Author: Gayan

Audio volume gaining or normalization is the process of adjusting the audio level of an audio file (increasing/decreasing) and saving the changes permanently (so you don’t have to manually up/down the volume every time you play a track). This is useful because, there are some encoded music files (sometimes happen when downgrading from a high quality multichannel track to 2 channels stereo or when changing between audio codecs) that have either low or too high volumes by default. But the good thing about volume normalization is that, most tools (including the one that I’m writing here) do it in a…

I’ve used many audio players in the past (including extremely simple ones), but haven’t really used something like the “Nulloy” player. It is another simple music player that uses the Gstreamer multimedia framework for audio playback. It’s an open-source audio player, the UI is written in Qt and supports GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. But as said before, one of the things that makes it unique is the progress bar style that it uses (which also adds a beautiful look to it). As you can see from the below screenshot, whenever you play an audio file, it creates a…

In terms of software, basically any operating system can be “divided” into two main categories. First type of software are the ones that communicate directly with your computer’s hardware (such as VGA card, CPU, RAM, HDD, BIOS etc). This includes your OS Kernel, hardware drivers (GPU drivers, audio drivers etc) and so on. They are usually called, “System Software” and the hardware devices communicate with these “system software” using software of their own which are known as “Firmware” (usually embedded into their chips such as the “BIOS” of your Motherboard for instance) . Then there’s this other kind of software,…

Traffic shaping or limiting the download & upload speeds of a network is usually performed by the ISPs for maintaining a QoS (“Quality of service”). For instance, I have an ADSL connection setup with a wireless router and it has a monthly bandwidth limit of 20GB. If my monthly network usage exceeds this limit, then the ISP slows it down (pretty hard). So to save unnecessary bandwidth consumptions by applications (Web Browser or VOIP tools such as Skype etc), there can be situations where limiting the network speed by yourself is a necessity. If you use Ubuntu Linux OS, though…

While creating professional looking (with pretty graphics and other whatnots etc :D) presentations in GNU/Linux, office productivity suites such as LibreOffice, OpenOffice, KOffice and Caligra are widely used because they’re user friendly and rich in features. However you still can create a professional looking presentation with a minimalistic appearance in plain text too. In those occasions why not try “TPP” (stands for: Text Presentation Program). TPP is a command-line based utility and when formatting a document (such as adding headings, sub heading, date, footer content etc) you’ll have to do it in the old-school way of using built in text…

If you don’t really need a lot of options and looking for a simple Bittorrent client, then something like the BitStormlite or Gnome-bt might get you interested. But for all you command-line lovers ;-), ‘CTorrent’ is also another command-line based features rich Bittorrent client that is worth checking out too. Now there are few others that you can try, but in my experience, ‘CTorrent’ is one of the most user friendliest. Few main features … *. Set download/upload rates (when launching the program or can also be changed on the fly). *. You can set it up to automatically exit…

If you’re looking for a powerful video thumbnailer that creates thumbnail images with “printed” details of the source file such as the resolution, file size, frame-rates, codec type etc, then “ThumbnailMe” (free) is a features rich and easy to use app that you might find useful. It supports GNU/Linux and Windows (XP, Vista and 7). Recently released the version 3.0 which brought few improvements over the previous versions. The GNU/Linux packages still aren’t updated to the version 3.0 but according to the developer, “.deb” packages should arrive pretty soon :). I’m using the somewhat older 2.1 version in Ubuntu and…

“DVD region code” is a feature that is integrated into DVD players and DVD video discs that doesn’t let you watch a DVD video if your drive’s “region code” doesn’t match with the DVD disc’s region code. There are 6 DVD regions that cover various countries/territories globally. For instance, if you purchased a DVD drive in Japan and tried to play a DVD video disk that’s originally from US, then the DVD drive won’t let you play it. However the DVD drive manufactures do let the users change between region codecs 5 times (usually). But once you’re done changing the…

If you need an IP subnet calculator that runs under Ubuntu and okay with using the command-line a bit, then I think Sipcalc is one of the best ones out there. But if you’re looking something that is more simpler than ‘Sipcalc’ then you also can try ‘SubnetCalc’. It is also based on the command-line but really easy to use and other than the subnet calculations, SubnetCalc resolves domain names automatically and shows the binary subnet mask value is in a different color for easy recognition as well. Some of its features … *. You can enter either the IP…

Because having a strong password does make a difference, when we’re setting up a password in Ubuntu it checks whether if it is strong enough or not before accepting it into the system by based on few things (the number of characters, whether if it has digits and punctuation marks etc). So, if you entered a simple or a “weak” password, then the OS might give you an error saying that you have to enter a new, more stronger password and the current one is unacceptable. Recently I wanted to change my password in Ubuntu Linux (using 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot)…

A computer network can be “monitored” in many ways. You can measure the traffic and get an idea or can have a look at a log file (of a Firewall) for instance. But nothing can give you a clear idea about a network as good as by using a network traffic monitor that “simulates” your network graphically. But the more complex the network the more complex the output will be. Still, it is pretty handy in many situations. In that sense, EtherApe is a simple yet an extremely powerful network traffic monitor that has the ability to display your current…

Asturix is not just another Ubuntu based GNU/Linux distribution. Because it features a heavily customized Gnome 3 (also known as Shell) desktop by the Asturix developers thus it’s a unique desktop of their own!. Update: As you can see from the below comment from Ricardo (a developer), This is not a Gnome Shell desktop, in fact it’s a totally new desktop environment of their own called Asturix on! (created by a 16 year-old & the Asturix project core developer called Luis Iván Cuende). It’s a desktop that’s designed using web based technologies (such as HTML 5 etc, as a “future…