Tag: Linux

A new version of Sound Switcher Indicator — 2.3.0 — has just been released.

This version finally adds a frequently-requested feature: the ability of mapping global keyboard shortcuts to input and output ports.

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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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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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My current project makes use of the MySQL database, which runs in a Docker container.

At a certain moment connecting to the database became excruciatingly slow, taking tens of seconds to establish a single connection. After that everything would work as expected.

The application opens a connection some hundred times, so the startup time had become really unacceptable.

I’ve spent a lot of time hunting that down, and then even more time looking for a solution as I failed to find any on StackOverflow. But finally I’ve solved this.

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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 couldn’t take it anymore so I created an audio input/output switcher indicator for Ubuntu.

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Finally I got to create a public repository on GitHub for all my public domain utility tools (I had to fiddle quite a while with git filter-branch to extract all the ‘safe for public’ stuff from my home repo).

At the moment the following four scripts are available:

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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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