Sintel Movie Review
The most recent film produced by Blender, an open source 3D video editing program, to showcase its abilities is Sintel. This is the third such film, following in the footsteps of Elephant’s Dream and Big Buck Bunny. My review and the film following the jump. Sintel takes on a new style of film, with a setting like something out of many contemporary fantasies, and for the most part does well with the genre. Indeed, the scenery and characters mostly are beautifully rendered. Although it may not quite reach the same standards that many commercial studios reach, especially in movements such...
Update Ubuntu With Aptitude
For some reason, trying to update my Ubuntu server with apt-get upgrade often fails to install all the available updates. In a similar quirk, the default update client for Ubuntu on my laptop usually fails to install updates. After experimenting with various methods for updating a bit, I finally discovered that by upgrading with Aptitude, I usually could regularly install all the updates. To upgrade with Aptitude, follow these steps: To launch Aptitude, run aptitude. Now, update the cache by pressing u (lower case ‘u’). Next you selected the upgradeable packages by pressing U (this time upper case ‘U’). Hit...
Combining Two Mpeg (or Other Video Types) Files With Ffmpeg
Combining two video files in an graphical editor is easy, but what if you had reason to combine several dozen videos at once? Unless that editor has some form of scripting you can use, the process could take hours. On the other hand, combining the files in command line is not intuitive, but is far easier to script. This tip assumes that the file is already in mpg format. Some formats may also work with this method, while others may have to be converted first. First run, cat 1.mpg 2.mpg >> temp.mpg The command cat reads the data into the...
Mount a Windows Share Folder As a Drive
For most purposes, the built-in features of Nautilus to browse and mount smb shares will suffice. But in some cases, such as when you wish the folder to be automatically mounted, or need to have another application read from the folder, it needs to be mounted differently. In my case, some of my music happens to be in a shared folder on a Windows server. I use Amarok to play my music, and so unless I have the shared folder mount automatically, and in a regularly accessible location, problems ensue with accessing the music through Amarok. Fortunately, this is a...
Escape a Space in Linux Configuration Files
A few years ago, I discovered that mounting a network drive that had a space in the name was quite tricky. The problem is, fstab neither detected the space automatically, nor when I put a backslash in front of the space would it escape the way it would in terminal. After hours of searching, I finally discovered a method for doing it. You still use the backslash, but instead of just typing the space you need to enter the number 040. This is the octal version of the ASCII code for a space. The other bases may also work for...