Converting Video for Use on iPod Nano

I wanted to leave my kids some video messages on their iPods for camp (7th generation Nano devices). I did this last year using the Photobooth app on the Mac and just loaded them into iTunes and there was no problem. Naturally this did not work again. Linux to the rescue, however.

Checking out just a little with Subversion

We have a huge source tree in subversion and I don't want the whole thing on my laptop. There is a top-level trunk directory and then project directories within it, and I only want a few of those project directories. Ordinarily I would just check out the individual ones I want separately, but this leaves them unrelated and when you have to make changes to multiple projects and want check them in all at once with a single commit you simply cannot. The alternative, checking out the entire trunk, seems to be a bit excessive as well. Luckily there is another alternative: checking out the root directory with a depth of empty, and then updating only the subdirectories/projects that I want within that directory.