Transcoding and More Transcoding...

And yet another ffmpeg go!
Converting videos so we can watch those on the Roku:

./ffmpeg -i video.avi -c:v libx264 -crf 19 -preset slow -c:a aac\
 -strict experimental -b:a 192k -ac 2 video.mp4

It took the T60p about 3 hours to convert the 760 MB video to mp4.

Movies During The Weekend

We had a really relaxed weekend (both with a bit a flu), we actually watched no movies at all, but a couple of documentaries instead.
And, on top of that, we are both finding harder and harder to watch the last few episodes from "House of Cards"... We are only three short of finishing the third season, but they got kinda boring...

• Iris

A Maysles documentary.
The GF requested this one, it was interesting.

• Pets: Wild at Heart

A surprisingly good PBS documentary dealing with the true animal instincts of plain vanilla household pets.

Tuesday 27-10-2015

Virtualbox: Kernel driver not installed (rc=1808)

The dreaded error, and the subsequent failure that prevents Virtualbox to start the guest OS.
When I did a:

sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

I got:

sudo: /etc/init.d/vboxdrv: command not found

On a 32 bit plain vanilla Linux Mint (XFCE) install, I had to do this:

sudo apt-get install virtualbox-dkms

Then, again, after installing that, if I issued a:

 sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

I got the same error than before and of course, VirtualBox failed to start the guest...
What I did was:

sudo modprobe vboxdrv

After that, I was able to boot the guest OS, but issuing a;

sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

Still failed.

Saturday 17-10-2015

Testing CloudReady on a T43 & T60p

Yesterday installed CloudReady. (or actually wanted to) on my Thinkpad T43.
But before I get to that, I had to do a couple of things first to actually try to install it, or better yet, to actually create the USB boot drive from Neverware's CloudReady image.

I had to rename the downloaded bin file from "cloudready-free-43.1.37.bin" to "cloudready-free-43.1.37.bin.zip", the instructions on the PDF doc on their site mention that the file might be called either, on my case, it had to be called *.zip, otherwise it failed to create a proper USB boot drive, matter of fact, it failed to do anything.
It took the T43 about an hour and a half to actually make the USB boot drive from the finally renamed bin file.
After that I was able to boot from the USB drive, or actually not... On the Thinkpad T43 it simply failed, over and over and over, with a white screen with a countdown in the upper left corner, with a message and a spinning wheel:

Your system is repairing itself. Please wait.

After that, it rebooted by itself, and this repeated, over and over...

On the Thinkpad T60p things went much smoother, after only one of those cycles with the message "Your system is repairing itself. Please wait." it finally booted onto ChromiumOS.
Just for kicks, loaded a 250 GB SATA HDD on the T60p and installed the thing.

Installing the thing onto the T60p -after all the warning messages that you were about to destroy the data on your drive if you proceed- took about 30 minutes, and no surprises whatsoever.
The WiFi worked Ok (wasn't able to find a way to setup a fixed IP address, tho), the LCD resolution worked (1600x1200), etc.
Anyways, I think I'm not gonna keep that OS for the moment, this is just a test, it seems nice and all, but I don't see any improvement in terms of snappiness compared to the same T60p running Linux Mint XFCE.

76K and counting!

And 10 later, yet another thousand up!
That pretty much seems to be the standard these days... 10 days and 1000 music themes.

Killing The Squeak

Today I dismantled a little bit my W530, the right palm rest makes a squeaking noise that its rather ball breaking...
I'm impressed by how clean the laptop is on the inside, it was indeed, a pretty good deal.

Movies During The Weekend

It was kinda of a slow weekend... We actually watched only one movie.

• San Andreas

Less than so-so.
Nice XF... And I guess that pretty much sums it up...
What can I say? The GF sort of wanted to see this one, so, I had to comply ;)

Nouveau Glory

 Taken last Saturday, an external monitor connected to the W530, thru VGA. using the Nouveau driver for the NVIDIA card.
Not that many problems doing so, just a little bit of plug and play, with a minimal configuration needed.

The Unity Desktop

A litle lighter theme this itme, Irradiance. and once again, using the amazing Loli-Papelk icons.

Movies During The Weekend

Shit load of movies during the last weekend, after all, it was a long weekend around here.

• Child 44

Nice one, but, perhaps it tries to pack too much things.

• Cooties

Funny one, found out about this one while watching trailers a couple of months ago...

• The Keep

the quest to see all of Michael Mann's movies continues, but this one sucks, it certainly doesn't look like a Michael Mann film.

