Andrew's Corner of the Web

This site was established in June 2006 and it is designed to function as a Mathom-house, or storage area for some of the work I undertake and for some resources for my areas of interest. A Mathom-house is a creation of J.R.R. Tolkien and was described in Tolkien's Prologue to the Lord of the Rings: 'Concerning Hobbits':

So, though there was still some store of weapons in the Shire, these were mostly used as trophies, hanging above hearths or on walls, or gathered into the museum at Michel Delving. The Mathom-house it was called; for anything that Hobbits had no immediate use for, but were unwilling to throw away, they called a mathom.

The site will never be more than 20 or so pages big and will be updated when I have time to spare from my "real life". If you find any information in this site that is of benefit to you I perhaps have accomplished a not insignificant thing.

Contents of the Site

The site has recently been drastically revised and many older pages have been culled. My apologies if a page you are after does not appear on this list:

• Urban Myths & the Iliad My sad and lonely effort to counter some common misconceptions about Homer's Iliad. Did you know that Achilles did not die in the Iliad, there was no wooden horse and that in ancient times Achilles was not even really a great Hellenic hero?
• Using Mutt with Gmail This page gives a detailed set of instructions for setting up the Linux email client mutt (together with fetchmail, procmail and msmtp) to receive, sort, read and send email using Gmail as a relay.
• Slackware and Leafnode-2 This page aims to guide users through the installation and initial configuration of the NNTP proxy server Leafnode-2 under Slackware.
• Usenet Pages. Three Usenet "Definition" pages:
  • Don't feed the Trolls!
  • Sock Puppet Warning!
  • Please Don't Spam!
• Rough Justice in the HTML Newsgroups I am a huge fan of Usenet in general and HTML newsgroups in particular. It can be a somewhat robust environment and I have been both amused and horrified to see a form of rough justice meted out upon those who transgress often unwritten rules, less amused when it was meted out upon myself!
• CD and DVD Writing from the Linux Command Line This page aims to provide a gentle introduction to the world of CD and DVD writing from the command line under Linux.
• abcde: Command Line Music CD Ripping for Linux I will describe on this page how to rip and encode music cds to each of the three major music formats: mp3, Ogg Vorbis and flac using the amazing abcde script. To top it all off I demonstrate how with a single command a music cd can be encoded to all three at the same time!
• The Matrix, MPlayer, Mencoder and Matroska This page aims to document my own exploration of the amazing program MPayer as I make a backup copy of one of my favourite movies "The Matrix" suitable for playback on my computer.
• CSS Templates. Four free CSS based templates:
  • Single column flexible template
  • 2 Column flexible template
  • 3 Column flexible layout
  • Yet Another Single Column flexible layout!
• Slackware 12 and "For The God Who Sings" A page where I describe how to download the world's most beautiful radio music broadcast using mplayer. A detailed walkthrough is included for compiling mplayer and for command line encoding to the Ogg Vorbis format.
• Setting up the newsreader slrn under Linux A guide to setting up slrn, the best console newsreader available for Linux. It is an exciting time to be involved with slrn as after 13 years it looks like finally reaching version 1.0.
• Encoding Video for the iRiver X20 Recently I acquired an iRiver X20 which I have been using to store my music collection in Ogg Vorbis format. This little player also does a fairly spectacular job playing movies, despite having only a 320:240 screen, so I set myself the task of converting my DVD movies to a suitable format for such a player and such a screen.

About This Site

This site is hand-coded with more than a little assistance from Bluefish 1.0.7 on an underpowered computer running Slackware 12. Feel free to contact me using the email address at the base of most pages of the site and I will be more than happy to discuss any issues raised by material on the site. If you are feeling generous perhaps you would also like to assist with the hosting bills for this site, any donations go directly to my Dreamhost account and pay to keep this site going. If not please feel free to utilise this site in any way you see fit and remember: "Have Fun!".