Apr 24 2011
FFmpeg is a great cross platform, open source encoder and converter for a wide range of audio and video file formats, but it’s command line syntax and Unix roots can make things tricky to get it working properly on Windows platforms. Encoding for iPod, iPad or iPhone devices is further complicated by the complexity of the H.264 video codec and it’s plethora of profiles, levels and options that all must be correctly specified in order to get a valid encode. Put the two together, and you have a recipe for head scratching.
In this post, I’ll show how I use FFmpeg on Windows to transcode video files for my iPhone.
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Apr 4 2011
After upgrading a VPS to Debian 6.0 “Squeeze” I ran into a baffling problem with the dovecot login processes that meant users could not log in to their mailboxes. Although simple to fix in the end, this was a bit of a headscratcher to find, and I hope this post will help someone in a similar situation
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Mar 21 2011
I wrote recently about a small Linux machine that I had built to act as a SOHO NAS. The machine worked well with one exception: the very noisy power supply (louder than the quad-core workstation that sits beside it). For my sanity, I’ve now replaced the stock supply with a silent unit. On request, I’ve also measured the machine’s power usage and taken a few photos. Read on for the updates.
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Mar 16 2011
I’ve been running my own installation of the Yourls URL Shortener for some time over at girv.in, and have posted before about it a few times. One question I keep getting asked is “How can I make a page that lists my yourls links like the one on http://girv.in ?”, and I shall now attempt to answer it.
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Mar 14 2011
This summer, leading Belfast based software house Kainos (Greek for “innovation”) are running a training scheme for first year university students targeted at developing applications for Apple’s iOS devices (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad). Welcome to App Camp.
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