René's old blog

Category: IT

  • Converting AAC audio files to mp3

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    René Seindal
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    This command will convert an AAC audio file to an mp3 audio file: ffmpeg -i input.m4a -acodec mp3 -ac 2 -ab 128 output.mp3 Batch conversion can be done with for i in *.m4a; do ffmpeg -i “$i” -acodec mp3 -ac 2 -ab 128 “${i%m4a}mp3”; done Sometimes it really is simple 🙂

  • Longest Common Prefix in perl

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    René Seindal
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    I can’t help finding this slightly elegant. Unfortunately I no longer remember where the idea came from. #!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; sub longest_common_prefix { my $prefix = shift; for (@_) { chop $prefix while (! /^$prefix/); } return $prefix; } print longest_common_prefix(@ARGV), ” “;

  • Xterm and the clipboard

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    René Seindal
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    It has long been an annoyance that xterm doesn’t follow the same rules with regard to the clipboard as most GTK/Gnome applications. Xterm by default only uses the PRIMARY selection for copy and paste, and follows the implicit selection model where the selection is set immediately when text is selected with the mouse, without any…

  • With GNU Emacs you can always learn

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    René Seindal
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    It is close to twenty years that I have been using GNU Emacs almost daily, and you still figure out new stuff. I’ve been somewhat annoyed that copying and pasting between Emacs and Gnome applications were so inconsistent, and then its all in the manual: Using the Clipboard As well as the primary and secondary…

  • irctail – track a file on an irc channel

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    René Seindal
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    Irctail is a small program I wrote to keep track of log files on various servers through an IRC channel. It will track stdin or a given file (like tail -f), and send the lines to an IRC channel. There are options to specify irc server, channel, nick and some more. An example: irctail -c…

  • Labels on ext2 and ext3 filesystems

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    René Seindal
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    I just recently discovered that you can put a label on an ext2 or an ext3 filesystem, just like you can with a msdos/fat filesystem. The reason I didn’t know was probably that it didn’t matter, but now with hal and gnome-volume-manager automounting removable disks, the disks in my usb enclosures are mounted as /media/usbdisk,…

  • D-Link DI-704P router

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    René Seindal
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    I recently bought a D-Link DI-704P router with the intent of using it as a first line of defense in front of a Linux server I have on a public IP. The basic stuff is working as expected, mostly “virtual servers” or “port forwarding” which is used to allow access to the select services I…

  • Vmware and tmpfs

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    René Seindal
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    With the installation of udev a tmpfs file system is mounted on top of /dev at boot. Device nodes are created automatically by udev as the devices appear, but in the case of vmware it doesn’t work. Vmware needs some device nodes that are created when vmware is configured, so they aren’t there when /dev…

  • Resampling audio data

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    René Seindal
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    I’ve never done much with audio data, so when I had to write some audio files to cd, and they weren’t sampled at the right rate, I had a problem. Fortunately, I found sox: sox input.wav -r 44100 output.wav resample did the job. And I tought it was going to be difficult 🙂

  • Mozilla Thunderbird and the order of accounts

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    René Seindal
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    It has long annoyed me that I couldn’t control the order my mail accounts are listed in the left pane in Mozilla Thunderbird. In the end I decided to just edit my ~/.mozilla-thunderbird/default.xxx/prefs.js file to get it right, and after several unsuccessful attempts I found out how easy it is. Open your prefs.js file in…