Welcome to LukeMcReynolds.com!

This is my place to put stuff online so I won't forget it, show the world that I can make a decent website, and share my thoughts with family and friends. It's also a place for me to share Linux/web development tips and tricks with the world at large, and a place for me to post pictures of my cat. If you don't know me and would like to, please get in touch with me - I'll try to respond right away.

---

Converting .flv to .avi files with mencoder

My dad asked me to do something tech-oriented today, and I thought I’d share how I did it.

My dad saw this botfly-extraction video the other day, and wanted to save it to his computer. (Everyone in our family has a certain amount of personal experience with botflies, my dad slightly more than the rest. That’s what living in Belize for four years will do for ya. For what it’s worth, the video very accurately describes the “botfly experience”.)

Anyway, looking through the source of the blip.tv page that the video was hosted on, I was able to find the main .flv file: http://blip.tv/file/get/Vserrao-TheBotflyInMyHead550.flv. I saved that to my computer, and then converted it to an .avi file, so that my dad can view it easier.

I used mencoder to convert the .flv file to .avi. On my Linux desktop, this is what I used for the conversion:

mencoder -oac mp3lame -ovc lavc -o botfly.avi botfly.flv

mencoder gave a much higher quality resultant video than ffmpeg did.

Screenshots of the original .flv, the mencoder .avi, and the ffmpeg .avi are below. The screenshots aren’t of the botfly, don’t worry - that’s just gross.

Posted on Sep 16, 2009 - 07:11 PM Categories: Family, Geek
read more | 0 comments

---

Reddit Addict on Ubuntu Linux?

Anyone had success installing and running RedditAddict Lite on Ubuntu Linux? I’ve installed Adobe Air, and installed the appropriate .air package, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how to actually run it. (And there’s no documentation on the RedditAddict Lite page itself.)

Anyway, leave a comment if you’ve gotten it worked out. If I get it worked out, I’ll post my solution. Thanks!

Posted on Sep 14, 2009 - 12:22 AM Categories: Geek
read more | 3 comments

---

I’ve Been Loving This Song Recently

Gorgeous - possibly a better song than the original, even. The song is called “Archangel”, and it’s on Burial‘s Untrue album. This is Phaseone‘s remix.

Posted on Jul 23, 2009 - 05:28 PM Categories: Personal
read more | 0 comments

---

A Quick Comment Spam Avoidance Technique for ExpressionEngine

I’ve been noticing some slightly strange search engine keywords used to find this website in my Google Analytics account. People are reaching my website by searching for things like “please enter the word you see in the image below”, “remember my personal information”, and “notify me of follow-up comments”.

These searches come from bots using Google to look for pages with comment forms on them in order to leave comment spam. Phrases like “notify me of follow-up comments” are likely to be on a comment page, particularly because that exact phrase is part of ExpressionEngine’s documentation for the Comment Entry tag.

So - and you should note that I haven’t (yet) done this myself - a simple way to cut down on random spam comments would be to change the wording on your comment pages. Make it be something just as easy to understand, but just don’t echo the generic EE-specific wording used in the documentation.

EDIT 9/17/09:

I made the comment form changes when I got a spam comment on an entry I had posted just half an hour ago. Checking my server’s logs, I found that he found my site by searching for

family “remember my personal information” “notify me of follow-up comments”

My site was on the top page of results.

Posted on Jul 01, 2009 - 06:20 PM Categories: ExpressionEngine, Geek
read more | 3 comments

---

Grand Rapids/Sacramento Differences, Part 1

Three interesting groups of people that I saw today that I probably wouldn’t have seen in Grand Rapids:

1. Four Mexican roofers/painters walking in to a Starbucks at 8:30 in the morning and all ordering vente vanilla non-fat mochaccinos.
2. Three attractive female construction workers, employed by the state, digging a big hole in downtown Sac.
3. A group of three very gay office workers, all talking quietly in Spanish to each other in a suburban Del Taco.

