Ubuntu

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....

I often find myself with a bunch of images that are not properly rotated. Many cameras write the rotation information to the EXIF header of the image file, but the file itself is not actually rotated. Some photo editors do this automagically when you import the files, but I prefer to copy files manually to my drive. I therefore have a little one-liner that can rotate all the files in a folder:...

I have lots and lots of photos on my computer (and servers!). Sometimes I have a pile of photos of which I want to find only the ones that are in portrait or landscape mode. This can be done manually for a few images, but browsing through thousands of them is more tricky. Then I often tend to use a nifty little shell script that I found here. It effectively sorts all images into two folders automagically....

This is a note to self, and hopefully others, about how to easily and quickly trim videos without recompressing the file. I often have long video recordings that I want to split or trim. Splitting and trimming are temporal transformations and should not be confused with the spatial transformation cropping. Cropping a video means cutting out parts of the image, and I have another blog post on cropping video files using FFmpeg....

As part of the fun of reinstalling an OS, you need to set up all the small things again (and you also get rid of all the small things you had set up and that you don’t need any longer…). This message is mainly a note to self about how to move windows between screens on Ubuntu with a key combination, found at stackexchange: Install CompizConfig Settings Manager: sudo apt install compizconfig-settings-manager compiz-plugins-extra Run Compiz from the dash Click Window Management Enable the Put plug-in (select the check-box) Click on Put Configure the shortcut for Put to next Output (click enable)....

Yet another note to self on how to fix things in Ubuntu after a fresh install, found at askubuntu, this time to remove the standard bookmarks in the Nautilus file browser. I use a different setup of folders, and don’t really need these unused bookmarks. I wish it could have been easier to just right-click and delete to remove them (like for your own bookmarks), but it turns out to be a bit more tricky....

One of the fun parts of reinstalling an OS (yes, I think it is fun!), is to discover new software and new ways of doing things. As such, it works as a “digital shower”, getting rid of unnecessary stuff that has piled up. Trying to also get rid of some physical mess, I am scanning some piles of paper documents. This leaves me with some large multi-page PDFs that I would like to split up easily....

After four years as Head of Department (of Musicology at UiO), I am going back to my regular associate professor position in January. It has been a both challenging and rewarding period as HoD, during which I have learned a lot about managing people, managing budgets, understanding huge organizations, developing strategies, talking to all sorts of people at all levels in the system, and much more. I am happy to hand over a Department in growth to the new HoD (Peter Edwards)....

Back on OSX one of my favourite small programs was called PDFCompress, which compressed a large PDF file into something more manageable. There are many ways of doing this on Ubuntu as well, but nothing really as smooth as I used to on OX. Finally I took the time to figure out how I could make a small shell script based on ghostscript. The whole script looks like this: #!/bin/sh gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1....