Here’s my latest update to dhyana.pl…
All of the Perl modules can be found in CPAN, here is the FFMPEG site and here is mplayer. And don’t forget ImageMagick.
OK, so a few weeks ago my old G3 iBook broke down. Yesterday I took delivery of a brand new (well, eBay-sourced, but new for me) G4 iBook and was about to start synching my music collection from my Linux desktop when it struck me that that’s just a dumb idea. I’ve got a 54 Mbps wireless network, so why not put it to good use. There must be a way to get iTunes to be able to play my OGG files directly off the Linux server.
One option is Rhythmbox which I happened to already use as my main audio player on Linux. It is able to participate in iTune’s music sharing function by virtue of its DAAP plugin. However, this solution relied on me always being logged into the Linux box with Rhythmbox running. What if someone else was logged in?
Then I discovered Firefly Media Server a DAAP daemon capable of sharing a whole directory of music files (including several formats which iTunes doesn’t support — Firefly transcodes them into WAV on the fly!). This seemed like a great solution, so I installed it…
This release works around errors in capturing screen shots from certain WMV files. It also changes the default geometry from 240×180+0+0 to “auto” which is an automatically calculated, hopefully appropriate, geometry.
" item,B,en_GB,http://tobyinkster.co.uk/blog/2007/08/19/dhyana/,19/08/2007: Sequential Video Thumbnails on Linux,"So, I was looking for a way to create sequential video thumbnails (like this one) from a video file on Linux. I found that my options were severely limited. On Windows there are a plethora of tools capable of this fairly simple task, including Media Player Classic, but on Linux all I could find was QFrameCatcher. The QFrameCatcher website was inaccessible yesterday; today I managed to download the source code, but couldn’t get it to build.
Anyway, I decided it probably wouldn’t be very difficult to build my own so…
dhyana.pl is a small Perl script that co-ordinates mplayer and ImageMagick to create a lovely montage of thumbnails. (Dyhana — roughly pronounced as “jahna” — is the Sanskrit word for a deep meditation.)
" item,B,en_GB,http://tobyinkster.co.uk/blog/2007/06/18/dict-thes-ency/,"18/06/2007: dict, thes & ency","dict is a command that is supplied with most Linux and BSD distributions. If you enter dict foo at the command-line, you get back the dictionary definition of “foo”. Normally several different dictionaries are supplied, including some dictionaries of translation, and it’s possible to look up the word on various online dictionaries too.
As counterparts to dict I’ve created thes for looking stuff up in Moby’s Thesaurus and ency for online encyclopaedia Wikipedia…
" item,A,en_GB,http://tobyinkster.co.uk/article/source2html/,source2html,"I needed to print out a directory full of small scripts. This Perl script will go through the current directory and create a pretty HTML page of all the files in that directory. That HTML page can then be fed to a browser for printing.
#!/usr/bin/perl $cd = `pwd`; chomp $cd; $ls = `ls -1 $cd`; @ls = split(/\n/,$ls); print ""<title>Directory Listing $cd</title>\n""; print ""<h1>Directory Listing $cd</h1>\n""; $ll = `ls -l '$cd'`; chomp $ll; print ""<pre style='padding:1em'><b>$ll</b></pre>\n\n""; foreach $f (@ls) { if (!(-d $f)) { $l = `ls -l '$f'`; chomp $l; print ""<div style='border:2px solid black;padding:1em;'>\n""; print ""<h2 style='margin:0;padding:0;'>$f</h2>\n""; print ""<pre><b>$l</b></pre>\n""; print ""</div>\n""; $t = `cat '$f'`; $t =~ s/&/&/g; $t =~ s/</</g; $t =~ s/>/>/g; print ""<pre style='padding:1em'>$t</pre>\n\n""; } }This software is distributed under the terms of the GNU GPL.
" item,A,en_GB,http://tobyinkster.co.uk/article/password-scripts/,Password Scripts,"====All of this software is distributed under the terms of the GNU GPL.
Toby’s Beneficial Password Generator (ToBePaGe) is a PHP function to create pseudo-random passwords.
<?php /*
* Toby’s Beneficial Password Gen (a.k.a. ToBePaGe) v1.0.0
* ===============================================
*
* Usage:
* $password = pwd_gen($string);
*
* Where $string is the password pattern to use. Password patterns
* may include:
*
* %C- replaced with a uppercase consonant
* %c- lowercase consonant
* %K- same as %C, but also includes common combinations of
* consonants such as ‘Sh’, ‘Ch’ and ‘Str’
* %V- uppercase vowel (includes Y)
* %v- lowercase vowel (includes y)
* %L- uppercase letter
* %l- lowercase letter
* %a- any letter
* %n- numeric…
"
item,A,en_GB,http://tobyinkster.co.uk/article/nmap/,nmap-services,"====
The following is an nmap-services file that can be used in conjuction with nmap to hunt for viruses on a network. It can’t find all viruses — only those ones that open a TCP or UDP port as a backdoor — so only use it as a small part of the overall defense for your network. I won’t bother explaining how to use it — if you don’t know how then you probably shouldn’t be using it. It could potentially be used for good or evil. I use it for the former.
# List of ports used by malware #
# Note: some of these have legitimate uses too. These are given
# as [bracketed] comments where known.
#
# Also, tonnes of trojans use common ports such as 21, 25, 80, etc.
# I have generally left these out as they’ll result in tonnes of
# false-positives. Blaster 69/udp # [tftp]
Sobig 995/udp #
Sobig 996/udp #
Sobig 997/udp #
Sobig 998/udp #
Sobig 999/udp #
MyDoom 1080/tcp # bugbear, [some proxies]
Ultor …
"
item,A,en_GB,http://tobyinkster.co.uk/article/linux/,Linux,"====
This area has a lot of information about the operating system Linux and a few Linux programs to download. The programs were either written by me or I have permission to distribute them.
