Posts Tagged Linux
Taking Notes
Posted by MB in Uncategorized on September 24, 2017
Most people reading this blog carry around a computer every day, whether its a laptop, tablet, or smartphone. Yet many of us still reach for paper and pen when it’s time to take notes.
For many of us, it’s because pen and paper are what we’re familiar with, and we know how they work. There’s a bunch of note-taking apps out there, and they don’t all work the same, or even similarly in many cases.
I recently decided that I was going to try to take notes in a digital format whenever possible and went on an adventure to see which of the most popular apps fit my needs. I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted when I started, and I’ve spent a few days trying to find an app that was just the right fit for me.
I put together a few apps I found and a list of the features that I directly compared between them below, and hopefully it helps someone in the same position that I’m in decide which works best for them:
| OneNote 2016 | Evernote | Bear | Turtl | Apple Notes | |
| Publisher | Microsoft | Evernote | Shiny Frog | Lyon Bros | Apple |
| Price | Free | Free-$7.99/mo | Free-$1.49/mo | Free | Free |
| Platforms | Windows, Mac, iPad, iPhone, Android, Web | Windows, Mac, iPad, iPhone, Web | Mac, iPad, iPhone | Windows, Mac, Linux, Android | Mac, iPad, iPhone |
| Cloud Sync | Yes, via OneDrive | Yes, via Evernote | Yes, via CloudKit (Subscription only) | Yes | Yes, via iCloud/CloudKit |
| Self-hosted sync option | No | No | No | Yes | No |
| Offline access | Yes | Paid plans only | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Local storage option | No | Yes | No | No | Yes |
| Organization | Notebooks, Sections, Pages | Notebooks, Notes | Notes, Hashtags | Boards, Notes | Folders, Notes |
| File attachments within notes | Yes | Yes | Images and photos only | Yes | No |
| OCR within attachments | Partial | Yes | N/A | No | No |
| Encryption | Yes, per section | Yes, selected portions of notes | No | Yes | Yes, per note |
| Encryption Strength | AES-256 | AES-128 | N/A | AES-256 | AES-128 |
| Encrypts media within notes | Yes | No | N/A | Yes | Yes |
| Web Clipping | Yes | Yes | No | No | No |
| Sharing | Yes | Paid plans only | No | Yes | No |
| Drawing/Write anywhere | Yes | Mobile apps only | No | No | No |
| Markdown support | No | Partial, as typing shortcuts | Yes | Yes | No |
| Language syntax highlighting | No | No | Yes | No | No |
| Note history | No | With paid plan only | No | No | No |
| Import options | Print to OneNote, Import from Evernote | zip file | Apple Notes, Evernote, DayOne, Vesper, Ulysses | None | ENEX |
| Export options | OneNote, Word, PDF, XPS, mht | ENEX, HTML | HTML, PDF, DOCX, MD, JPG | None |
There are a lot more options out there than just these. In fact, there’s a whole Wikipedia page here.
Installing Munin on Linux
Posted by MB in Uncategorized on February 5, 2016
I read several articles on how to install the Munin monitoring tool for Linux, and they all seem to over-complicate the install, or end up with an install that doesn’t work.
This article will walk you through installing Munin for a local monitor/node setup on Debian 8 64-bit. Tweak it to your liking. This also assumes that you are running as root. Prefix commands with sudo where appropriate.
Start by making sure your system is up to date:
apt-get update apt-get upgrade
Next, install apache, munin, munin-node, munin-plugins-extra and dependencies.
apt-get install apache2 apache2-utils libcgi-fast-perl libapache2-mod-fcgid munin munin-node munin-plugins-extra
Now, edit the munin config file /etc/munin/apache24.conf
nano /etc/munin/apache24.conf
Change the section as follows:
... Require all granted Options FollowSymLinks SymLinksIfOwnerMatch ...
Do the same with the section, adding the Options line if it’s not preset.
Now restart both apache and munin-node.
/etc/init.d/apache2 restart /etc/init.d/munin-node restart
You can now view Munin data at (your-ip)/munin
Sound not working in Java apps in Ubuntu Linux
Posted by MB in Uncategorized on November 12, 2015
I tested Ubuntu 14.04 LTS in VMware. I started with a clean install. I made sure sound was working in the VM, then updated everything using this command:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
I then checked Software Updater and found a few more packages that didn’t get updated, and updated them.
I then made a backup of the VM to have a good baseline. I then installed OpenJDK 7 and the icedtea-7-plugin, using the following command:
sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jre icedtea-7-plugin
I did not have openjdk-6, icedtea 6, or Oracle Java installed. If you do have any of those installed, try removing them to prevent any conflicts.
You can test your Java sound output any trying any Java applet that produces sound, such as this SoundApplet demo. If you don’t hear sound from it, you have an issue. If you have more than 1 sound device, check the other sound device for the sound output. In my case I only had 1 device (through virtualization), but it worked fine.
I also tried AllStar and was able to hear audio from the node announcements just fine, albeit with occasional crackle, perhaps due to the limited resources of the VM. I tried transmitting but did not get a reply from the few nodes I tried.
