My experience with Ubuntu blogged

If I screencast something, than most of the time I do it with recordMyDesktop which produces .ogg-Videos. If you need to convert it so you can show it to your friend or upload it to a video hosting page like youtube or so you have to convert it into another format. I chose avi as format.

Simply fire up this command to convert your file:

mencoder out.ogg -o out.avi -oac mp3lame -ovc lavc

• out.ogg is the .ogg-file you want to convert
• out.avi is the .avi-file you want to create
• mp3lame is the used audio-codec (here mp3)
• lavc is the used video-codec (here libavcodec)

For more information you can look at the MPlayer manual page.

Every now and then I need to get thumbnails of my pictures. I found some solutions, that create thumbnails, but none of them gave attention to the orientation of the image. So if I wanted to resize the images to 640×480 than the landscape pictures had a correct resolution of 640×480px but the portrait pictures had something like 640×850 or even 640×480 (deforming the picture to landscape). So I wrote a script to do this job for me.

Installation

You need to install imagemagick to get the script working. (sudo apt-get install imagemagick).

I installed the script as nautilus-script.

1. Download the thumbnail-script and modify the script to your needs (See more at the bottom)
2. Create the folder “~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/” and copy the script into this folder named create_tn
3. Make it executable
   (chmod a+x ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/create_tn)
4. Restart nautilus per killall nautilus

5. Now you can start the script by going into the folder where your original images are and right click anywhere in the white area or on a file and select Scripts -> create_tn.

Now the script creates thumbnails of all the images of your current directory and places it into the subfolder thumbnails.

Modify the script to your needs

• Change the resolution of the thumbnails: Change the variables long and short in line 4 and 5. eg. use long=”1024″ and short=”768″ if you want a landscape resolution of 1024×768 and portrait resolution of 768×1024.
• Ask every time for a resolution: If you want every time another resolution just uncomment the lines 11-14. Now you can enter every time you start the script a resolution like 800×600 or 1024×768 so width x height without spaces.
• Use a better quality: The script uses a quality of 80% for image resizing. If you need a better one you can change it in line 34 by modifying the number after “-quality”. So you can replace 80 by 60, 100 or every other integer number you want.

Script-Sourcecode

If the Download from Rapidshare does not work you can copy and save the source:

#!/bin/bash
# Define a fixed resolution
long=“110″
short=“82″
## Enter a resolution every time
## Uncomment the next lines if you want to enter the resolution
## each time manually
#resolution=`zenity –entry –text=”Resolution: (eg. 1024×768)”`
#posx=`expr index $resolution x`
#long=${resolution:0:$posx-1}
#short=${resolution:$posx}
# Filecount for progressbar
progress=0
filecount=`find -maxdepth 1 -iname “*.jpg” | wc -l`
let “inc=100/$filecount”
mkdir -p thumbnails
# Creating thumbnails
(for i in *.jpg *.JPG; do
echo “$progress”;
echo “# Resizing $i”;
width=`identify -format %w $i`
height=`identify -format %h $i`
if [ $width -ge $height ]; then
size=“${long}x${short}”
else
size=“${short}x${long}”
fi
convert -resize $size -quality 80 $i thumbnails/$i
let “progress+=$inc”
done
) | zenity –progress –title “$Creating thumbnails…” –percentage=0

If you want to send an E-Mail quickly per Mozilla Thunderbird in Nautilus like the Send To Feature you have to write a little script. (I found a .deb for replacing Evolution with Thunderbird, but it did not work. Instead it killed the whole feature. At the end you will get a menu like the one in the screenshot on the right.

1. Because I do not need Evolution in Nautilus I removed the nautilus-sento app. To do this execute the following: sudo apt-get remove nautilus-sendto.
2. Create a file in ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts named sendto.
3. Make it executable with chmod a+x sendto
4. Paste the following one-liner into the file and save it
   thunderbird -compose attachment="file://$NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_FILE_PATHS"
   Note: If you have Thunderbird 1.5 (or minor?) you must replace “thunderbird” with “mozilla-thunderbird”.
5. Restart Nautilus with killall nautilus

Now you can right click on a file and select Scripts -> sendto to send a file as an attachment in Thunderbird.

For more scripts you can goto Nautilus File Manager Scripts.

If you work a lot on a PC you should also take many breaks. If you are like me and forget about this very often you could use this trick to force yourself to take the break.

Go to System -> Preferences -> Keyboard. In this Keyboard Preferences dialog switch to the Typing Break tab and select the following:

• [x] Lock screen to enforce typing break
• Work interval lasts eg. 45 minutes
• Break interval last e.g 3 minutes
• [ ] Allow postponing of breaks. (disabled for me because otherwise I would postpone it everytime )

Now you have to take a break every 45 minutes for at least 3 minutes. You should stay up go to the toilet or simply move and stretch your body.

Another possibility is to archive this is to use the external tool workrave.

Today a friend of mine called me for burning a CD. The last CD I burned with GnomeBaker, which had to be installed before. Now I did not wanted to install an app first and to try what Ubuntu has to offer just out-of-the-box.

I inserted a blank CD and and a second later I had a icon on my desktop and nautilus popped up and showed me the blank CD-ROM. I just dragged to content to burn from the folder and dropped it on the CD-ROM-Icon. Then I just clicked the Write-to-disc-button, and after I configured the burning speed I could see the burning process.

There occurred no problems and the CD worked fine. Hmm I think since Windows XP there was a simple way to accomplish this task but I always had to install my old Nero Version ;-).