Today I decided to take a look at my old Pentium 4 box back from the days before I knew of Linux. It has been sitting unused for years, and lately I have come across the desire to setup a torrent box. Before wiping Windows XP off it, I decided to have a look at what it still had.

After starting it up I realised that I had forgotten my login credentials many years ago. To change them I would have to reboot and start the computer off one of my old CDs containing ntpasswd. Unfortunately...

Linux is an interesting beast. By design it is modular, and so as a direct consequence it is very flexible. Its flexibility both on a large scale ( for example scaling for hardware ) and on a small scale ( what it can do ).

Operating systems such as Microsoft Windows however has been designed with a very narrow mindset. This 'target implementation' is a rough fathom of the average user's presumed work: documents, games, file management, etc. Although it would seem to cover most...

I originally started blogging as an experiment, but soon lost the time to write regular entries. Eventually this blog decayed and died. Ever since I have been wanting to write but have never found myself at a computer at the right time.

From now on I am starting a regular blogging routine of more than two posts per week. Expect to start seeing some of my shell scripts, reviews of software and opinions on all things in the virtual world to start coming out of this blog again....

A few minutes ago I was preparing to distribute video encoding of files on my portable harddrive across multiple computers in the house. Just to get the quality and codec settings right before I finished, I started encoding one of the videos on only my main computer.

I'm glad I ran this test.

At first when encoding, I noticed the second CPU wasn't being used. I thought perhaps the encoder wasn't designed to be multi-threaded, but that would be ridiculous. I decided...

I've had my troubles with GUI audio CD rippers lately, whether it be DBUS connection issues or lack of 'codecs' for cdda or wav ( sounds as weird as it is ). On top of that the rip-one-at-a-time strategy was too time consuming for the repetitive audio book ripping I am doing, which involved placing four disc rips under the same title.

So I wrote a shell script that does most of the work for me

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