I backed up my GPS last night by simply copying the files from my 4Gb SDHC card to a 2Gb SD card, it just abouts fits with all the applications and France+UK maps. The only things that seem to be missing are settings, but favourites are still there. I’ve been playing around with the latest versions of Nessus and Tennable Security Center lately, SC really adds functionality to Nessus, its not simply a web frontend.

My nephew came over today for a few hours, we played various Xbox games – he’s mad on driving games like Burnout3 and MX vs ATV Unleashed, although not so keen on Outrun2. He’s much better at Sonic The Hedgehog than me. Surprisingly for a 4-year-old, he could read things like “2 player”, “Sega” etc; and even navigate through the setup menu’s to start a different game. Then finished off with pizza (which he plastered in Tabasco sauce!

I tried to install Solaris 10u6 in VirtualBox the other day, but whilst the install went OK, it never managed to boot – I even tried going back to using an IDE drive instead of SATA (which was the fix for 10u5 apparently) but that failed with the same problem – I think the virtual BIOS was not setting the disk ID’s consistently by the looks of the error message. I might try 10u5 later today.

I noticed when transferring files from the new Core2Quad to the fileserver that there seems to be a big burst of file transfer (like 500Mb in a couple of seconds) and then the remaining 200Mb or whatever seems to take forever – so much so that the windows grey out and Nautilus becomes unresponsive. I’ve got a feeling that this is a Compiz or Fedora9 issue, as it doesn’t present itself with Fedora7 – well some unresponsiveness maybe, but that’s probably due to the not-that-great drives or SATA controller in the fileserver.

I’ve just revisited transcoding DVD to XviD as per this post and it seems to fail on the latest mencoder – it only encodes the first chapter of the title. The fix seems to be to specify the title and use dvdnav instead of dvd urls, so something like this (title 20, all chapters): mencoder dvdnav://20 -dvd-device HERBIE -ffourcc DIVX -af volume=10 \ -aspect 16:9 -of avi -noodml -oac mp3lame -ovc lavc -lavcopts \ vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=1242:abitrate=128:threads=2 -audio-preload 0.