - it was going to take several hours?!?! But the whole point of recording in mpeg2 is so that it wouldn't be necessary to transcode.

So, I searched high and low and tried several dvd authoring packages - but all insisted on transcoding. Until I found TMPGEng DVD Author from Pegasys software. It let me create a few menus and create a dvd structure and it only took as long as the vob structure took to write to disk.

I have two issues with this software: first, it only runs on windows.....now that my desktop is BSD.....the second issue is that I would have liked for the chapter names of each of the videos to be set to the filename automatically, or at least an option to specify.....I run a script over the video files that renames them to the date that they were created....for this purpose. TMPGEnc automatically names each chapter as chapter 1, chapter 2, etc. Manually renaming 100 files is tedious at best, so I have settled for letting it name them this way. I also keep raw archives of the videos on dvd and my server, so the filenames/dates will be preserved there.

There were a couple of other nice options it provided - there is the ability to create a DVD without menus, as well as having the first action (when inserted into a dvd player) to play all tracks sequentially (when using menus).

So, in the end, for windows, TMPGEnc DVD Author seems to be the best solution for authoring DVDs. The reason for this post is as a precursor to some posts I hope to make regarding my trials and tribulations of authoring DVDs on BSD/Linux.

splitting and joining avi files

I captured some old home videos from VHS on to my computer using my Adaptec Gamebridge 1400 (not recommended, will hopefully post about it later). I'd converted them to MPEG4 using mencoder and ffmpeg.

I had a file that ran too long....needed to chop off part. I loaded the file into vlc, figured out the time at which I needed to stop (1:35:32) and used "avisplit":

avisplit -i movie.avi -t 01:35:32.00

I also had a couple of files that needed to be one so I merged them using "avimerge":

avimerge -o outfile.avi -i infile1.avi infile2.avi

Note, the -i and files need to come last!

Both avisplit and avimerge appear to be part of the "transcode" package.

rtorrent & dtach

My search for a new torrent client has come to a close with the winner being rtorrent.
It provides an ncurses interfaces and encryption! Perfect. No more having to deal with a resource hungry GUI. Unfortunately the port for rtorrent didn't include a default rc file or create on upon first run. So, I downloaded the rc file from the website, tweaked it to my liking and off we go.

During my search I stumbled upon people suggesting the use of "GNU screen" to be able to allow rtorrent to run in the background, yet be able to attach and detach from the application at will and from remote locations. Cool.

However, I also saw a lot of posts about GNU screen being bloated, slow and awkward to use - and most suggested dtach instead: a fork of GNU screen that has been trimmed down.

So after installing rtorrent and dtach and reading the man pages I gave it a go:

dtach -A /tmp/rtorrent.dtach rtorrent

The program starts....I add a torrent file (the backspace key)....and sure enough it runs like a charm. ctrl-\ and I've detached. dtach -a /tmp/rtorrent.dtach and I'm attached again.

dtach will definitely come in handy when remotely installing ports/packages or building something that will take longer than I can keep a remote session open. Sure a build can be done in the background, but portupgrade requires an attached terminal because it may ask questions of the user.

utorrent & *nix

So, I'd been using uTorrent for quite some time - excellent program! Extremely small footprint, efficient and well designed. Other than some of the sysinternals tools, I haven't seen a windoze program that is within the same class. My only beef with uTorrent is that it's not open source.

So, I recently switched away from windoze on my desktop....was on ubuntu for a while, but in the end I'm a FreeBSD kinda guy and thought I'd give PC-BSD a try. I really like it.

So, what to do for a torrent client? Azureus is a pig. I need encryption 'cause my ISP is throttling. Ktorrent? Didn't work to well....even with encryption enabled, my DL/UL rates were significantly worse than with uTorrent.

So, as it turns out, uTorrent runs on top of wine! Okay, so now my speeds are back up....but.....wine is taking up 40% of my CPU usage at all times! So much for a really efficient torrent client.

Next?