computers

SSH (secure shell) allows you secure shell access to a server from a client across any network (local or Internet) with the comfort in knowing that your information is secure (even your password used to log in). Everything that travels across a SSH connection is encrypted. Typically you'd use SSH for executing terminal commands at the server (restarting HTTP servers or managing your MySQL server for example) but it also supports port forwarding, tunneling and even file transfers.

A few days ago I made that huge post about how to use Mencoder to transcode FLV videos downloaded from sites like Youtube to MOV (Quicktime) format in order to import them into iTunes and then to your "i" device. As it turns out there is a bit more to it than I realized. I dug around a bit and found a script out there called podencoder but it only runs in Linux so that doesn't help everybody. I did try it out in my Linux virtual system and it worked swimmingly.

Mplayer can be used to play videos but it can also be used to strip out just the audio track to a WAV file. I figured this out one day because I wanted to have audio-only copies of some of my favorite Flight of the Conchords videos Youtube - songs that aren't on the Conchords album - to copy to my iPod.

I don't know how useful it really is, but I have a little method of grabbing videos from sites like Youtube, or any page with an embedded video, converting it to a Quicktime format and importing it into iTunes. This, of course, makes it so ultimatly I could copy it to an iPod for portable viewing.

Cuil is rumored to be the "Google Killer" by some posts I have seen about it and when I scan through their website's information I kinda start to believe them. When you visit their company info page you find this bit of boasting:

The Internet has grown exponentially in the last fifteen years but search engines have not kept up—until now. Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.

So what is going to happen to my Dell XPS M1530's Nvidia chip? Is it gonna die as some others are or did I get lucky? Maybe I don't push mine to the limits? At any rate, I'm not excited at the possibility of my computer bricking because Nvidia cut some costs and delivered second-rate hardware. Now the word is surfacing that at least one manufacturer, HP, knew about the issues last year and still continued to sell the chips.