Scott Garrett When I am converting videos from one format to another, I often need to convert the susbtitles as well. I wrote a script to extract (and convert PGS to VobSub). This is a bash script that I am running on my Mac. If you want to run it on linux, just update the PATHs to … Read more
Subtitles come in a myriad of formats, and not all of them work in every container format, and not all containers are as easy to work with. Converting Matroska (mkv) files to MP4s cause issues when the mkv has PGS (Blu-Ray) subtitles. PGS subtitles can be embedded in Matroska video files, but not MP4s. But … Read more
A while back, I found a nice TrueType font that mimicked the old DEC terminals. It was made by taking the ROMs of a DEC VT220, and creating the TTF font based on that data. It occurred to me that it would also make a really great replacement for the linux console font, where it … Read more
Sometimes it’s desirable to have a back door into a system that is behind a firewall. ssh is a security person’s best friend, and worst nightmare. This is more in the latter category, but as an admin, incredibly useful. I have a server that I can get outbound connections to anywhere, but do not have … Read more
When I was installing Ubuntu linux, I tried to set up 20.04.2 with LACP bonding during the install, and the installer kept crashing. So, to get through the install, I just configured one port with the basic info, and then updated the OS after to have the bonding. I do recommend that you make the … Read more
For some bizarre reason, the package management tools for MacOS do not have an option to uninstall in any easy way. However, if you drop into the Terminal, you can do all the steps by hand relatively easily. There is a command called pkgutil that will give you the information you need. To list all … Read more
Traditionally, on *nix systems, cron (or one of its derivatives) is used. It’s possible to use cron on the Mac, but it’s deprecated. launchd is the preferred method. The set up is a little more complex because it’s a bit of XML code, but it’s very straightforward. I set up dynamic DNS for a remote … Read more
There are a lot of tutorials out in the netland, but almost all of them are out of date, or didn’t address my use case. I run my own domain (can you guess what it is?), and I wanted to allow a couple of users I have that don’t have static IP addresses to be … Read more
This is a simple, but useful one. If you hate ADs as much as I do, this is a quick solution that gets rid of most of the advertisements in the Apple News app on the Mac. All you have to do is add/modify a line in your /etc/hosts and send traffic for news.iadsdk.apple.com into … Read more
For some strange reason, in the land of the internet when people create books with flowable text (i.e. novels), they use the PDF format, which is simply awful for the medium. Yet when they have a content that lends itself perfectly to the PDF format, like comics, they instead use an unnecessary made-up format that … Read more
