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URL for your Dynamic home IP

To be able to connect to computers or servers on the internet, you will have to be able to reach that computers IP address. You might want to connect to your home computer from anywhere in the world, but the IP your ISP gives you changes from time to time.

This is quite common and, unless you constantly carry a note with your IP, you won’t be able to make use of your home computer.
I myself run various services that are remotely available from my home desktop computer: FTP server, VNC server, MySQL, Torrent interface and there are many more soon to come.

To bypass the problem of a variable IP, you will need to use a service like DynDNS. There are many other free service provider out there, I just happen to chose this one.
DynDNS is a free service that, upon updating through their API or interface, makes a record of your IP address and routes that to a URL that you can access through the internet.

Step 1: Simply create an account!

Firewalls and / or routers:
Most commonly people have a router these days. A router acts like a firewall and will not let incoming transfers through, unless it specifically has been set-up to do so and to a specific internal IP. In some cases you can also use the DMZ (DeMilitarised Zone) of the router / firewall. The DMZ will channel all incoming requests through to set IP as if the machine would be connected straight to your external IP. This is not recommended unless you use a software firewall in addition to protect yourself.

Use NAT (Network Address Translation) or how it is called in my router ‘Application Sharing’ to map the incoming requests from any port to a specific internal IP and port. In most cases FTP will run on 21, for example. VNC will run on 5901…
If you use a software firewall, open the same ports on your software firewall. In the Windoze firewall, you have to use ‘Exceptions’, I think (although I haven’t done this in a while).

Step 2: Punch holes in your firewall

Now the last step: You will have to auto-update the DynDNS site from time to time. Most of the newer routers have a feature build in to update Dynamic DNS. You simply select your DynDNS service and add your username and password. Otherwise, you might need to install a programme that will make these updates for you.
There is a list of update tools on the DynDNS website here.

Step 3: Add service to auto update your IP with dynamic DNS host

Transdroid – Connect to your home computers torrent client

Hi,

This is a recommendation for those of you using an Google Android Phone, such as my HTC Magic:

I often find myself talking about a programme or tool or something that I want to get from torrents while I’m on the road or at friends places. Of course, so far, I wasn’t able to download that then right away and once I got back home, I totally forgotten about said download.

But the solution is here: with Transdroid, a free and easy to use application you can now track the status of your torrents, search torrents while on the go and add torrents to the tracker while you are out and about.

How to get it? – Transdroid is available through the Android Market.

It works with the most commen torrent clients, I use Transdroid with Transmission, the standard Gnome / ubuntu torrent client.

Setup was easy and a guide can be found on the transdroid-blog. This will get you going while you are in the range of your local network (eg. you connect your android phone to your home wireless), but to truly use it on-the-go, you will have to have a web-URL or static URL for your machine that is available from the net.

Here is how you can get one if you are connect through a common ISP that provides dynamic IPs…

eBay initiative: Demand an end to unfair trade practices

Hi,

I received an email from eBay this morning, informing me about a petition they want their users to sign.
I can only recommend everyone signs it as it is, in my opinion, a very important part of retaining your rights and a free market – it’s about the sale of branded goods.

We all know that there are more counterfeit products on the markets than genuine ones. I myself tend to buy branded goods, although they have to be reasonably priced. I also buy ‘counterfeit’ products – or ‘like’ products – not because I want to damage the brand that’s been copied, but because I like their product, but find that less quality at a much more affordable price is what I’m happy with.

Who expects to buy a genuine Armani jacket for £15? – Someone incredibly stupid! But if it’s nice, I would buy it, well aware that it’s fake, but I’m happy with purchasing it.
When Armani says that this damages their profits, they clearly do not understand that I would never pay £500 for the same item, no matter how wealthy I am. I am clearly not their target consumer. Nor would I go and claim that this is a genuine product or do I care what the label says.

While I do buy counterfeit and often prefer counterfeits to the real brand, I encourage the purchase of those products from countries that have ethical workplace policies: no child labour, fair wages…

There is another side to it. The bigger brands are trying to eliminate the re-sale of their products through eBay alltogether. This is not because they fear for their brand name, but simply because of their greed. If you really want Prada, but can’t get it used, you will have to purchase it new.
This not only puts pressure on your wallet, it also infringes on your rights as owner of the products.
When you buy something it becomes rightfully yours… You should be allowed to wear, show off, sell or destroy the product as you please. It’s yours.

Once authorities take away your rights to your own property, what could that mean? – You would own a watch, but will later be forbidden to look at it; you have dog food; but you aren’t allowed to feed it to your dog, throw it away or consume it yourself; you have a bank account, but won’t be allowed to get money off it; you have a house, but won’t be allowed to live in it. The abstractions are endless, but it’s important to understand the concept: if something is yours, you should have all rights to do with itas you please as long as you don’t harm others…

For all these reasons, I encourage you to sign the eBay petition!

Trees that smell like semen

Hi,

As you may know, if you follow my Twitter updates, I recently complained that Hyde Park smells of semen all day, especially around the Serpentine. I cycle through there morning and evening and endure more or less endure the stench, but had very few people believe my plight.

