Dick Thomas' Blog

Pantalla

noreply@blogger.com (Dick Thomas) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 19:58:00 +0000

Pantalla Screen Caster

*BETA*

Pantalla is a application for screen casting using ffmpeg and pulse audio

it has the following features:

Full screen mode
Windowed mode
Record from microphone
Record from loopback (microphone and system sound)

Pantalla Screen Caster

it requires a ffmpeg with lib264 support from debian multimedia repo or other such location

code can be downloaded from

https://github.com/xpd259/pantalla/zipball/master

and installed with the install script

Features coming:
automagical upload to youtube

Source Code
https://github.com/xpd259/pantalla

xpd259 install's - openSUSE 12.1 KDE Desktop

noreply@blogger.com (Dick Thomas) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 03:38:00 +0000

xpd259 installs openSUSE 12.1 with gnome 3

noreply@blogger.com (Dick Thomas) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 05:45:00 +0000

Xpd259 Install's Fedora 16 DVD install

noreply@blogger.com (Dick Thomas) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 03:01:00 +0000

Installing Debian Gnu/Linux Wheezy with Gnome 3

noreply@blogger.com (Dick Thomas) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 07:34:00 +0000

BRING ON THE SPAM!

noreply@blogger.com (Dick Thomas) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 06:22:00 +0000

I'm sure I will regret this but... I've disabled comment moderation as I was always clicking delete by accident

BRING ON THE SPAM!

recording desktop audio with pulse audio

noreply@blogger.com (Dick Thomas) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 08:41:00 +0000

Recording desktop audio with pulse audio

I wanted to record my desktop audio (the sound coming out of the sound card) with my microphone input so I could if I wanted make a screen cast of a game with audio comments at the time of playing.

It proved to be harder then I thought but the answer is quite simple

in a terminal enter

$ pacmd load-module module-loopback latency_msec=1

and you should head your voice (or feedback) on your speakers/headphones.

Now to record output and the microphone, Install pavucontrol with your preferred app install method.

Start recording and then load pavucontrol and set the Recording tab the output to "monitor of "

Setting Monitor set to monitor of SB Audigy

this effect will only last till next reboot or till the module is removed with

$pacmd list-modules

then look for index: <number> <module-loopback>

$ pacmd unload-module <module number>

this should unload the module returning your audio to normal till it is loaded again

Souces
www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/Modules
http://blog.stebalien.com/2009/03/howto-ones-linux-computer-with.html

Debian, Nvidia Geforce Cards with HDMI and no audio

noreply@blogger.com (Dick Thomas) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 04:31:00 +0000

Debian, Nvidia Geforce cards with HDMI and no audio

The Problem

I recently upgraded my system to include a second graphics card so I could dual head

this card was a Nvidia GeForce 210 from Dabs.com, While the card worked perfectly I did notice that my audio no longer worked on 9 of 10 boot's and then only on GDM not the desktop

After much investigation I narrowed the problem down and fixed it

It was quite hard to diagnose but thankfully I knew what should be in my system as I had only just built it

and when I did lsmod there were a lot of refernces to snd_hda_intel.

Knowing I didn't have an Intel sound device and it wasn't there when I removed the graphics card it was obvious that the HDMI port on the graphics card must be interfering with my audio some how

Also when I use alsamixer this also reported a Intel card under the card listings when I pressed F2

alsamixer showing 3rd device

so I had to blacklist snd_hda_intel

The Fix

If you have an Intel sound device this will do nothing as it will stop your

snd_hda_intel driver from loading stopping the sound device from working altogether

sudo echo blacklist snd_hda_intel >> /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base-blacklist.conf

and reboot

the output of lspci -v for the graphics card gave the following

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GT218 [GeForce 210] (rev a2) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller]) Subsystem: CardExpert Technology Device 1401
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 18
Memory at fb000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
Memory at c0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
Memory at de000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=32M]
I/O ports at cf00 [size=128]
[virtual] Expansion ROM at d0000000 [disabled] [size=512K]
Capabilities: [60] Power Management version 3
Capabilities: [68] MSI: Enable- Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+
Capabilities: [78] Express Endpoint, MSI 00
Capabilities: [b4] Vendor Specific Information: Len=14 <?>
Capabilities: [100] Virtual Channel
Capabilities: [128] Power Budgeting <?>
Capabilities: [600] Vendor Specific Information: ID=0001 Rev=1 Len=024 <?>
Kernel driver in use: nvidia

Sources
www.dabs.com

Debian Gnu/Linux 6.0 Graphical installation guide

noreply@blogger.com (Dick Thomas) — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 15:19:00 +0000

Debian Linux Graphical installation guide using Debian 6.0.3

Net install CD image

"Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer. An operating system is the set of basic programs and utilities that make your computer run. Debian uses the Linux kernel (the core of an operating system), but most of the basic OS tools come from the GNU project; hence the name GNU/Linux."

