ffmpeg from svn

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, I have really been engrossed in using ffmpeg, one of the most amazing a/v command-line tools out there, for my various personal video projects.  However, recently I was experiencing a recurring bug where I could not work with some specific codecs when either the input or the output file was on…

Time-lapse photography with CHDK

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem As I’ve already alluded to in a previous post, I’ve been using the CHDK firmware supplement with my Canon PowerShot A550, which on it’s own is an outstanding camera, alhamdulillaah. This firmware add-on, though, really takes the cake! One of the features made possible by CHDK is the ability to run scripts…

CHDK – Unleash the POWER in your PowerShot

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, I’ve been playing around with CHDK, which is a free firmware add-on (note: it does not require flashing your camera’s firmware) that enables a multitude of features on your ordinary, run-of-the-mill Canon PowerShot digital camera. In short, it’s amazing. I haven’t had enough time to truly “unleash the POWER” yet, but…

Fedora 9 seeding stats

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, I’m about to head out from work, and I’m going to have to disconnect my torrent seeds that have been running all day – at least until I get home, in shaaʾ Allaah. Here are the graphical bandwidth charts showing the stats of the seeds from all day.

Fedora 9 is gold!

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, Fedora 9 is officially released! At least, the official torrents are available. The main site doesn’t seem to be updated yet, but then again, it’s not 10 AM, either. I’m grabbing the x86_64 DVD build on one server and the i386 on the other, so I hope to be seeding by…

Fedora 9 – Why it’s so awesome

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Okay, I know that title is a pretty pretentious statement by itself, as much of Fedora 9’s awesomeness isn’t unique to it. So, I’ll grant that much of the coming awesomeness is related to Gnome 2.22, which is not limited to Fedora 9, nor is Pulseaudio, Upstart (props to the Ubuntuees for…

Syndication

Note to self: If I want my blog posts to show up in an aggregator, make sure to give the admin the right link first…

Tapeless HD camcorders

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem I’ve been keeping my eye out for tapeless (e.g., hard drive or flash memory instead of tapes) HD camcorders for a while, because of the obvious flexibility of being able to transfer the recorded video directly rather than “recording” it via IEEE 1394 (i.e., “FireWwire”) – while an IEEE 1394 link is…

Hello Fedora Planet & People!

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Hello!  I know I’ve already had a few posts show up on the Planet already, but I wanted to at least acknowledge the fact that I am now, as opposed to having been previously not, a member of Fedora Planet! I am an avid Fedora user – I have been using Fedora…

Texas Dawah Convention 2007 Audio Project – overview

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Introduction Alhamdulillaah, a few months back, I successfully wrapped-up the audio recording & production project for the Texas Dawah Convention 2007. This was clearly one of the most ambitious projects in which I’ve been involved in my life, especially given the degree of responsibility I was given and the amount of work…

Fedora 9 Preview released

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, the Fedora 9 Preview has been released to the torrents! You can grab ’em here: http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/

Shell History Meme

I got tired of seeing everyone on the planets (Fedora & Gnome) showing-up in Liferea doing this, and I was left out.  So here’s mine from work: [basil.gohar@escapdv01 ~]$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head 265 ll 210 cd 101 time 86 dbrestore 79 exit 28 su 24 vi 18…

Family blog

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Last week my wife & I have decided to start our own family blog to track family’s Islamic development.  As a result, I will most-likely be posting my personal- and family-related musings over there rather than here, allowing HidayahTech to remain more tech-oriented.  That doesn’t mean there will be a complete dearth…

WordPress 2.5

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, WordPress 2.5 has been released.  I’ve upgraded my personal blog (this site), the Columbus Dawah blog, and my new family-development blog (more on that later, in shaa Allaah). WordPress 2.5 (Brecker, apparently), is chock-full of new features that I cannot hope to explain in one short post here, so I’ll invite…

Record snow in Columbus

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080309/ap_on_re_us/severe_weather Subhaan Allaah! I knew that we were getting a lot of snow this weekend, but it turns out parts of Columbus received over 20 inches of snow! I’ve snapped a few pictures and I’ll take some more, so you can find them here as I upload them throughout the day, in…

DSLRs and RAW image format

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem A came across an interesting post, albeit a few years old, discussing the RAW image format on the Nikon N70. I came across that link while reading a post about Hack Week at Novell on the Planet GNOME blog aggregator. It piqued my interested because I have been looking at getting a…

WordPress customization

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Yesterday I had a implement a small, custom template for WordPress. As a result, I had a chance to see the innards of WordPress in a way I never really did before. Let me just say that now I’m really excited to actually go through and write my own custom theme for…

My projects running on free software (and how to better integrate them)

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Software that is free from proprietary restrictions (a.k.a, free-and-open-source software, which I will refer to as simply “free software” for the rest of this post) has become exceedingly important in my life for both philosophical as well as practical reasons. Not only do I truly believe free software to be inherently better…