Archive
See everything and the kitchen sink about your harddrive
Ever wondered what specifications your harddisk/SSD actually has? hdparm is your best friend here. I wondered whether my Corsair SSD actually had TRIM supported/enabled, and this is what sudo hdparm -I /dev/sda (of course, replace /dev/sda with w/e your desired device node is) got me:
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Remove all non-printable ASCII Characters from filename
Sometimes I get some crappy zipped/rared/whatever packages that contain filenames that are not UTF-8 encoded, mostly from old package programs used on the Windows platform. What happens is that those packages will unpack just fine, but more often than not you end up with filenames that contain non-printable characters. PITA if there’s a lot of them. tr to the rescue!
ls -1 | while read file; do N=$(echo $file | tr -cd '\11\12\40-\176'); mv "$file" "$N"; done
What this does is basically:
- get every filename in the current directory and toss it to tr
- the -c and -d options used like this command tr to only output characters that we actually specify
- the quoted argument tells tr to only retain the octal characters 11, 12 and 40 to 176. Octal 11 is Tab, 12 is linefeed (technically, this should be omitted from a filename, but I also use this to filter textfiles, so it comes in handy and is of no real harm here). 40 to 176 are the standard keyboard characters from space to ~, which we actually like in our filenames.
- finally, we move the garbled filename to the new, cleaned up version.
Split a video file on the command line
Since it’s so insanely useful and installing/using the common graphical video editors is pretty much a pita:
ffmpeg -ss 00:15:00.0 -t 00:10:0.0 -i <source>.foo -vcodec copy -acodec copy <destination>.foo
Above command clips everything to the 15 minute mark, puts the following 10 minutes into the destination file and then clips everything after that.
If you leave out the -t parameter, everything from the -ss mark to the end gets copied to the destination file. Useful and fast.
Life Changing Chrome Extension Of The Month: Hover Zoom
Seriously, it’s that good. What Hover Zoom by Romain Vallet does? It ‘simply’ loads the images behind little thumbnails and displays them in an overlay frame.
Sounds simple? I’m sure it isn’t, even more so if you look at the supported sites:
• Amazon • Last.fm • 4chan • Baidu (百度) • MySpace • Reddit • deviantART • Picasa Web Albums • Imgur • eBay • Twitter • Panoramio • Facebook • Wikipedia • Fotolog • Flickr • Windows Live Photos • VKontakte (ВКонтакте) • Google Images • Yahoo • YouTube • Google+ • WordPress
Apart from these officially supported sites, I found Hover Zoom working well for quite a lot of other websites on which it ‘just works’.
The author has done an amazing jobs keeping the extension really simple and unobtrusive, with options for whitelisting certain sites, adjustable delay and fading effects and zoom on keyhold. It even displays captions below the zoomed image if it’s able to catch one. This is the kind of extension that’s hard to describe, but once you’ve installed it you are going to miss it on any browser that doesn’t have it.
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Hover Zoom is available from the Chrome Web Store.
Ever wondered what font’s being used on a webpage?
I certainly have. And it bugged me to no ends having to look for the CSS and then maybe, just maybe find what font family’s being used. Sure, FireBug and the integrated Chrome Developer Tools eased that process somewhat, but still… well, no more. I wish I’d known earlier that the fabulous WhatFont existed. It’s a Bookmarklet/Chrome Extension/Safari Extension that basically sits somewhere until you click it. You can then hover over any text and it tells you what font’s being used to display it. If you click you get additional information about the font service used, size etc. etc. Invaluable!
Screenshot shows the Chrome Extension.
If I had one wish this year…
… it would be Spotify officially available in Germany. The software (hello wireless iPhone syncing!) and the service is so good, it’s hard to live without once you experienced it. Maybe Apple will introduce something reasonably priced… it will still come with the monster that is called iTunes. And it sucks.
Lotus Notes 8.5.2 + Ubuntu 10.10 = working, out of the box
Wow, they got it all right this time. Everything works without any tinkering – thanks IBM, you made my day. Seriously.
Disclaimer: On x86 that is.
Ubuntu Maverick Looks = …
… awesome. ‘Nuff said. Polished. Fonts=great seriously awesome+1. Theme=great. Overall feel=great+1.
Everyone said it already…
… and I am late to the party, but KDE SC 4.5.1 is an awesome release. Looking absolutely gorgeous, rock stable and fast for me so far. Kudos and thanks to everyone involved!
So simple, yet useful…
… it almost hurts. Read this post by Andrew Jamison about making directories and automatically cwd’ing to it – once you read it, you know you always needed it!