This was installed in virtual box on Debian Linux, recorded using ffmpeg and edited using Kdenlive and Blender

sources
http://www.debian.org
http://www.virtualbox.org
http://www.xpd259.co.uk
http://www.kdenlive.org
http://www.blender.org

FFMPEG Desktop Recording (update)

noreply@blogger.com (Dick Thomas) — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 19:49:00 +0000

FFMPEG Desktop Recording (update)

as I posted a few week ago I wrote about how to record the desktop on Debian Linux, I have since improved my scripts

Debian 6.0 and Windows Dual boot install guide

noreply@blogger.com (Dick Thomas) — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 23:59:00 +0000

Debian 6.0 and Windows Dual boot install guide

Sources

http://www.debian.org
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/
http://www.virtualbox.org
http://www.kdenlive.org/

Debian 6.0 Squeeze Text Mode Install Video

noreply@blogger.com (Dick Thomas) — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 04:54:00 +0000

This is my Debian 6.0 install guide for 32/64Bit Text mode install
after reading http://wiki.debian.org/GoogleCodeIn2011/Applying I thought I would make a vblog about it

This is my first Video-Blog so be nice :)

sources
www.debian.org
www.virtualbox.org
http://wiki.debian.org/GoogleCodeIn2011/Applying#Create_a_video_showing_how_to_install_Debian_in_your_language.2C_and_upload_it_to_YouTube

Screen casting, ffmpeg , Debian and Virtualbox

noreply@blogger.com (Dick Thomas) — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 23:42:00 +0000

Screen casting, ffmpeg , Debian and Virtualbox

I've been pulling my hair out trying to get this to work, I've been using gtk-recordMydesktop but the ogv files it makes kdenlive just didn't like so my only option was ffmpeg, But ffmpeg didn't like VirtualBox so here is my work around ... kinda

Read more »

Debian Linux, Google music and 2 step authentication

noreply@blogger.com (Dick Thomas) — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 15:17:00 +0000

If like me you want to use Google music and 2 step authentication, You may of noticed that every time you restart your pc you need to create a new password in auth manager. This is a pain in the ****
a quick simple fix is the following

create a bash script to start google-musicmanger
alter menu to point to new script
run and enjoy :)

Saned Networked Scanner & Debian Linux Squeeze

noreply@blogger.com (Dick Thomas) — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 17:59:00 +0000

Saned lets you share any image acquisition device over the network as if it was connected to your PC and even put passwords on the device or limit it's access to a limited set of IP addresses

Why would you want this? Well imagine you live or work in an office where more then one person wants access to the photo scanner for the occasional scan It would be a waste of resources to have a dedicated machine for scanning and then there is moving the image to their machine to work with it. this means anybody can scan from any PC

Xsane Dialogue box showing net:192.168.0.13 scanner

Client
I prefer to use xsane but you any front end that is able to access the network such as Simple Scan will work

edit /etc/sane.d/net.conf and place the server IP address in the file and it should look something like this

# gksudo gedit /etc/sane.d/net.conf

# This is the net backend config file.
## net backend options
# Timeout for the initial connection to saned. This will prevent the backend
# from blocking for several minutes trying to connect to an unresponsive
# saned host (network outage, host down, ...). Value in seconds.
# connect_timeout = 60
## saned hosts
# Each line names a host to attach to.
# If you list "localhost" then your backends can be accessed either
# directly or through the net backend. Going through the net backend
# may be necessary to access devices that need special privileges.
# localhost
192.168.0.13 # this is the IP of the server running saned

there more be required for your scanner like mine as it was a HP all in one I had to set up via the hp-setup tool but this is beyond the scope of this howto

Server

apt-get install sane openbsd-inetd

Edit /etc/services and make sure it contains a line like this:

sane-port 6566/tcp # SANE network scanner daemon

edit /etc/inetd.conf should contain a line like this:

sane-port stream tcp nowait saned.saned /usr/local/sbin/saned saned

#lsusb #output edited for length

Bus 005 Device 003: ID 03f0:2f11 Hewlett-Packard PSC 1200

and find your image device and note down the ID
then edit /etc/udev/rules/z60_libsane.rules

