Predicting emerge times with genlop First emerge genlop: emerge -av genlop You can now get an estimate for how long an emerge will take based on historic data and check how long an emerge has taken so far. root@jaws:mjeg/$ emerge -p glibc | genlop --pretend These are the pretended packages: (this may take a while; wait...) * sys-libs/glibc Estimated [...]

Recording an audio stream using Mplayer To output straight to a WAV file (rather than just spool the raw stream to disk): mplayer -vo null -vc null -ao pcm:file=output_audio.wav rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk/radio4/worldtonight/worldtonight_tue.ra The example is for a BBC Radio 4 Real Player stream.