Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Audio, Video Editing, Converting, Batch Processing
First of all, I converted usual audio tapes to mp3. I used a simple stero cable to convert and transfer to my computer. Then, using Audacity softwere, I processed the audio files.
With videos, first I changed the names at once using KRename software. The software is also good to change names if you have hundreds of pictures and you can give your files sensible names in a minute.
Then I converted these mp4 videos to mpg by using software ffmpeg.
ffmpeg -i your_video_file -ac 1 -ar 22050 -s 320x240 output.mpg
To batch process all the videos at once, I used the following script.
#!/bin/sh
for f in *.mp4; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -ac 1 -ar 22050 -s 320x240 "${f%.mp4}.mpg"; done
Save it as a script and give permission on the file:
sudo chmod +x
That's it!
For processing videos, Pitivi Video Editor is a great free software.
Friday, February 04, 2011
Nepal, Electricity: The Power Crisis
One of the Nepal's top television networks, Kantipur Television has used only a kerosene (paraffin) lantern to light its 30-minute-long 7pm news bulletin. (source: BBC)River-driven, hydro stations around Nepal are not overhauled in time. Due to insufficient rain, Kulekhani reservoir is running out of water and both of turbines there are not in a working order. The destruction of import lines from India because of last August's flooding in southern Nepal also added to the problem. Most of all, it seems there is lack of planning to tackle this major problem.
I also read before that the NEA was preparing to hike the electricity tariff by 30 percent and also said that the country will continue to reel under power cuts for six to seven more years and in this dry season, the duration of load-shedding will be up to 14 hours a day.However, to my surprise, Uttar Kumar Shrestha, MD, Nepal Electricity Authority recently said, " After five years, Nepal will not have any power cuts." I hope what he says is true and Nepal won't become a land of the blackout permanently.
Friday, November 12, 2010
Jlime for Nanonote
Jlime in Nanonote
(source: www.jlime.com) The current image brings a X Environment, Matchbox window and desktop manager, and several useful applications (video player, music player, image viewer, text editor, terminal, pdf viewer, dictionary, games….)
Desktop DOCUMENTATION
root password : root
Shortcuts to control the Desktop
ALT+F1 : Hide all windows and focus desktop ALT+F2 : Move backwards between windows immediately ALT+F3 : Move between windows immediately ALT+F4 : Close a window
KEEP THIS LIST OF SHORTCUTS ON HAND! :) or you will have to reboot your system when some application runs fullscreen and you don't know what to press.
Number keys: fn key + number.
Vol keys react as Page up/down on X. But for video player and music player these work as Volume.
NETWORKING
Your muffinman system have already configured its usb0 network interface (IP 192.168.1.202).
Example to set your usb0 on your Linux PC:
ifconfig usb0 192.168.1.200 // set pc usb0 ip, to give your host an IP address which is in the same subnet as your NanoNote.
To review that, you can use ifconfig as well
$ ifconfig usb0
and should get the following:
usb0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 71:BF:F1:B2:8A:E8
inet addr:192.168.1.200 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:5998 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:7357 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:357275 (348.9 Kb) TX bytes:9340199 (8.9 Mb)
Modify /etc/network/interfaces as below:
$ sudo gedit /etc/network/interfaces
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
auto usb0
iface usb0 inet static
address 192.168.1.200
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.254.0
up iptables -A POSTROUTING -t nat -j MASQUERADE -s 192.168.254.0/24 &
up echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward &
up iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT &
down iptables -D POSTROUTING -t nat -j MASQUERADE -s 192.168.254.0/24 &
$ sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart
Do the following to enable internet on the Nanonote
You will most likely need to replace the /etc/resolv.conf nameservers on your nanonote with the proper ones (just use the ones inside your pc's /etc/resolv.conf).
In Nanonote, do following:
Jlime$ cat /etc/resolv.conf
nameserver 10.48.49.25
nameserver 10.32.52.21
Jlime$ route add default gw 192.168.1.200
Now, your Jlime system has internet connection.
After this configuration, next time you boot your Nanonote, you can ssh to Nanonote directly.
PACKAGE MANAGEMENT
NEW!. Now there is a new tool to install packages. It is a script to avoid the swap problems with opkg. The name is jlime-pkg
opkg is already configured to use Jlime repositories.
After you have gotten your internet connection going, its time to grab an list of available packages.
opkg update <-- syncs package database
Examples of actions:
jlime-pkg search<-- will search some package. Example: jlime-pkg search game jlime-pkg install bash <--will download and install bash opkg remove bash <--will remove bash from your nanonote
So use jlime-pkg to search and install packages. Use opkg to update and remove packages.