# mkdir, cd into it
mkcd () {
mkdir -p "$*" && cd "$*"
}
Put into your .bashrc – profit!
Ubuntu.addToDefaultInstallation(“ubuntu-tweak”)
While playing around with my new Ubuntu 10.4 installation, I searched for a quick and easy way to setup Compiz’s screen edge features to show me my windows, desktop and workspaces – but that doesn’t seem to be possible in the default installation. One has to install the Compiz Settings Manager and then do it from there. Sure, easy enough – even though that thing is a beast with all its configuration options.
But while poking around the net, I came across Ubuntu Tweak that features a seriously nice, stripped down interface for that – and so much more.
This application should seriously be considered being added to the default installation. “Hide” it somewhere if you need to, name it “Advanced Tweaks” or something, but it’s absolutely helpful to quickly change some more hidden configuration options if you need to.
Kudos to the developer!
Oh, to install it:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tualatrix/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-tweak
Very impressed…
… with the new Ubuntu looks introduced in the 10.4 beta. Absolutely polished and very, very functional. Okay, it is different – but that is not necessarily a bad thing. People will get used to it. And as a Mac user I definitely welcome the move of window buttons from the windows’y right side to the left. They just feel more natural there, anyway.
Another thing that really struck me in the beta is how absolutely gorgeous the default font rendering is (haven’t checked, but I think they now use the Liberation fonts over the DejaVu ones they are the DejaVu fonts). Usually I spend quite some time after installing a new distribution trying to get the fonts right. I don’t know why, but some distributions just can’t get it right – Ubuntu certainly has. You can think of Ubuntu whatever you want, but they know how to get the very, very important “basic” things right (which are really advanced when done right). On the desktop, no joe-average-user needs the absolutely latest and greatest and whatnot in kernel/service/security-land, what they need is an attractive, modern, good looking environment that is stable to work with.
Using Dropbox in a KDE environment
Even though the Dropbox Service I seriously can’t live without anymore is basically designed to work with Nautilus and therefore Gnome, it works very well in a KDE environment.
Register with the service and then
cd $HOME # download dropbox x86 wget -O dropbox_x86.tar.gz http://www.getdropbox.com/download?plat=lnx.x86 # or, if you are running x86_64 wget -O dropbox_x86_64.tar.gz http://www.getdropbox.com/download?plat=lnx.x86_64 # unpack it tar xfvz dropbox_<x86 or x86_64>.tar.gz # start dropboxd - the initial Wizard will be coming up to enter you account data .dropbox-dist/dropboxd # put the Dropbox daemon into your autostart, so it begins its job once KDE comes up ln -s $HOME/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd $HOME/.kde/Autostart/dropboxd |
Enhancing the XBMC (Live) Experience
The XBMC Experience on a HTPC is just awesome with a NVIDIA VDPAU (Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix) enabled graphics card or chipset. My ZOTAC MAG HD-ND01 has a NVIDIA Ion chipset, so CPU usage is at like 3-8% while watching High Definition media. Doesn’t get any better.
XMBC Live is XBMC’s very own spin of a barebone Ubuntu Linux, preinstalled with XBMC. While it works really, really well directly out of the box after installing the newest NVIDIA drivers from the PPA – which are required for VDPAU acceleration – there are some things you might want to do to enhance your experience even more.
If you are hooking your HTPC up to your TV via HDMI, you won’t be able to hear any menu sounds. That is because the default soundcard is still the onboard/whatever one. Fire up your favorite text editor and edit/create the file .asoundrc in your XBMC user’s home directory.
pcm.!default {
type plug
slave {
pcm "hdmi"
}
}
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This will make the HDMI output the default for all sounds, thus enabling XBMC menu sounds.
Next up, /etc/X11/xorg.conf – disable the Hardware Cursor, enable 1080p24 (very important for fluid playback of most HD material) and 1080p60, disable Composite and let your TV do the resolution scaling.
#Remove Hardware Cursor
#Browse to the 'Device' section and insert the following
Option "HWCursor" "False"
Option "FlatPanelProperties" "Scaling=Native"
#Make 1080p24 and 1080p60 available
#1080p24 is pretty important to have, make sure you calibrate your screen
#in System Settings for this resolution afterwards if you allow XBMC
#to match the screen's resolution to the video playing (which I heavily recommend)
#Browse to the 'Screen' section and insert the following
Option "DynamicTwinView" "False"
# Disabling Composite improved the video playback for me even more, YMMV
Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Disable"
EndSection
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Enjoy XBMC, it rocks! 
XMarks is awesome for cross-browser bookmark synchronisation
’nuff said. Try it under www.xmarks.com. Love it. I do.
