Showing headlines posted by wayover13

I know I didn't know what dhcpcd hooks were and why I should care about them. That is, until I set up a file server that runs headless and which I want to make sounds when certain events, such as the network coming up, occur.

I'm not a registered Twitter user and have never managed to think of a compelling reason to be one. In fact, the only time I ever really have or want anything to do with Twitter is when some Twitter feed comes up in an internet search. And all I do in those cases is read any relevant text and move on. Recently, however, I became interested in joining a service that sends out invitations periodically on Twitter. Not having an account and not being interested in much of anything else Twitter represents or offers, I'm at a distinct disadvantage in this case. . . .

So you've gotten, via inter-library loan, the pdf's you requested to aid you in researching the article you're writing. For purposes of putting them on your e-reading device, the form they're in is probably perfectly suitable. But what if you'd like to do other things with one or more of them, such as printing them out? There is quite a range of pdf manipulation tools that can help you put them in a form more congenial to such aims.

In this installment, I'll cover concatenating multiple image files into a multi-page pdf--a very handy trick the imagemagick utility convert makes possible. But first, a bit of grousing on the subject of academia, budget-constrained researching, and academic publishing.

I've been pursuing a research project for the last year or so and have been locating and saving material related to it, as well as doing some of my own writing in the area. I keep that material in a particular folder. That's all fine and good. The problem is that I want the ability to work on the project while I'm at any of 3 different computers--computers that are often located in 3 different locales, some of which are even remote from my LAN. So, how to host the same folder on all three machines, and keep it current with the most recent changes made on any of the 3 computers?

Sort of a dramatized headline for what I've accomplished using the command-line Lynx browser, but not too far from the mark. I've described in previous entries how I've used lynx to accomplish similar goals of extracting target information from web pages, so this entry is a continuation along those same lines.

I've got to put together some articles and am sending them out for proofreading. So I wanted to mark them as drafts, which I know how to do and have blogged about previously. This time though, I'm using only one utility to do the watermarking--LaTeX--and I'm tweaking things a bit further.

Unless you, like me, are stubbornly trying to repurpose aging hardware, this tool might not be of much interest to you. But it allowed me to get an older machine booting from USB when BIOS limitations were interfering, so I decided to document here the fairly simple procedures I followed to accomplish this in case they might be of benefit to others.

As sometimes happens, I recently needed to print off a portion of a public-domain work that's been scanned to portable document format and made available for download via Google Books. As the case proves to be at times, the original book had pages with fairly wide margins; when that sort of scanned book gets printed on letter-sized paper, you end up with a smallish text-box in the middle of a page that will have something like two-inch margins.

I used to subscribe to an on-line dictionary's word-of-the-day (WOD) program. That entailed signing up, using one's e-mail address, on their web site so that they would, each day, send a different WOD along with its definition to that address. The service proved to be a bit flaky, however, and the e-mails would sometimes get caught up in my spam filter. So, somewhere along the line--perhaps owing to an e-mail address change--I stopped receiving those educational e-mails.

I'd had in the back of my mind going back to using that service but hadn't signed up again--all the while having a nagging suspicion that it must be possible, using open source tools, to cobble together some way of doing this sort of thing from my own computer, thereby obviating the need to sign up for some service. But could I, with my modest technical acumen, actually pull this off? Read on to find out the result.

In this post, I'll answer a question to which I hoped I'd find an answer on the internet--but I did not manage to find that answer. The question is about minimal specs for a motion-capture machine and, though my answer will have to remain somewhat imprecise owing to the fact that I did not test multiple systems, it will at least give a probable base-line for what may be the lowest-powered system one could use for the task I'm describing.

I'll describe my recent success with adding watermarks to a document. As often happens when I want to do a quick document or need to work on a .doc file, I turned to LibreOffice for this task. The major part of this post, then, will be occupied with how to add watermarks to documents created in or edited with LibreOffice/OpenOffice.

Ok, I'll admit it: there's certainly hyperbole in this entry's title. What I'm doing with the text-mode browser lynx isn't really scraping--it's just something that bears some conceptual (in my view) similarities. It might appear similar because what I've done is to come up with a way of invoking lynx (or any other text-mode browser for that matter), with search terms already entered, from the command line. The end product is just the text results google finds relative to your query--sans all the bells and whistles google's search portal has been foisting on us in recent years. Why is this a significant accomplishment? Well, consider the following.

Since my mythtv set-up was, for some crazy reason, not allowing me to do a direct download of recorded programming through the mythweb interface, I needed to find an alternate way of snagging those files. I have an ssh server running on my home LAN, so using scp for this seemed like it should work, though I knew it would take a bit of tinkering. Read on to see what sort of tinkering I did and, just as importantly, a way I discovered of resuming the disrupted download.

I became aware some time ago of conky, a minimalistic utility that can display these--and many other--types of helpful information under differing window managers or desktops and, though I'd seen screenshots of it configured to run as a sort of panel, most conky configurations I've come across actually have it display on the desktop background--not something particularly desirable for me since I tend to run applications full-screen on my evilwm desktops. But lately, I somehow came across information about another utility--Xmobar--that can display the sorts of system information I want but which seems to be configured to run mainly as a panel. So I decided to have a go with it. I was able to configure it to my liking fairly easily and decided to offer in this entry a further description of the program and to post the configuration I am using. That information follows.

I recently visited a relative who is studying in the natural sciences and who, surprisingly, is even less capable in certain technical aspects of computing than I am. He was trying to create, on his Mac, a script that would run as a cron job, and asked me for some pointers. Though I know the basics about cron and was willing to pitch in, I wasn't so sure about the script: you see, calling my bash skills rudimentary would be high praise. Nonetheless I decided that, with some web searching, I might be able to assist with that, too. Sure enough, I was able to find just the sort of information that would help us create a script that would tar and compress, then encrypt, a target directory. Details--shamelessly lifted from various locales on the web--are included below.

During a recent vacation, I needed to convert some digital images taken by a relative's camera from a raw format into something that would display better on my laptop. As usual, imagemagick came to the rescue. Details are included below.

With a recent upgrade (apt-get dist-upgrade to 12.04, custom-built Ubuntu) to my office machine, I started having serious audio/video sync issues when producing screencasts using recordmydesktop. As you may (or may not) recall, I record lectures on my computer and use, as a sort of visual aid, an on-screen whiteboard, where I type key words or phrases about which I'm speaking: that's what I capture from my screen when I'm recording these screencasts. Well, with the updated recordmydesktop, the text on my on-screen whiteboard would begin to appear several seconds before the audio about the word or phrase was indicating its appearance.

With the academic year approaching, coming up with a resolution to my screencast file-size problems has taken on renewed urgency. To reiterate, a recent major hardware upgrade on my computer led to a twofold increase in the size of screencast video files I produce on this machine--which in turn led to upload problems at my course web site. It looks like the resolution may well be provided by ffmpeg.

Want to get on a wifi network fairly quickly and painlessly from the command line? Try network-manager's command-line cousin, cnetworkmanager. A command like sudo cnetworkmanager -C essid-of-network --unprotected (for unprotected networks) will do it. For further details on how I discovered this and for further remarks on cnetworkmanager's capabilities, read below.