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DVD ripping with ffmpeg
To rip DVD movie to ogg format using ffmpeg, follow these steps. 1) find the vob files on the mounted video DVD in VIDEO_TS that stores the movie itself. There would be a few other VOB files that stores splash screen or special features, the vob files for the movie itself can be identified by its superior size. You can verify these vob files by playing them directly with a player (e.g. mplayer) 2) concatenate all such vob files, pipe to ffmpeg 3) calculate the video size and crop size. The ogg video size must be multiple of 16 on both width and height, this is inherit limitation of theora codec. In my case I took 512x384. The -vcodec parameter is necessary because ffmpeg doesn't support theora by itself. -acodec is necessary otherwise ffmpeg uses flac by default.

Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

List files size sorted and print total size in a human readable format without sort, awk and other commands.

How to backup hard disk timely?
Creates files in $DATE and hardlinks existing files to $PREVDATE. Thus full backup in each directory. Only drawback is changed modification time. Recommend a wrapper script to determine $DATE and $PREVDATE. Works like a charm. (Dirvish handrolled)

Both view and pipe the file without saving to disk
This is a cool trick to view the contents of the file on /dev/pts/0 (or whatever terminal you're using), and also send the contents of that file to another program by way of an unnamed pipe. All the while, you've not bothered saving any extra data to disk, like you might be tempted to do with sed or grep to filter output.

Random colours at random locations

Runs previous command but replacing
Replaces the first instance of 'foo' with 'bar'. To replace all instances of 'foo' with 'bar': !!:gs/foo/bar/

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Get all upgradable deb packages in a single line
Works for debian and ubuntu based distros.


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