How to bulk convert FLAC to MP3 at the command line
Sometimes you just gotta break out the console if you want to do big jobs with a minimum of time involved. Here's how to convert FLAC files into MP3
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Bulk Converting M4A files to MP3
Let's say you suddenly realize some of your older music collection is in the wrong format. Everything is organized into folders for albums, etc. and you don't want to have to go into every subdirectory and individually convert the files. Here's a little bash script for you. Place this in the top level directory of the tree you want to convert and it will bulk convert all m4a files into mp3 files. It's an easy way to convert all the files in a specific tree and could easily be modified for different file formats.
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SSH Hostname Autocompletion
Do you use SSH quite a bit, and grow tired of typing in the machine names each time? There's an easy fix for that!
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Formatting Large USB Sticks for MP3 Use
A lot of newer vehicles have USB sockets for plugging in your music collection. The default FAT32 format that Ubuntu does in the disk manager just doesn't cut it. In many cases, the vehicle may not even be able to read a stick formatted with the default Ubuntu method.
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Finding Packet Loss
Finding Packet loss on a large wide network or within your ISP's network can be difficult. Generally the cause of packet loss is bad hardware or lines at a specific location, or an oversaturated network. Since most pathways on the internet will require 10 hops or more, figuring out which hop is troublesome can be difficult.
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Testing Flash Cards
With today's digital devices using larger and larger memory cards, particularly with cameras it's a good idea to put new cards through the wringer before you use them. Better to find out before shooting your kid's birthday party that the card is bad, rather than finding out during, or worse, after.
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Simple Changes To Secure an Ubuntu Deskop
When you talk about desktop security there's a lot that can be discussed: user permissions, firewalls, etc. Here's a little step that gets overlooked quite a bit, but can go a long way to preventing a direct attack against your destkops. In Ubuntu Desktop, you can deploy custom Gnome settings that override the defaults by dropping an XML file at: /etc/gconf/gconf.xml.mandatory/%gconf-tree.xml I use Puppet to deploy these settings to all of my Linux desktops. If you're from the Windows world, this is like using group policy, but with much more granular control. Here's a sample of a few things you should change:
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Changing a Linux Server Partitions With a GUI
Continuing my "avoid the console" series, I'm going to cover remotely managing partitions on a Linux server. Yes, this will involve a bit of console, but this will set you on a path to using GUI tools on your servers without having to install a complete windowing environment. Installing a complete desktop-like environment is a waste of resources for most servers, so keeping things to a minimum helps to streamline and allow your servers to do more things with less hardware.
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Disabling USB Storage in Ubuntu for Security
For security reasons, many businesses are completely disabling USB storage devices on the computers at work. Particularly if you are like me and work with healthcare information, it's doubly important that not only no one can bring in a virus, but that they also can't leave with any private information. In Linux the risk of viruses are small to nonexistent, however USB sticks automatically mount for reading and writing regardless. There's an easy way in recent Ubuntu distributions to disable USB storage devices. Simply blacklist the kernel driver: sudo echo "blacklist usb-storage" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf After that, nobody can use a USB memory stick in that computer, but still allows the administrator(s) to manually load the module and use it. I'll be giving more enterprise Linux tips in the near future if all goes well.
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Bulk Renaming MP3's
I have a small collection of MP3's that I ripped over the years from various CD's using multiple applications. One of the biggest annoyances is that the programs I used to rip these has changed over the years and no two applications have used the same naming scheme.
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