How to shrink PDFs

Sometimes a PDF document you’ve created is several megabytes in size due to high resolution images. This may cause problems when you want to send this PDF via email if the attachement’s size is limited by your email provider. There is a way you can reduce the file size of an existing PDF without having to render it again with low resolution images.

How to create a video DVD with command line tools

Maybe you know this scenario: You’ve been invited to a family get-together and you take some videos of the most memorable events. Afterwards a family member comes to you and says: “I’ve seen you recording this and that. Could you give it to me on DVD?”. As a matter of fact, you can easily create a video DVD of any video you have recorded with just a view command lines.

How to use a remote firewire port and transcode DV video locally with ffmpeg

I recently moved into another appartment and found some old VHS tapes I recorded years ago. As luck would have it, I got my hands on a VCR and a MiniDV camcorder with builtin ADC, so I can get analog video signals into the MiniDV camcorder. So all I needed was a computer with firewire or IEEE1394 port. The only computer I have that still has a firewire port is my server, so I hooked the VCR to the MiniDV and the MiniDV to my server.

How to add a hard disk to hddtemp and read the temperature

Hddtemp is an application for reading the temperature sensor of hard disks with S.M.A.R.T support. In case the software doesn’t recognize your hard disks sensor, but you are sure that your disk has one and is also S.M.A.R.T enabled, you can manually add the correct parameters for your disk to the hddtemp database. I will show this based on my INTEL 530 Series mSATA Solid-State drive in the second part of this post, .

How to use your iPod Shuffle in Linux

In this article I will describe the probably best way to use your first or second generation iPod Shuffle in Linux. The described method is based on a python script called rebuild_db. The script will allow you to simply copy/paste music files to your iPod like to any other regular MP3-Player. In case you have a different or newer version of the iPod, the described method may not work for you and you should try using gtkPod instead.

How to enable and use Wake on LAN

In this article I will describe how to enable Wake-on-LAN (WOL) and how to use it to start-up a system remotely. In order to use Wake-on-LAN your systems hardware and network driver needs to actually support this technology. You will also need to know the MAC address of the systems ethernet card.

How to use an SSH connection as a SOCKS proxy

In this article I will describe how to use an SSH connection as a SOCKS proxy. This basically means that you can route the network traffic of any application or even your entire systems traffic through an SSH connection.

How to trim disk images to partition size

I’ve recently been playing with my Raspberry Pi and Arch Linux when I encountered the following problem:

I’ve downloaded the Arch Linux image from the Raspberry Pi download page and used dd to copy it to a 8GB SD card.

How to mark books as read in Calibre

In this article I will describe how to mark/flag books you have already read in Calibre. Calibre is probably one of the best open source E-book library management application out there. It comes with many great tools and features and it’s easy to customize. By default there is no prebuild possibility to mark books you have already read in your library, but that’s where Calibres possibilities of customization come in handy. You can achieve this by simply adding a new column to your library. Just follow these simple steps:

How to make screencasts with FFmpeg

FFmpeg is able to use audio and video streams from many different sources. In order to record a screencast, you can use the x11grab input module for recording an X screen and the alsa input module for audio recording.