Linux

As mentioned yesterday, the source files for the illustrations in my Sound Actions book are available on GitHub in the form of LibreOffice Draw files (ODG). Draw may be less powerful but much easier to work with than more advanced line art software, such as Inkscape. One of the nice things about the LibreOffice package is its scripting possibilities. While working on my book, I wrote a shell script that would read all the ODG files in a folder and convert them to PDF and PNG files:...

I don’t spend much time in traditional “word processors”, but when I do, it is usually in LibreOffice. Then I prefer to save the files in the native .ODT format. But it happens that I need to send a bunch of files to someone that prefers .DOCX files. Instead of manually converting all the files, here is a short one-liner that does the trick using the magical pandoc, the go-to tool for converting text documents....

There is always a need to add fade-in and fade-out to audio tracks. Here is a way of doing it for a bunch of video files. It may come in handy with the audio normalization script I have shown previously. That script is based on continuously normalizing the audio, which may result in some noise in the beginning and end (because there is little/no sound in those parts, hence they are normalized more)....

Today, I recorded Sound Action 194 - Rolling Dice as part of my year-long sound action project. The idea has been to do as little processing as possible to the recordings. That is because I want to capture sounds and actions as naturally as possible. The recorded files will also serve as source material for both scientific and artistic explorations later. For that reason, I only trim the recordings non-destructively using FFmpeg....

I have previously written about how to export each of the pages of a PDF file as an image. That works well for, for example, presentation slides that should go on a web page. But sometimes there is a need to export only the images within a page. This can be achieved with a small command line tool called pdfimages. One way of using it is: pdfimages -p -png file.pdf image This will export all images in file....

I take a lot of timelapse shots with a GoPro camera. Usually, I do this with the camera’s photo setting instead of the video setting. That is because I find it easier to delete unwanted pictures from the series that way. It also simplifies selecting individual photos when I want that. But then I need a way to create a timelapse video from the photos easily. Here is an FFmpeg one-liner that does the job:...

I have previously written about a shell script) for compressing PDF files in Ubuntu. Here are some variants of the script. Low, mid, and high resolution Low resolution for screen: gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.6 -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=out.pdf in.pdf I prefer the “ebook” mode, which has slightly higher resolution: gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.6 -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=out.pdf in.pdf And then there is the high resolution for printing: gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.6 -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=out....

We have a bunch of Canon XF105 at RITMO, a camera that records MXF files. This is not a particularly useful file format (unless for further processing). Since many of our recordings are just for documentation purposes, we often see the need to convert to MP4. Here I present two solutions for converting MXF files to MP4, both as individual files and a combined file from a folder. These are shell scripts based on the handy FFmpeg....

So I decided to install Ubuntu on my daughter’s new laptop, more specifically an HP Pavilion. The choice of this particular laptop was because it looked nice, and had good specs for the money. It was first after the purchase I read all the complaints people have about the weird UEFI implementation on HP laptops. So I started the install process with some worries. Reading on various forums, people seemed to have been doing all sorts of strange things to be able to install Ubuntu on HP laptops, including modifying the UEFI setup, changing the BIOS, and so on....

My 9-year old daughter is getting her first laptop. But which OS should she get started with? I have been using various versions of Ubuntu as my main OS for around 5 years now, currently using Ubuntu Studio on my main laptop. This distro is based on XFCE, a very lightweight yet versatile OS. The reason for choosing Ubuntu Studio over the regular XUbuntu was to get a bunch of music apps by default....