die mensch maschine

June 3, 2011

2 finger scrolling on Ubuntu

I managed to get 2 finger scrolling working on my Dell Mini 9 running Ubuntu 11.04.

Turns out that most recent Synaptics trackpads (Synaptics is the trackpad vendor for almost all major Laptop manufacturers) already have the ability to recognize multi-finger gestures, but do not enable it by default (patents by Apple? I wonder... ).

See man synclient for more configuration options. These can be added to xorg.conf, although i have just added them in a startup script.

synclient VertTwoFingerScroll=1
synclient HorizTwoFingerScroll=1
synclient EmulateTwoFingerMinW=5
synclient EmulateTwoFingerMinZ=48

To get 2 finger scroll working on a recent windows laptop, install the TwoFingerScroll utility. Works like a charm.

Thanks to tip via mixeduperic.com

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May 31, 2011

one a week...

Finished reading 'The Stars my destination', by Alfred Bester. 2nd book of the SF Masters series that i bought from 'The last bookshop' in oxford a couple of weeks ago. I promised myself that i'd read 1 book a week and so far, i'm on track.

simple writing, easy to understand; yet some elegant metaphors about revenge and hate. very unusual for a SF. began and ended with almost DFW'esque humor. i was pleasantly surprised.

the first one that i finished reading last week was 'Do androids dream of electric sheep', by Phillip K Dick. Funny how he says 'electric', not 'electronic', or 'digital'. This is the book the movie Bladerunner is based on. This was even shorter and written in simpler prose.

i've to pick book #3 now.

PS: DFW - David Foster Wallace

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February 18, 2011

India Shining??

Yes please. Can we have more Commonwealth games please.

Cricket world cup?? Yes yes, that too.

India is nearly a developed country after all.

No?

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February 14, 2011

How to extract audio from a Youtube video using the command line?

* Works on Mac OSX and *nix systems. Windows users can install cygwin and should be able to get this working.

Tools needed

1. youtube-dl - a python script for downloading youtube videos. Needs python. After downloading, give it execute permissions and copy it to a path folder like /usr/local/bin. http://rg3.github.com/youtube-dl/

2. ffmpeg - A cross-platform tool to covert audio and video file formats. We'll use this to extract the audio from a youtube video file into an uncompressed WAV file. http://www.ffmpeg.org/

3. lame - An mp3 encoder library, cross-platform. Download and install this. http://lame.sourceforge.net/download.php

Follow the instructions to install these on their respective sites.

The fun part

Step 1: Download video

[sukhbsin@sukhbsin-fedora-vm Music]$ youtube-dl.py <video url>

e.g. <h t t p://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saDguIg9CIE>

This should save a file called saDguIg9CIE.flv. Sometimes a .mp4 file gets saved.

Step 2: Extract uncompressed audio

[sukhbsin@sukhbsin-fedora-vm Music]$ ffmpeg -i saDguIg9CIE.flv Play.wav

This will create a wave file called Play.wav. You can even use this directly, but since this is uncompressed, it takes up a lot of space.

Step 3: Convert to mp3

[sukhbsin@sukhbsin-fedora-vm Music]$ lame Play.wav play.mp3

You should now have the play.mp3 file. That's it!

This file won't have any ID3 tags, but you can easily add those using any modern mp3 playback tool.

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February 10, 2011

Redemption song

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January 16, 2011

A Kitchen window

Sent on the go

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January 1, 2011

A new year

I took these on a walk out to a nearby Japanese restaurant on the 1st of January, 2011.
Some say that the new decade begins today. I'm not sure i understand how that logic works.

Filed under // ealing holidays iphone iphoneography iphotography london photo story street

Posted from Ealing and London, United Kingdom

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December 27, 2010

Cascades by Flakjakt

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October 13, 2010

motivation

“Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,” Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires.”

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