planet

Push It To the Limit #3

If you’re considering trying out autocross, I say go for it. I’m very new, and have found people at the two events I’ve attended (WOSCA #1, and PITL #3) to be friendly and extremely helpful. Additionally, you can do it with your own car. You don’t need some sort of special race-spec track beast. Both events have also had loaner helmets available (although I spent $200 and bought my own helmet meeting the appropriate standards).

Highlight Reel

Goal I want to combine a few clips together, with a 5-seconds of intro text on each one. Create overlay text in GIMP I created some overlay text in gimp, then exported to png files. An example (Note the transparancy, and drop shadow): Trim clips to length Using the methods I’ve described in previous ffmpeg posts, I trimmed the clips, ensuring that there is at least five seconds of lead-in on each clip for the text.

ZigZag Volvo

While driving through New York on my way to the Watkins Glen 2017 opening weekend, I encountered a nut in a Volvo zig-zagging through highway traffic. I decided use ffmpeg yet again (I’m starting to wonder if OpenShot would actually bring anything to the table at this point, besides crashing) Plan I want a video with the rear camera until the Volvo passes, then the front camera after. I want to use the front audio for the whole video.

ffmpeg part three - No more Boogaloos to give

Just like the first two times, I’m assembling my Watkins Glen 2017 track footage with ffmpeg. However, I encountered a small issue I didn’t last year, plus I decided to change things up a bit with codecs, and audio selection. ffmpeg requires protocol whitelist now I’m using pretty much the same concatenation command as last year (filenames are a bit different): $ for f in Front-*MOV; do echo file "$f"; done | ffmpeg -f concat -i - -c copy Front.

Using Metadoctor on HP/Palm WebOS Devices

My Devices I decided to update the 3/4 of my Palm WebOS devices. The Pre (not pictured) and Pre2 (middle) were my primary, daily-driver phones for over two years, from September 2009 through to spring 2012, when I acquired a Galaxy Nexus and made the jump to Android. The Pre3 (right) I also picked up on eBay. It came in box, with all accessories, and a spare battery. The Pixi (left) I picked up cheap on eBay.

WebOS in 2016

Note: Yes, WebOS Technically still exists. However, this article isn’t talking about the TV OS version made by LG. While this article was actually written to discuss getting Palm devices usable, I felt some preamble was necessary. My Palm History I’ve got a soft spot for Palm. My first PDA was the Palm Vx, possibly the greatest PDA ever made. Easily get days of battery from a device that can store all your calendar and contacts information, synchronizing periodically with your master copy on your computer.

Snapperd on Fedora with SELinux enabled

Snapper is an excellent utility that provides hourly snapshots of btrfs subvolumes. Fedora ships with selinux enabled by default. This is excellent, and shouldn’t be disabled. To allow this, most software in Fedora has appropriate rules defined, including snapper. However, snappers rules only allow it to work on / and /home. If you wish to use it to snapshot /mnt/data, or /srv, or any other particular path, you’re going to have a very bad time.

ffmpeg part two - Electric Boogaloo

I just attended the Watkins Glen opening day for the second year. It was, again, a blast. I made some slight adjustments to my ffmpeg assembly procedure from last year. Dashcam saves video in 5-minute chunks Instead of creating .list files, I simply used a pipe as input: for fo in AMBA091*; do echo file "$fo"; done \ | ffmpeg -f concat -i - -c copy Front-Track1.mov Front and Rear videos need to be combined Much like last year, I made short samples to confirm if any offsets needed to be done.