SET DATE and TIME
Use date and hwclock commands.
For example (we are setting 31th of August 2010, at 20:00pm):
date -s 20100831
date -s 20:00 hwclock -w
SHUTDOWN - REBOOT
Use the power ON/OFF button to shutdown the device, always..
APPLICATIONS USAGE
If you want to see/play your files easily:
Copy the video files under ~/videos/
Copy the music files under ~/music/
Copy the image files under ~/image/
For text files and other kind of formats use ~/documents/
To transfer file:
Password is 'root'. Jlime$ ls
documents images music videos
To transfer PC_FILE to documents folder:
$ scp PC_FILE root@192.168.254.101:~/documents
To copy NANONOTE_FILE FROM documents folder to you computer:
$ scp root@192.168.254.101:~/documents/NANONOTE_FILE ./
VIDEO PLAYER
Video player is MPlayer.
Keys:
q : quit
o : OSD ON/OFF
0,9 : Volume (+ + )
arrows : backward/forward
space : pause
HOW TO ENCODE : In order to watch 320×240 videos encode your videos on PC with :
ffmpeg -i your_video_file -ac 1 -ar 22050 -s 320x240 output.mpg
scp output.mpg root@192.168.1.202:
(And then use the video player.)
MUSIC PLAYER
Music player is GMU. Their usage is pretty easy because there is a help at bottom. Main keys :
Keys:
ALT+ENTER : quit
TAB : move between playlist/file selector/etc
IMAGE VIEWER
Image Viewer shows the image files under ~/images/ folder. You can browse them using arrows. “Q key” quits.
DESKTOP LOOK AND FEEL
Muffinman is fully theme-able, because it uses both, Matchbox Window Manager and Matchbox Desktop.
If you want to replace the WALLPAPER, just replace the /etc/muffinman-extras/wallpaper.png file with your wallpaper.png file.
To modify the theme, icons and folders just read the Matchbox Desktop and Window Manager documentation
It is easy, because Matchbox, like others Linux Desktop/Window Managers, uses freedesktop.org specifications.
How to RECORD and PLAY sound files (using mic/speaker)
You can use the “Audio Recorder” application on Desktop. But, if you need manual settings or work done follow the below instructions.
In order to record, the device's “capture” switch must be set. To do so, run alsamixer (Audio Settings), select your microphone (maybe you need to press TAB) and press space. Something like…
CAPTUR L R
should appear. Set the level of the Mic there with arrow keys :33% is okey for good quality.
Then we record a while using the mic with (CD quality, 8 seconds, wav) :
arecord -d 8 -f cd -t wav test.wav
Then listen your file with :
aplay test.wav
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Installing LAMP, Mediawiki in Ubuntu
sudo apt-get install tasksel
sudo tasksel
And select LAMP Server
During the installation you will be asked to insert the mysql root password. Make sure you record your MySQL root superuser name and superuser password that you will create at installation. You will need it later.
(Each of the components (Apache2, MySQL5, and PHP) can also be installed individually, if you wish.)
To full manage your lamp Server database, install phpmyadmin
sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin
Please choose the web server that should be automatically configured to run phpMyAdmin.
Web server to reconfigure automatically: [ ] apache2
To login to phpmyadmin, open browser and type :
http://ip/phpmyadmin or http://localhost/phpmyadmin
Install MediaWiki
Install the package:
sudo apt-get install mediawiki
Optionally install add-ons:
sudo apt-get install imagemagick mediawiki-math php5-gd
Enable MediaWiki by editing the following file and remove the '#' from the third line so that it reads 'Alias /mediawiki /var/lib/mediawiki':
sudo nano /etc/mediawiki/apache.conf
Then restart apache:
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
Start your MediaWiki
http://localhost/mediawiki
Follow the setup instructions.
Friday, October 22, 2010
Cisco VPN in Ubuntu 10.10
1. Install vpnc.
sudo apt-get install vpnc
# Get the cisco decrypt programwget http://www.debuntu.org/files/cisco-decrypt.c
# Get the dependencies needed for itsudo apt-get install libgcrypt11-dev
# Compile it into a binarygcc -Wall -o cisco-decrypt cisco-decrypt.c $(libgcrypt-config –libs –cflags)
chmod +x cisco-decrypt
# Move it to a place in our pathsudo cp cisco-decrypt /usr/bin
2. Download the pcf2vpnc perl script.
wget http://svn.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/vpnc/trunk/
or, wget http://svn.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/vpnc/trunk/pcf2vpnc
or, wherever you can find it!
