Paul Sutton

I have been looking for a program to help create DVDs from movie files. I have found a program via the Debian users mailing list called DeVeDe which is really easy to use.

Installing devede and other related packages.

Firstly you need to install the software with

apt install devede

In general I use brassero to record the cd / dvd

apt install brassero

I have also used youtube-dl to download youtube videos for off line viewing.

apt install youtube-dl

What next.

Firstly you need to create a new directory within your system /home structure, then download a video. This can take some time depending on how long the video is that you’re downloading, the speed of your connection and other factors.

Once done you can use Devede to create your DVD.

Under Debian this can be found on the Sound and Video menu folder as DeVeDeNG

We want to create a DVD video so select the first option in this menu.

Choose Project

You are then presented with :

Add

Now click add

From here navigate and select files to add to your dvd.

You will then be taken back to the main window.

Video Added

We can now set up a menu, the create menu with the titles is ticked, by default so if you now click menu options:

We can fine tune our dvd menu.

If you are adding more than 1 video you may want to check the play all option. You also need a menu title. The other options are about customizing the look and feel of your dvd. Once you are happy with this. press OK to go back to the main screen and press forward.

You can now select where to save your ISO file. The default seems to be /home/user/movie, which is probably fine. Note that this folder should be EMPTY if not anything within this will be erased. I changed my folder to movie2 to be on the safe side.

Make DVD

Once the process is complete you will have an ISO file You also have an option to burn this to a DVD, in which case your default burner software will open. This part is beyond the scope of this post. I will do a separate post for that

Once you have an ISO you can open it in VLC player (for example) and test it works OK and you’re happy with everything you can navigate to where you saved your iso file, right click and in my case I would open in Brasero.

REFERENCES

Free Software Foundation

TAGS

#YearOfTheFediverse,#DeVeDeNG,#DVD,#Creation

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January 27, 2021

Numbers, units and arithmetic

I have just completed the course 'Numbers, units and arithmetic' with Open Learn. This is an excellent 5 hour course and will be really useful going forward.

Well worth doing if you need a refresher as there are lots of worked examples and activities to have a go at to re-enforce learning.

You can of course, as with any OpenLearn course use this as a reference in the future if you need to revise or revisit how to do something. Full PDF of the course is also .

REFERENCES

TAGS

#OpenUniversity,#Maths,#Study,#Learning,#OpenLearn.

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January 26, 2021

Text to speech

Text to speech utilities are really useful, especially if you want make your text more accessible to those who can't read or access text based resources, this maybe due to a variety of reasons.

One solution to this is Festival text to speech, this can be installed with.

apt install festival festvox-rablpc8k

Which will use the 8K audio option.

So you can run this with festival —tts text.txt and the software will read out the contents of the file text.txt.

The —tts option stands for text to speech.

REFERENCES

TAGS

#YearOfTheFediverse,

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January 25, 2021

PM Press

PM Press is an independent publisher that specializes in radical, Marxist and anarchist literature, as well as crime fiction, graphic novels, music CDs, and political documentaries. It has offices in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and West Virginia

Just giving them a mention here, to try and boost exposure and help give the small business the boost they need.

REFERENCES

TAGS

#YearOfTheFediverse,#PMPress,#ebooks,#libre,#books

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

January 24, 2021

Open University Space Science Newsletter

As I have studied with the Open University [1]. I am now part of the Alumni Association. At the end of 2020 I joined the new OU Students Space Science Club. Soon after this there was a call for ideas for a Newsletter.

I decided to offer to help put something together, so have been undertaking this.

Issue one, has been completed and sent out. I am now working on issue 2.

I am writing this in $\LaTeX$ [2] using Overleaf[3], which is much easier for creating documents, then word processing systems.

The newsletter is a mix of news about space and space science, links to related websites.

REFERENCES

1 Open Unversity 2 LaTeX Project 3 Overleaf

TAGS

#OpenUniversity,#SpaceScience,#Group,#Newsletter

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January 24, 2021

SpaceX Launch

Less than 1 hour till the next Falcon 9 Launch. (15:00 UK time)

Details
Thanks to Mastodon News Bot for posting

REFERENCES

SpaceX
NASA

TAGS

#YearOfTheFediverse,#Space,#Launch,#KSC,#Falcon9,#NASA

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License)

January 24, 2021

WICD Curses

wicd-curses

wicd-curses is a console program that allows you to connect to wireless wifi networks. I found out about this after chatting on IRC with a few other users on freenode and mentioned I was having issues connecting to wifi from the command line.

This can be installed using apt install wicd-curses. A man page can be viewed with man wicd-curses.

Wicd-curses

As I am using Debian then the package information can be found here.

The above screenshot is from my desktop which does not have or even need wifi connection. But on my netbook this should show available wifi networks, and allow the one you want to be selected. You will probably need your wifi credentials e.g password etc to connect further.

Another step to seeing if I can actually use a computer directly from the command line without the need for a gui. I need to try and configure alpine to now send e-mail and I may be nearly there. However this isn’t really essential to my needs anyway.

Please feel free to discuss further on Mastodon

#console,#wicd-curses,#network,#wireless,#YearOfTheFediverse,

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