#nano -w /etc/udev/rules.d/z60_libsane.rules
SYSFS{idVendor}=="03f0", SYSFS{idProduct}=="2f11", MODE="0777", GROUP="scanner,lp", ENV{libsane_matched}="yes"

Edit SYSFS{idVendor} and SYSFS{idProduct} to match your device (note colours)
this will change the device in /dev to be accessible to all users not just root (as seems to be for my scanner in debian)

then access to the scanner should be as simple as running xsane on the client

Xsane Ready to scan

this should work for all Debian based distor's such as Ubuntu and Linux Mint

SOURCES
http://www.sane-project.org/
http://www.xsane.org/
http://sanetwain.ozuzo.net - SaneTwain is a TWAIN data source supporting SANE
http://www.winsane.cx/ - WinSANE is another TWAIN data source supporting SANE

Evernote and Linux

noreply@blogger.com (Dick Thomas) — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 09:28:00 +0000

Evernote and Linux

Evernote is to quote them

"... a multi platform note taking application ..."
it is a note service with image/pdf OCR and search for windows, mac and web browsers

.htaccess magic

noreply@blogger.com (Dick Thomas) — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 08:30:00 +0000

I've spent the last few weeks playing with .htaccess and apache and it can be very powerful but has the potential to break every thing.

Read more »

change root terminal to different colour

noreply@blogger.com (Dick Thomas) — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 21:20:00 +0000

When using root it can be risky, to make it a little safer change the colour of the root terminal prompt to red

making it more obvious you are still in room and don't do rm -Rvf /

edit and place at the end of /root/.bashrc

PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;31m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\$ '

then re-login to root

Terminal with red root prompt

Sources

Life hacker months ago lost link

but had changes in my bashrc

securing phpmyadmin on Debian Squeeze

noreply@blogger.com (Dick Thomas) — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 09:00:00 +0000

Securing Phpmyadmin on Debian Squeeze

securing phpmyadmin to the local network is much easier then I thought, there are three routes

Epic passwords and or option 2 and 3
user name and password .htaccess & .htpasswd files
Apache2 config editing to only allow known IP's access

assuming phpmyadmin is installed via apt-get and is in the default locations for squeeze 6.0.2

I don't guarantee these are any good, but they work for me by limiting access to 2 sets of passwords (.htaccess and application's) then IP address)

1. Epic Passwords

epic length (20 char or more) passwords and unique passwords should always be used for each service

http://www.pctools.com/guides/password/ is a good password generator

but be warned that if some one is sniffing your network traffic they could get the password making the whole exercise pointless

I personally use pwgen

# apt-get install pwgen
# pwgen --secure # then pick four or five passwords from this and string them together

output of ~$ pwgen --secure

2. Username and Password

visit http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/password/ and follow the instructions
using /usr/share/phpmyadmin/ as Path to .htpasswd file relative to your server's root directory

then using the information fill out.

# sudo nano -w /usr/share/phpmyadmin/.htaccess

# sudo nano -w /usr/share/phpmyadmin/.htpasswd

then upon visiting http://localhost/phpmyadmin it will ask for username and password
before asking for the applications username and password.

3. Apache2 configuration editing
This method will secure Apache to reject any IP address but the one's in the local network.

#sudo nano -w /etc/apache2/conf.d/phpmyadmin.conf

and add this to the bottom,

<Directory /usr/share/phpmyadmin/>
Order Deny,Allow
Deny from All
Allow from localhost
Allow from 192.168.0
</Directory>

then because of apache config changes a restart is needed

# sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

The 192.168.0 is the IP address my network uses so will let any machine on the localhost or 192.168.0.0/255 IP range to access it anything else gets a error

if your network uses 10.10.10.0/255 or something else then edit to match your network or want to add a static IP address or some machine on the internet then add that e.g 192.168.0.13

Sources:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/
http://www.phpmyadmin.net/home_page/index.php

Twonky Media Server, Debian squeeze X86_64 AMD64 and transcoding

noreply@blogger.com (Dick Thomas) — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Twonky Media Server, Debian Squeeze X86_64 / AMD64 and Transcoding

Twonky Running in chrome

Twonky is a media server for Window's, Linux and Apple Mac it steams media to your web-browser, Xbox360, PlayStation 3 and any other DLNA/Internet enabled device and I highly recommend it

There is a nice 14 day trial before you buy, but if you're using Linux there are other options to try 1st but non of them worked on my Xbox360 so I had to use twonky not that I might paying for good quality software with good support with a nice Android App