3. Make the script executable.
chmod +x pcf2vpnc
sudo cp pcf2vpnc /usr/bin
4. Convert your .pcf files to work with vpnc.
# Run the converter, which will call the decrypt program./pcf2vpnc cisco.pcf > cisco.conf
5. Copy your new .conf files to /etc/vpnc.
sudo cp cisco.conf /etc/vpnc/
6. Connect using vpnc.
sudo vpnc-connect cisco
Then I got this error:
vpnc-connect: Error binding to source port. Try '--local-port 0'
Failed to bind to 0.0.0.0:500: Address already in use.
So, I tried:
sudo vpnc-connect cicso --local-port 0
And, it worked.
7. To disconnect your vpn tunnel.
sudo vpnc-disconnect
TestDisk, Data Recovery
TestDisk is OpenSource software and is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
TestDisk is powerful free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy.
TestDisk can
- Fix partition table, recover deleted partition
- Recover FAT32 boot sector from its backup
- Rebuild FAT12/FAT16/FAT32 boot sector
- Fix FAT tables
- Rebuild NTFS boot sector
- Recover NTFS boot sector from its backup
- Fix MFT using MFT mirror
- Locate ext2/ext3/ext4 Backup SuperBlock
- Undelete files from FAT, NTFS and ext2 filesystem
- Copy files from deleted FAT, NTFS and ext2/ext3/ext4 partitions.
TestDisk has features for both novices and experts. For those who know little or nothing about data recovery techniques, TestDisk can be used to collect detailed information about a non-booting drive which can then be sent to a tech for further analysis. Those more familiar with such procedures should find TestDisk a handy tool in performing onsite recovery.
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Host Ubuntu 10.10, Guest Windows XP - sharing folders.
Then, I setup sharing folder from Devices menu of virtualbox.
For example I shared \home\mysharingfolder. (the folder exists in \home of my ubuntu system).
In Folder Path navigate to the folder you created in step one and select it.Check “Make Permanent”.
In commandline of windows:
net use x: \\vboxsrv\mysharingfolder
Now, I can access the 'mysharingfolder' in windows.
Open My computer,you will see the shared folder:
Windows Host and Ubuntu guest:
1.Create a folder in windows,assuming it is:
c:/mysharingfolder
2.Same to the step 2 above.
3.In ubuntu guest,open terminal(Applications->Accessories->Terminal).Using following command mount the folder:
sudo mkdir /media/mysharingfolder sudo mount -t vboxsf vbshare /media/mysharingfolder
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
HCI4D: Infrastructure
To highlight its importance, I would like to briefly mention the 'low-cost computer for poor' as an example. Following the success/failure stories of OLPC, simputer and many other technologies including existing attempts to develop cheaper computers for poor, it clearly highlightsaffordability of computing as a still remained primary barrier. As we know that the idea of leapfrogging technology (off-the-shelf solutions) that could be replicated - doesn't work and low-cost terminals is definitely a central part of ICT4D. But, even though the quest for the low-cost computer has been one of the most significant pursuits of ICT4D, most projects have fared poorly in markets, despite the apparent enthusiasm for many such initiatives. Demand is therefore to develop low-cost approaches and replicable hardware, and also serve the unique needs of developing regions and populations.
The need to support open standards to encourage interoperability of emerging technical solutions is highlighted as one of the grand challenges. My personal interest is to introduce and explore the use of an open platform (open-source software and open-source copyleft hardware) in the context of ICT4D.
The restricted license of a proprietary devices do not allow using hardware designs freely. But, the copyleft approach ensures the design is always open for a complete customization, enhancement or extension, allowing the community to influence its future hardware revisions and there is no end of life for devices as in a proprietary system. If coplyleft approach used, even if the device fails, it can at least ensure that the design can continue to live and be improved in future. But, as it has happened with open source software, though, it may take some years and test cases for legal clarity to emerge in open source hardware. Therefore, while benefits of an open-source software are well established, hardware based on an open-source copyleft designs to support specific need in the developing regions are yet to be seen. Also, as Weiss highlighted, open source hardware also faces several challenging questions such as how would business benefit from open sourcing hardware and who is really going to make their own device?
Ubuntu Upgrade from 10.04 LTS to 10.10 Maverick Meerkat
Upgrade from 10.04 LTS to 10.10
Network Upgrade for Ubuntu Desktops (Recommended)
You can easily upgrade over the network with the following procedure.
Open the Software Sources application from the System -> Administration menu
- Select the sub menu Updates from the Software Sources application
- Change the Release Upgrade drop down to "Normal Releases" and close the application
Press Alt-F2 and type update-manager
Click the Check button to check for new updates.
