How to save your place in a movie when exiting MPV.

Saving your place in a movie when exiting MPV is very easy, this would be very useful when watching a long film and you need to exit the player and watch some more later. Add this to the ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf file. save-position-on-quitsave-position-on-quit This will allow the player to resume playback when you restart playing a movie … Read more

Interstellar movie shows real physics when depicting a black hole.

The new Interstellar movie is one that showcases science in a positive light as the possible saviour of mankind. We do need to find other planets to settle on, but why not settle on Mars? It has sunlight that we could use for generating power and water. But travelling through a wormhole is one way … Read more

My thoughts on the new Star Trek Into darkness movie and Star Trek in general.

The new Star Trek movie Into Darkness is an interesting film. The juxtaposition of the new JJ Abrams Star Trek with the classic scene borrowed from the ending of Wrath Of Khan, but in reverse is a strange element indeed. The fact that this is an alternative universe with a different timeline is the reason … Read more

How to use mplayer to rip the sound from a video and create a wav file that you can encode with lame.

This is the command I just used to rip the audio from a movie and save it as a wav file. Then the lame command is used to encode the wav into an mp3 file. john@adeptus-mechanicus ~/Music $ mplayer -ao pcm:fast:file=out.wav -vo null -vc null video.mp4 && lame -h -b 320 out.wavjohn@adeptus-mechanicus ~/Music $ mplayer … Read more

Computer interface used in the Avengers movie and thoughts on the touch interface.

http://cargocollective.com/jayse/Avengers. Some information here about the user interfaces used in the Avengers movie. These touch screen interfaces were used a lot in the movie. The touch screen computer model is all the rage at the moment even if it is not that useful when using a computer for a long period. Especially when using a … Read more

Usage of computers in the movies. Some get it wrong. The Matrix and Tron Legacy are the exceptions.

The usage of computers in movies has always been quite hit and miss. The Matrix Reloaded movie had realistic depictions of the usage of the NMAP port scanning command and the use of the ssh command to login remotely to the target machine and execute commands to shutdown the power plants to buy the keymaster … Read more

A look at the Armageddon movie and Hollywood depictions of space travel.

On the space.com website, there is an article about the Armageddon movie and the giant asteroid that was threatening the Earth. They calculated that the energy needed by a bomb to destroy the Asteroid would be 800 trillion terajoules — compared with the 418,000 terajoules produced by history’s most powerful blast, the Soviet Union’s test detonation … Read more

Tron Legacy UNIX desktop usage.

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/09/linux-top-command-used-in-tron-trailer/#dsq-new-post. In the Tron legacy film trailer at 1:12, you can see a terminal displaying the output of the top(1) command, a traditional UNIX command to display the list of running processes. It is funny that the machine is only showing 9 days of uptime though, it should be longer than that. This is like … Read more

Blade Runner styled movies no longer made?

After watching the Blade Runner movie I am wondering why we never see movies like this these days. Nowadays the movies showing the future never show it as the Blade Runner movie ever did. The dystopian future shown in the Blade Runner movie with the crumbling buildings and dark rainy weather is very different to … Read more