Andrew's Corner...

The site was established in June 2006 and has run for the most part continuously since that time. Creation and maintenance of this site has always been a wonderful and absorbing pursuit for me and I know from email I have received that the site has also been useful to others. And thus I have achieved a perhaps not insignificant thing...

• Urban Myths & the Iliad My effort to counter some common misconceptions about Homer's Iliad. This page is still one of my favourites while simultaneously being one of the least visited...
• Linux and "For The God Who Sings" A page where I describe how to download the world's most beautiful radio music broadcast using FFmpeg. Do you need some calming and uplifting music in these difficult times? Then this is the page for you...
• Using MXE... Teaching myself to use the cross compiler MXE by creating Windows binaries of the great AAC encoder fdkaac. Cross compiling for a Window target has always been black magic so hopefully this page will make the whole process a lot clearer.
• Running a better Marathon in 2025... My first marathon run was a bit of a debacle with me limping home, eventually! This page documents my 12 month battle to run a better marathon at the end of 2025.
• Exploring Hardware Encoding... Using FFmpeg and my slightly aged NVidia GeForce GTX 1660Ti GPU to explore hardware video encoding with both H.264 and HEVC.
• slrn and Windows 10... In the twilight years of Usenet this page demonstrates how to install the MinGW-64 compiler and build slrn and slrnpull under Windows 10.
• Using Mutt with Gmail How to use POP3 over SSL with mutt, getmail, maildrop and msmtp to receive, sort, read and send email using Gmail as a relay. An IMAP free zone...
• When hackers strike... Your humble webmaster takes up cudgels against a website hacker and gains only partial success.
• Exploring Cinepak in 2022... Encoding the amazing Sintel movie trailer to playback on my Windows 2000 Virtual Machine. An exercise in nostalgia!
• Why don't old people run?... My response to my granddaughter's question about old people! As a beginner runner I trained using Jeff Galloway's method to finally complete my first 10K run.
• A story... I was trained as a Satyananda Yoga Teacher in the Mangrove Mountain Ashram and like many others I was devastated when I found out the dark past of the Ashram.
• Swimming in retirement... Having a good look at how swimming has been a part of my life for many years, and the part it will play in my retirement.
• Nursing: Looking back... I spent almost all of my working life as a Registered Nurse with more than three decades working in a busy Intensive Care Unit. This page tells some of this story.
• Custom 404 page | Troll Warning | Please don't spam | Sock Puppet Warning My own attempt to keep the HTML 'definition list' alive and well...
• Building a Threadripper System... I have been building computers for a few years now and my latest build is a second generation Threadripper build which is aimed fairly and squarely at supporting my daily computer usage while using Slackware Linux...
• Who needs a Threadripper system? I love the nice Threadripper system that I built a year or two ago but this sort of power is not always required for day to day tasks.
• Updating Slackware -current... Some thoughts on the safest way to update Slackware -current on my Threadripper system. This page written after I managed to comprehensively brick my system after a careless update...
• Using qaac under Linux... | Using fhgacenc under Linux... | Using l3enc in 2020... Instructions for using some unusual AAC and mp3 encoders under Linux.
• abcde conf files | SlackBuilds | Downloads The last few pages of this site that may be useful to some...

I update the site when I am able and I have something interesting to add, a combination of events that will be occuring more often soon as I move into retirement! Hopefully you will find something of use here, perhaps you could even assist me keep this site alive by assisting with the hosting bills? if not please feel free to utilise this site in any way you see fit and remember: "Have Fun!".