Rip audio CDs on LINUX

I still use audio CDs sometimes. But they tend to get lost or damaged easily. So it is a good practice to convert them to MP3.
So far I used Asunder for CD ripping. It is very easy to use ... when it works. But with some discs, usually lower quality CD-R, it just hangs right from the start. So I searched for another tool to rip audio CDs on LINUX.
It turned out you can do this very quickly with two command line tools - cdparanoia & lame. As usual you can quickly install them on Ubuntu with a single command line:

$ sudo apt-get install cdparanoia lame

Assuming the CD is loaded in the CD drive, running this simple command will copy all audio tracks in WAV files in the current directory:

$ cdparanoia -B

Next to convert those WAV files to MP3, run this command:

$ ls -1 | xargs -L 1 lame --preset standard

This will compress the audio files about 10 times using VBR ~190kbps.
If you are satisfied with the result, you can delete all WAV files:

$ rm *.wav

This will leave only MP3 files named like track04.cdda.mp3.
Of course these tools have many more options so you can tweak them as much as you like. For example lame option --ta sets the artist and --tl the album in ID3 tags inside MP3 files.
You can also script and automate this process as you see fit, but these are the tools that do the job nice and quickly.

BTW did you know that "disk" refers to magnetic storage while "disc" refers to optical storage? See Wikipedia.

Batch convert MOV to MP4 in Ubuntu

for i in *.MOV; do avconv -i $i -b:v 3000k ${i%.MOV}.MP4; done

Video: mjpeg -> libx264
Audio: pcm_s16be -> libvo_aacenc
Compression: 10 -> 1

These are video clips from my Panasonic photo camera

mogrify or batch resize images in Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install imagemagick
mogrify -resize 30% *.JPG

7-Zip

The guys at Tom's Hardware have done some benchmarks of recent compression tools.
It turns out 7-Zip is most efficient in terms of compression speed and ratio.
It can also extract many other formats like RAR.
Considering that this tool is also free and open source you may seriously consider switching to it.

Extracting MPEG2 streams from DVD-RAM

DVD-RAM
Using DVD-RAM discs with camcorders is quite convenient. Recording on this meadia is much more reliable. You can also edit your videos on the camera - delete, cut, join etc. The downside is incompatibility. Most DVD players do not play DVD-RAM discs. But recent PC optical drives do read them. So when I get the disc out of my camera and put it in my PC, it shows this file system

C:\temp>dir e:\DVD_RTAV
 Volume in drive E is DVD_CAMERA
 Volume Serial Number is 57DC-951A

 Directory of e:\DVD_RTAV

31.01.2010  16:42    <DIR>          .
31.01.2010  16:42    <DIR>          ..
03.03.2010  16:49            11 961 VR_MANGR.IFO
03.03.2010  16:49            11 961 VR_MANGR.BUP
03.03.2010  16:49       713 383 936 VR_MOVIE.VRO
               3 File(s)    713 408 142 bytes
               2 Dir(s)     688 580 608 bytes free

Actually it seems the video (and audio) is recorded in MPEG2, just like in ordinary DVD but it is packaged differently (probably to facilitate editing on the disc).

DVD-VR
Fortunately a nice guy Pádraig Brady wrote a simple open source tool dvd-vr that extracts MPEG2 streams from DVD-RAM. It is written for Linux but with cygwin it compiles to dvd-vr.exe. dvd-vr extracts each video clip into a separate .vob file. You can play these directly on your PC. If your media player does not recognize these files, you can rename them to .mpeg.
Having a separate file for each clip is very convenient. You can arrange them as you see fit, much like your photos.
You can also record selected clips on a regular DVD to share with your friends. You can do this with various tools like DVD Flick for example - another free and easy to use app.

Happy shooting!

Liberate your code

Do you still read your portable Java code in proprietary Microsoft fonts?
If so, you can consider liberating it from corporate license chains.

Some time ago the folks at Red Hat decided to create free equivalents for popular Microsoft fonts.
The result was Liberation fonts.You can download them for free from here. For Windows you would need the ttf flavor.
Once you install the new fonts, you can start using them in Eclipse.
Open Window > Preferences. In the dialog navigate to General > Appearance > Colors and Fonts. On the right expand Basic, select Text Font and change it to Liberation Mono.

Liberation Mono is the equivalent of Courier New® but looks cleaner and is more condensed vertically so more code will fit on your screen.
Here is a sample

Enjoy!

Ignoring Perforce keywords when comparing revisions with Araxis Merge

In Araxis select View > Options
Select All Comparisons > Expressions and double-click an empty item to create new expression.

Type some description and paste this in Expression:
\$(Id|Header|Date|DateTime|Change|File|Revision|Author)(: .*)?\$

Select the check-box next to your new expression.

You may need to refresh the comparison results after this change. But it is persisted so you have to do it only once.
This can save lots of effort if you compare many files and most of the differences are in Perforce generated keywords.
BTW Perforce keywords are documented here - Using RCS Keywords

Enjoy!