I’m hosting a show with the esteemed DDMNeo over there

• I use OS X
• Google turned up a metric shit-ton of ways to do this on Windows

The tool I found and like to use is called MKVtools.
I downloaded the beta, so that’s where these screens are coming from. I can’t find the page I got it from, and the link on the site doesn’t seem to work. :S Moving on:

So, fire this baby up and here’s what pops up.

Fairly intuitive, no?

All the buttons do what you think they’d do. One point of special notice is the filesize limit there in the lower left-hand corner. If you’ve got something like a feature film you need to convert you might need to bump the settings up; as it stands, however, the file I used was only 700MB.

So now let’s add out file to be converted and check the tracks that we want to bring over. This being a fairly straight forward video file, there’s one audio track and one video track. Check them both, and the hit the “MP4″ button.

This neat nag screen pops up, click through it..

Then we have our settings pane:

I used the 360 preset, hit convert, and… it didn’t work. Apparently the presets don’t do shit. :S

So, basically change the video type to mpeg4, because the 360 plays nice with that and leave the other settings alone.

It’ll run for a while, then crap out a nice .mp4 we can play on our 360!

• 1 part generic robots
• 1 part poor storytelling
• 1 part Megan Fox
• 2 parts explosions
• a pinch of T3

Heat until lukewarm and serve.

This poster is about as awesome as the movie gets.

The story is completely inane, although to be fair, if you came looking for a deep mythos to explore, that was your first mistake. The first tip is that the movie starts with a narration immediately to TELL you the story, instead of just showing the story. This is called bad storytelling, kids. I wont even knock it for having to construct history that wasn’t covered in the first movie, although I really should. Anyway, Sam gets all angsty and ends up romping around the globe with some really fucking racist robots and The Hotness. I think the plot tries to do too much; instead, the plot needs to be a thinly veiled excuse for giant robots to wail on each other. Wow. I never thought I’d be advocating less story in a movie. It’ll grind on you, too, when the characters shout, “Optimus! NOOOOO!” and are totally serious about it.

Now, I’m neither a director nor a cinematographer, but I’m pretty sure cameras work even when not on cranes. This fact escapes Michael Bay, who insists on use them incessantly. Even when characters are just standing around talking, the camera swoops around like no other. It’s annoying and completely unnecessary, knock it off. Goddamn.

So, bottom line: This is what happens when you give a straight-to-DVD movie $200 million. Expect that level of story and action.

$3/$7 — Watch the first movie again and find those pictures of Megan Fox from GQ

This is my desktop

For the todo, I used “cat ~/todo.txt” instead of GeekTool’s ability to read text files, because I can control how often it updates if it’s run as a shell script. It’s set to refresh every 2 minutes.

For the stats, it’s a slightly more complicated command:

top -l2 -u -o cpu -S -F -n 10 -U hank | sed '1d;2d;3d;4d;5d;6d;7d;8d;9d;10d;11d;12d;13d;14d;15d;16d;17d;18d;19d;20d;41d'

So what this command does is shows all processes running by my username, excluding frameworks, ordered by CPU useage. The first part is the actual top command, then sed is used to cut away the first list, because it doesn’t display CPU %, and leave only the second, which does.

The readers are actually one command each, custom written for the thing they’re reading. The basic idea is use curl to fetch a page, use grep to find the tags we want, use sed to strip tags and add in characters that later, with tr and fmt, we use to format the text into the nice column you see. I have these set to run once a minute for the Twitter command, and every two minutes for the Slashdot headlines. Here are the respective commands:

curl -s -u user:password http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.xml | grep -e "" -e "" | tr -d '\n' | sed -e 's/]*>/|/g' -e 's/| |/~----------------------------------------~/g' -e 's/| |/~ -/g' -e 's/ |/Twitter Feed:~========================================~/g' -e 's/|/~=======================================/g' -e 's/"/"/g' -e 's/“/"/g' -e 's/”/"/g' -e 's/–/-/g' -e "s/’/\'/g" -e 's/#&8212;/-/g'| tr '~' '\n' | fmt -w 40

printf "Slashdot Headlines\n========================================\n" && curl -s http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot | grep -e '' | sed -e 's/>/>/g' -e 's/</</g' -e 's///g' -Ee's#(Search )?Slashdot##g' -e's##~~#g' | tr -d '\n' | tr '~' '\n' | fmt -w 40

That’s how my desktop is set up! I hope this was… entertaining, if nothing else.

-t_g

qsTODO – the Quicksilver interface for todo.sh I want to write – Haven’t even started. In all honesty, it’ll probably just end up being an Applescript action or two. :S

My Desktop HowTo / Show ‘n’ Tell – Coming along, just have to find time to, y’know, write it.

Sever Re-mod – putting my old NESpc into a different case – Got the case, got some ideas as to what to do, just need to draw up some stencil templates for the different hole that need to be cut and purchase a power supply to be done with the planning stages. I might be able to get a post on this out this week, yet.

-t_g

-t_g