Old forgotten encripted files

Dear me, I've just found some old embarrassing poetry from the 1990's. Well I know that's what it is but I encrypted it to stop nosey family members from looking when I lived with my family and used their computer.
It looks like to find out what I wrote I'm going to have to decrypt it but I forgot the password. I better try  "Rarcrack-0.2"

make sure I have libxml2-dev build-essential on my system if not

Terminal

apt-get install libxml2-dev build-essential


Download Rarcrack from the Internet. Sourceforge.

place rarcrack-0.2.tar.bz2 in the home folder along with poetry.rar

unpack rarcrack

Terminal
tar -xjf rarcrack-0.2.tar.bz2

got to the folder

Terminal
cd rarcrack-0.2

then build the program

Terminal
make

then as root install it.

Terminal
sudo make install

Now all I have to do is use it as a command in Terminal for anything I want to try and decrypt. Hope I didn't put too long a password on this thing.

Terminal
rarcrack poetry.rar

Non-existent Drive Mounting on boot

I've had this problem before once and recently it happened again.

When I start the computer it hangs during the Mint load-up screen with the message:
Key: Disk not mounted. Press S to skip or M to manually mount (or something like this anyway)

Sometimes I use software like PhotoRec and GParted to check friends damaged hard drives and recover their files for them. I use my external Hard disk Caddy to do this. I back-up the drive first and then start messing with it sometimes booting to a windows partition to use CHKDSK the windows disk tool along with other things such as Hyrons boot disk etc.

Somehow I seem to on occasion reboot to Linux Mint without removing the damaged drive, I think I've done it when I have been tired or frustrated but the end result is Mint automatically adds the drive to my start up. This is probably the Automount programme (I need to read up more on that one).

Result, on a boot up the computer expects to find a disk that is not there after I have removed it from the caddy.

To fix this, once booted into Mint and after the message (Press S to skip the mounting) I need to go into Terminal and change the fstab script which controls the disks expected to be found.

Terminal
sudo fdisk -l

As Root. This lists the drives. Check the ones available. sda (first physical disc), sda1 (first physical disc, partition 1), sdb2 (second physical disk, partition 2) for examples.

Terminal
gksudo gedit /etc/fstab

As Root. Use "gedit" text editor to view contents of file "fstab" located in folder "etc".

Once this is up and viewable I can see the instructions and options for each partition to be mounted. There is a  description above each instruction with a hash (#) symbol in front of it  which is used like the old REM comment tag in Basic's.

Anyway I use this hash (#) tag to comment out the instruction which loads the now no longer existent drive. I save the file to make the changes and use menu to reboot the machine.

The computer now loads as normal without searching for a non-existent drive.

September: Memes, Music and 2D modelling

September has been quite quiet really. Everything I have wanted to do using Linux Mint I've been able to do easily and quickly.

I've made a few Memes to post for friends. Knocked them up, no problem using "Gimp" and "Pinta" (the Linux equivalent of PaintNet). One thing I didn't realise with "Pinta" though was that you cannot print with it. It just took an extra stage saving the file then opening it with an image viewer and printing it from there.

I've started to use "Clementine" as my music player instead of "Quod Libet" as it seems to be a bit faster, it also has a nice Tag editor built in and a few other options but not too many as to make it bloated and too much. One point with "Quod Libet" also was that it had a few problems associating itself with my various music file types Ogg and MP3. I did fix it but it kept breaking. In the end I just could not be bothered with finding out why as I had discovered "Clementine" by that time and decided to use that.

One other thing I've been messing with over the last month is trying to make 2D plans for some  wooden weathervanes, windmills I wanted to build. Gimp was no good for this so I tried Inkscape the Vector graphics program, thinking it could size things up more accurately. It was too complicated for the casual use I wanted so I moved onto looking at other modelling programs.
Blender the 3D modeller was again just too much as I just wanted a basic 2D plan to print and paste onto wood to be cut out on my bandsaw.
LibraCad hit the sweet spot. Not to over complicated and 2D. It's a bit light on tutorials and help files but I have managed to get some plans drawn on it. Its still a learning curve having done nothing like this since Technical Drawing at school where we had a pencil and a ruler. I think I will improve soon though with a little work. YouTube did have a reasonable set of tutorials but as I said there's a lot missing for the novice like me.

