today's howtos
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University of Toronto ☛ One reason that ZFS can't turn a directory into a filesystem
One of the wishes that I and other people frequently have for ZFS is the ability to take an existing directory (and everything underneath it) in a ZFS filesystem and turn it into a sub-filesystem of its own. One reason for wanting this is that a number of things are set and controlled on a per-filesystem basis in ZFS, instead of on a per-directory basis; if you have a (sub)directory where you want any special value for those, you need to make it a filesystem of its own. Often you may not immediately realize this before the directory exists and has been populated, and you discover the need for the special setting values. Today I realized that one reason ZFS doesn't have this feature is because of how ZFS filesystems are put together.
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University of Toronto ☛ Thinking about the sensible limits of customization of things
Recently, for reasons beyond the scope of this entry, I've been mostly handling my email in GNU Emacs, with MH-E. GNU Emacs is famously flexible and customizable, mostly through the somewhat challenging method of 'merely' writing the relevant (Emacs) Lisp code to do what you want. I'm capable of writing Emacs Lisp, so armed with a hammer and using a new mail client, I have been finding plenty of things to use that hammer on (sometimes with hackery and Emacs crimes). At this point, I've accumulated something like 1500 lines worth of customization (although that includes a lot of comments), and I can think of more things that I might do.
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Ubuntubuzz ☛ How To Merge MKV Videos Made Easy
This simple tutorial will help you join separate MKV video files into one my using mkvtoolnix command from the MKVToolNix software package. We use this in real life for merging separate sessions of our online course recordings and it is fast. However, this tutorial only discuss the merging and for converting into another format we recommend you to use FFmpeg. Now let's do it!