Through every breath that I breathe.

• On fandom's ridiculous sense of entitlement.

Last night redcountess was unwell, so I was hoping to go out tonight. Now I've been knocked out by an asthma attack, so Liz has actually been doing things for me today. *prrr* feanelwa came over to drop off T-shirts for arkady and ewtikins and was looking marvellous!

Many Ubuntu users have problems with Firefox crashing unpredictably. I've switched to SeaMonkey, which is the current version of the old Mozilla suite. Not as slick, but utterly, utterly solid. There's no Ubuntu (or Debian) package, so I save the .tar.gz download to my home folder and install it there, then make a shortcut by hand.

I'm now going to be doing videos as MPEG4 AVIs:

for i in 1 2; do mencoder [input AVI] -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=512:vpass=$i -oac copy -o [output AVI] ; done

— they play in VLC and mplayer, and that's all anyone needs, isn't it. And I can get usable clips at twice the resolution of MPEG1/2 and quite a bit smaller file size than MPEG1/2 or especially the original MJPEG. Compare: MPEG4 (640×480, 30fps, ≈512 bit/sec, 2989KB), MPEG4 (640×480, 30fps, ≈800 bit/sec, 4407KB), MPEG1 (320×240, 30fps, 6849KB).

Phoned Arkady. She has been recruited by a cult of Ninja Morris dancers. Matt black clothes, black stick, silenced bells. She has also been playing at the folk festival to an audience of festival headliners without being booed off.