All in one converter

FF Multiconverter

Converts Video, Documents and Images.

Terminal



sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ffmulticonverter/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ffmulticonverter

Supported formats:

Audio/Video formats:

aac, ac3, afc, aiff, amr, asf, au, avi, dvd, flac, flv, mka, mkv, mmf, mov, mp3, mp4, mpg, ogg, ogv, psp, rm, spx, vob, wav, webm, wma, wmv
And any other format supported by ffmpeg.

Image formats:

bmp, cgm, dpx, emf, eps, fpx, gif, jbig, jng, jpeg, mrsid, p7, pdf, picon, png, ppm, psd, rad, tga, tif, webp, xpm

Document file formats:

doc > odt, pdf
html > odt
odp > pdf, ppt
ods > pdf
odt > doc, html, pdf, rtf, sxw, txt, xml
ppt > odp
rtf > odt
sdw > odt
sxw > odt
txt > odt
xls > ods
xml > doc, odt, pdf

Iomega Buzz and Linux

This is a really old capture card and unit I had lying about in a box that I decided to hook up after having loads of problems with my EasyCap USB capture device. Once this worked but now, whatever I do it will not.

Anyway I thought why not throw the card in the PC and see what happens ? If nothing else I will have a SCSI card that may come in useful one day (the Card has one built in).

Well it wasn't as easy to get results as I was hoping until today when I decided to go back to it and try again.
The latest Mint Olivia has drivers for this models chip built into the Kernel but I have never up to yet got it to display video, until now. I found a post on the Ubuntu forums referencing people having problems with the aforementioned EasyCap device. Someone had posted a solution for getting video out of it. Well it didn't work for MY easyCap when I tried it but I thought as it's plugged in why not check the fix out using the Buzz ?

It worked !

So, this solution.....

Apparently the EasyCap assumed (my simple understanding) that input from the transmitting device, whether it be a Camcorder, VCR, camera, Satellite receiver, whatever was transmitting S-Video format, so if you are using the composite input to the EasyCap you would get no Video unless you were sending an S_video signal using the S-Video input.
I have no S-Video leads for anything so had never checked if anything worked this way. All my old stuff has composite or SCART outputs which I use a SCART to Composite converter plug on.

(Composite is the Yellow Phono plug usually next to the Red and White Audio out plugs on old stuff)

I digress, I connected up everything as I would normally for a test on a little camera I have that sends a live composite signal. I fired up "Cheese" my webcam application, checked its properties and set it to /dev/Video1 which is my little webcam and got a nice reflection of myself waving to myself on screen. So it works for that. I then changed to /dev/Video0 which is the Iomega buzz...Blank screen.
I then closed down Cheese and opened terminal, entering the fix from the forum.

Terminal

sudo apt-get install v4l-utils

This installed the v41 utilities for the Linux Video driver V4l. Then on installation

Terminal
v4l2-ctl -d /dev/video0 -i 0

This is a direct command to tell the system whether the input is composite on /dev/Video0

Opening "Cheese" again I selected /dev/Video0 once more in preferences and found a video feed that could be watched or recorded. I now need to check out my old VCR tapes and see if it records the sound also, but that's another day.

I don't yet know if this will be permanent on a reboot or if I will have to make a configuration file for this. I will know tomorrow.

The info along with how to set things up with VLC Player can be found (after a long scroll to the end of the thread) at:

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-924504.html

Thanks Guys !!

Get Plex Media Server Running Quick

OK so I've had to install Plex Media Server a few times and had problems because I had no idea what I was doing. I've read various forums and the Plex site, all of which make it seem so complex to do.
This time I knew what the problem was and did it simply and quickly.

There is no up to date Plex software in the repositories so I had to go to the plex site and download the Ubuntu 64 bit version that comes in a debian package.

I then double clicked on it to install it using the debian installer. Upon installation I opened up the menu and found under "Other" the menu item for Plex.

This opens up a webpage as it tries to log into the server as it runs. I skipped past this to the add folder page where you add your folders containing your video.

Now we come to the problem that many a page of rubbish has been written and people who know what they are doing complicate.

The problem is "permissions". The server (Plex) needs permission to read and write to the folder containing the video files.

I use my Video folder which is set up with the install of Mint in the home folder.

