I’ve recently been corresponding with Denny Dias, from Brazil, who’s converted his blog over to Pelican - and we’ve been helping each other out a bit with building themes and whatnot.

He’s written up his conversion & theme building process - and was generous enough to credit me after he borrowed some of my theme’s logic, from this blog’s GitHub repo.

As he’s such a nice guy - and as I’ve just borrowed his tagsort jinja filter for my blog’s tag page, I though I’d return the favour - cheers Deny! :)

I recently needed to convert some FLAC music files from the increasingly common 48 bit encoding, down to 16 bit at 44100 kHz, so that they’ll play on my Sonos. Here’s how to do it:

If you don’t already have sox installed, do this to install it:

$ sudo apt-get install sox

Then run this to do the conversion, in the folder with music in:

$ mkdir resampled
$ for flac in *.flac; do sox -S "${flac}" -r 44100 -b 16 ./resampled/"${flac}"; done

And that’s it - it will convert all the .flac files in that folder to 16 bit at 44100 kHz and put the result into the ./resampled subfolder, preserving the metadata.

A trip report from our Canada Day 2013 long weekend kayak camping trip to Thormanby Islands, Smuggler Cove & Secret Cove, on the sunshine coast.

Thunar - XFCE & XUbuntu’s small but perfectly formed file manager - has a simple mechanism that allows you to easily add new commands to the right click menu of files and folders. These are called Custom Actions and are easy to create…​ here’s how to do it.

Click the Edit menu, then click ‘Configure custom actions…​‘. This will take you to the Custom Actions Manager, where you can create, edit or delete your custom actions.

You can enter anything into the command box, including complex bash scripts, names of scripts or executables on the PATH, or the full path and filename of the command you want to run.

On the ‘Appearance Conditions‘ tab, you tell Thunar when you want your item to appear in the right click menu:

reddit, the insanely popular internet community, had 71,435,935 unique visitors last month, with over 2,360,783 people logged in [1].

I say people - but it turns out that not all the denizens of reddit are human. There are also bots. Lots and lots of bots. How many? No-one really knows. [2]

This is an interesting and somewhat shadowy facet of the otherwise very public reddit community, so I thought I’d take a closer look…​

Seemingly like everything else in the world, Stack Overflow is getting more & more competitive as time passes. Gaining a good reputation - and even finding good questions to answer - is becoming harder and harder, as more and more people compete for less and less unanswered questions.

This is fantastic if you want to find an answer - but makes it much harder for newcomers to get started and build a reputation on the site.

This guide will help you jump-start your reputation on StackOverflow and help you get more out of the site.

How to find questions you can answer

Ignored & Favourite Tags

Use the no answers page, the …

I switched my XFCE machines over to use Compton for window compositing today - and it’s a noticeable improvement.

A compositor glues your stacks of windows together to form the final image that you see on screen. It’s responsible for any fancy effects like drop-shadows, as well drawing windows while dragging, resizing and minimizing or maximizing them. [1]

Compton does this beautifully. It does one thing and it does it well. It provides glassy smooth, tear free compositing and supports a few tasteful effects - drop shadows, fades and transparency.

I stumbled across this while searching for something else and found a great guide in the NeoWin forums [2], where most of this info comes from, so thanks ViperAFK.

Switch off the existing compositor

You’ll need to switch of any existing compositing you’ve got running, otherwise this won …