Merging AVI together

I sometimes find in my video collection of multiple AVI files, in windows I had to use complex software to try and get the videos into a single file. However, in linux there's a terminal friendly method.

1. Download and install transcode package using sudo apt-get install transcode
2. The transcode package contains a utility called avimerge, use this to merge the two files together: avimerge -o outputfilename.avi -i firstFile.avi secondFile.avi thirdFile.avi 

Make sure you check the output file to make sure that it has joined everything properly, one way to do this is to check the ends of the files to see the transition - this should be seamless if the two files are meant to flow from one to the other. 

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Reset MySQL root password Ubuntu/Debian / Linux mint

I wanted to get my portfolio up and running and saw this great plugin for Wordpress which I thought was kook to showcase tool. The only problem was that it needed Wordpress to operate, and I thought sure not a problem and used apt-get install to download install it on my Mint.

After installing the wrong version I struggled installing Wordpress, only to realize that I had to pull down the tar.gz and upgrade Wordpress manually. Well here is where all the trouble started, for some reason I had forgotten my MySQL root password and I had forgotten the the only user that I had created to create users and create databases.

I went online and tried different methods without much success, and finally found one that worked with my Mint 14 setup:

1.  sudo dpkg-reconfigure mysql-server-5.5

2. Enter the password for root as part of the sudo command

3. Enter the new password for root for MySQL

And that's it, the password has been updated. Now to get into MySQL punch this in mysql -u root -p

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Samsung Galaxy SIV (S4)

It's not too long now before the Samsung Galaxy S4 is announced with all the new features and bells and whistles. I unfortunately didn't take up the opportunity of getting the S3, why? because was I was tossing and turning over whether to switch over the Windows Phone and to give that a go. Plus, I wasn't a fan of the Touchwiz interface from Samsung, I felt it was abit bloated and the stock android was pretty snappy and looked great. So to kill the time I had purchased the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, loaded with Android 4 - this has to be one of the best phones that I have had in a long time even to the point where I had forgotten about all the other phones.

With the LG Nexus, I decided to stay away - purely because I didn't like LG phones. period.

So with the new Galaxy SIV, the specs that I have been reading about look absolutely amazing :

• 2 x 4 cores (1 for heavy tasks and 1 low level tasks) - 8 cores!!! My latest upgraded computer has only 4!
• A massive 4.99inch display with full 1080p
• 2GB of graphics RAM
• 13 Megapixel at the back and 2.1 at the front

In other news that I had read today, there is potentially new mechanism for scrolling with your eyes. That is where the phone recognises where your eyes are and then scrolls the page based on where your eyes are looking. You may have seen a similar feature with the S3 where they touted that it knows when you have fallen a sleep, and also knows when you are looking at the screen to maintain the brightness (I think they called it smart stay). I think this might be a gimmick, or people may not have realised that smart stay was actually working - since I have never heard any one rave on about this feature. Regardless it is still a cool feature to have. 

What I would like to see from Samsung as part of the S4 are:

• Better battery life
• Usage of curved OLED, i hope this phone has this feature
• Key Lime PIE!!!!
• Faster turn around of Android updates, I know that the carriers play a part in it but really they blame samsung for not providing x, y, and z. Getting very tiresome. 
• Wireless Charging - Nokia has it, Samsung should do too

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XBMC: Remove Music from Library

I was playing around with my XBMC home theatre setup and decided to add in some music and pictures to the library. The wanted to first do a trial with a small amount and then see how it works before trying to load the full library.

The CD that I loaded failed miserably, when I had ripped the CD I forgot to include the ID3 tag information using the CD database. That was a huge fail, and I don't know to what extent this has affected my mp3s.

So after the first attempt, I tried to look for an option to remove the files from the library. My first thought was to remove the source and then update the library - my thinking here was that once the source is removed I assumed that XBMC would recognise that it is no longer available and remove the records from the library. I thought wrong.

I searched high and low, I even tried to use the clean library function. After reading some forum posts, I realised that this was not going to be as easy with a number of people facing similar challenges. Some suggestions stated to move the files to another location and then to use clean library - since the issue was that the files physically existed on the location.

After some digging I found a method that worked for me, without having to move the files etc... I did the following:

• launched nautilus
• went to ~/.xbmc/userdata/Databases
• deleted the file MyMusic32.db
• Exit XBMC
• Launch XBMC

MyMusic32.db is the database holding the contents of the library for your music. Once you delete this you essentially delete the library, you then need to exit XBMC and then re-launch it. Once you re-launch it XBMC will generate a new database without any content. 

Whilst this solved my issue, this may not solve your issue especially if you have individual music that you want to remove from the library - and I don't have a very good solution to share in this scenario. This is feature, I feel, that has been overlooked by the development team (even as great as they are). To the development team, thank you for all your hardwork on producing something as good as XBMC, I would like to see in future versions some of these functionality to manage the library a whole lot better. 

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