Neil's Open Source & Linux Blog

You might have a collection digital audio files -- such as MP3 files -- or a source of analog audio -- like the headphone output from your phone, tablet or computer, or a vinyl record, a cassette tape, VHS tape, or any other old school audio format -- and you want to share it with someone who has a CD player in their boom box or their car's audio system. Or maybe you just like making mix tapes and you want to update your game for the 21st century. In this post, I'll  cover: how to convert your analog audio to a digital audio format,  how to convert your digital audio into the specific format you need to make an Audio CD, the type of CD that will pay in a stand-alone CD player or the CD player in a car's sound system.  To burn an Audio CD, your track files must be in a specific WAV file formats (details below). Note that you could easily use these steps to convert existing digital audio, like AIFF files, to another format, like MP3s, or to covert analog audio to a

It all started when I wanted to convert some text to Title Case. Ubuntu's default text editor, gedit, is quite capable, but does not include case conversion. A quick trip to Google and I found  (gedit is number 4). Since I write some code, too, I'm always interested in a good text editor. After going through the list, I picked #2, Atom. Atom looks appealing for a number of reasons. It's available through the Ubuntu Software app (almost -- see below for details) It's built on web technologies. It's cross-platform. From the article: Atom is a free and open source text editor that’s developed by GitHub. Based on Electron (CoffeeScript, JS, Less, HTML), it’s a desktop application that’s built using web technologies ... The major features of Atom are cross-platform editing, built-in package manager, file system browser, multiple pane support, find and replace function, and smart autocompletion. You can select from 1000s of open source packages and add

One of the biggest barriers preventing me from using Ubuntu as my primary desktop OS used to be  my favorite password manager,  1Password . I use it on the Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android and couldn't really function without it. For a while I could use it on any computer running a web browser using the 1Password Anywhere browser only implementation, with Dropbox. But Dropbox no longer supports that option (not sure why, but that's the way it goes). I was thrilled to discover that 1Password 4.6 for Windows runs quite reliably on Ubuntu via Wine . Even better, the Browser Helper program also runs on Wine, which means I can also use the nifty browser add-ons to auto-fill web logins. Installation was super easy. I installed Configure Wine from the Ubuntu Software app, and just like that, I could run Windows applications. I then followed the excellent instructions on the Agile Bits support site, Running 1Password for Windows on Linux systems . It worked just as advertised

Puppy Linux Logo I've been using Puppy Linux quite a bit these days and I like it! My favorite features are the ability to boot from (and store personal data to) a USB stick. You don't need very much space, in fact. Puppy Linux operating system is a lightweight Linux distribution that focuses on ease of use and minimal Memory footprint. The entire system can be run from RAM with current versions generally taking up about 130 MB. -- Wikipedia, Puppy Linux Thinks I Use Puppy Linux For Booting Intel computers from a USB stick with portable settings, including browser preferences, desktop settings, and data. Running an old Dell with 512 MB of RAM and turning it into a performance champ.  From the Puppy Linux web site,  Puppy's goals Easily install to USB, Zip or hard drive media. Booting from CD (or DVD), the CD drive is then free for other purposes. Booting from CD (or DVD), save everything back to the CD. Booting from USB Flash drive, minimise writes t

Now that Minecraft is outta beta, at version 1.0.0, it's time to get it running on Ubuntu with all the mods. The standard 1.0 version runs fine in Ubuntu 11.10, but I'm having some trouble with ModLoader, and therefore all the mods that in turn depend on ModLoader. My first task is to run Minecraft without any errors. To start I installed and ran Minecraft on Ubuntu using Alloc's Easy Minecraft Installer . This creates a handy desktop icon on the account I used to run the install script. Of course, using this icon precludes seeing any error output from the program. Once you've installed Minecraft using the script, you can copy the icon file to any other desktop directory, and then update the command line with the name of the new home directory. Then, set the properties of the shortcut file to "executable" To review the error output, I open Terminal and paste in the command: java -jar /home/[myhomedir]/.minecraft/minecraft.jar where [myhomedir] is the

Area51 won't boot up correctly, and the behavior is quite odd. I was able to boot off of my handy Ubuntu 10.10 disk, however, which rules out most problems with the motherboard, RAM, video, networking -- it looks like there's some problem reading the hard drive. I want to do some troubleshooting on the hard disk partitions, since that seems to be the most likely source of the problems. This is right after I ran that disk utility, but the computer booted since then. Fortunately, since I can get onto the Internet, I can log my work right here on this blog. - Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

On my Apple blog I describe how to connect to Mac OS X computers with Ubuntu's Remote Desktop Viewer . Ubuntu's Remote Desktop Viewer ( Applications : Internet : Remote Desktop Viewer) is really Vinagre, A VNC Client for the GNOME Desktop . This VNC client supports connections to Mac OS X using the Mac's Screen Sharing service, Apple's built-in implementation of the VNC server protocol. The post includes step-by-step instructions on how to configure the Mac Screen Sharing server, and how to establish a connection with Ubuntu's Remote Desktop Viewer.