The Ubuntu Linux distribution is very good for working with multimedia files. I insert a flash drive with an AVCHD file on it and it is automatically opened as a folder. This makes it very easy to extract the video files inside. This is even more convenient than on Mac OSX. There are ways to … Read more
Setting up a bash shell is a lot of fun, there are a lot of ways to configure the bash shell to work just the way you wish it to. Using Linux makes this very easy. The bash shell has a few files that help it perform various functions. The .bash_logout file executes when the … Read more
Merging a subtitle *.srt file to a move on Linux is very easy. Just download a suitable srt file from the Internet, then put it in the same directory as the TV show or movie you have. Then do this to merge the two. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 … Read more
This simple shell script will pick a random sentence from a text file. This is made up of multiple sentences from parts of the text file merged into one long sentence. words.sh1 2 3 4 5 #!/bin/sh numwords=$(shuf -i 14-88 -n 1) words=$(shuf -n $numwords 122-0.txt | cut -d$” -f2) echo -n $words ; … Read more
Opening and reading chm files on Linux is very easy, they are compressed archives and can be opened with 7zip. This is how to extract a chm file on Linux with 7zip. Then open the index.html file in Firefox to view the contents easily. jason@jason-desktop:~/Documents/kabylakeplatform_3_7_9/KabylakePlatSamplePkg/Docs$ 7z x PlatApi.chm 7-Zip [64] 16.02 : Copyright (c) 1999-2016 … Read more
SSH is amazing in that it can allow a user to access the resources of one machine from another over the network. But with fast gigabit Ethernet connections these days, playing movies from one machine from another is now possible. Install SSHFS on your machine. jason@jason-desktop:~/remote$ sudo apt install sshfsjason@jason-desktop:~/remote$ sudo apt install sshfs Create … Read more
The VI text editor is a very flexible text editor. This can read from STDIN, and this makes it very good to use in a script. But you can also read a file from the Internet. This works in concert with the wget utility. The wget -O- -q command reads a file from the Internet … Read more
The grep utility is very useful for searching for files and text snippets. It can also be used to search a file for certain values in hexadecimal. In the example below, I am searching for the text “JFIF” in hexadecimal in certain files. This will tell me that they are jpg image files. The hexadecimal … Read more
VIM is a very useful and versatile editor for Linux. This is how to use it to its full potential. Some great VIM tricks to help for a Linux user or programmer. To read the output of a command into a text file, use the :r command in the command mode, and then a Linux … Read more
There are various tricks for programming on Linux. One useful trick is to open a file for reading with C. This is how to do this. The “r” option for fopen() will read the file into memory. #include <stdlib.h> #include <stdio.h> int main(void) { FILE *f; char buf[256]; f = fopen("/etc/hosts", "r"); if(f) … Read more
To convert a MIDI file to OGG on Linux, use the LMMS music-making application. Import a MIDI file by opening the Import menu. This is the Project->Import menu option. Then export the MIDI file to an OGG format file with default settings. This will create a very high-quality rendering of a MIDI file, this uses … Read more
This is an interesting bash scripting trick. This allows deleting the first 10 lines from a text file, but keeping the rest of the file instead of deleting it. X=10 file="file.txt" # read the file, line by line while read -r line; do # add current line to array # (you can modify this to … Read more
When you are faced with a AVCHD file on Mac, it can be confusing on how to export the clips to separate files, but this is easy. Open the file in Quicktime player, as shown above, then select the clip you wish to view, and it will open the selected video in Quicktime player. Then … Read more
Microsoft have been plagued by many issues regarding the quality control and testing within the organisation. The main problem is that there are different testing teams for each section of the operating system, and this has lead to problems slipping through the cracks into mainstream releases. This has caused a lot of embarrassment for Microsoft, … Read more
MySQL can be a pain to use when it is is running with the –secure-file-priv option and it cannot export a database to your home folder. But there is a way around this. Execute this query in MySQl. 4.4 Mon Aug 19 jason@Yog-Sothoth 0: $ mysql -uroot -p Enter password: Welcome to the MySQL monitor. … Read more
The thumbs.db file in Windows is used to cache thumbnails for picture files in the file explorer, but this is a pain when the user wants to delete a folder and the thumbs.db prevents this. But there is a way to fix this, without needing to reboot. Open the Group Policy Editor by running gpedit.msc, … Read more
This simple example shows how to check if a file exists or not. This is how we do this. if [ -f "/home/jason/foo" ]if [ -f "/home/jason/foo" ] Putting it together in a script makes it simple to verify if the file exists or not. if [ -f "/home/jason/foo" ] then echo "file does exist." … Read more
The dd utility may be used to copy a file from one place to another, this is good to copy a ISO file to a USB thumb drive. This parameter is good for getting feedback about how long a file copy is taking, this is good if it is a big file. bs=4M oflag=direct,dsyncbs=4M oflag=direct,dsync … Read more
I do like some elements of the Gnome Shell desktop environment. The progress indicator in the title bar of the file manager is one. This shows the progress of file copying operations while the user is doing other things. A very good idea that should have been implemented a long time ago. This goes to … Read more
The original file manager that was featured in Windows NT 4.0 is now available for a modern 64-bit operating system. This is a Visual Studio solution and will build on a modern Windows operating system. Microsoft are gradually open-sourcing old parts of Windows. This is a good thing I think. This would be very interesting … Read more