What is Linux?
As linux.org puts it:
Linux is a free Unix-type operating system originally created
by Linus Torvalds with the assistance of developers around the
world. Developed under the GNU General Public License, the
source code for Linux is freely available to everyone.
![]()
Contrary to popular belief, Linux is not a limited operating system full of cryptic commands, but a full-featured graphical environment which…"
item,A,en_GB,http://tobyinkster.co.uk/article/jukebox/,jukebox.pl,"
jukebox.pl is a GTK2 player for Ogg Vorbis files written in Perl. It uses SDL for audio output.
Why yet another Linux media player?
Because this one has just the features I need and nothing more. It provides the facility to select which song you want to hear next (and if no songs are queued, will select one at random); skip the current song; pause; and a volume control. I don't need anything other than that, and I'd image that a lot of other people don't either. (If anything, the volume control is an extravagance!)
"
item,A,en_GB,http://tobyinkster.co.uk/article/rpms/,RPM Builds,"====
PAN - A newsreader for GNOME.
My build of PAN for Mandrake 9.2, including aspell support.
Dillo - What’s Dillo? A lightweight browser.
Dillo 0.6.6
My build of Dillo, which is specially patched for:
- HTTPS support, using OpenSSL.
- GNOME-style…"
item,A,en_GB,http://tobyinkster.co.uk/article/logitech-marblemouse/,Logitech Marble Mouse,"====
Kernel 2.4.x
Connected by PS/2 (not USB).
XF86Config
First things first, here is the correct settings for X:
Section "InputDevice" Identifier "Mouse1" Driver "mouse" Option "Protocol" "MouseManPlusPS/2" Option "Device" "/dev/psaux" Option "Buttons" "5" Option "Emulate3Buttons" Option "Emulate3Timeout" "50" EndSection
Result
This will set up the following behaviour:
- Large left button
- Acts as “button 1”, a standard left click.
- Small left button
- Acts as “button 4”, equivalent to a small scroll upwards on a scroll mouse.
- Small right button
- Acts as “button 5”, equivalent to a small scroll downwards on a scroll mouse.
- Large right button
- Acts as “button 3”, a standard right click.
- Chord of both large buttons
- Acts as “button 2”, a…"
item,A,en_GB,http://tobyinkster.co.uk/article/steg-encode/,steg-encode.pl,"====
steg-encode.pl is a basic tool for hiding secret messages in images. It comes with a friend: steg-decode.pl.
Download
Usage Example
To hide a message in an image, use the following syntax.
steg-encode.pl image message output
Output should be to either an uncompressed image file or a non-lossy compressed image file, and should be 24-bit colour. Formats such as PNG or Windows Bitmap are ideal.
An example is:
steg-encode.pl test-in.png test-in.txt test-out.png
To convert back:
steg-decode.pl image output
And to…"
item,A,en_GB,http://tobyinkster.co.uk/article/optiplex-gx270/,Dell Optiplex GX270,"
Not really in the spirit of this tutorials section, but I couldn't think of a better place to put this piece of advice.
If you have a Dell Optiplex computer and can't go above 256 colours in Linux, go into the BIOS settings and change the video card memory from 1MB to 8MB.
This little problem had me puzzled for two weeks!
"
item,A,en_GB,http://tobyinkster.co.uk/article/tutorial-disks/,Disk Drives,"====
Copyright © 2003 Toby A Inkster.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1
or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation;
with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no
Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section
entitled “GNU Free
Documentation License”.
The root directory “/” (which should not be confused with the “/root” directory, which is where the user “root” should keep its files!) is more
or less the equivalent of “C:” in Windows — it’s where everything lives.
In Windows, floppy disks, CD-ROMs and other hard disks are entirely seperate from “C:”. In Linux (and other versions of Unix), to access other
disks we graft them onto the main file system — this is called “mounting”
them.
So, for example, you probably have an…"
item,A,en_GB,http://tobyinkster.co.uk/article/everybuddy/,Everybuddy,"
====
![]()
Important: This is not the official Everybuddy page. The official Everybuddy page is at
Everybuddy.com. If you have any
problems with Everybuddy, don’t contact me — instead, go to the
Everybuddy web site, join the mailing list and ask there.
Everybuddy is designed to become a Universal Instant Messaging client, seamlessly
integrating all existing Instant Messaging clients and providing a single consistant
user interface. Currently, Everybuddy supports sending and receiving messages through
AOL, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, Jabber and IRC.
Here you can download recently updated Everybuddy binaries and source
code. It should be fresh from CVS within the last week or so. RPMs are
built on a Pentium Celeron, running Linux Mandrake 8.1. Builds that have
a version…"
item,A,en_GB,http://tobyinkster.co.uk/article/linux-whyuse/,Why Use Linux?,
A page explaining why Linux might be a good choice of operating system for you.
item,B,en_GB,http://tobyinkster.co.uk/blog/2002/07/22/linux-story/,22/07/2002: How I Started Using Linux,"====
I bought my first copy of Linux in 1999 - it was SuSE 6.2. I got it from the local branch of Software Warehouse (now called jungle.com) and it cost me about £30. I bought it partly because I knew that I would be using a UNIX system when I started University and wanted a little experience, and partly because I thought it would increase my future employability.
My initial experiences weren’t very favourable. I couldn’t get my sound card to work, nor my network card, nor my WinModem (no surprise there!), nor my TV card. As a result, it sat largely unused on my machine for quite some time.
At college however I used Linux regularly. There were only a few Windows machines, so you had to either like it or lump it - I grew to like it.
Linux gave me the power to do everything I could in Windows and a whole lot more…"