If you have something to add, please feel free to comment below.
Weather Underground forecast data in text display
Posted by MB in Uncategorized on November 11, 2015
One of the uses I found for my Raspberry Pi was using it to display weather data. I retrieved the weather data from Weather Underground using their API, parsed it, and displayed it on my RPi’s small LCD. This gave me an always-on view of the weather, which was nifty, and it was done all in bash scripting with a few external programs to parse the data.
This script is very customizable and extensible. You could use it to do any number of weather-related tasks.
I reduced the font size on the LCD to Terminus 6×12 using the following command:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup
This helped make room for all the forecast data on the tiny LCD. If you are running this on a PC, it’s not necessary.
For the smoothest updates, I have found it ideal to run the script under ‘watch’, as so:
watch ./weather.sh
I tired doing a ‘while true; do… clear… done’ loop, but the refresh rate was too low and the updates were not smooth.
Here is the script:
UPDATE : This has moved to github, here.
Last updated: 11-21-2015
Installing VMware Workstation serial on Workstation 9.0.2 in Linux
Posted by MB in Uncategorized on July 21, 2013
There appears to be a bug in the Linux version of VMware Workstation 9.0.2 in which it will not accept a serial number from the GUI. The solution is to open a terminal and install the serial manually.
Assuming your serial number is ABCDE-ABCDE-ABCDE (which it’s probably not, but you get the idea), do the following:
sudo /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-vmx --new-sn ABCDE-ABCDE-ABCDE
Windows 8 error code 0x807800C5 during Windows 7 File Recovery backup
Posted by MB in Uncategorized on January 24, 2013
The following error appears if you try to include a system image in your backup using the Windows 7 File Recovery backup tool.
There was a failure in preparing the backup image of one of the volumes in the backup set.
Details: The mounted backup volume is inaccessible. Please retry the operation.
Error code: 0x807800C5
According to this forum…
For Win 8 only: The Win 7 back up program included with win 8 does not support backing up a image file to any kind of NAS device (UNIX, Linux) . Internally the program gives an error that the NAS device has an incompatible sector mapping type. You can backup to a hard drive that is attached to a different windows machine and then back up that file to your NAS. Convoluted, but it works.
So, backing up a system image to a Samba share is out of the question. To work around this, disable the creation of a system image in your backup.
I haven’t tried backing up to an NTFS-formatted iSCSI LUN, which might work. If anyone has tried that, I’d be interested to know the results.
Build and install Mozilla Spider Monkey (spidermonkey-bin) on Ubuntu Linux
Posted by MB in Uncategorized on January 4, 2013
Here’s how to quickly and easily build spidermonkey-bin from source on Ubuntu Linux.
sudo apt-get install mercurial autoconf2.13 hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central spidermonkey cd spidermonkey/js/src autoconf2.13 ./configure make sudo make install
Enjoy!
Bash script to send contents of file containing URLs to Synology Download Station via API
Posted by MB in Uncategorized on January 1, 2013
This bash script will read a file containing a list of URLs line-by-line and send each of those URLs to a Synology DiskStation’s Download Manager via the published API.
Read the comments.
Note that, in user land, it might be easier to simply upload the text file to the Download Station. The below is useful if you want to programatically pass download tasks to Download Station, such as on the update of a web page, etc, etc.
UPDATE: This has been moved to github, here.
If you have any questions or comments on this script, please feel free to comment below. Thank you!
Simple Linux BASH script to locate and delete duplicate photos
Posted by MB in Uncategorized on September 15, 2012
This is a quick bash script I wrote to walk through directories and delete duplicate photos based on MD5.
It was written for a specific scenario and I highly advise against using it as-is. Instead, read through it and tweak it to your own situation. I would appreciate any feedback.
HF="$PWD/hashes.out"
echo HF=$HF
rm "$HF"
touch "$HF"
for x in `ls -bd *`; do
echo x=$x
cd $x
for y in *; do
m=`md5sum "$y" | awk -F '{print $1}'`
echo $y: $m
g=`grep $m "$HF"`
echo g=$g
if [[ "$g" != "" ]]; then
echo "MATCH!!";
echo rm "$y"
else
echo "no match"
echo $m >> "$HF"
fi
done
cd ..
done
How to retrieve EXIF data from the command line in Ubuntu Linux
Posted by MB in Uncategorized on December 17, 2011
If you want to make use of the EXIF data stored in a JPEG (.jpg or .jpeg) or TIFF (.tif or .tiff) file from the command line in Ubuntu Linux — or most other Linux variants — here’s how.
This was tested on Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot).
First, you will need to have imagemagick installed to provide the identify command.
sudo apt-get install imagemagick
Next, you can retrieve the data on an image with the following example:
identify -verbose /usr/share/backgrounds/WildWheat_by_Brian_Burt.jpg
If you want just the EXIF data, you can use something like the following:
identify -verbose /usr/share/backgrounds/WildWheat_by_Brian_Burt.jpg | grep "exif:"
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