Club Linux Coffs Harbour

Sometimes you want to pretend you're from somewhere else. Fortunately, there's no Law of the Internet that requires you to divulge your IP address, and thereby where, and (for all intents and purposes) who, you are. You can instead rely on the kindness of strangers who will form a virtual bucket chain to carry your data from one place to another, with nobody involved (or any evesdroppers) knowing anything more than the location of the next link in the chain. For this recipe you will need:

Have a whole bunch of ultra-high resolution images to upload to your website, but you don't have time to individually scale them to a Web-appropriate size in the GIMP? Imagemagick and bash to the rescue:

for i in `ls *.jpg`; do convert -resize 50% -quality 70 $i scaled/$i; done

…hey presto! That  9½MB file is now 50% smaller (in pixel dimensions) and a mere 750KB (in file size), and the same goes for the other hundred-or-so images in that directory.

Using my little computer which has the cpu capacity of a very stupid weevil I find it quicker to avoid too much GUI.

So, lets get to the point:

Navigate to the directory which contains the offending FLAC files and copy this in:

for file in *.flac; do $(flac -cd "$file" | lame -h - "${file%.flac}.mp3"); done

You'll get an error if you don't have lame or flac installed. So install them and try again. Done. Easy.

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My studious partner wants to listen to a Latin podcast on her audio player. She has a bit of catch up to do, there are hundred probably thousands of mp3 files to download. Now I know there are all kinds of graphical download plugins and managers I could use but I prefer something a bit quicker and more simple.

Corrections are now available to address security problems to the stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (codename lenny). Also offered are a few adjustment to serious problems in the Debian project's third update. However, the update does not translate into a new version of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 instead users can expect updates from some of the packages.

Could some kind soul explain the steps in changing from Evolution mail to Thunderbird, Please, and without losing emails.

Thank you in advance 

Sudoku is a puzzle game consisting of a grid partially filled with numbers. The presence of a number in a particular square may tell you that in some other squares certain numbers cannot be placed, or that in some other squares certain numbers must be placed. You can then deduce how to fill all the squares on the grid.

The Debian package management system may tell you that if a particular software package is to be installed on your system, certain other software packages cannot be installed on the same system, or that other packages are required to be installed on your system.

Obvious next step - if you're insane - work out how to express a Sudoku puzzle as a set of Debian packages, and let the package management system solve the puzzle for you.

I never get blasé about stuff like this. It always gives me the warm fuzzies.

Day one: I find what I think is a bug in a Drupal module I'm using on a web site, and find someone else reported the issue they day before.

Day two: I investigate the issue further and find it's a trivial problem and well within my capacity to fix.

Day three: The fix is accepted by the module maintainer, and integrated into the code in the Drupal version control system.

Day Four : My Drupal site tells me that an updated version of the module is available, containing the bug fix. Not just me, but everybody else in the world who is using the same module gets the benefit of the few minutes work I put into fixing the problem for my site.

Contrast this with proprietary software: You know there's probably a bug somewhere, but it's illegal and probably technically impossible to investigate further. You report the bug, hoping that the company that owns the copyright on the product (or the company from whom they have licensed the component containing the bug) feels that paying someone to fix it will be in the interests of their shareholders. You cross your fingers and patiently wait for the next Service Pack, or Patch Tuesday. In all likelihood the problem isn't fixed, but for your troubles the update includes a bunch of antifeatures that you never asked for, making the software even less useful.