Re-encoding movies in Powershell with ffmpeg Lately I have collected some media that uses the AV1 codec. It’s a great codec but my TV’s piddly mediaplayer just can’t cope. I need to re-encode these files to something the TV can handle, for example x265. I have plenty of Linux servers, even my NAS runs Linux, […]
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Checksums and deduplicating on QNAP / Linux I have a QNAP NAS where I copy over the content of my phone every now and then as a backup. The problem is that you end up with a ton of directories called ‘Phone_2025_09_24″ and so on but with basically the same files. So how do we
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Subtitles using ffmpeg New in ffmpeg 8.0 has been the inclusion of Whisper (a project by Open AI) that allows you to transcribe audio (in video files) to subtitle files. But how does it work? First we should note that your flavor of Linux might not have the latest version off ffmpeg in its repository.
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A log function for bash So if you are making scripts in bash, it’s sometimes useful to print debug information to the screen. You can use ‘echo‘ but why not use something a bit more fancy. This little function will print out a timestamp relative to the start of the script. (Easily changed if you
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Adding GeoIP alerting to your SSH logins If you ever look in your server logs, I’m sure you’ve seen the steady stream of failed SSH login attempts. Most of these come from the more lawless parts of the world like China and Russia. But what if they happen to guess your password? Or a password
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Doing generic foreach loops in C While doing some work with linked lists, I looked into making an iterator loop. I wanted it to be generic without too much #define magic so as to still be readable for the average C programmer. I came up with this: This code defines two arrays and uses the
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Wildcard SSL certificates for VDX.nl NOTE: VDX has introduced two-factor authentication for their DNS services. While good for security, this does mean you can not script DNS changes anymore. As a result, I changed to https://hosting.nl/ for my DNS needs because they offer an easy REST API to do DNS changes. If you have domain
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Why ChatGPT is dumb as a brick, but it doesn’t matter Everybody will probably have heard of ChatGPT by now and those without a programming background have been wowed by the ‘almost lifelike’ interface. As with any new thing that comes along (and it’s really not new), the end of programmers and IT people has
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Logging Linux CIFS and NFS traffic in Zabbix The entire script can be downloaded at the end of the article, so no need to copy/paste. I recently started at a new job where one of the first challenges was to set up monitoring on a large storage cluster. The cluster has two servers acting as
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Using gawk interactively to query a database In my previous post I showed you how to install a JBDC client to access a MaxDB database. Since I got that running I ran into an issue where I needed to retrieve a filepath from my database. This filepath was broken up into it individual components with
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