I wanted to play the Subway Fresh Buzz Scrabble game, but the problem was, the website didn't support Linux.

Here is a command line to encode to low-resolution Flash video for publishing on a web server (that isn't a streaming server).

cat FASTING/VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_*.VOB | /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg -i - -f flv -s 320x240 -acodec libmp3lame -ar 22050 -ab 64k fasting.flv

What this does is dump all the .VOB files into ffmpeg, which is told to take input from standard input.

The notebook computer says:

free ~ # smartctl --health /dev/hda
smartctl version 5.37 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-6 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: FAILED!
Drive failure expected in less than 24 hours. SAVE ALL DATA.
Failed Attributes:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   001   001   050    Pre-fail  Always   FAILING_NOW 1023

Yikes! That's the first time I've seen FAILING_NOW. No wonder I get error messages.

Sick of tYPING lIKE tHIS? Wish you could press Control-C without contorting yourself? If you're on Ubuntu, there's a feature to help you out:

On KDE (on Gentoo at least), it's under Control Center -> Regions and Accessibility -> Keyboard Layout -> Xkb Options, in the list.

I received a somewhat old, but very nice Medion MIM 2040 laptop from J--- who I sometimes work with. Thanks man. These are some notes about getting Gentoo Linux running on it.