How to cut (or trim) video with FFmpeg

The browser history tells me I’ve visted this FFmpeg HOWTO page many times as I get handy with the tool: My brain works on absolute, not relative, time so I’d much rather be able to directly indicate when to start cutting -ss, and when to stop -to; I also want to only copy the original video/audio, without any re-encoding, hence the -c:v copy -c:a copy part. Putting it all together: we take some input file foo.

Updated Build a PC

Last year, around the start of the pandemic, I built a PC for myself. Over time, my setup grew to encompass an ultrawide monitor, and a bunch of USB peripherals, so here’s everything appended to the original table. The total cost went up, now it’s exactly SGD 2297 (previously: 1297.10): Part Price GPU MSI GTX 1650 SUPER VENTUS XS OC 4GB 259 CPU AMD Ryzen 3 3300X 181 HSF Stock 0 MotherBoard MSI B450M MORTAR MAX 180 RAM Corsair VENGEANCE PRO 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4-3200MHZ 252 HDD None 0 SSD Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus (500 GB) 199 Power Supply Corsair VS650 80 PLUS 92 Case Cooler Master Silencio S600 134.

Kites and the moon at Marina Barrage

COVID-19-related lockdowns, have, to say the least, put a damper on spirits. I’m going to (try to) post more frequently, not necessarily technical topics that no one will read, probably random photos, or media I’m stealing from Reddit – with a credit whenever possible. Here’s the 1st one, a shot of the sky at Marina Barrage, a popular kite-flying venue, and if you’ll squint a bit, you can even see the moon:

Combining multiple PDFs using pdftk

Previously, I needed to extract multiple ranges from a big PDF. Now I want to use pdftk to combine two PDFs into a single file in order to support a claim, and this worked for me: pdftk A=foo.pdf B=bar.pdf cat A1 B3 output baz.pdf

Apple One More Thing Event

YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AwdkGKmZ0I. M1 is an SoC - system on a chip with a unified memory architecture: 8-core CPU: 4 performance/efficiency cores each: This performance gulf seems to be the case for graphics as well, with an (up to) 8-core GPU. Also, there’s a 16-core Neural Engine. On security: Universal App: x86_64 and arm64 binaries in a single .app/, falling back to use Rosetta 2 if there is no compatible binary.

How to create a bootable USB drive for macOS X El Capitan

Following How to create a bootable USB drive for macOS X El Capitan: $ sudo /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ El\ Capitan.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/UBUNTU\ 20_0 --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ El\ Capitan.app Password: Ready to start. To continue we need to erase the disk at /Volumes/UBUNTU 20_0. If you wish to continue type (Y) then press return: y Erasing Disk: 0%... 10%... 20%... 30%...100%... Copying installer files to disk... Copy complete. Making disk bootable.