Blog of FacePwning

FFMPEG Command for the Android Video Player

admin — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 06:09:48 +0000

Well I got my G1 yesterday, and it’s really cool, i’ll post more about it later. One of the big pitfalls is that Google didn’t put a video player on the phone when it shipped, they left it to a 3rd party developer to write one… The current one on the market works, but only for certain files, and it’s very picky. I was playing around with ffmpeg to see what the perfect command was to transcode avi/whatever else into a .3gp for the media player. I found
ffmpeg -i "inputfilehere.whatever" -threads 3 -s qcif -vcodec h264 -acodec aac -ac 1 -r 25 -ab 128 -s 480x352 -y outputfilehere.3gp which will use H264 and AAC to make a nicely sized video (the episode of The Office I used, which was 20 minutes long, used up 54MB of space). The Video is the perfect size for the screen and it sounds good.

I’m getting an Android phone!

admin — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 01:14:50 +0000

Finally decided to upgrade from my Treo 650, which is pretty cruddy, to one of those new T-Mobile G1s with Android on them :). I ordered it on Saturday, and it’ll be shipping on Monday. Hopefully I’ll have it in my hands by Wednesday or Thursday. I’ll post all the details and pics when I get it

Intel SpeedStep

admin — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 00:11:13 +0000

I decided to start overclock my PC again (now that it’s fall it won’t be quite as hot outside), I looked at a few forums to see what settings people have had success with, and I noticed that all of the guides turned Intel’s SpeedStep off, and gave no reason why. After I was all done changing voltages and clock speeds, I turned SpeedStep on in my BIOS to see what would happen.
When I booted up my clock was 2.24 GHz, but when I did anything processor intensive, the clock would jump up to 3.38GHz for a bit and the voltage rise also. So far I have seen no adverse affects from SpeedStep, it saves energy and keeps temperatures down when you don’t need the full power of the CPU, but when you do it ramps everything up and it runs like normal. It just made me wonder why it’s always turned off, I know some people really need to have 100% of their power all the time, even if they don’t need it, but that seems like a waste.

As for the overclocking, I got my E6600 from 2.6GHz to 3.38GHz without any problems at all, other then needing to slightly raise the volate because prime95 kept complaining, but no crashes

Hard Drive Failure Sucks!

admin — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 02:30:45 +0000

If anyone noticed, the site was down for a number of hours on Thursday, my VPS host had a catastrophic hard drive failure (apparently the whole machine almost went up in flames), thankfully after the DC Tech beat rush hour traffic he was able to restore my data and put it on their NAS with redundant RAID, so this shouldn’t happen again :). It would have sucked if the drive was permanently failed, because I didn’t have any backups (that was the first thing I did when I got my data back, I set up a daily whole-VPS backup). I also finally installed Akimset for wordpress, which is blocked *all* of the spam posts I’m still getting.

In other news I got another 2GB of ram for my desktop, for a total of 4GB (Thank god for 64bit operating systems

Blog Spammers Suck

admin — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 15:37:23 +0000

I haven’t posted here in a while, or logged into the admin panel, but I saw there was a new wordpress update, so I figured I might as well update to be safe.
When I logged in I saw that there was 1,094 comments awaiting moderation, and they’re probably all spam comments. Stupid blog spammers go around and try to spam the comments and link to their sites so they can get better search engine rankings and stuff
It looks something like this:

There’s 61 pages of those

If your comment doesn’t go through, it’s because there’s so much spam that’s coming through that it’s getting filtered.
Edit: Finally got fed up and installed Akimset, which should stop most/all of the blog spam that’s coming through (I had to delete like 40 spam comments that got through the filters )

Does your site work with Google Chrome?

admin — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 22:05:47 +0000

Mine does

If you haven’t seen it yet, google has just made a new browser called chrome, which uses webkit (the open source renderer behind safari). You can get it at http://www.google.com/chrome?open. They’ve also built a new javascript engine, called V8, which seems to be MUCH faster then firefox, or any other browser. If you use any javascript intensive sites (digg.com for example), you should give chrome a try, it’ll probably be much faster

Keeping up with all of Google’s other thrends, the browser will probably never make it out of beta (like gmail), but even at it’s first release, it works great, is complete, and has very few bugs.

Migration

admin — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 03:32:27 +0000

Facepwn.com / www.facepwn.com are now hosted on my VPS, despite the machine being much slower, the site loading times are MUCH faster. The new IP address is 216.66.9.147, so make sure you’ve migrated before telling me something is wrong :).

In order to get lighttpd to work with wordpress, I had to use a modified mod_rewrite, which you can find here: http://trac.lighttpd.net/trac/ticket/985. I’m not sure if there will be any problems with it, in my tests it seemed to work perfectly fine, but if you run into anything post a comment and I’ll see what I can do.

Driving to Mexico!

admin — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 05:00:56 +0000

For the next few days, i’ll be away (not like anyone cares), on vacation to Mexico. I’m not sure if the hotel we’re staying at will have internet (if it does the I’ll pop in every now and then), otherwise i’ll be out for a few days, try not to miss me too much

I’ll be leaving tomorrow (the 5th) at 10am, so this will probably be the last time i’ll be on.

Ubuntu!

admin — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 00:19:00 +0000

Well I managed to semi-hose my Server 2008 install (no idea what.. but it only works half the time now!). So I decided to *try* ubuntu. I’m not linux pro, but I’ve used it quite a bit (usually on servers), and usually when I try on my desktop it fails (I never seem to be able to get my dual monitors working :().

Then I found out about Envy, a program that finds the proper nvidia driver for you (8800gts in my case), then installs it. Before I was going to the nvidia site and downloading their drivers, but that would always fail (something about 64bit ubuntu and nvidia = fail). After envy did it’s stuff, I went into nvidia-settings, enabled my other monitor, set up the proper resolutions, told it to write to xorg.conf, then rebooted.. and it worked! Apart from a few applications that don’t like twinview (I’m looking at *you* VLC), it works without any problems at all.

Half life 2/Half life 2 deathmatch work 100% fine with wine, other then fullscreen seems to not work as well (probably because of twinview) all my devices worked, even my logitech easycall desktop, which worked as soon as I started skype up and told it which sound device to use. As for everything else, there seems to be a Linux equivalent that works nicely. The only thing that gives me problems is the 64bit flash plugin for firefox, since flash has no 64bit linux plugin, it needs to use a wrapper around the 32bit one, which makes it use a lot more resources, but most everything still runs fine.

To wrap it up, I think i’ll be staying with ubuntu for a bit longer then I did server 2008 (no promises though ;). Ubuntu is getting better and better with every release, and it’s quite pleasant to use (compiz is awesome, much better then Vista!)

Mac VS PC?

admin — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 19:33:41 +0000

Isin’t a PC a “Personal Computer”?

Last time I checked, Macs are “Personal Computers” as well.. Shouldn’t it be Mac vs Windows, not Mac vs PC? That’s always bothered me..