Author: Gayan

Computers are still pretty dumb (as far as I know :D) and still suck while trying to do things like interacting using human languages for instance. But there are certain fields that computers have shown pretty interesting “capabilities” too. The text to voice/speech conversions is a great example. If you’re willing to pay some decent amount of money and use Windows or Mac OS X, then there are pretty awesome proprietary text to speech engines available. They may not be as advanced as some of those premium (and proprietary ones) tool, but there are few noteworthy open source projects too.…

The system monitoring utility that comes with Ubuntu is a GUI tool and it is pretty good too. But if you’re a system administrator or a user who usually hangs around the Terminal or the command-line, then wouldn’t it be nice to type a command from same command-line window and open a system monitor without having to “switch over” to the mouse? If that’s so then you should check out this one called “nmon” (stands for Nigel’s Monitor). From real time system monitoring to saving the data for later analysis (can be useful for measuring the average system loads, power…

Unlike with MS Windows, by default, GNU/Linux comes with excellent built in tools for optical disc burning, such as Brasero or GnomeBaker if you use Ubuntu. But if you’re a power user then you’d be disappointed by them both because they don’t let us change advanced options such as disk buffer size, over burning, create bootable disks etc. If you’re willing to pay few bucks and okay with using a proprietary software, then the famous Nero has a version of its own for GNU/Linux which is worth trying. In recent years Nero has become a complete disk burning suite plus…

If you’re looking for a singe installer that will make sure that you’ll be able to play almost all known codecs to mankind 🙂 (I’m serious though!) plus at the same time that doesn’t cost you anything at all, then K-Lite Codec pack is the one to call for. K-Lite is a partially open source codec pack as most of its codecs taken from the open source multimedia codec library known as “ffmpeg”. K-Lite also has a multimedia player of its own too, though it looks a lot like the old MS Media player classic (in fact it uses the…

Data encryption is one of the best ways of protecting your sensitive data from data thefts and other security vulnerabilities. And normally data encryption can be divided into two main categories. Either into Hardware encryption (independent of the OS because the encrypting tool is located on a physical chip) or Software encryption (runs on top of the OS). Some say Hardware encryption is better than the Software version but others disagree. Hardware encryption might have a an advantage of being a bit faster (the encryption process) because that hardware is designed and optimized for that task. But then again these…

Mostly due to Audio CDs, Microsoft’s proprietary audio format known as “WAVE” is still heavily used. It maybe a proprietary format and has its own limitations but it does have the ability to hold quality audio streams nonetheless. But what if have one of those low quality Wav files (due to a bad recording device?) or what if it has higher audio levels that disrupts the output?, What can you do in those situations? Well, most of the time you’ll never be able fix some of these issues (such as bad recordings) because the source file is ‘bad’ to begin…

Sound server is a piece of software that “delivers” audio data (signal) from an audio rendering app (multimedia player or any other similar software) to an audio output device such as a sound card. It runs as a system service and works as the “middle man” between the OS audio driver and the physical hardware. Not that long ago (like 6-5 years ago I think) GNU/Linux had troubles playing simultaneous audio outputs where other platforms such as MS Windows had this capability even as for as with Win 95!. There are few primary sound servers in GNU/Linux such as OSS,…

If have a big image collection then one of the best ways to enjoy them is to create a slideshow. And every slideshow is sort of a “movie” (since videos are nothing but fast moving pictures) but unlike with a usual video file, a slideshow lets us enjoy each picture individually as plays them very slowly. Now, almost all the modern image managers that comes with major OS platforms do have the ability to let us view pictures as slidshows but most of them cannot let us create one that plays without the need of a special software (like putting…

If you haven’t heard then “ffmpegthumbnailer” is an awesome little tool that uses the faster and more efficient FFmpeg multimedia library to help Nautilus file manager create video thumbnails faster than Totem does. Now Totem is based on Gstreamer framework and I don’t know whether it’s Totem or Gstreamer to blame here but you can make Nautilus create video thumbnails under GNU/Linux (Ubuntu in this case) a hell lot faster than Totem does!. But here’s the thing. The method that was used in Ubuntu 11.04 to replace Totem’s entries with ffmpegthumbnailer don’t work in Ubuntu 11.10 since it’s based on…

Chrome OS Linux is a completely separate project from the original Google Chrome OS. Although they both “revolve” around the Chrome web browser, yet the Chrome OS Linux is an independent GNU/Linux distribution build on the OpenSuse distribution. According to her developers, the aim is to develop a lightweight operating system (with an emphasis on giving  a quality web browsing experience) that should run quite fast even on the older hardware where recent desktop “shift” is focused on “fancy” graphics and all that and they’re struggling to run properly even on never hardware (especially GPU) due to some driver incompatibilities.…

Amarok without a doubt is one of the best free and cross-platform music players and is also one of the major components of the KDE desktop environment. It supports few multimedia frameworks (Gstreamer/Phonon and player engines such as Xine), has  beautiful UI design, lets you easily manage “big” music collections … what can I say, it rocks!. But, to be honest I haven’t used it in a while because I’m drifted towards Gnome and their applications because I use Ubuntu and in Ubuntu which is primarily build on Gnome, when you try to install Amarok, it requires some decent amount…

This is another post for the Ubuntu newbies since the average users do know this :). If you’re ‘greeted’ with low disk space warning messages in Ubuntu which can be both annoying and might even slow down your PC for few seconds while loading the desktop and want to know how to disable them, then follow the below steps. Now, you can either do this when that message arrives and clicking on “don’t show this again” check box which should disable it only for that particular partition. Or you can completely disable this for all your disks or partitions by using the…