These are software packages that make my life easier. I use the GNU/Linux operating system, but most or all of these are available for other operating systems too.
Here's a command to add a comment to an Ogg Vorbis audio file:
vorbiscomment -a Ciaran_O\'Riordan_-_End_Software_Patents_-_LibrePlanet_2009.ogg -t "comment=Transcript: http://groups.fsf.org/index.php/Ciaran_O'Riordan_(LP09)"
Convert track 1 of a CD to ogg via pipe:
cdparanoia 1-1 - | oggenc -q 3 -o track-01.ogg - ; done
And to do that for a CD of 20 tracks:
for i in `seq -w 1 20`; do cdparanoia ${i}-${i} - | oggenc -q 3 -o track-${i}.ogg - ; done
gs -sPAPERSIZE=a4 -sDEVICE=pnmraw -r300 -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH
-sOutputFile=- -q input.pdf | ocrad > output.text
There's an article about a more thorough method here: How To Extract All Text From PDFs (Including Text In Images).
Here's a command which operates on all .pdf files in the current directory. It replaces any spaces in the filenames with underscores.
find . -maxdepth 1 -iname '*.pdf' | while read n; do mv
"$n" `echo "$n" | sed 's/ /_/g'`; done
I have two files with lists of words, each has one word per line, and I want to run a command based on all combinasions of those two lists. For a practical example, there's a website that posts videos each day, but they don't provide a convenient way to download them. The file names are different each day, but many use a recurring set of words used to form the file names, so if I try all those combinations, I'll get a few videos each day.
cat prefixes | while read p; do cat suffixes | while read s; do wget -c http://videos.gmanews.tv/2010a/03/${p}_030710_${s}.flv; done ; done
In this example, I'll also have to change the date (mmddyy).
To play a file at 1.5 times normal speed with mplayer:
mplayer -af scaletempo=scale=1.5 the_file.ogg
This increases the playback speed without increasing the pitch.
If you want to run, say, GIMP in Spanish, you can lauch it with this command from a shell command line:
LANGUAGE=es_ES gimp
Hmm, I don't remember exactly what this does:
ffmpeg -i filename -ab 56 -ar 44100 -b 500 -s 320x240 filename.mpg
It might have something to do with Rockbox's instructions for shrinking videos.
(Go: homepage of Ciarán O'Riordan)
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