For days I thought something perverted is happening near the serpentine, but thanks to a work colleague, I found out that it’s actually true.

Apparently the Bradford Pear and a few varieties smell strongly like spunk when in bloom.
Here is a picture, unfortunately it’s not the most brilliant quality:
Although the wikipedia article does not mention the smell, there are plenty of other sources on the net that do mention it, plus, it’s on Y!Answers.

I read that this pear tree is preferred in urban areas, because it grows higher and not so wide as the average pear tree.

Publish Post


On the other hand, I wonder why the park authorities didn’t plan ahead for this and chose to use other trees use that don’t smell like the jizz?

Gourmet Burger Kitchen Voucher

I thought I share this voucher with you.

If you want the PDF version for better print, you can use this link.

It’s two for one, where GBK promises to pay for the more expensive burger of your choice. Offer is valid until Sunday the 28th of June.

I tried it yesterday, having a nice burger in the evening sun in Chiswick. Very nice.

VMWare Player – Have a second operating system & create your own appliance

Hey,

If you want to try different Operating Systems before actually committing to a complete switch, you might have come across Virtual Machines. A Virtual Machine is essentially an emulated computer system inside your running Operating System.

As far as I know, there are two major virtual machine products on the market:

  1. Virtual Box – Which I tried, but had some problems getting some of my hardware working with… And:
  2. VMWare – Which has three product offerings: Server, Workstation and Player…

VMWare Player is free and there are versions for Windows and Linux available for download. There are also some ‘applications’ – pre-build virtual machines available for download…

However, you will discover that there is a small hurdle to overcome: You can’t create your own machine and if you do want to run Microsiff operating systems, you need to create your own appliance. This is where this site: EasyVMX is coming in handy. Simply fill in the information and download the empty virtual machine. This you will then be able to use to install your favourite operating system…

One last step:
Once you installed the Operating system, you will need the VMWare Tools to connect your Virtual Machine to your regular Operating System to allow things like file sharing… Again, these do not ship with VMWare Player. You will need to download server or workstation’s LINUX version.
In the tar-ball are the tools… Have a look for any additional *.iso files. Normally the name gives them away ‘Linux.iso’, ‘WinXP.iso’… something like that.

Either mount the iso in your virtual machine as a CD or you burn it and actually put in the CD…
If you do want to use an ISO as a Disk in your virtual machine, this can be very easily achieved with these settings in the *vmx file:

# Settings for physical CDROM drive:
ide1:0.present = “TRUE”
ide1:0.deviceType = “cdrom-raw”
ide1:0.startConnected = “TRUE”
ide1:0.fileName = “auto detect”
ide1:0.autodetect = “TRUE”

# Settings for iso as CD:
ide1:0.present = “TRUE”
ide1:0.fileName = “office.iso”
ide1:0.deviceType = “cdrom-image”
ide1:0.autodetect = “TRUE”

Have fun with your new virtual machine and let me know if you found this post useful…

How to re-encode videos using MPlayer

Hi,

It often happens to me that I get sent a video and it turns out to be unnecessarily huge. I think nowadays people record videos with a digital camera or an older camcorder – but this isn’t really important…

If you use Windoze, there are probably hundreds of programmes that you could use to re-encode videos, provided you pay a license fee or steal the software. Linux however this comes free for all of us and it’s fairly easy to do from the trusty shell (console, prompt…). In addition you will find that you can change aspect ratio, frame rates and do other processing functions easily using MPlayer. In addition, MPlayer crosscodes nearly all media files, certainly most I have ever come across…

The prerequisit is that you get MPlayer and their codec-pack installed. You can find that here: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/. If you use ubuntu, you should be able to do something like:

sudo apt-get MPlayer

to install the player using the package manager.

Let me know if there is need for more detailed instructions on how to install MPlayer…

There are different codecs for re-encoding for both audio and video. It’s also not always possible to convert the audio part of a file into something much better – and why would you, it’s not going to sound better!

Next, we need the massive video file that we’d like to shrink. Simply navigate to the folder it is in. To encode with standard settings, using the liblav codec (for DivX), try this command:

mencoder -ovc lavc inputFile -oac mp3lame -o outputFile

This will re-encode the file, but this mightn’t be using the best settings for your needs, so I’m going to intruduce a few more features:

Need to fix a broken index in your video file:

mencoder -idx input.avi -ovc copy -oac copy -o output.avi

Want to merge a few media files? This is for you (be sure that they are the same format etc…):

cat 1.avi 2.avi | mencoder -noidx -ovc copy -oac copy -o output.avi

Here’s a simple command that converts an MPG file to AVI format:

mencoder file.mpg -o file.avi -ovc lavc -oac lavc

-ovc and -oac represent the options for the video and audio codecs that mencoder will use. To find out what video codecs are installed on your system, use mencoder -ovc help and mencoder -oac help.