• Pixels

A real bummer... The GF saw this one at the theaters on a girls night out, not sure why, she hates Adam Sandler.
I was hoping for something way better and funnier.

• Cop Car

The best of the bunch.
No idea what the film was about, the GF selected this one, after watching the trailer, I believe on her judgement.

• Z for Zachariah

A piece of crap... For the love of Jeebus, what a huge mountain of crap!

Migrations Are A Bitch

Completely and totally covered by work.
Right now migrating 3 servers from a remote office to "the cloud"...
Taking a VPN (OpenVPN) and a Nagios monitor server fron two stand alone boxes onto a virtual, petite, dirt cheap Ubuntu Server on Digiral Ocean...
Things went sorta smooth, setting up and getting up & running the OpenVPN server was pretty much straight forward (this is the first time I setup an OpenVPN server from zero, i've used an Endian Firewall before).
Migrating Nagios was also pretty pretty easy (from another Ubuntu Server), simply copied the config files, and edit the /etc/nagios3/nagios.cfg file, and presto.
Will keep polishing things off the next few days...

The War, Rewatched

Right now re-watching The War.
It has been at least five years since I saw this one for the first time, I got the DVD box set.

The Unity Desktop

 My desktop on the W530, right now!
I freaking love the screen real estate, the thing is huuuugee! Working on is pure pleasure.
The icon theme it is the amazing flat looking Loli-Papelk.

75K and counting!

And yet, ten days later, another thousand up!!
Want to reach the 100K no matter what!!!

Window Shopping On A Rainy Sunday

A little stroll thru some nice (and mostly flat) themes and icons that got my attention.

• Boston

• Super Flat Remix Icon Remix

• Vivacious Colors

Thursday 08-10-2015

Sunday 04-10-2015

Movies During The Weekend

Not many movies this time, but an amazing one, and also another episode of our TV series as a couple, "House of Cards".

• The Martian

Obviously, went to the theater to see this one and in 3D.
Mighty good, but not as good as the Weir's book, but, hey it's Ridley Scott.

• Jurassic World

Nice, entertaining reboot of the franchise. Chris Pratt seems like an excellent idea for the new Indiana Jones.

Forticlient 64 bits on Ubuntu 14.04 (2)

Installed the 64 bits Forticlient SSL on the Thinkpad W530, no biggie, except that this time, after installing ir, and without the need to install the "lib32gcc1" package, I got an apt-get error, that force me to do a:

colossus > sudo apt-get -f install
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree      
Reading state information... Done
Correcting dependencies... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  account-plugin-windows-live empathy-common folks-common gnome-contacts
  gstreamer0.10-nice gstreamer0.10-plugins-good gstreamer0.10-x
  gstreamer1.0-nice guile-2.0-libs libavahi-gobject0 libfarstream-0.1-0
  libfarstream-0.2-2 libfolks-eds25 libfolks-telepathy25 libfolks25 libgc1c2
  libgupnp-igd-1.0-4 libmeanwhile1 libmission-control-plugins0 libnice10
  libpurple-bin libpurple0 libtelepathy-farstream3 libtelepathy-logger3
  libupstart1 libzephyr4 signon-plugin-password telepathy-gabble
  telepathy-haze telepathy-logger telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
The following extra packages will be installed:
  lib32gcc1 libc6-i386
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  lib32gcc1 libc6-i386
0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 12 not upgraded.
1 not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 2,253 kB of archives.
After this operation, 10.0 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y

After that, everything seems to be A Ok, even after a reboot, and of course, the Forticlient SSL works ok as well.

The Unity Desktop

The first sceenshot of the beast, the Thinkpad W530.
By Jeebus, the screen -that is the resolution- real estate is humongous!

Saturday 03-10-2015

Now The Moto Is Complete!

Finally got my hands on the Otterbox case for the Moto G!
Now I certainly do have a cell phone, damn it!

74K and counting!

Another thousand up!
Will I make it to 100K before 2016?

Movies During The Weekend

Once again, we 're back on track!!!
We actually watched a shit load of movies with the GF, and even got time to watch another episode of our first TV series as a couple "House of Cards"

• Focus

Pretty, pretty good movie.
I wanted to see it mostly to take a look at how Bs. As. looked like on a modern US flick, but the movie was actually quite enjoyable.

• Poltergeist (2015)

Mostly to make a comparison with the 80's flick... The remake is really good.

• Last Shift

The GF asked for this one... You'll shit yourself... Scary to the max, and quite good, made with zero budget.

• Tomorrowland

I wanted to see this one, and what can I say? I simply loved it.

• Terminator Genisys

The worst of the bunch, a total piece of crap.