Mounting iso files

Unlike Windows where we need to install third-party apps, GNU/Linux or other Unix-type OSes have a built-in way to access disk image files as block devices as "Loop Devices." This can be done using the mount command as:

mount -o loop example.iso /media/disk

Concatenating videos with MEncoder

Some video formats like mpg allow files to be merged directly by concatenation. You can combine other complicated formats like avi, flv with MEncoder which is a free video encoding/decoding utility and a close sibling of MPlayer. The way to do this is:

mencoder -of lavf -oac copy -ovc copy -o output.flv input1.flv input2.flv

Boost your volume on toshiba laptops running ubuntu

If you have a Toshiba Satellite laptop and run ubuntu, then you probably hate the fact that you cannot hear the sound as loud as you would want it to be. Doing a
sudo apt-get install gnome-alsamixergui
will not help too much as well, since it will still show only Master and Capture in the alsamixergui under Applications -> Sound and Video -> Alsa Mixer

So here is what you need to do: you need to install alsa from source. First, download the latest ones from here: http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Download. The volume control is under Utilities, but you will also need the Library to install that stuff.

So first, install the library:

tar -xvjf alsa-lib-1.0.20.tar.bz2

cd alsa-lib-1.0.20

./configure

make

sudo make install

Then install the utilities:

tar -xvjf alsa-utils-1.0.20.tar.bz2

cd alsa-utils-1.0.20

./configure

sudo make install

NOTE - there is no make step here - direct make install!

If you get an error that says "`t-ja.gmo': No such file or directory" then you need to install gettext.

sudo apt-get install gettext

After that, once your utils are fully installed, go ahead and see the alsa in full glory: open Applications -> Sound and Video -> Alsa Mixer Gui and increase the Master, Head and Front volumes to full! Yennjoy!

Vim convert whole word to lowercase

UPDATE: following whatever is typed below the horizontal line will convert your entire file into uppercase. The better way for just a word is to use

gUw

Yep - no funny colons or commands - just get your cursor under the word and type gUw.

---

If you are a vim user and want to change some whole config to lower case, here is the quick shortcut:

:%s/[A-Z]/\l\0/g

That's a backslash-el, backslash-zero, by the way.

Annoying right clicks on the google talk icon in your taskbar

It can be annoying when you want to right click and exit or sign out of google talk and you right click on the icon on the taskbar. Not always, but sometimes it shows this menu instead of the one you want:

 

So the way out is to just left-click somewhere empty on the bottom taskbar. This will hide the menu above. Then you right-click on the google talk icon again...

and voila - you can exit!! :)

Cygwin ls command not found

If you are a linux enthusiast and really miss those greps and sed/awks on the windows box, you've probably installed cygwin. You tried running it either by double-clicking the cygwin icon on your desktop or the cygwin.bat file in your "C:\cygwin" directory and got the bash-3.X$ prompt. However, although the pwd or cd commands work, if you try ls, it says:"ls: command not found".

Here is what you need to do to fix it:

1. Right click on "My Computer" -> Properties -> Advanced -> Environment Variables
2. Add a new environment variable, called CYGWIN_HOME and set its value to C:\cygwin
3. Edit the PATH environment variable and add C:\cygwin\bin to it (usually separated by a ';').
4. Just click okay, exit any command prompts or bash shells (over cygwin) you may have open, and open it again - it'll work!

Note: this assumes that you have installed cygwin at C:\cygwin. If you've kept it someplace else, please modify the above accordingly.

ASCII videos in mplayer

Mplayer comes with different video drivers each providing fine tuned adjustments from choosing graphics accelerators to viewing images. "$ mplayer -vo help" will give you a list.

My favorite of course is the ascii art driver AAlib. Here's how to view videos in ascii and replace aa with caca to see color.

$ mplayer -vo aa video.avi

If a picture is worth 1000 words or not, see for yourself. Try to guess what movie this is...