Alejandro R. Mosteo

For some time I had wanted to have a live Linux distro in my keychain. This, in turn, preferably required encryption of, at least, the home partition.

Obvious candidates need not to be named. I thus searched for a simple tutorial and, while some exhaustive ones exist (mostly for Arch, Gentoo, and Debian), all of them required a quite custom and long (i.e. error-prone in my hands) procedure.

Me being a natural¹ person, I tossed these aside and went for the obvious, dummy way. Since due to space limitations I didn't want to have a separate /home partition, Ubuntu was out of the picture (because it only allows, during install, to encrypt /home). Instead, I turned to Debian netinst, which I had recently used in a VirtualBox image. And so I did:

1. Create, in VirtualBox, a VM without hard drive, enough memory for Debian netinst (I guess around 512MB should be more than enough), and USB support.
2. Configure this VM with the Debian netinst image as mounted CD, and boot from it.
3. Plug-in the USB key, pass ownership of it to the VM just being booted.
4. Proceed with standard Debian installation. When partitioning arrived, I could select my USB key as if it were any regular hard drive. Select encryption of everything but a small /boot partition. This way almost all usable space in the pendrive goes to the root partition which also comprises /home. You could separate them if you prefer. I also threw in a small swap partition, also encrypted. I don't very much care about flash wear, for this system is to be used sporadically on unknown machines.
5. Complete installation, shut down the VM, unmount the USB key, boot from it in some machine to verify installation.
6. Delight on being asked your password in the early stages of console boot and everything working out of the box.
7. Optional further steps:
   1. Insert the key in another running Linux (e.g. my desktop Ubuntu). Encrypted partitions are detected, you'll be asked for your password so you can unlock and mount them. I took advantage of this to unlock (but not mount) the USB root partition in order to remove the ext3 journal and downgrade to ext2 (and don't forget to change it in /etc/fstab), which is said to be preferable in flash media (did I just say that I don't care about flash wear? Well, if it can be avoided...)
   2. Change from stable to unstable in /etc/apt/sources.list if you prefer (as I do) a more bleeding-edge system. Boot from USB and upgrade system.
   3. Install restricted drivers, every other wifi firmware (look for firmware-* packages) in order to be ready when you use this pendrive in some unknown machine.
   4. Install some GUI if you like (nowadays I go with xfce4 after the KDE and Gnome debacles).
   5. Customize to your liking, whatever.
   6. Update regularly.

All in all, this was easy-peasy as any other regular installation. I was mildly² surprised that it worked in the first try, to be honest. Even more that nobody³ else (that I could found) had documented this easier procedure to have a fully (but for /boot, of course) bootable live Debian USB.

¹In the sense that mother Nature always finds the path of least resistance, i.e. effort.
²With nowadays generalized use of UUIDs and computers being regularly able to boot from USB, not so much really.
³I just learned about package live-magic which frankly makes this post moot (although it is broken in Ubuntu). As it often happens in my current world of ignorance. Sheesh.

I was going to review this anime in anidb.net but I don't want to comply with their guidelines. I just want to have out this frustration that it put into me.

I think that what most saddens me is the potential that this had and that was thrown overboard. I saw the first 9 episodes in a row. I was amazed and gloating in anticipation.

Hold your horses.

It's well and dandy that they chose to narrate this through Albert, and not the Count. That left more opportunities to enrich the Count's mystery. However, there is a gradually increasing feeling that something with the Count depiction isn't right. And indeed isn't right. We are supposed to like him, at least if we must understand the pains Albert takes to "redeem" or "save" him. We get this very clearly in the book: the Count is capable of great compassion, generosity, and he's appalled at the collateral damage of some of his vengeful acts. The struggle can be felt, and the final fate of the Count is, amongst several possible, perfectly fitting.

Here the plot takes us into a totally unnecesary relight of the Mondego character once it was almost disposed with. Mondego goes in minutes from crazy maniac to repentant father. In the end, he doesn't get neither the punishment he deserves (not by law, but by all the people that he deceived) nor a decent final stand-off.

But the Count... the Count is wasted nonsensically and acts even more incongruously. One could think he's struggling between compassion and revenge, between hate and love, ... but if this is the intention, this isn't what's depicted. Minutes before his end, he could have been master of his destiny, but ultimately he is overwhelmed by the Gankutsuou first, Albert (!!!) embrace (if not kiss) next, his pitiful attempts at killing when again human then, and finally death.

Talk about anticlimatic.

We are then "subtly" bombarded with the apparent similarity between the young trio and the previous generation one. Nice and dandy if it weren't for the detail that in the former, one man is secretly in love with the other to the point of giving his life, while in the latter the conniving bitch by any measure kills his "friend" and steals his woman. Yeah, exactly the same, fond, memories. That's enough reason to let die the condemned and let live (if even he's to coward to do so) the scum-friend. (And, since I mentioned it, since when failing to show at a duel is simply forgotten?)

Yes, I think that duel is the point where things go decidedly south. In the book this is the point where Albert has to forcibly mature, and the Count reluctantly knows it has to be done, even if in the end is for the best. Here he goes in as the murderer zombie he is, kills the wrong rival, forgives the missing one, and we are left wondering why anyone loves him).

I could go on on other characters' rationality and plot holes the size of the titanic (how does Albert board the fscking bombing cruiser? hello?), but these are secondary to the depiction of the Count. We have to accept at face value that he's worth rooting for (as in the book), but he's not (in the anime). Which in itself is a cognitive dissonance, even more so for anyone who has read the original. In the end, the last few chapters feel like random happenings, but the worst is that nothing forced them taking that route.

/Rant.

How to get high quality videos at reasonable sizes. Needed this in the past for conferences and again now for a friend submission to notodofilmfest.

$ ffmpeg -i <inputfile> -threads 0 -pass 1 -vcodec libx264 -vpre medium_firstpass -b <bitrate>k <outputfile>.flv

$ ffmpeg -i <inputfile> -threads 0 -pass 2 -vcodec libx264 -vpre medium              -b <bitrate>k <outputfile>.flv

-threads 0 detects available CPUs. The important thing here is selecting the appropriate video codec.

Bitrate, I'm afraid, can only be determined somewhat empirically, if you want a target file size. I ended doing binary search.

I guess that if you're desperate for quality you can use -vpre placebo[_firstpass].

For single-pass, it's said to be better to use -crf <something in 15-25 range>, less is higher quality/larger size, instead of -b. Also the -vpre hq profile might be interesting?

For completeness, including the audio codec, I had:

$ ffmpeg -i <inputfile> -threads 0 -acodec libmp3lame -ab 160k -ar 44100 -pass 1 -vcodec libx264 -vpre medium_firstpass -b <bitrate>k <outputfile>.flv

Since no video editing program that I know understands animated gifs (kdenlive, openshot, pitivi), using this recipe one can use such gifs in these programs:

mencoder -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=ffv1 -o outfile.avi infile.gif

The ljpeg codec is also lossless, but files are bigger.