Stream of Ry

I’m a hard worker, especially when I love what I do.
I have been working hard, these past few weeks on something I absolutely want to see in the market and as far as I can see, compared to where I was before I started, I’ve made considerable progress and the pace I’ve been learning all these things has been extraordinary.

When somebody comes in and say “you’re working at turtles’ pace, without progress”, it was a bit difficult to take in. Defense mechanisms took over but I had to restrain my own thoughts. Deep inside, I know that they are right.

But what more can I do to quicken up my pace?
I’ve decided to stop with Plurk for a while. I only blog for documentation purposes anyway. I’ll ban Youtube on my browser. I’ll stop myself clicking on interesting ads / links. Maybe sleep for only 6 hours instead of my usual 8? More importantly, I have to have absolute focus on what I’m doing and keep all of my other plans in the backseat for the meantime.

What more to do?

One thing I’d like you to know about me is that I’m lazy.
In fact, lazy enough that the extra step of extending my hand from the keyboard to my monitor to turn it off before I go out for a bit (and doing the reverse when I come back) is already bothersome for me.

So, in typical Linux fashion, I looked for a way to force my monitor to sleep.. and map it on my keyboard.

In System > Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts, I have:

Name: Monitor Sleep
Command: xset +dpms dpms force off


and I mapped it to, aptly, Pause / Break.. which is what I do when I press the button.

Try the command via CLI first before mapping it since I’m not sure if it came with the default X11 installation. If not, you can install it via:

# apt-get install x11-server-utils


Laziness is a virtue, methinks.. sometimes. D:

So, I got the 1080p version of Taeyang – Wedding Dress (really sad MV there) and decided that I’d stream it (via VLC) to our Canmore. However, the transcoding is rather inefficient and thus a lot of frames are being dropped. VLC even makes it a point to tell me that my CPU is slow T_T. I decided to just convert the thing to m2ts and copy it over instead of streaming it via the network.

ffmpeg -i ~/Videos/WeddingDress.mp4 -f mpegts -vcodec libx264 -b 3721216 -bf 2 -acodec libfaac -ab 131072 -y /home/rystraum/wd.m2ts


-b and -ab should be adjusted according to the video and audio bitrate accordingly. libx264 and libfaac are the video and audio encoders for h264 and aac, respectively. The ffmpeg version that comes with VLC doesn’t have them out-of-the box and requires a recompile from source.

I should be able to enjoy my HD Youtube downloads now (after transcoding everything).

I used to avert using Rhythmbox as my music player and usually resorts to VLC. Today, however, I just wanted a shuffle play of my whole music files and decided to use Rhythmbox for it.

It’s actually convenient enough since it’s integrated with Ubuntu already so it neatly stays at my taskbar. There was a catch though, it did not have shortcut keys support (at least, out of the box, it doesn’t)

It’s easy enough to add though, through System >> Preferences >> Keyboard Shortcuts.

Just add a new shortcut, mine’s:

Name: Rhythmbox Next
Command: rhythmbox-client --next



Name: Rhythmbox Play-Pause
Command: rhythmbox-client --play-pause

and then assign a shortcut key/combination for it. That easy!

A bit of a background:
rhythmbox-client is a CLI utility that controls a running Rhythmbox instance. You can view all the other different options through the man pages.

man rhythmbox-client

It is only right to put the benefit of others before our own,
But is it right to be expected to betray our hearts so others can be happy?

Everyone has something their hearts truly wish for, truly believe in..
But if even *you* don’t try to fight for your own beliefs,

Who will?

(From Blackbird)