Loud Noises in the Dark
From the "What the hell was that?" Dept., posted: 16-Sep-2008 21:36
Well, Friday the 12th was a day to remember.
Disturbed played Christchurch. To be more precise, Disturbed blew the roof off the Westpac Trust centre and rained Metal all over Addington.
What a concert - my lovely wife & I went along expecting to feel old and colourful against the sea of black t-shirts & jeans and were surprised to be nowhere near the oldest rockers there. And there was much more than just black t-shirts on view.
Redline started up OK - tickets said first band on at 7.15 but I'm fairly sure that Redline started earlier than that; they were over by 7.30pm. Alterbridge did their set against intermittant house lights that kept coming up - their set was OK, but not quite what I expected. P.O.D. were OK as well - we both expected more from them though.
However, from the moment Dave Draiman was wheeled on until the house lights came back up at the end, Disturbed owned the show! Audio was loud & clear, the lighting was great and their prescence on stage was impressive.
We had seats dead centre at the top and we could see everything really well. We watched the moshpit sway left and right as those up front got right into it. It was funny to see the large number of glowing cell phones held up and recording in the standing crowd from up top where we were. And the clouds of dubious looking smoke rising to the lights. :)
DD had a few words to say at the end of the gig, and his comments on the chick(s) who decided to remove articles of their clothing (and everything for one girl) got a good laugh for all. (FWIW apparently the 2nd chick who presented herself to the crowd to have a look at wasn't all that hot, according to a friend in the moshpit who was right there next to her).
Then Disturbed ended up their set with 'The Sickness' and had the crowd really pumping and jumping. And several thousand happy sweaty people made their way out into the cold Christchurch evening.
What a night!!!
Mythtv, xvid, and my PSP
From the "Low WAF" Dept., posted: 4-Sep-2008 22:45
When I first started fiddling around with Mythbuntu I (like everyone else) needed to know how to get the video off the myth host into something less annoying than the nupplevideo format it records in. (if you are using a BT analogue capture card, that is)
Searching lead me to apt-get install nuvexport. Nuvexport is a set of scripts that does a nice job of converting the nuv files into xvid, mpeg2 and other formats. (no H264/MP4 the last time I checked).
So now my host records Family Guy each night, then converts said episode into a 300mb xvid @ 1meg/s CBR which I then re-rip using PSPVideo9 into an MP4 to watch on my PSP at lunchtime. Video quality is excellent, audio is listenable (I'm doing the MP4 ripping at the lowest quality so it fits on to my memory card 'cause I'm too cheap to buy a bigger one and I *REALLY* want to keep the demo of God of War on it). PSPV9 takes about five min to rerip. Handy bit of s/w.
When using nuvexport with mythbuntu you first need to have enabled the Win32 codecs using mythbuntusetup, then use apt to install nuvexport.
Running nuvexport by hand works like a treat - I found that once I added it to the user jobs as nuvexport-xvid (to select xvid output by script name) the export jobs would bomb out. Reading through the export logs found that certain lines in the scripts try to write to the screen and as they are running in the background they can't and get pissy and stop. Rem'ing the offending lines out of the nuvexport scripts resolved this so now the user jobs work fine. DVD export works OK, just takes ages. Then again, as the myth host is a dual-cpu PIII 700 converting 36min of Family Guy to xvid takes about 4.5 hours to complete.
The next step is to buy a Hauppauge Nova-S card and stick that in the host - then I'll have mpeg2 written to the drive instead of nuv files, and I'll be able to go directly to PSP without having to go through the xvid stage first.
WAF was dropping sharply for a while, now as I've stopped spending nights fiddling around with the satellite receiver it's slowly increasing.
All this just to get C4 reception in Lyttelton. And to watch Family Guy again. (Without exceeding my ISP data cap...)
Removing the XPAntivirus bug that's going around
From the "Where did that come from?" Dept., posted: 18-Aug-2008 21:44
Five laptops in one week to remove this little darling from. My, people do click some funny emails.
To kill this wee begger and it's friends (from WinXP), do this; {I take no responsiblity if you cabbage your PC though}
1) Scan the HD out of band if you can. Ie remove and use a USB-IDE/SATA adapter if you've got one, or build a Bart-PE CD with the latest version of Clam-AV on it and boot up on the CD and scan from that.
2) Once scanned out-of-band, boot back up into safe mode (F8 repeatedly while turning the pc on)
3) Run regedit; navigate to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
4) In here is an entry 'Userinit' - It should usually only have 'C:\WINDOWS\system32\userinit.exe,' in there - if there's anything else appended to that line remove it from the entry, take it back to the trailing ',' after userinit.exe
5) Then go to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run. Backup this reg key and then clean out anything you think is remotely dodgy. Do the same for HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run & HKEY_USERS\.Default\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
6) If you weren't able to log in during (2) as the first infected user the above steps can be done as the local admin - once these are done, to get into the other accounts (network ones) reboot, go into safe mode with networking. Then you can sign in as the network users. Use regedit to clean out HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run for each other affected user.
7) Now that the registry is clean, reboot into normal mode, and run a local virus scan. You need to download and install spybot1.60 from www.safer-networking.org and let spybot clean out some more crap from the registry.
Ta-Daa. Virus gone but not forgotten.
IMHO Symantec Enterprise 11 MR2 does a nice job of ferreting out the nasties out-of-band, and Spybot does a good job of the cleanup afterwards. AVG8 works OK too inband though haven't had to use it in anger out-of-band yet.
To kill this wee begger and it's friends (from WinXP), do this; {I take no responsiblity if you cabbage your PC though}
1) Scan the HD out of band if you can. Ie remove and use a USB-IDE/SATA adapter if you've got one, or build a Bart-PE CD with the latest version of Clam-AV on it and boot up on the CD and scan from that.
2) Once scanned out-of-band, boot back up into safe mode (F8 repeatedly while turning the pc on)
3) Run regedit; navigate to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
4) In here is an entry 'Userinit' - It should usually only have 'C:\WINDOWS\system32\userinit.exe,' in there - if there's anything else appended to that line remove it from the entry, take it back to the trailing ',' after userinit.exe
5) Then go to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run. Backup this reg key and then clean out anything you think is remotely dodgy. Do the same for HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run & HKEY_USERS\.Default\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
6) If you weren't able to log in during (2) as the first infected user the above steps can be done as the local admin - once these are done, to get into the other accounts (network ones) reboot, go into safe mode with networking. Then you can sign in as the network users. Use regedit to clean out HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run for each other affected user.
7) Now that the registry is clean, reboot into normal mode, and run a local virus scan. You need to download and install spybot1.60 from www.safer-networking.org and let spybot clean out some more crap from the registry.
Ta-Daa. Virus gone but not forgotten.
IMHO Symantec Enterprise 11 MR2 does a nice job of ferreting out the nasties out-of-band, and Spybot does a good job of the cleanup afterwards. AVG8 works OK too inband though haven't had to use it in anger out-of-band yet.
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