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OpenShot

OpenShot Video Editor 1.0 has just been released!

• Transition snapping – Transitions now snap to the nearest clip or the play-head.
• Improved Stability – Just try and crash OpenShot now. We dare you. Seriously though, many common issues that would crash OpenShot have been resolved, and the overall stability is great now.
• Improved Accuracy – The accuracy of our edits and cuts has been improved. No more skipped frames, out of place frames, or flashes of white.
• New Transitions – 28 new transitions have been added.
  
• New Titles – 29 new titles have been added (both in 4:3 and 16:9 ratios). Also, titles are higher quality, and look great up to 1080p. Based on your project’s aspect ratio, the Title Editor will automatically show you the correct aspect ratio titles. In other words… no more squished or stretched titles.
  
• New Themes – Two new themes have been added, making a total of 4 themes. A) simple theme with smaller icons for small screens. B) flat blue theme – a theme with no glass or gloss.
  
• Time Format Improved – The time format has been changed to include the frame number, instead of the millisecond:
  
• New Profile – HDV 720p 24 fps
• More Languages – There are now 42 languages included with OpenShot version 1.0!
• Help Manual Integrated – The help manual is now integrated, and will launch in your native language (assuming we have a translation for that language). Currently, French, Spanish, and English are 100% translated.
• User Interface Enhancements – Many small changes to the UI have been made to simplify OpenShot. The “Open Project” toolbar button has been replaced by the “New Project” button. This removes the confusion between importing files and opening files. A few other buttons, labels, and icons have been changed also.
• Window State Fixed – The window state now correctly recognizes “maximized”, and is more reliable. In other words, when you resize the window, vertical panes, or horizontal panes in OpenShot, it remembers your screen layout the next time you launch it.
• Clip Properties Fixed – The IN and OUT properties have been fixed to not allow the user to overlap them. The “Add Effect” button has been fixed to work correctly with audio effects.
• Chroma Key Fixed – Some users were unable to see the color picker on the chroma key effect. This has been fixed.
• Tooltips Translated – The main screen has been improved to show translated tooltips on all of the toolbars.
• Lock File Fixed – The lock file now verifies that it is valid, instead of preventing OpenShot from launching.

Not good enough? Still want more? Well, soon we will be cleaning up our LaunchPad project to better structure everything. Once that is complete, we will start work on our roadmap for the next version. As always, we will listen to you (our community) and try and make the best video editor that Linux has ever seen!

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I have a number of HP Media Vault Pro, MV5150s, which I purchased to provide classroom storage at a low cost.  These are MV2, Series 2 Media Vault servers, and the instructions that follow are specific to this series only.  They work great, and I have begun to use them daily with all my classes.  Out of the box they don’t support using rsync and that is one of my critical needs for a variety of functions.

If you can’t open it, you don’t own it.  And it was my first opportunity is a great while to see what embedded Linux systems are about in recent times.  So time to hack.

To start hacking a Media Vault means starting with Lee Devlin’s great website http://www.k0lee.com/hpmediavault/.  It is a great respository for the HP Media Vault community and Lee led me to the two User Support Groups on Yahoo!:

User Support Group

There is an 3300+ member Media Vault user group at Yahoo set up specifically to discuss the HP Media Vault and share information with other users.    You can join the group and ask questions or search its archive of more than 8500 messages if you want to learn more about the HP Media Vault or can’t find the answer to your question in this FAQ.    For hacking purposes, there is another group called Hacking the HP Mediavault.

And both of these led me to installing the ipkg packager.  These instructions work fine:

Download ipkginstall.zip

1. Extract the file.
2. Copy the file (ipkginstall.sh) and the dir (ipkgsetup) to a share on the Media Vault
3. SSH in, and cp the file, and dir to “/”
4. # sh ./ipkginstall.sh

Ipkg is now installed in /opt/bin and I modified /etc/profile to include that in the path.

Then one simply runs “ipkg update” to install the file database and “ipkg install rsync” to install the new version of rsync.  Ipkg installs rsync in /opt/bin and to make it work with remote rsync hosts I added a symbolic link in /sbin to /opt/bin/rsync.

The HP MV2 series uses Busybox linux.  Busybox comes with Dropbear SSH which is compatible with OpenSSH ~/.ssh/authorized_keys public key authentication, so use these simple instructions from Mathias Kettner

SSH login without password

Your aim

You want to use Linux and OpenSSH to automize your tasks. Therefore you need an automatic login from host A / user a to Host B / user b. You don’t want to enter any passwords, because you want to call ssh from a within a shell script.

