So I've recorded a ton of television shows using my HD-PVR, but the .MP4 and .TS files are huge. More than once I've tried to use ffmpeg and/or mencoder to compress the files, but every time I've tried, the audio and video would become unsynced. Last night, I deduced that it isn't a lag issue, the audio was just starting later. So I tried delaying the video using ffmpeg, something like:

ffmpeg -i tvshow.ts -itsoffset 00:00:02.5 -i tvshow.ts -map 0:0 -map 1:1 output.mkv

That wasn't exactly what I put in, and I got errors at first, but when I finally got it to work, it did the opposite of what I wanted. I played around with the maps for awhile, then I decided to do a negative offset and that worked--the correct offset ended up being 3 seconds. Now that I'm thinking of it, I could probably do it without two input files. I know almost nothing about ffmpeg, so I'm feeling my way around through trial, error, and googling. I also haven't tried this on any different files yet, so I'm not sure if the 3 seconds is constant or not.
...
Eh, I just went on and tried it on another file, and confirmed that (1) 3 seconds seems to be constant, and (2) I didn't need two inputs.

Fixes

So it looks like I've fixed two problems. My Kubuntu partition is back. In the process of trying to install backtrack I ran fsck and was told there were problems with the journal on the Kubuntu partition. I repaired them, and then the partition worked. So for awhile I had all three OSs working, but now the wireless on Backtrack has stopped, which was the whole motivation for installing that distribution in the first place. Oh well.

On another note, I finally figured out why I kept getting errors with inetd and saned. At first inetd would say it didn't recognize user saned.saned, but everything still worked. When I decided to remove the .saned, I would errors every 10 minutes saying that the saned address was already in use. I thought it was a bind problem because bind was included in the address. The problem was actually that I was running saned from rc.conf at startup and then from inetd. Stupid me.

Inserting an image into MS Access programmatically

Several times I've wanted to be able to rip images from a web database and insert them into an Access database. I've searched online and found jack. I figured I'd settle for being able to programmatically insert images from from a file into Access 2007. I think I found a solution on the Visual Studio Forums. The original poster couldn't get it to work, but after poking around in the MSDN Library online I think I saw how it all fit together. It is pretty late though, so I don't want to take the time to implement it now.

Its back...

The problem I had booting into Kubuntu came back yesterday. I played around with it more today, but I couldn't get Kubuntu to boot at all, with any previous kernel, even in recovery mode. After doing some research online, it appears I have have the 550559 curse. I had been thinking of buying a new hard drive, but now that I'm back to work I definitely don't want to fool with a complete laptop overhaul. Interestingly enough, my other two OSes--Vista and CentOS--have no problems whatsoever.

On the plus side, I did take a tiny step forward in learning mail servers, after I took some steps back. I figured things were getting too messy with courier, so I removed it and restored sendmail. Sendmail wasn't working either, and may have had problems for awhile, based on some mail I received as root (wait, does that even make sense?) Anyway, looks like the problem was that I hadn't configured the mail aliases. So that might have been the problem with Courier too. Regardless, after getting Sendmail going, I decided to install Dovecot instead. Stayed with mbox and was able to connect remotely with the simple configuration in the documentation. SSL and such comes later, much later. And LDAP is still looming in the horizon.