Graphical glitches with nouveau driver on my laptop

Mostly this is documentation for myself. Not sure this will be helpful to others… Got Linux testing up on my laptop again. Running in Gnome 3, was getting some graphical glitches, so I made a video. (By the way, ctrl-alt-shift-R is Gnome 3’s built-in way of starting/stopping a screencast recording… very convenient, the video is Read more about Graphical glitches with nouveau driver on my laptop[…]

New program: “Kanji”, a simple flashcard-like study program

Screenshot of "Kanji"

Last Saturday, I got up early and decided to whip up something quick yet useful. Roughly two hours later, I had released the first version of “Kanji”.

“Kanji” is a simple tool for reviewing Japanese characters or words. It reads in a UTF-8 encoded file and displays the entries within at random, showing a new entry every 30 seconds. It is intended to be run in “always on top” mode, in which case it can be used for passive studying of Japanese while working on other things.

This tool is minimalistic by design. There are no config files nor preferences. Everything is specified via the command line, after which, the program simply runs until closed.

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Fun with xargs: parallelized FLAC to MP3 conversion

I’ve been wanting to use xargs for a practical application for some time. I’ve read many articles that have mentioned it, but it was Ted Dziuba’s Taco Bell Programming which was the tipping point.

Here’s the situation: I want to convert my FLAC collection to an MP3 collection so that I can upload my CD collection to Amazon. Further, I’d like to store the MP3s in a different folder, while maintaining the original subfolder structure. Finally, I want to maintain the metadata in my FLAC files; the flac command line utility only seems to support decoding to .wav without metadata.

Finally, I have 8 virtual cores, and I want to use them all to convert everything as quickly as possible.

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