Author: Chalkie

How to Convert video file format.

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(** NOTE: avconv was discontinued after Ubuntu 16.04 so this may not be helpful if you are running a later version. New post soon)

Here are my notes on how to convert video files between mp4 and other file types on Ubuntu. Especially between mp4 and mpg but avi and wmv can be used too.

There are a number of GUI converters in Linux but I’ve always found the command line converters the best. In fact most of the GUI solutions are just front ends on these command line driven converters. GUI tool winff isn’t bad but using command line tools (either avconf and ffmpeg) give you more options.

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Creating a local Backup of a Hostpapa WordPress site

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Here’s my personal notes (with an intro) on creating a local backup of a Hostpapa wordpress site. Maybe they’ll be useful to you too.

It is a good idea to always keep a recent local back up copy of your Hostpapa website. You can use Hostpapa’s remote backup facility for convenience as well, but if you have a recent local copy sitting there on your hard drive you know exactly where you stand.

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Ubuntu: Wifi connection has gone missing?

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Here’s my personal notes on restoring a Ubuntu (or other linux distro) wifi connection that has gone missing. Maybe they’ll be useful to you too.

Sometimes when Ubuntu comes out of suspend or even after booting from power-on the wifi connection disappears. Usually the little triangular wedge on the task bar is empty. Usually this is easy to fix.

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Local WordPress Install: Posts return 404?

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If you have just set up (say) a local Apache2 server and have a local wordpress install so you can debug your website locally you may find (like I did) that while the main webpage comes up fine, when you click through to anywhere else on the site it returns a 404 Not Found error. Even though you know the page/post is there and it shows up OK in the wp-admin section.

For me it turned out that I had not enabled an important plugin on Apache2 to allow permalinks to work. The missing module is called mod_rewrite. It is simple to fix.

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