The easy way to set this up from the desktop without having to go into Terminal is to navigate to the home folder, right click on this folder to bring the menu up and "open as root". You need to have root permission to give Plex the permissions it needs because Plex is further down the pecking order you may say.

On putting in your password the folder will open to show its subfolders, one of which is Video (where I keep my Video files). By right clicking again on the Video folder and going to properties you open this tabbed screen where the second tab is permissions. Here is the owner and groups that can use the files within.

Go to group and scroll down the list of applications next to it until you reach Plex. You can now define which permissions plex has within these folders. Give it read and write permissions, tick the apply permissions to enclosed files and close the tab.

Voila, you can now return to the Plex web browser screen and add the Video folder or any other folders within it you wish to designate for movies, home, movies, music etc.

One other thing if there are still problems try changing permissions in the /home/.plex folder and /usr/lib, basically anywhere plex may want to write something like a config or log file. I'm just thinking of this offhand and can't exactly remember where the places are it does write but it makes sense doesn't it.

Quick safe reboot tip

If you lose your Graphics display as my previous post shows I have done this is a quick tip on how to do a safe reboot  without being able to see anything.

Press Alt + Prtscn + r
Press Alt + Prtscn + s
Press Alt + Prtscn + e
Press Alt + Prtscn + i
Press Alt + Prtscn + n
Press Alt + Prtscn + u
Press Alt + Prtscn + b

To remember; Raising Skinny Elephants Is Never Utterly Boring

Another one found on the Mint Forums.

ATI Graphics fix for Radeon HD2*** - HD4*** Cards

Well I fixed this once but then after messing about adding a Nvidia external card to my system I broke it and had to go through the painful experience of finding the fix again.
So better write this down.

The Problem.

It seems that ATI Radeon Graphics Cards and built in motherboard Graphics using these chips (such as my ASRock 960GM Motherboard) are a bit problematic when installing the propriety drivers and the open source drivers are a bit crap (up to yet).

It has problems using the Cinnamon desktop and manifests itself by only using software rendering which has meant using 45% of the processors power and the fan runs hot and crazy sometimes. I also noticed no hardware 3D.

The reason.

After some reading and a lot of red herrings from various forums it comes down to ATI no longer supporting the Linux drivers for these cards, series Radeon HD 2*** through to Radeon HD4***. Mine is an onboard Radeon HD3000.
It seems as the x-org server which runs the desktop behind the scenes has been updated this has created incompatibilities with the driver.
The newer versions of the ATI Catalyst propriety installation program for Linux will not work for the older cards / chips and are not supported anymore.

The Solution.

The only way to fix this is to downgrade your x-org server to an older version and then install the legacy (old) driver that last worked fully.
Luckily Tomasz Makarewicz has made a fix for this and a web search for his site shows you how. https://launchpad.net/~makson96/+archive/fglrx

Now I followed his instructions but still had problems with Cinnemon not running. It crashed on start up.
I wasn't the only one and found an interesting fix on the Linux Mint forums. I can't remember the link though and this guy needs some credit too. I did write down his process to do after the makson96 fix was done and this has fixed everything. Even the Catalyst adjustment program works on the menu.
This is it.

Reboot ...... Cinnemon crashes.....

Open terminal

sudo apt-get remove --purge xorg-driver-fglrx fglrx*

sudo apt-get install --reinstall libgl1-mesa-dri xserver-xorg-core

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg


He then says delete xorg.conf which is in the ./etc/ folder but I don't think this is necessary.

Anyway then reboot. I did it straight from the terminal with

 sudo reboot

Voila !!! My sytem was working with the ATI drivers.

Next Job getting duel monitors working. that should be fun.

My Music Organisation Process

Well I've been organising and converting my music collection, which is a mixed bag of formats. I've tried tidying it up before with mixed success. It's still a bit of a task but it's coming along.

This post is just about the method I've finally settled on and what seems to be working.

The biggest problems I've previously come across are tagging correctly, unknown albums and multiple formats. I've narrowed down the tools I need to cover all possibilities I've come across and built a handy little set that seems to do the job without installing too much stuff I will never use.

These are:

Sound Converter
MusicBrainz Picard
Quod Libet
and the command line tool BinChunker

By using these four tools I have managed to overcome just about every issue I've had. The only thing I have not sorted out is album art. I've not really looked into it yet as my priority was to sort the actual music out for easy access and cataloguing and so stuff will play to my media players around the house.

