Category: software

Link: Useful FFmpeg Commands

FFmpeg is an extremely powerful and versatile command line tool for converting audio and video files. It is free and available for Windows, Mac and Linux machines. Whether you want to join two video files, extract the audio component from a video file, convert your video into an animated GIF, FFmpeg can do it all and even more.

Full article here:
Useful FFmpeg Commands (Digital Inspiration)
Related: OS X installers (second line below contains link to newer version at this writing):
Run ffmpeg On Mac Without Compiling Anything (peppoj.net) (UPDATE to this article)
FFmpeg installer for OS X (Rudix)

Link: Managing the Exif Data on Your Photos From the Command Line [Linux]

ImageMagick is a suite of tools for Linux which allows you to manipulate images from the command line. The “convert” command allows you to perform image conversions and image transformations; however, there are several other tools included in the suite, some of which allow you to work with the Exif data in JPEG photos.

Full article here:
Managing the Exif Data on Your Photos From the Command Line [Linux] (Make Tech Easier)

Link: Get hardware information on Linux with lshw command

Lshw is a nifty small command line utility that generates detailed reports about various hardware components on the system. It does so by reading different files in the /proc directory.

Lshw is capable of reporting memory configuration, firmware version, mainboard configuration, CPU version and speed, cache configuration, bus speed etc.

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Lshw also comes with a gui frontend called lshw-gtk that reports the same information in a minimal graphical user interface. Here is a screenshot.

NOTE: Some Linux distributions may already have a tool similar to this, that is installed during the initial installation of the operating system.

Full article here:
Get hardware information on Linux with lshw command (BinaryTides)
Related:
Basic troubleshooting commands in linux (Webkul)
2 GUI tools to check hardware information in Linux (Linux and Life)

Link: Best Alternative App Stores for Linux

The concept of app stores, though popularized by Apple, followed by Android, has been around for a long time. In fact, Linuxians know that it was in the penguinian world of software that the concept of app store basically originated. A software housing a collection of apps stored in a convenient location was something Linux users have loved and still love.

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That said, if you are an Ubuntu user, you probably must have gotten tired of using Ubuntu Software Center already. It’s clean, sleek, and does what it says on the tin; however, as a FOSS enthusiast you might be looking for something different. If that’s the case, then we have for you a list of alternative app stores for Linux that will help you get the software you need instantly.

Full article here:
Best Alternative App Stores for Linux (TechSource)

Link: Command Line Tools to Monitor Linux Performance

It’s really very tough job for every System or Network administrator to monitor and debug Linux System Performance problems every day. After being a Linux Administrator for 5 years in IT industry, I came to know that how hard is to monitor and keep systems up and running. For this reason, we’ve compiled the list of Top 15 frequently used command line monitoring tools that might be useful for every Linux/Unix System Administrator. These commands are available under all flavors of Linux and can be useful to monitor and find the actual causes of performance problem. This list of commands shown here are very enough for you to pick the one that is suitable for your monitoring scenario.

Full article here:
Command Line Tools to Monitor Linux Performance (KBTechWorld)

Link: How To Install & Configure BIND9 on Raspbian Wheezy

About BIND9

BIND is the most widely used DNS system on the internet, on Unix like operating systems its the de facto standard. Originally written by four graduate students at the Computer Systems Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB), the name originates as an acronym from Berkeley Internet Name Domain, reflecting the application’s use within UCB. BIND 9 was released in September 2000.

Raspbian is an unofficial port of Debian wheezy armhf with compilation settings adjusted to produce code that uses “hardware floating point”, the “hard float” ABI and will run on the Raspberry Pi.

Full article here:
How To Install & Configure BIND9 on Raspbian Wheezy (Sam Culley)

Install this kernel driver so OS X can monitor the S.M.A.R.T. diagnostic data for external drives

EDIT: Sorry to say that it appears this no longer works in MacOS. Every time Apple upgrades MacOS, things that formerly worked perfectly seem to break, and this program is one of those things that apparently no longer works. The code is available on GitHub, so if you care and if you are a programmer, maybe you can fork and fix it.