If there are any updates to install, use the Install Updates button to install them, and press Check again after that is complete.
- A message will appear informing you of the availability of the new release.
Click Upgrade.
- Follow the on-screen instructions.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Using git in Ubuntu
2. Make HelloWorld folder in your Desktop.
3. cd HelloWorld
4. Create hello.c file.
---------------------------------
#include studio.h
main()
{
printf();
}
---------------------------------
5. Initialise git.
git init
6. Check the git status.
git status
7. Add hello.c to your git.
git add hello.c
8. Commit your file to git.
git commit -m "hello.c created"
9. Check the log.
git log
10. Make some changes to your hello.c.
---------------------------------
#include studio.h
main()
{
printf("Learning to use git.");
}
---------------------------------
11. Commit your file.
git commit -m "printf argument added"
12. Check the difference in different revisions.
git diff
13. To check the difference between latest and the last revision.
git diff HEAD^...HEAD
14. Delete current hello.c file from your HelloWorld folder and retrieve the last commited file.
git checkout hello.c
Monday, September 27, 2010
Mediawiki
- \var\lib\mediawiki
- \etc\mediawiki
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Free eBook: Mobile Learning: Transforming the Delivery of Education and Training
Free e-Book "Mobile Learning: Transforming the Delivery of Education and Training" is available here. Amazon is selling it for £30.88. The book is edited by Mohamed Ally. March 2009. Paperback $39.95. 978-1-897425-43-5 (SC)
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Limor Fried leads off at Open Source Hardware Summit
One reason for doing Open Source Hardware is to share the work you've done with others. Then there are haters, who are frustrating to deal with. Being good at Open Source hardware and being good at business are two different things. Turn your fear of getting ripped off into a sense of pride that your design was chosen to be ripped off. Biggest reason for doing open source software is the awesome community. We are giving to the community. We are letting go of our Art so that it can grow up. What we make will outlast us. She does open source hardware to make herself a better engineer.
Source: dalepd | Dale Dougherty
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
ICT4D: Mountain Regions of Nepal
This paper focuses on an interpretive case study in Nepal to widen the understanding of how locally-initiated ICT4D projects may help to narrow educational, healthcare, information, and communication gaps between urban and remote communities. The study utilises the Assets Pentagon Model to identify the strengths and challenges of the Nepal Wireless Networking Project (NWNP) in the mountain areas, and to identify implications for research and practice based on insights from the case.
References:
- Devinder Thapa, The Impact of ICT Availability on Remote Communities: A Case Study in Nepal, in Molka-Danielsen, J. (Ed.): Proceedings of the 32nd Information Systems Research Seminar in Scandinavia, IRIS 32, Inclusive Design, Molde University College, Molde, Norway, August 9-12, 2009, ISBN 978-82-7962-120-1.
- Devinder Thapa's Blog
- Richard Heeks, ICTs in Mountain Regions: Impact Assessment
Development 2.0
Monday, September 20, 2010
MW4D Impact Analysis
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Rich v. Poor Country ICT Statistics and Charts Online
Based on ITU data, this provides a compiled and cleaned-up spreadsheet of data; charts comparing technology penetration levels in countries grouped by income; 'digital gap' charts comparing richest vs. poorest countries; and 'digital lag' data showing how many years behind the richest countries are the poorest countries.
Other items available at - http://ict4dblog.wordpress.
To subscribe to the blog, visit: http://ict4dblog.wordpress.
For source data, visit: http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/
Richard Heeks
Director, Centre for Development Informatics
University of Manchester, UK
http://www.manchester.ac.uk/
Wikireader: compiling Wikibooks

- This contains current versions of article content, and is the archive most mirror sites will probably want.
- pages-articles.xml.bz2 78.9 MB
- apt-get install python-gd gawk gforth flex bison m4
- apt-get install netpbm qt4-qmake libqt4-dev wget
- apt-get install python-serial sqlite3 php5-cli python-dev
- sudo apt-get install mecab-ipadic-utf8
- sudo apt-get install python-mecab mecab-ipadic-utf8
- cp samo-lib/include/config.h-default samo-lib/include/config.h
- //#define BOARD_SAMO_V1 1
- make help
- make clean
- make
Wikireader currently supports 15 different languages but doesn't support 'Devanagari' yet. My attempt to compile Nepali Wikipedia failed. Wikireader screen may not be good enough to show such detailed letters, but I've requested the team to look into this.
Hopefully, it will be possible soon.
