Author: Gayan

MP3 is an old lossy proprietary audio codec (compression format) and when compared to the open source answer to it (OGG Vorbis), it has many drawbacks. For instance, OGG can hold more than 2 audio channels where MP3 can only hold 2, it can give better quality outputs in the same bitrate, it also compresses better than MP3 at both lower and higher bitrates and the list goes on ;-). But MP3 is still one of the widely used formats and is supported by most audio players etc. There are a few that supports OGG Vorbis too but that’s nowhere…

If you’re a system administrator of a GNU/Linux based computer network (my condolences ;-)), then having the ability to calculate the IP subnets and to get other IP addresses related details is a must. And in those cases you can try “sipcalc”. The thing about it Sipcalc is that, it is a command-line based utility, but once you get familiar with it, it is extremely easy to use. You can enter either an IP address or if you know the network interface “id” (more below), then even if you don’t know your current IP address, once given the network interface…

PulseAudio is the default sound server used in Ubuntu these days (including many other GNU/Linux distributions). Although I usually end up having troubles with it thus I just use ALSA instead. But many like it for its versatile features. Anyhow, as a quick tip, if you ever encounter troubles with PulseAudio and wanted to restart the PA Daemon in Ubuntu or any distribution that uses PA, you can simply open your Terminal and enter the below command, and it should solve some of those issues (hopefully). pulseaudio -k After issuing the command in Ubuntu you should see the audio icon…

While reading PDF files, I’m sure that you’ve come across those that have unnecessary white spaces between the beginning and the end of each individual page. One of the drawbacks of having these white spaces is that they force you to do unnecessary scrolling while reading. So best solution is to crop it out and most of the time those spaces are equally spread out in each page. In those cases, a tool like “PDF-Quench” can come in real handy as it lets you easily crop pages. You can define the cropping area using your mouse for a single page…

Even if you use highest quality materials and storing methods there’s still no guarantee against data corruption because shi* just happens :/. Although having a quality optical storage media devices such as CD/DVD (or even Blu-ray in today’s standards) do help and by using them with a utility like DvdDisaster can add even more durability. But tools like ‘DvdDisaster’ can do very little if your optical discs are already in a bad state and your only hope is to use some sort of a data recovery tool. If you use Ubuntu then you can try ‘SafeCopy’. It is based on…

When it comes with dealing with file copy & move operations in Ubuntu Linux the built in tool (Nautilus file manager) does a decent job. And in Ubuntu even if it couldn’t copy the full content of a file, it’ll still save the partially copied content where Windows would simply delete it. But if you usually deal with a lot of mass file copying & moving operations then having a dedicated utility does makes sense as it lets you somewhat automate the task (by letting you add files to a queue for instance) and comes with additional features. So if…

“Metadata” is a certain type of data that hold some key information about a file. When considering the file’s integrity, they’re not always terribly important (they are sometimes!). For instance, when you click on an audio file in a music manager, it shows you a lot of data about it such as the Artist, Album name, Year, Genre, Comments etc. It’s the metadata of that audio file that holds those information. So even if the meta data is somewhat corrupted, most of the time the audio should work but metadata has few varieties and depending on the file’s type, the…

Matroska is an extremely powerful and features rich multimedia container format. It’s completely free and supports a huge number of codecs (audio/video) and many other advanced features that aren’t even supported by some of the premium, proprietary container formats. It’s also known for its robustness, because unlike many other formats (the old and troublesome “avi” for instance) it has a very low content corruption rate. From storing into a lot of codecs (MPEG, Windows audio/video, H263, H264, Xvid, Divx, MP3, OGG Vorbis, Flac, AAC etc) to multiple stream support, adding subtitles plus it even supports “menus”, like with the Vob…

You can find a lot of dictionaries in Ubuntu but some are a little bit difficult to setup. So if you’re looking for a easy to use and easy to setup dictionary then ‘GoldenDict’ is well worth trying. I’ve been using it for sometime now and extremely happy with its features and usability. It’s a fully open-source project and a cross-platform tool that runs in GNU/Linux, MS Windows and Mac OSX. Main features … *. Simple interface with a search box to your left, content in the middle and available dictionaries to the right side, just perfect ;-). *. Supports…

Some even say that the GNU/Linux desktop is about to have a paradigm shift but personally I don’t believe that at all. Though KDE seems like a conservative one but Gnome has always been ‘Gnome’ and it’s difficult believe a change is coming any time sooner. Anyway, as a Windows user I’ve always been frustrated with the Gnome desktop, specially because I find its context menu (in both Nautilus and the desktop) to be extremely simple. Apart from other options it lacks the ‘refresh’ feature and in the early days it used to drive me mad :). One way to…

Because in GNU/Linux Hashsum or checksum calculating tools usually come installed with the OS, if you know your way around the command-line then calculating or verifying a file’s integrity isn’t that difficult. By since I just wrote about a Checksum generator, I thought giving you another tool (GUI) for checking Checksums would make sense too :). Sigma Informatics offers a free Checksum calculator and a varifier called “HashCalc” that can be used in GNU/Linux, MS Windows and Mac OSX . It’s actually a portable app and once extracted, you can take in anywhere too. . Main features… *. Supports Hash…

Ubuntu and many other GNU/Linux distributions nowadays use the Pulse Audio sound server because of its versatile features. Although my sound card never had that much luck with Pulse Audio because when the audio output is “amplified” by Pulse, it just mutes my audio outputs. Not just because of that and there are other reasons but I personally still am quite fond of the old and stable “ALSA” :). But I’m pretty sure Pulse audio is doing an awesome job for you. Anyway, Ubuntu comes with a built in graphical utility for adjusting PulseAudio based settings easily. But there exists…