I had always suspected this, but now I can confirm it: the Spanish Spanish accent really does sound gay.

Posted on Jun 25, 2009 - 07:14 PM Categories: Local, Personal
read more | 0 comments

---

We’re in California!

So we’re in California now! Here are a couple photos I took on the way and while I was packing.

In more or less chronological order:

Here’s my old, old bike. Once I got a new one, I left the old one outside the back porch, leaning against the house. Nature soon hopped on top of it, perhaps wanting to go for a ride…

Here’s our cat in our empty living room. She looks a little sad.

I took this in Iowa. It’s the sign for the world’s largest truck stop, Iowa 80. It is indeed quite large. It has a barbershop, even.

Finally, here’s a shot I took out the back window of snow on the Sierra Nevadas, on I-80 before Truckee. It’s good to see the Sierras again.

Posted on Jun 18, 2009 - 12:45 PM Categories: Family, Personal, Photoblog
read more | 1 comments

---

The Guy Who Runs Look Who’s Been Busted Is Kindof a Dick

Since I wrote about the new newspaper in town, Look Who’s Been Busted, I’ve gotten a lot of comments and e-mails from people who think that I publish the newspaper, both positive and negative. (For the record, I don’t publish Busted - a guy in Ocala, Florida named Dan Oakley does.) While I think the idea behind the newspaper is kinda scummy - people who get arrested usually have enough problems without being profiled in a local newspaper - I think it’s entirely legal. That’s what the 1st Amendment is for - it’s protecting this guy’s right to say what he wants, which is as it should be.

That said, this guy’s still a dick. Bear with me here…

I got an e-mail the other day from a woman in Oregon who was arrested for possession. It was a wake-up call for her: she started going to rehab, and started getting her life back together. Then, a distant relative of hers calls her up to tell her that her mugshot is on the cover of one of the Clackamas County, Oregon Busted newspaper. Her children found out, her family knew about it, it was a big mess.

So, this woman e-mails me, complaining about it. I tell her I don’t publish Busted, etc, and give her the newspaper’s e-mail address. She e-mails Busted; the text of her e-mail is below:

Posted on Jun 05, 2009 - 12:28 PM Categories: Local, Personal, Political
read more | 1 comments

---

Valid W3C XHTML Embed Code for Hulu

After embedding the previous Conan O’Brien clip from Hulu, I noticed that the Hulu embed code broke my site’s W3C XHTML validation. This is because the embed tags that Hulu uses aren’t part of the XHTML 1.0 standard.

Anyway, I figured it out. Here’s the valid embed code for the Conan clip:

and here’s the default, non-valid Hulu embed code:

Adapted from Bernie Zimmerman‘s article.

Posted on Jun 05, 2009 - 10:36 AM Categories: Geek
read more | 0 comments

---

This is how I feel about Twitter

Conan O’Brien sums up how I feel about Twitter pretty well. Here he is:

Posted on Jun 04, 2009 - 06:45 PM Categories: Geek, Personal, Videos
read more | 0 comments

---

Weblog Entry Date Offset in ExpressionEngine

I recently had a client ask me to have their “Blog Archive” page display all of their previous weblog entries - except for entries posted in the last week.

That seems like a pretty reasonable request, right? Weblog entry display dates should be able to be sliced and diced however the user should want, with a minimum of work. Unfortunately, looking through EllisLab’s extensive weblog entry tag parameters documentation, I couldn’t find anything like a date offset function. The closest exp:weblog:entries paramaters I could find were the start_on and stop_before parameters. The problem is, the stop_before parameter would have to be dynamic: it would have to be consistently set to seven days before the current date.

I was able to solve that problem with a little PHP - read on for the code.

Posted on Jun 02, 2009 - 01:51 PM Categories: ExpressionEngine
read more | 0 comments

---

Page 2 of 9 pages  <  1 2 3 4 >  Last »

Error

Error

Error

Unless otherwise noted, all content, graphics and photos on this site are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
< ? grbloggers.com # >