Mint Droid

Archive for May, 2006

I love the idea of the ogg media standards. I don’t use vorbis, since TiVo doesn’t support it, and we spend a lot of time listening to music over our TiVos. But Theora is different. My Palm T|X can handle Theora (thanks to the wonderfulness that is TCPMP), and that’s the only place I need to convert DVDs for, so why not convert to Theora? Well, the only real reason I hadn’t so far is it’s a pain in the neck to do this from the console. Enter Thoggen, an X tool that can rip a DVD and save straight to Theora.

Thoggen is a new DVD ripper/backup-tool for Linux that encodes video into the free Ogg Theora format. Unlike its rivals, Thoggen is easy to use, and its built-in support for the Theora codec instead of the patent-restricted MPEG-4 and derivatives makes it worth looking at.On its surface, Thoggen is a DVD backup and extraction tool (i.e., “ripper”). You use it to make a copy of the video titles on your DVD, either because you worry about damaging frequently played discs, because watching compressed video from the hard disk is faster and less power-hungry than watching it from a DVD drive, or perhaps because you simply need portability. The thought of carrying every episode of “Arrested Development” wherever you go is certainly appealing…

Whatever reason you have for ripping DVDs, do yourself a favor, grab Thoggen, and rip to Theora.

Those of us who love amaroK but use Ubuntu Breezy were left out of this month’s release of amaroK Fast Forward. Due to irreconcilable conflicts, amarok 1.4 is not in the official Ubuntu repositories. However, if you are willing to take chances on an unofficial repository, the amaroK Wiki has step-by-step instructions to install amaroK 1.4. I was nervous about breaking things, but everything seemed to survive. amaroK had to re-build the collection, but once that was done, it’s been working flawlessly.

And the new features are well worth the risk! The major new features in 1.4 are:

• Tagging support for all major audio formats (OGG, MP3, MP4, FLAC and RM)
• Enhanced media device support (iPod® IFP/IRiver®, generic devices)
• Reworked tagging dialog for better management of the collection
• Non-KDE users are now able to set their default browser without installing KDEBase
• Consistent and independent icon set
• Option to view wikipedia articles in another language by default
• Gapless playback for the xine engine
• User-based rating system
• More options to configure the sidebar

amaroK was already good stuff. But the new update makes amaroK one of the best music library applications available for any platform.

Here’s an interesting script, something that I’ve been searching for for awhile: Automatic MySQL Backup. What does it do?

Everyday AutoMySQLBackup will run (if setup on /etc/cron.daily) and using mysqldump and gzip will dump your specified databases to the /backups/daily directory, it will rotate daily backups weekly so you should never have more than 7 backups in there.

Every Saturday AutoMySQLBackup will again backup the databases you have chosen but they will be placed into /backups/weekly, these will be rotated every 5 weeks so there should never be more than 5 backups in there.

For those of us who use a blogging package that uses a MySQL back-end, this is an ultra-cool utility. It’s much more convenient than using WordPress’s backup plugin, since it requires no further user intervention once it is configured and added to cron.