Wipe Hard Drive
The linux utility dd is good for all kinds of things. The most common for me is using it to write zeroes to all the sectors on a hard drive, ie wiping a hard drive. Be sure you have lots of time this command will take awhile.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M
You can do alot more with it as well. Linux Questions post about dd.
Posted Sunday 07:12 AM
Mencoder Movie Clips
Another in the collection of things that I don't do often enough to remember how to do them exactly. Using mencoder to pull a clip out of another file from certain time index, -ss, and of the specified length, -endpos.
mencoder -ss 1000 -endpos 100 file.mpg -oac copy -ovc copy -o file-clip.mpg
Posted Saturday 02:25 PM
Labeling Partions
Giving names to partitions so that when they are automatically mounted you get a meaningful name instead of an UUID or as Nautilus does 250 GB File System is a handy way to help keep things organized.
Unmount the partitions before trying to change their labels
The tool for ext2, ext3, and ext4 file systems is e2label. The first line shows the current label for the specified partition and the second command will change it.
e2label /dev/sdh1 e2label /dev/shd1 Partition_Name
The tool for reiserfs partitions is the reiserfstune program which is part of the reiserfsprogs collection of tools. As with e2label the first command below will show the current label if any and the second changes the label.
reiserfstune /dev/sdh1 | grep LABEL reiserfstune /dev/sdh1 -l Partition_Name
For more information see the man pages for commands.
Posted Friday 11:48 AM
Stuff I Always Lose
Decided to start adding some things here that I always end up having to google for every time I need them. They will all be tagged as notes so maybe I keep this somewhere that I'll remember.
First off the ffmpeg command line to get an mp3 out of a flash video.
ffmpeg -i video.flv -ar 44100 -ab 160k -ac 2 file.mp3
Posted Tuesday 10:16 PM