Monthly Archives: August 2008

5 Things to do to make life at home after work actually relaxing

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1. Hire a cleaning service, no you’re not lazy, no you shouldn’t be ashamed.  Get someone to clean you house so you aren’t coming home from a long day of hard work to only do more hard work before you pass out from exhaustion.

2. Purchase some iRobots so you don’t have to have the cleaning service over as much, I”ve got a Roomba and a Scuba both on automated schedules that pretty much keep the entire house free from dust and cat hair on the floors, it’s very very nice.

3. Do yourself a favor and spring for that big LCD you’ve always wanted and HDTV.  It then doesn’t matter if nothing good is on if that nothing good is in HiDef

4. Get a big ass leather recliner to watch #3 in.

5. Get yourself some super super high thread count sheets for your bed and pillows, it’s amazing how much better of a sleep you’ll get and how much quicker you’ll fall asleep if you’re immersed in extreme comfort.

Weather station unavailable for the past few days

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Due to a unexpected server/programming issue, my wunderground node was offline or intermittent for the past few days, normal service has *finally* been restored.

-S

How to create a thumbnail storyboard from a video file with FFmpeg & ImageMagick

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This took me a few minutes to write after I couldn’t find anything via Google.  Basically what this little script does is take a file as input, takes a snapshot every 100 seconds and arranges them in a 3×30 display.  This can be modified in anyway to change the speed in which shots are take to how they are arranged.  Remember this is open source, do whatever makes you happy.

The script! :

#!/bin/sh
# Filename is first input
file=$1
# Resolution for screenshots is second input
size=$2
#Take snapshots of $file every 100 seconds in image2 format @ $size
ffmpeg -i $file -r 0.01 -f image2 -s $size images%05d.png
# Images 1&2 Always seem to be black so lets remove them
rm -rf images00001.png images00001.png
# Merge the snapshots together with 0 border/margin, tile them 3×30 and save that new image as $file.jpg
montage images000* -geometry +0+0 -tile 3×30 $file.jpg
# Clean up after ourselves
rm -rf images0*

I have the above saved and chmod +x in /usr/bin/thmbcreate, when I have a movie I want to create this storyboard from I run the following command:

thmbcreate myfile.avi 320×240

Enjoy!

-S