Problem: I have a multiline string - not a file - and I want to remove the first few lines from it and keep the rest. I found this surprisingly unintuitive. So these are notes in case I want to do it again. Feel free to suggest a better way! Example Given this input: $str…
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Here's a quick tutorial for turning an old Nook into a passive display. This is an update to my 2013 post End Result An eInk screen which displays the trains I can catch from my local station. It shows the next few available trains, and whether they're delayed. It also shows how long until the…
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You can't post raw audio to Twitter directly. It sucks. Sure, you can post links to audio, but it's not quite the same. Here's a couple of Linux one-liners which will turn audio into simple video suitable for uploading to social media. Waves This converts audio to a waveform: ffmpeg -i input.mp3 -filter_complex "[0:a]showwaves=s=640x480:mode=line,format=yuv420p[v]" -map…
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I hate creating Alexa skills. What should be a 3-click process inevitably ends up requiring trips to multiple websites, to set up weird parameters, and reading outdated tutorials for obsolete libraries. So this is how to create a self-hosted Skill, using PHP. It runs on your own server and doesn't require any interaction. The Skill…
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I want to convert YouTube's auto-generated subtitles into a plain transcript. Why is this so hard? This blog post gives a more detailed explanation than my answer to this StackOverflow question. Here's what the subtitles look like when you view a video: And here's what the code which generates those subtitles looks like: 00:00:00.930 -->…
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This is a quick guide for setting up your new mouse with Ubuntu. I'm a big fan of the Evoluent Mouse range, and I've agreed to publish this Linux guide in return for a review sample. The Basics The only way to configure this mouse is via the command-line. This may look a bit daunting,…
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Here's an interesting conundrum. My TV can automatically detect when 3D video is being played and offers to switch into 3D mode - but how does the detection work? This post will give you a few strategies for detecting 3D images using Python. Firstly, some terminology. 3D videos are usually saved either as Side-By-Side images,…
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As ever, mostly notes to myself. I have a bunch of old images which don't have any timestamp associated with them. This quick Python script will add a DateTime EXIF metadata tag to an image. This uses piexif which can be installed using pip install piexif This simple script reads a photo, adds a timestamp,…
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Here's how to solve a common WordPress problem. I want to re-import all my blog's images into the media library. I've moved my blog to a new host - but kept the same domain name. I started with a new WordPress install, the uploads folder still has all my images, but WordPress can't see them.…
Continue reading →This is part of my redecentralisation efforts to liberate my videos from YouTube. MPEG-DASH is a simple method of streaming videos which doesn't require any specialised server software. You convert a high resolution video into a series of smaller resolution videos. You chop each of the videos up into several chunks. As the video plays,…
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