Tag: howto

How to Roll Crêpes (pancakes) by a Real French Person

Being British I’m naturally a connoisseur of fine cuisine but I’ve never mastered pancake-folding, crêpe-rolling, whatever you like to call it — until now. My friend and genuine femme française Coralie developed the perfect pancake preparation process but alas, it’s only in French! Perhaps it’s a government conspiracy to preserve tradition. Perhaps she enjoys the sight of Englishmen dribbling … Continue reading How to Roll Crêpes (pancakes) by a Real French Person →

Introduction to Paper Wallets for Bitcoin, Dogecoin, etc.

No matter how much you trust a digital currency online exchange or service, they are not subject to the same tough regulations as banks and won’t be bailed out by governments should something bad happen (at least not at the time of writing). If you hold an amount of bitcoin, dogecoin, whatever-coin and are planning … Continue reading Introduction to Paper Wallets for Bitcoin, Dogecoin, etc. →

How to Convert Videos to WebM With FFmpeg/AVConv

After lots of trial and error each time I convert a video to WebM, I finally got around to posting this so I don’t forget next time. In a nutshell, here’s the conversion command that works for me: avconv -i myvideo.mp4 -acodec libvorbis -aq 5 -ac 2 -qmax 25 -threads 2 myvideo.webm What is this … Continue reading How to Convert Videos to WebM With FFmpeg/AVConv →

Privacy-respecting Social Media “Share” Buttons

Sometimes you want a “share” link in your website or email newsletter but you don’t want the extra JavaScript and iframes that come with the standard social media buttons. Here’s how to do it, giving your users faster page loading times and a bit more privacy. Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Pinterest Google+ Hatena Bookmarks Twitter Firstly … Continue reading Privacy-respecting Social Media “Share” Buttons →

How to Create a DVD-Compatible Video in PiTiVi

I wanted to edit one of my geeky songs in PiTiVi and burn it to DVD. After searching around and trying a few things it seemed to work, so for reference, here’s how I did it. Important: Save the PiTiVi project before you start, as I’ve found it to be prone to crashing. Once the video and audio are ready, … Continue reading How to Create a DVD-Compatible Video in PiTiVi →

How to Show Japanese Text in Evince

A quick tip that might help others (or me, the next time I forget)… I found that Evince, Ubuntu’s default PDF viewer, doesn’t display Japanese characters, at least on my non-Japanese system. After a quick search it seems the answer is nice and simple – install the poppler-data package. So, either use the Synaptic Package Manager or … Continue reading How to Show Japanese Text in Evince →

How to create Ogg videos in Linux (with GUI)

Following up on my previous post about converting videos to Ogg Theora, there’s also an easy way for those who like a GUI. Although it’s possible to use VLC for Ogg encoding, I had problems with the audio and video being out of sync. Fortunately I found another way – enter OggConvert. Written in Python by Tristan Brindle, … Continue reading How to create Ogg videos in Linux (with GUI) →