(I've heard people say that if you use the manual install version on the site it doesn't expire, but I very much doubt this as that would be a poor business model, but I never tested it out)

Installing

This was the latest version as of writing this but always check for a newer one but always check site for latest version

#wget http://twonky.com/upfiles/twonkymedia-i386-glibc-2.2.5-6.0.37.sh

now to install

#sudo apt-get install ia32-libs chkconfig #ia32-libs is only needed if you're running amd64/x64
#chmod +x twonkymedia-i386-glibc-2.2.5-6.0.37.sh
#./twonkymedia-i386-glibc-2.2.5-6.0.37.sh

then to link the init scripts

#sudo ln -s /etc/init.d/twonkyserver /etc/rc2.d/S70twonkyserver
#sudo ln -s /etc/init.d/twonkyserver /etc/rc2.d/K70twonkyserver

it should now run on reboot and be accessible from

http://<serverip>:9000
or in mycase http://127.0.0.1:9000

Transcoding

I've found the twonky guides don't work so I had figure this out on my tod

1st needed is the multimedia repo for lame
so visit http://debgen.simplylinux.ch/ and select your country and Debian multimedia and follow the instructions for installing it

then

#sudo aptitude install lame ffmpeg flac imagemagick
#sudo ln -sf /usr/bin/ffmpeg /usr/local/twonkymedia/cgi-bin/ffmpeg
#sudo ln -sf /usr/bin/flac /usr/local/twonkymedia/cgi-bin/flac
#cd /usr/local/twonkymedia/cgi-bin/
#sudo echo "/usr/bin" > ffmpeg.location #doesn't work but still best to do it
#sudo su
#wget http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/11/12/2184486/Softwares/Linux/any2mp3
#chmod +x any2mp3

then visit http://127.0.0.1:9000/config and restart server then visit transcoding and all options should be selectable

Twonky config / transcoding

Sources:
twonky.com
http://renjithis.in/index.php/linuxmenu/9-linux-scripts-category/13-any2mp3-article.html
http://debgen.simplylinux.ch/

Debian Administration Handbook

noreply@blogger.com (Dick Thomas) — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 07:09:00 +0000

sources
http://www.ulule.com/debian-handbook/

tmux screen replacement

noreply@blogger.com (Dick Thomas) — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 19:40:00 +0000

tmux is a terminal multiplexer, it enables of terminal or windows each running a separate program to be created, access and used from a single screen

Like screen tmux can be detached and reattached again later (even on a different machine)

tmux in action

tmux:

'via Blog this'

Calas de Majorca [Flickr]

xpd259 — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 12:48:05 PDT

xpd259 posted a photo:

Calas de Majorca , Majorca
2011

post processing by Open source software
hugin hugin.sourceforge.net
gimp www.gimp.org
Taken with Fuji Film S9600

Name Change by Deed Poll

noreply@blogger.com (Dick Thomas) — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 13:18:00 +0000

Name Change by Deed poll

There are many company's charging anything to up £30 to get your name changed when all you need is a simple document

If you wish to change your name all you need to do is print and fill out this http://docs.google.com/View?id=dc5pf5zk_23gtp5vp document then get a friend to co-sign it and your legal then send a copy to your bank, dvla and any other official places that need to know about a name change

It will need a red legal seal but these can be bought from staples for about 99p

Sources

http://docs.google.com/View?id=dc5pf5zk_23gtp5vp

they're like sex

noreply@blogger.com (Dick Thomas) — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 12:49:00 +0000

You won't find me on Facebook

noreply@blogger.com (Dick Thomas) — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 19:42:00 +0000

HDR Cat [Flickr]

xpd259 — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 06:56:58 PDT

xpd259 posted a photo:

HDR Louie

edited with
GIMP 2.6.11
Qtpfsgui 1.9.3 tonemapping parameters:
Operator: Fattal
Parameters:
Alpha: 0.1
Beta: 0.8
Color Saturation: 1
Noise Reduction: 0
------
PreGamma: 1

Station furniture [Flickr]

xpd259 — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 13:45:45 PDT

xpd259 posted a photo:

Taken in Guiseley, England

guitar head [Flickr]

xpd259 — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 12:40:45 PST

xpd259 posted a photo:

playing with my camera on it's manual settings

Foggy valley [Flickr]

xpd259 — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 11:00:05 PST

xpd259 posted a photo:

Foggy valley in Bradford

taken with
HTC Desire
and stitched using
Hugin and gimp