If you use OS X and have ever gone into Disk Utility, you may have noticed that OS X cannot monitor the S.M.A.R.T. status of external drives connected via USB or Firewire. To fix that, all you need do is install this kernel driver:

S.M.A.R.T. for USB and FireWire Drives (MacUpdate)

S.M.A.R.T. Status - VerifiedAt the time we are writing this article, there are two versions available, “Stable” version 0.8 and “Beta” version 0.9. We went ahead and installed the 0.9 beta on a system running OS X Mavericks. At first, when we fired up Disk Utility and looked at our external drives, it didn’t appear that the driver had worked — it still showed “S.M.A.R.T. Status : Not Supported” for each of the drives. But then we discovered the secret — after installing the driver, you must unmount each of your external drives, then power cycle them. That is, actually disconnect the power to each drive for a few seconds, then reconnect it. When it powers back up, OS X should automatically detect and remount it, and then if your drive is supported, you should see “S.M.A.R.T. Status : Verified” for that drive in Disk Utility.  It is NOT sufficient to unmount and remount the drive, you must power cycle it. Alternately, a full system reboot would likely also work.

Unfortunately, this driver will not work with all external drives. The project page (where the source code is available) notes:

This is a kernel driver for Mac OS X external USB or FireWire drives. It extends the standard driver behaviour by providing access to drive SMART data. The interface to SMART data is same as with ATA family driver, so most existing applications should work.

The driver requires a SAT (SCSI ATA Translation) capable external drive enclosure. The driver should work with Snow Leopard and Lion and Mountain Lion. People have reported problems with Lion and Encrypted volumes. Some enclosures are reported to work with FireWire but not with USB. The driver is not compatible to WD Drive Manager, or enclosures with custom kernel extensions.

As noted above, we installed the 0.9 beta version on a system running Mavericks, and it appears to be working great, so they probably should add that to the list. We have three Western Digital external drives connected, and the driver is working for all three. We suspect it will work with most consumer-grade external USB drives. However, if you buy your own external drive enclosure and mount an internal drive in it, then the chances that it will work are probably a bit lower. If it doesn’t work for you, or for some other reason you want to remove it from your system, simply enter the following two commands from a terminal window:

sudo rm -r /System/Library/Extensions/SATSMARTDriver.kext
sudo rm -r /System/Library/Extensions/SATSMARTLib.plugin

and then reboot your system.

It’s great to be able to check the S.M.A.R.T. status of your external drives right from the OS X disk utility. Apple should purchase the code from the author of this project, make any necessary tweaks to ensure that it is stable, and include it by default in upgrades and future versions of OS X!

Link: 18 commands to monitor network bandwidth on Linux server

This post mentions some linux command line tools that can be used to monitor the network usage. These tools monitor the traffic flowing through network interfaces and measure the speed at which data is currently being transferred. Incoming and outgoing traffic is shown separately.

Some of the commands, show the bandwidth used by individual processes. This makes it easy to detect a process that is overusing network bandwidth.

The tools have different mechanisms of generating the traffic report. Some of the tools like nload read the “/proc/net/dev” file to get traffic stats, whereas some tools use the pcap library to capture all packets and then calculate the total size to estimate the traffic load.

Full article here:
18 commands to monitor network bandwidth on Linux server (BinaryTides)

Link: 5 of the Best Code Editor Apps for Your Mac

Is programming your profession or passion? No matter what category of programmers you belong to, you will need a tool to write down your programming code. If you take a look at the apps available to do coding, you will find that there are many, and choosing the one that will fulfill your needs seems to be quite a difficult task. Here, we have come to the rescue of those of you who are looking for some of the best code editor apps for Macs. Go ahead and get started with coding using the tools listed below.

Full article here:
5 of the Best Code Editor Apps for Your Mac (Make Tech Easier)

Link: 5 Free Tools that Let You Edit PDF Files

Isn’t it really annoying when you have a PDF file that you need to modify or change? Actually going into the PDF and changing it requires a slew of expensive Adobe software that, quite frankly, very few people can legally afford. I am not a proponent of illegally downloading software – especially Adobe’s expensive software – so I have compiled a list of my five favorite tools that let you openly edit PDF files.

Full article here:
5 Free Tools that Let You Edit PDF Files (Make Tech Easier)

Note: Some of the suggestions in the above article are Windows-only. If you run OS X, you could try running one of the Windows-based programs, or use one of the “Universal” solutions in the above-mentioned article. Alternately, here is a somewhat dated article that may offer some additional suggestions, and note that Preview (which comes with all recent versions of OS X) has the ability to edit unprotected PDF files. If you run Linux, you could try PDFEdit or some other editing tool.