smorgasbork

In my previous article, I discussed good ffmpeg options for encoding MPEG-2 video.  This worked great when encoding relatively low quality clips, like the 3 Mbps example in my article.  When you want to encode much higher quality (like full 1920x1080 HD video at 20 Mbps or more), you start to run into some performance issues that you have to address through selection of the appropriate command line options.

If you're like me, you don't like to do hundreds of tiny updates to live servers.  We batch up our RHEL updates so that we perform them every couple of months (or whenever a serious security issue crops up).  When you take this approach, you may end up with hundreds of packages requiring updates.  Just downloading those updates can take a long time, and if you're trying to update systems in a small off-hours maintenance window, this can present problems.

So I wanted some geeky gift tags for some Christmas gifts for my development team.  I couldn't find quite what I was looking for, so I offer these to you.