Debugfs

A few weeks ago Irvin (not his real name) came into our computer recycling project. Irvin is 82 years old. He walks with a walker and somehow managed to lug a fairly big desktop Lenovo Thinkcentre down to our recycling project. Irvin had been to several computer stores over the past few months trying to get help with his computer. Unfortunately it seems that he wasn't able to get the help he needed despite paying repeatedly for help. Irvin doesn't speak and didn't appear to understand much English, his native language is Russian. Initially one of our volunteers spent a couple of hours over two weeks trying to help Irvin with different issues he was running into. Irvin's computer was old, even by our refurbishing standards - it was running the Lenovo version of Windows XP. Many of the issues Irvin was running into were due to the fact that he was still running Windows XP. Communication was our first issue, but Google Translate seemed to work well enough that we we...

It occurred to me that I started posting to debugfs as if I just left off from my old domain (a story for another time). I had something in the order of 300 articles on the site so naturally posts on this site don't have the context they had on the old site. When I first started debugfs I talked about the Handbrake command-line script I run on our KODI server to shrink the size of Blu-rays (since they can be huge). I didn't really get into the details of the whole process and I've since changed how I rip and encode media. When I buy a DVD/Blu-ray the first step I take is to back-up the media using MakeMKV. MakeMKV is great for dumping both Blu-ray and DVD content to a .mkv file. I prefer .mkv over .mp4 because I love subtitles and the .mp4 container only lets you "burn" one subtitle into the file. Files in an .mkv container can contain as many subtitles as the DVD/Blu-ray has. I normally rip these on my desktop workstation which has a late 2013 AMD A8-5...