How to do it

First log in on A as user a and generate a pair of authentication keys. Do not enter a passphrase:

a@A:~> ssh-keygen -t rsa
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/a/.ssh/id_rsa):
Created directory ‘/home/a/.ssh’.
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /home/a/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /home/a/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
3e:4f:05:79:3a:9f:96:7c:3b:ad:e9:58:37:bc:37:e4 a@A

Now use ssh to create a directory ~/.ssh as user b on B. (The directory may already exist, which is fine):

a@A:~> ssh b@B mkdir -p .ssh
b@B’s password:

Finally append a’s new public key to b@B:.ssh/authorized_keys and enter b’s password one last time:

a@A:~> cat .ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh b@B ‘cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys’
b@B’s password:

From now on you can log into B as b from A as a without password:

a@A:~> ssh b@B hostname
B

And that was all there is to it.  Follow the caveats.  Know your abilities.  As always your mileage may vary.

Geek of the Week: Marty Stepp, UW’s rapping lecturer

After a brief hiatus, Geek of the Week is back with a rapping computer science lecturer from the University of Washington.

Read the full article HERE

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The following archival copy is only in the event the original article disappears, I use this blog for my classes.  Please go back and read the full article from the original site.  It isn’t simply a matter of honorably allowing the advertisers to provide their services and pay for this kind of well written article, the related articles and comments are the best part of the online experience and not reproduced here.

Read the article at http://blog.seattlepi.com/thebigblog/archives/179372.asp?source=rssat

No. Really.

And programmers, if you have to match your skills against Marty Stepp’s, watch out. As he puts it in his rap lecture above, “My code eats yours for breakfast.”

P.S. — Stepp is right. Batman is a geek.

Have someone in mind for next time? Let me know.

Name: Marty Stepp

Title: Lecturer, University of Washington, Computer Science & Engineering Department

What do you do, exactly? I teach computer science and web programming at UW. Check out our textbook at webstepbook.com.

Geekiest title you’ve ever had: I dabble in rapping in some of my lectures under the name of “Vicious D Marty Slick.”

Geekiest thing you’ve ever done: I won a Nintendo competition in Phoenix when I was young. The games were Super Mario Bros., Rad Racer, and Tetris.

Favorite movie: “Memento.” It’s about a man with no long-term memory. After marathon work sessions, I can really relate to this character.

Favorite game: Guitar Hero 2. There is nothing cooler than devoting way too much time practicing a fake musical instrument.

Favorite book: Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, all five books.

Favorite junk food: Trader Joe’s cranberry whole wheat cookies. Serving size: 1 box.

Favorite time waster: Browsing funnyyahooanswers.com or The Onion.

Mac or PC? I wanted to get a Mac, but I’m saving for a new kidney.

iPhone or Blackberry? I love my new Google G1 phone. You can use it to check your email, watch Youtube, surf the Web, and more. It also makes phone calls. As a handy side effect, if you are using it in public, it acts as a potent repellant to the opposite sex.

Star Wars or Star Trek? They’re both great (original trilogy only, por favor), but I cast my vote for Battlestar Galactica.

Coolest new tech venture in Seattle: Cloudera is technically in California, but they have a ton of UW and Seattle connections. They provide massive amounts of “cloud computing” power to enterprises who need to crunch big data.

When did you first know you were a geek? Describe that moment: When I was upset about the bad Wi-Fi reception in my mom’s womb.

Who are your geek heroes, and why? Batman is my geek hero. Yes, Batman is a geek! He invents all those amazing gadgets and wears them on a gaudy belt. I still treasure the model Batmobile racer I built in middle school.

Look into your crystal ball: What’s the next big disruptive technology/event/movement? Ubiquitous computing is the idea that computing devices will soon pervade every aspect of our daily lives. Soon you won’t be able to smile, sneeze, or cross the street without a device detecting it, recording it, and alerting the NSA. It will provide us with lots of valuable information and enrich our lives, and the only cost is a complete lack of privacy.

Final thoughts? Young people of America, be careful what you post on the Web. I have some embarrassing old Web sites I wrote in the late ’90s, including a space club site with pics of me stealing a golf cart from my high school. Now they’re online for all eternity.

Geek link: cs.washington.edu/homes/stepp/

Twitter: martystepp

Our last GoW, Stephanie Vasko, asked Marty what his theme song would be, if he could have one playing in the background as he walked down the street.

“My theme song would be ‘White and Nerdy’ by Weird Al Yankovic,” Marty responded. “I’m white, I’m nerdy, and as a computer scientist, I actually get the jokes in the song.”

To keep a thread going with future GoW’s, we asked Marty to submit a question for the next geek. Check back next week to find out what it is, and how it’s answered.

WordPress Visual Cheat Sheet is the new document, of the Visual Cheat Sheet family, that contains a practical reference guide to WordPress 2.8. This cheat sheet (5 pages) contains the full reference guide to WP Template Tags with detailed descriptions and sample code.

WordPress-Visual-Cheat-Sheet
WordPress 2.8 Visual Cheat Sheet