Tag: How-To

A devoted reader of my blog might have noticed that I care about typography. For instance, my use of em-dash — which I love — or ⌀, the diameter symbol. That involves the use of special techniques while typing.

It’s also worth noting that many people prefer to communicate with emojis over letters nowadays (which is even reflected in modern architecture).

While it’s quite trivial to enter such characters on a smartphone, it may get tricky when it comes to a Linux desktop. But fear not, for that is actually taken care of: there are even multiple ways of inserting your favourite 🐱.

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What’s the easiest way to download a video file from YouTube, Vimeo etc. in Linux? And how do you extract its audio track as an MP3 file?

You can opt for one of numerous online video converters, but I personally prefer doing that from the command line using youtube-dl.

It supports video downloads from YouTube, Vimeo, BBC, CBS, and about 1100 more (even from YouPorn).

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Joining the mass sustainability hysteria spree, I’d like to put my two cents into the future of my and others’ grandchildren.

Many interactions with Dutch institutions result in a filled-in and signed document that needs to be emailed or uploaded.

Or another example: you visit Russian Post where you’re requested to fill out 117 copies of a certain form. Do not give in to the provocation and do not fill it in by hand!

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WARNING: Commento is abandoned. I strongly recommend using Comentario instead. A while ago I’ve made a decision to migrate off Disqus, which is arguably the most popular external commenting system for website owners.

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In my last post I told you about upgrading an iMac with a solid-state drive (SSD). These drives are very fast (read throughput is usually ca. 500 MB/s if connected via a 6 Gbps SATA III) and completely silent.

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My today’s story is about a well-known yet impressive graphic editing technique called multiplicity . It allows you to multiply objects on a photo—most commonly people, but it can be just as well kittens or lawn-mowers. Using this technique, you can make pictures like this:

I’m a Linux guy and hence my favourite graphic editing tool is Gimp, but the same can be done with any other editor that supports layers and masks.

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I already published a script that sets a random image file as desktop wallpaper. It has only one downside: you have to run it every time you want to rotate your wallpaper.

However GNOME since 2.28 allows assigning a slide show as wallpaper by providing an image list in XML format. There you can specify the order and duration for each image. Moreover, you can even define a transition from one image to another.

So I decided to create a simple script that generates an XML file for a given set of images and, optionally, sets that as the current wallpaper. It requires GNOME 3+ or Ubuntu (11.10 or later).

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This bash script picks up a random image file (.jpg, .jpeg or .png) from the predefined directory and sets it as wallpaper.

The previous version of the script worked fine with GNOME 2 and Ubuntu 11.04 (and earlier), but after GConf backend was changed to dconf in GNOME 3, it stopped working.

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Preface

Those of you who happen to author pictures and publish them on the Internet, must have thought about being able to claim your authorship for them.

One of the most obvious ways to do that is watermarking pictures by adding your URL, name, copyright and/or copyleft. An average Joe would open his favourite image editor, click the Text tool and write a magnificent message for the generations to come.

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Note: this script will not work in GNOME 3 and Ubuntu 11.10; for these systems you have to use the new version.

This bash script picks up a random image file (.jpg, .jpeg or .png) from the predefined directory and sets it as wallpaper.

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