• a new Mac laptop with a fast hard drive, but one that is smaller than all the data you need to backup
• A backup hard drive you’ve used on Windows and Linux, but is formatted NTFS, and is much larger than your new laptop’s HD
• You have files named on your system that needs to be backed up that aren’t kosher for NTFS

So, being a Linux geek, you realize “Ha! I’ll just tar my files up, copy it to the backup drive, over to the new system, and untar.”

Yes – you do just that, but then you need to use your laptop for work; so instead of waiting to untar the file, you copy the very large backup tar files from the external HD to your new laptop.

Now, here’s the problem: you can’t untar the entire tar flle w/o running out of space. What do you do? Un-tar a bit at a time; delete; continue.

Untar a bit of the archive you want, delete it from the tar, and continue until you have more space on your HD than the rest of the tar file.

# tar xf MYBACKUP.tar This/directory/I/want
# tar --delete --file=MYBACKUP.tar This/directory/I/want


This method works surprisingly well, considering the tar file crossed all three major operating systems.

If you are unsure of what is inside the archive, you can use:

# tar --list --file=MYBACKUP.tar


I wrote a quick alias erlman that only searches these erlang man page sections.

~/.bashrc

I spent much to much time trying to figure out the right combination of video/audio encodings that would would from an RTSP streaming server (went with a RealServer demo, for now) to a variety of clients (QuickTime Player, VLC, various phones, etceteras.)

First, VLC is a champ. Every time I tried a new streaming server, VLC could play the stream with video and audio. QuickTime Player was not so kind. Even the phone we were streaming to — the Nokia N95 (tech specs) — could play streams that QuickTime Player could not.

I tried a variety of tools, from the venerable ffmpeg to QuickTime Player’s export functionality to create stream-able videos (mainly for QuickTime, since it was being very picky). The tools I used were the following:

• ffmpeg from FFMPEG project
• faac from AudioCoding
• mp4creator from MPEG4IP

Here is a simple bash loop I made to iterate over .mov’s in the current directory and create MPEG4 video, MPEG4 audio (AAC LC), in an MPEG4 container that was hinted. You should set FRAMERATE and SIZE (as “WxH”) as environment variables. Note that the first line has -ac 1 which sets the audio to mono. Also, edit the -qscale to your liking (or remove it).

However, the logs were complaing TELL commands have not been enabled. It seems that SPAMD_OPTS in /etc/conf.d/spamd is missing the -l (–allow-tell) option.

Adding the above -l to SPAMD_OPTS allowed spamc to talk to spamd and make it start learning.

• install esmtp
• create your ~/.esmtprc file
• man esmtprc — seriously, it’s easy
• add the following to your ~/.muttrc

e.g.

First, you need to launch urxvtd. This is as easy as adding a line like the following to your ~/.xinitrc:

Once the daemon is running in the background, you can connect to it with urxtvc. Then a terminal launches, and you are ready to it as usual.

This time, I’m going to actually keep notes of the different programs I use.  This will include programs like rxvt-unicode, my terminal of choice, and mutt, which is arguably the best (or simply most popular) cli mail client.