I was tasked with recovering some photos from a dying drive. I finally resorted to magicrescue, which is nice and to the point. And command line and packaged in Ubuntu, so very dandy.

 

Before finding it, however, I backed up the whole partition with dd. I'm used to mount .iso images, so I guessed that a dd dump can be likewise easily mounted. Indeed, it would be as simple as:

 

sudo mount -o loop <dumpfile> <mount point>

 

This triggered an interest into creating any arbitrary filesystem within a file (saving the need for toying with real partitions or virtual machines). It turned to be damn easy:

That's it. Or, you could insert a partition table (between steps 3 and 4) with fdisk, and create several partitions inside. At that point you can use nicer graphical tools like gparted.

 

Alex out.

So I had this glorious idea of using the CD mp3 instead of the youtube video sound, to have better audio quality. Bad idea.

Audio was slightly faster than video. At first I thought it would be some easy 25-->24 or 24-->23.976 framerate issue, easily fixed with ffmpeg. Bzzt, nope.

Empirical testing with OpenShot (Kdenlive 0.7.6 has some strange bug where clips don't snap to tracks that makes it unusable) showed a relative higher speed of 1.0025 for the audio. That implied that I needed to move from 23.976fps (the original video frame rate) to 24.03594fps. Obviously ffmpeg doesn't support this (better said, the mp4 spec doesn't allow it).

I could apply the 1.0025x in OpenShot quite easily. But, double size video, half the quality, due to this silly thing of fixed output video profiles. Scale-up, whatever, stuff; result: shitty fat video.

In the end, applying the inverse rule in yuvfps (i.e. lying about the source frame rate, which yuvfps swallows be it whatever it be) I got it. The sync is amazingly perfect, so much that I cannot understand where this 1.0025 comes from.

Conclusion: for my next ultrastar adaptation (Fantine's death), which I have already almost finished, I used the youtube audio. Too bad if it's crappy overcompressed, artifact ridden mp3. (It's actually not that bad :P)

 

P.s: The final recipe was

ffmpeg -i orig.mp4.bak -f yuv4mpegpipe - | yuvfps -s 2403594:100000 -r 23976:1000 | ffmpeg -f yuv4mpegpipe -i - -y -r 23.976 -b 500k 24.mp4

Just discovered Performous via Ultrastar (thanks, Ster!). Isn't it great? I couldn't stop adapting some of my faves, more to come soon!

 

Someone took the time to upload a complete package of txt+mp3 to freenet . If you have it installed you know what to do.

 

#TITLE:Bring him home                                                                                  
#ARTIST:Les miserables 10th anniversary

 

Full TXT in the article body.

Today I tried to install GtkAda-2.14 in some Ubuntu Karmic machine. No luck. 

 

Until now, it sufficed to use the stock libgtk2.0-dev packages and simply compile GtkAda. However, the current gtk+ version is 2.18, and some fields in GtkEntry have changed, breaking GtkAda.

 

So I had to unpack the gtk+-2.14 available at AdaCore in my local account folder, and export the proper folder with $ export CFLAGS=-I$HOME/local/gtk+-2.14/include/gtk-2.0

 

Note the last /gtk-2.0 part, that throwed me out for a minute. Now GtkAda compiles and installs.

 

Amazingly, linking is done against the Ubuntu stock installation and it seems to work (and my program shows windows and stuff dude). I suppose this is a bomb waiting to blow up at the most interesting moment. Whatever.