понеделник, 18 февруари 2013 г.

No streaming in Second Life

Not that I'm such a fan, but I do enter Second Life every once in a while. And for a long long time, I didn't have streaming, which meant very boring clubbing experience. Today I finally fixed it. I followed the instructions given here:
1. nano .secondlife-install/secondlife
2. UNCOMMENT the following entries (i.e. remove the # in the beginning) so that you have :
export LL_BAD_OPENAL_DRIVER=x

## - Avoids using the FMOD ESD audio driver.
export LL_BAD_FMOD_ESD=x
## - Avoids using the FMOD OSS audio driver.
 export LL_BAD_FMOD_OSS=x
And save (Ctrl+O)
Then, after restarting the client, I had music! Yay!

четвъртък, 14 февруари 2013 г.

Visualization in Amarok

Who would have thought that something so simple in Windows would be that complicated in Linux. So, yesterday, while listening to a quite nice song, I decided I wanted visualization desperately. I tried some script for Amarok involving buffer sample, but it kept on giving me an error. So I started digging and I came up with a solution. It's called Project M.
$sudo equo install libvisual libprojectm libvisual-projectm libprojectm-qt projectm-pulseaudio
I think those are the packages needed in order for Project M to run. Or they are what I have installed on my PC.
After installing, you can find Project M Pulse in your start menu. Now, don't think you'll have the normal winamp options - you wont. Or at least I haven't found them yet. But it's pretty and colorful. And it moves. :)

четвъртък, 7 февруари 2013 г.

How to reduce the size of a pdf

I needed to send a pdf, and it turned out way to big. Well, it was big, no doubt, since it consisted of 3 high-quality pictures, but anyway.
So, here's what I did.
$pdf2ps file.pdf file.ps
$ps2pdf file.ps file_.pdf
And the pdf got like 3 times smaller. Which was good. 

Essentially, you can achieve the same by opening the pdf in Okular and doing a print to pdf - this is how I did it the first time. 

There is, of course, the longer option: 

$gs -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf

where you can replace "/screen" with "/ebook", "/printer" or "/prepress" for higher quality (/screen being the worst, /prepress - the best). But if you increase the quality, the pdf will remain BIG. And for once, we want it smaller. :)


convert -density 180x180 -quality 50 -compress jpeg Mercadona_Shtereva.pdf Mercadona.pdf