Colored Man Pages

You certainly know that manpages tend to be very long and boring to read , especially without any colors at all.

You can easily get colored manpages with just one copy&paste into your .bashrc!

Follow this link to Linuxtidbits' post about "Less Colors For Manpages" and you'll know how to make it happen!

Colored Manpage

© 2010, Arnaud Soyez. Texts and illustrations found in this post are under the preceding copyright, unless specified otherwise.

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Script to capture a screenshot (with Chromium) (Command-line)

Introduction

I wanted to take screenshots of about 15 Websites, but didn't want to install any plugins as I wouldn't use them often. I saw a lot of how-to's using import from Imagemagick but they capture the whole screen, not clearly what I was looking for.

Using chromium, xwininfo (from X) and import, I made this bash script which captures only the webpage. See below for the Source code.

How it works

Upon calling chromium-capture:

  • it finds every running chromium browser using xwininfo,
  • gets the window's id of each browser's currently opened tab (because hidden tabs cannot be accessed using xwininfo/import)
  • takes a screenshot of each webpages using import and the windows' ids.
  • saves the screenshot in the current directy as chromium-WINDOWID.png (with WINDOWID = id of the respective window)

You get a screenshot of only the website. All of the arguments and options given to chromium-capture will be used as arguments and options when calling import.

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© 2010, Arnaud Soyez. Texts and illustrations found in this post are under the preceding copyright, unless specified otherwise.

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Piwik Web Analytics - A very good open source alternative to Google Analytics

Piwik is an open source, licensed under GPL, web analytics tool that uses PHP and MySQL. Piwik aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics.

The installation process is very easy to follow. To collect information, you just need to add your site to your Piwik installation then add the given Javascript code before the </body> of the site and you're all set!

It gives interesting reports on your website visitors, your popular pages, the search engines keywords they used, the language they speak… and so much more.
Because Piwik has been built on the top of APIs, all the data is available through simple to use APIs. All features in Piwik are built inside plugins: you can download new plugins, and easily build your own. The user interface is fully customizable and light speed.

You can try out the Piwik online demo which will show you all the features and see if you like it or not.

I think this is far better than Google Analytics in the sense that:

  • You keep your data on your own server.
  • You can use the API to show stats on your websites.
  • It's FREE both as in free speech and as in free beer.
  • If you know PHP, you can tweak it as you wish
  • You can host as many websites as you like! You can offer web stats to your friends and families!
  • It's been elected SourceForge project of the month!
  • ...

© 2009, Arnaud Soyez. Texts and illustrations found in this post are under the preceding copyright, unless specified otherwise.

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How to move F-spot pictures folder to another folder (version 0.6.1.5 or higher)

After my second hard disk started failing, I really thought about moving my +11000 pictures to my young main hard disk, BUT, also keep all my favorites, tags, comments in F-spot.

F-Spot

F-Spot

So here's how I did it:
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© 2009, Arnaud Soyez. Texts and illustrations found in this post are under the preceding copyright, unless specified otherwise.

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Easy Apache log statistics using Visitors

There are many Apache log analyzers that you can now choose from, but it can be long or confusing to install most of them. I wanted to try and find a simple log analyzer that just does its work using cronjobs. Visitors seems to fit the needs!
We'll also use ip2host to resolve the IP addresses into domain names.
All of this will be run daily by a cronjob.

Screenshot of a report generated by Visitors
Screenshot of a report generated by Visitors

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© 2009, Arnaud Soyez. Texts and illustrations found in this post are under the preceding copyright, unless specified otherwise.

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Electro Collection #1 - An electro-flow of music

speaker

Here's a collection of electro/electronica songs (as mp3) I like and that are free and libre. I'll just call this collection "Electro Collection #1"!

I've picked these songs because they each contain a unique melody and they are easy to listen even for those who might think they don't like electro music. Really, listen to the first three songs (though you should listen to them all) and see! I'm sure you'll find one that you like!
They almost all have the same genres. Mostly, it is: Electro/Electronica, Dance, Experimental.

If I had to pick favorite ones among these, they would be (as unsorted list):
02 - Jolie Micro Girl
04 - Struttin
05 - dub is dumb
06 - Chips dreams
11 - The sun is coming
13 - Plume
14 - don't be shad
17 - Pour toi

Note that this is not an album. Each song in this collection has its own copyright, copyright holder(s), and license. The songs are in their entirety in unmodified form and are seperate and independent works in themselves. See below for copyrights/licenses.

Download

Tarball containing all the songs: electro-collection-1.tar.gz (~97Mb)
Download each song separately from:
HTTP: Here
FTP: Here or connect using a FTP client to codealpha.net on port 21 as anonymous.

Licenses and Copyrights

Licenses and copyrights are downloadable from here and are also listed below:
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© 2009, Arnaud Soyez. Texts and illustrations found in this post are under the preceding copyright, unless specified otherwise.

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[Ubuntu] Byobu: a very useful enhancement for GNU Screen

I'm now using Byobu (earlier known as screen-profiles, but changed to Byobu) everytime I ssh into one of my servers:

[local]$ ssh myserver
Last login: Thu Aug 13 11:03:58 2009 from ...
[remote]$ byobu -R

byobu1

Byobu can be seen as a replacement for the "screen" command, though it is not really a replacement; It should be seen much like an addon or a plugin. It can also be used locally without ssh (I just find it useful with ssh). It shows very useful information (about the computer where screen/byobu is running) and acts just like screen, same commands (though it adds some more keybindings). See screenshot above.
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© 2009, Arnaud Soyez. Texts and illustrations found in this post are under the preceding copyright, unless specified otherwise.

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[ubuntu] Smasher 1.1.1 deb package for Jaunty

Smasher is an easy to use and lightweight audio loop slicer for Linux and Windows. I decided I would give it a try and that I should package it for Ubuntu (see Download section below).

It might need a little time before you figure out how this thing works. First you need to understand the Patterns (upper-right part); Smasher divided the file you've given him into slices, and each slice gets a number and that's the numbers you see on the left. From there, you can select in which order to play the slices.
Below the pattern area, there is the effects area, that's where you can apply an effect to each slice (first column for first slice being played). Then it is very easy to understand the rest of how it works.

Important: Smasher doesn't seem to support (or struggles with) files that are relatively big. I suggest you stick with mp3's that are less than 1mb, or Wav files are less than 2 or 3mb. Otherwise you'll see your Ram memory go up and your computer will start freezing.

Here are some of the features it offers (from official website):

  • slice loops in seconds
  • load MP3, WAV, FLAC and AIFF
  • save as WAV
  • resonant filters
  • effects
  • share presets online
  • sample packs
  • free and open source

Screenshots:
smasher-1
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© 2009, Arnaud Soyez. Texts and illustrations found in this post are under the preceding copyright, unless specified otherwise.

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