In times of Facebook, Google and YouTube, why should it still be necessary to
rely on outdated technology like Usenet/NNTP? Portals like phpBB also invite you
to exchange ideas with other users.

So why should you use Usenet these days?

From my point of view the question is very simple: It is a tried and tested
standard, similar to emails/SMTP, it hasn’t really changed for decades. Some
people may interpret this as a disadvantage, but for me it is clearly an
advantage because I don’t constantly need new programs to write articles and I
don’t always have to worry about having to enter my login data with the latest
web browser version. There are also many people who still use Usenet on a daily
basis.

Of course, you can’t just add colorful pictures to the content and you have to
significantly increase your brain power to put everything into
words. Ultimately, discussions with substance arise here – plain text-based and
highly optimized.

I use Usenet in combination with Emacs and Gnus – it also fits seamlessly into
my email communication and allows me to work productively.

Especially with automated scripts which establish SSH connections to external systems, the request for a password within the script is undesirable or leads to the script being blocked.

It is possible to simulate such password entries with the expect tool, but this is anything but secure. The best way is authentication via RSA keys, which must be entered as a public key in the target system in order to enable password-free access.

If you administrate many systems and have forgotten to import a public key into a target system, you end up with the problem of the blocked script again because a password query is initiated as a failover.

To prevent this, the -o BatchMode=yes parameter is simply passed to the SSH client. It is generally recommended to use this parameter as soon as ssh appears in a script. As a rule, however, it is not considered and prevents many a system from running automated processes.

A typical command-line will look like this:

ssh -o BatchMode=yes www.my-sample-hostname.com

If you use SSH indirectly via Rsync, this parameter can be used as follows:

rsync -av -e "ssh -o BatchMode=yes" www.mysample.com:/src1 /dst1

There are several approaches here. The order of the images is problematic. The easiest way would be by:

cat *.jpg | ffmpeg -f image2pipe -r 25 -vcodec mjpeg -i - test.mp4

A warning is issued here because the pipe is aborted and ffmpeg does not seem to be able to recognize this.

Another method would be via image names which contain a sequential counter in the file name. If this is not the case, the file names can be changed as follows:

#!/bin/bash
COUNTER=1
for i in *.jpg; do
   NEW_FILENAME=$(printf "%04d.jpg" "$COUNTER")
   mv -i -- "$i" "$NEW_FILENAME"
   let COUNTER=COUNTER+1
done

The video can be created using:

ffmpeg -start_number 1 -i %04d.jpg -vcodec mpeg4 test.avi

In this case, the 4 fixed numerical digits on the left are filled in with 0. If the number is higher, the mask %04d must be changed accordingly.