Best headphones under USD100

http://reviews.cnet.com/2300-6468_7-10011889.html?tag=mncol

Automated robbery

Wired exposes how.
http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/06/automated-robbery-how-card-skimmers-still-steal-millions-from-banks/

Extracting Pages from PDF

First, install PDFTK on Linux.

Then, do this command:

pdftk foo.pdf cat 2-3 output abstract.pdf dont_ask

Where foo.pdf is the original PDF file, 2-3 is the range of pages (you can type 2-end to extract to EOF), and abstract.pdf is the output PDF file.

FFMPEG Convert AVI to JPEG

$ ffmpeg -i input.avi -qscale 1 -qcomp 0 file-%03d.jpg

• qscale[:stream_specifier] q (output,per-stream)’
• Use fixed quality scale (VBR). The meaning of q is codec-dependent.
• qscale constant quality buf variable bitrate. n = 1 for best quality, n = 31 for worst quality
• qcomp compression
• video quantizer scale compression (VBR) (default 0.5). Constant of ratecontrol equation. Recommended range for default rc_eq: 0.0-1.0
• qblur blur
• video quantizer scale blur (VBR) (range 0.0 - 1.0)
• Previously tested with qblur option of 0 and 1, and outputs were exactly the same

Converting HD720 to 320x240

$ ffmpeg -i input.avi -vcodec huffyuv -vf "crop:960;720:0:0" -y intermediate.avi
$ ffmpeg -i intermediate.avi -vcodec libx264 -s qvga -y output.m4v

HuffYUV is a lossless codec. From Wikipedia:

Huffyuv (or HuffYUV) is a lossless video codec created by Ben Rudiak-Gould which is meant to replace uncompressed YCbCr as a video capture format.

Despite the "YUV" in the name, it does not compress the YUV color space, but YCbCr.[citation needed] The codec can also compress in the RGB color space.



-vf "..." replaces -croptop, -cropbottom, -padtop, -padbottom etc of older versions of FFMPEG

FFMPEG with x264: another option

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=786095

KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) FFMPEG

How to remove jitter from the first couple of seconds of Nikon DSLR video, and keep only 60 seconds.

$ lav2yuv +n DSC_0000.AVI > dsc0000.yuv
$ ffmpeg -i dsc0000.yuv -ss 3 -t 60 -y -s vga dsc0000.mp4
$ mediainfo dsc0000.mp4

...asumming you want to convert the MJPEG original to MPEG-4, of course....

By the way, my Nikon outputs 1280x720 HD video (hd720 in FFMPEG-speak). No Full HD (aka hd1080) from this baby.