DATAPUISTOKEMISTI

Same as old post except with updated patch for fresh Handbrake SVN version. Handbrake does good job auto-cropping black bars from source and calculating resulting aspect ratio. However if you're encoding digital TV recordings it's common to have channel logo on otherwise black portion of image.

Please see updated version:  http://blog.asiantuntijakaveri.fi/2015/07/smartmontools-v64-and-ubuntu-1204.html

Some process was spinning my suspended USB disks back up every few minutes which is bad, mmkay. To monitor processes accessing disks I used following commands

Intel Core i5-2400, 4GB RAM, 11 x Seagate 3TB USB hard disks connected via 4 x D-Link USB3 hubs to StarTech PEXUSB3S400 PCIe card. Ubuntu 12.04 with ZFS 0.6.1. Disks were configured as RAID-Z3 (triple parity). write: 137438953472 bytes (137 GB) copied, 250.822 s, 548 MB/s read:  137438953472 bytes (137 GB) copied, 197.451 s, 696 MB/s

I have remote Linux server and needed to run some Windows-only utilities. Since Wine is as great as always I decided to virtualize Win7. Since remote Linux is headless not only I needed headless Windows but also headless virtualization.

While burn-in testing my new USB 3.0 ZFS RAID array on Ubuntu 12.04.1 I wanted to fill disks with random data. Not zeroes from /dev/zero, but random data to catch any flakey disks or USB cables. Well it quickly turned out that reading from urandom was slowing process down a lot. Since quality of randomness doesn't matter much in this case frandom was easy solution.

XBMC has addons for various geolocked services, Hulu and iPlayer being among most popular. Switching between VPN connections manually gets boring quick so I hacked following script that will automatically connect and disconnect VPN to US / UK on demand. Tested with XBMCbuntu and XBMC 12.0 Frodo.