Suppose you need a file with no compression on the audio part and decide to use PCM. You can specify the type of audio codec you want by using the acodec option:

mencoder file.mpg -o file.avi -ovc lavc -oac lavc -lavcopts acodec=pcm

When it comes to MP3 compression, you can also choose a bitrate using abitrate:

mencoder file.mpg -o file.avi -ovc lavc -oac lavc -lavcopts acodec=libmp3lame:abitrate=128

You can use lameopts if you have libmp3lame installed and want to add extra options to the encoding process. You can also create files with variable bit rate audio compression:

mencoder file -o file.avi -ovc lavc -oac mp3lame -lameopts vbr=2:q=3

where q can be any number between 0 and 9.

You can do the same thing with the video part of the file:

mencoder file.mpg -o file.avi -ovc lavc -oac lavc -lavcopts acodec=libmp3lame:abitrate=128 vcodec=xvid

If you don’t want to use video compression, try vcodec=copy. With that option, the frames will be copied one by one from the source file.

You can use xvid or divx directly, without going through lavc:

mencoder -ovc xvid -oac mp3lame -o destination.avi source.avi

If you need customized quality, you can add a few options to the XviD compression:

mencoder -ovc xvid -oac mp3lame -xvidencopts bitrate=878 -o destination.avi source.avi

The higher the bitrate, the better quality the video file will be. The downside is a larger file size.

Now let’s get fancy and make an XviD copy of a DVD using two passes. During the first pass, mencoder analyzes the content of the file; on the second pass mencoder encodes the new file based on the information obtained. By using two passes you can produce a better compressed file, but you’ll have to wait a little longer for it, and you’ll probably see CPU usage at 90% during the conversion:

mencoder dvd:// -oac mp3lame -ovc xvid -xvidencopts pass=1 -o /dev/null

mencoder dvd:// -oac mp3lame -ovc xvid -xvidencopts pass=2:bitrate=800 -o xvidfile.avi

You can use whatever bitrate option you want. If you need to squeeze a DVD into a 700MB XviD file, you could use the following command, which forces the file size of the resulting AVI to 700MB.:

mencoder dvd:// -ovc xvid -oac mp3lame -xvidencopts bitrate=-700000 -o file.avi

If you don’t like the CPU being used to the max and want to leave resources for launching other applications, use the nice option, which will run the program with the lowest priority when it comes to process scheduling:

nice -n 19 mencoder dvd:// -ovc xvid -oac mp3lame -xvidencopts bitrate=-700000 -o file.avi

Suppose you have a folder full of small video files of different types and would like to merge them into one big movie for easy watching. First, rename them so that they’re in the order you want them to appear in the final video, then use:

mencoder * -o output.avi

If you want to add a particular audio file to a movie, use:

mencoder source.avi -o destination.avi -ovc copy -oac mp3lame -audiofile file.wav (for uncompressed files)

mencoder source.avi -o destination.avi -ovc copy -oac copy -audiofile file.mp3 (for compressed files)

To convert a video file to run on a device running iPodLinux, use:

mencoder -ovc raw -ofps 15 -oac pcm -vf scale=176:-2,expand=176:132,format=bgr16 input.file -o output.avi

This produces a RAW AVI file with uncompressed audio data and scales it so it fits the Nano’s tiny screen perfectly.

I have a Pocket PC that I sometimes bring with me on business trips. I take a couple of movies I haven’t seen in a while and convert them to fit on a 512MB SD card:

mencoder -oac mp3lame -lameopts mode=3:preset=24 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vhq:vbitrate=384:keyint=250 -vop expand=”320:240″ -o outputfile.avi inputfile.avi

or

mencoder input.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=200:abitrate=48 -vop scale=320:240 -oac copy -o output.avi

The difference here is that the latter command scales the file and the former fills the PDA’s 320×240-pixel screen with the movie.

If you have a webcam and want to record the output, use:

mencoder tv:// -tv driver=v4l:device=/dev/video0:width=640:height=480:forceaudio -ovc lavc -oac lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:acodec=mp3 -ffourcc divx -o test.avi

The command records anything output by /dev/video0 in 640×480 resolution, using DivX with MP3 audio as an output result.

As you can see, you can use mencoder to convert almost any type of video file in several ways. It works fast, it works well, and I wouldn’t change it for any other application, be it GUI-friendly or not.

Kindest Regards to Kivilcim Hindistan – from whom I ripped some parts of this tutorial…

Spotify – Listen through a huge catalogue of music online

Hi,

If you like music and you are lucky enough to live in a country where it is available, you should get an account with Spotify (www.spotify.com).

It contains a huge catalogue of music albums and samplers from most of the major record labels and I’m amazed how many -what I thought, would be- rare tunes can be found there.

If I find out how I can get my playlist published, I will try to do so here.

mySpace Account

Hello,

I thought that I need some inbound links for my webshop (Badgercomp – a retailer for computer hard and software) and so I decided to give mySpace a go. Afterall, sooner or later all these SNS will huddle together…

Anyhow, I opened an account and here it is: My mySpace profile. I actually thought that this was pretty easy, but it turns out the navigation and features aren’t really as easy and as ‘plug-and’play’ as on facebook.

I also didn’t set up my shop as an endorsed link, simply because I thought that there must be some link to my “website”. I guess some things need to be done manually there…
In the meantime, I will see if there are any cool apps on Blogger that work plug & play…