My first thought was "How am I going to store the files ?". I will be storing everything on an external Hard disc connected to my PC with Mint Olivia running as its operating system. This made my choice of file system to use wide but limited as well. I did some research.

fat16 / fat32 = too old and newer file systems seemed better at dealing with faults.

exFat = This is the system designed with USB sticks (Pen drives or whatever) in mind. It looked modern and what I was looking for but it has a flaw. Linux support is not so good from what I read and the linux drivers are slow. As I will be using Linux machines mostly I don't want search delays and stuttering music. So this option was out.

ext3 and ext4 = My operating system is formatted in this so I thought, why not ? A lot of info (the bits I understand) seemed outdated saying ext4 was untested and stick to ext3. I decided to go the ext4 way.

 On settling with ext4 I started to format an external drive I had using gparted.
I hit a problem. The drive I had was a Western Digital external drive and it would not allow me to write to it after the ext4 formatting unless i was in ROOT. A little investigation showed me the drive uses WD Elements which seems to be an external piece of software held with the driver chip and not on the Hard disc itself. This is there to do various tasks that work very well on a Windows based machine but the WD forums basically leave you on your own as a Linux user. Not being able to bypass this block without spending too much time I abandoned my choice of ext4 and made a new decision.

NTFS = After my previous choice was made too difficult to proceed with I was left with just the one. I did look at a few other systems such as HFS and Reiser4 but each had their minus points that put me off. And so I was left with NTFS, which seemed to be the best option with the equipment I had.

So the external drive was formatted and ready to go. I could now write to it and all was well.

My second decision was how to organise things while I was going through the process of conversion. I decided to put a folder next to my original music folder to store the originals but after I had processed them, to make it easier to distinguish files converted between conversion sessions (we all need a break eh!). This meant at the end of each session I could just move the files over and it would be easy to see where to start again when I came back.

I then made a folder for the converted files on the external hard disc to store these files in.

I used SoundConverter next setting it up to store the converted files in the root of the external drive. I did this so I could check for errors and multiple albums before storing them in the completed folder. SoundConverter has a bulk process option which is why I chose it.

I decided to use ogg as my format to convert to, so all my files would be the same. There are various qualities and formats so I didn't think it would make too much difference and FLAC would be overkill on most. If I was unhappy with the sound quality I could always go back and re-rip the CD's from my collection although this would not be possible with my own recordings from my friends bands gigs obviously.

Any faulty TAGS were altered in Quod Libet as this has a good tag editor or updated in Picard so the file names and tags were correct.

At one point I found a Bin and Cue file which was quickly converted using BinChunker to a set of Wav files which could then be converted and tagged.

So thats how its been working so far.

File and default application association

OK, today I've been messing with my music collection. I've decided to use "Quod Libet" as my music player. It's much simpler than "banshee" which has just too many options and other rubbish I won't use on it. Quod Libet is much simpler and has the options for any plugins I may want to add in the future..and my favourite thing about it is that is has a nice file viewer which is exactly how I like to choose my music (from the folder it is stored in).

Anyway I set everything up but found under menu / system settings / details / default applications I could not associate Quod Libet with the option to play all music files as the default player. It just was not there. it wasn't under "other applications" either.

After some searching of forums I found the process to add it. Apparently you need to associate the file type to the application, just as you would in Windows, but for some reason I have not discovered on my Linux learning curve Quod Libet is not showing as an application on the list.

So how to do it. Instead of using Nemo (the standard file manager) you need to use "Thunar" an alternative one (maybe a permission thing ?). Luckily I already had that installed so I navigated to it on the menu / system tools and there I opened a music file in the .ogg format, which is the type of music file I want Q L (lets call it that from now on) to play. From within the file manager view that listed the contents of the folder I was in I chose an .ogg file and right clicked on it to bring up the properties dialogue. Here it gave me the option to associate the file type with an application. Scrolling down, Q L was there. I associated it with the file by making sure the check mark was crossed and applied using the button for this. Easy, it associated the file system wide and now everytime I click on an Ogg Vorbis music file type Q L comes up to play it.

It even shows now as linked on the system details screen.

I've come across this situation with other file types and applications and now I have the answer !

Software manager not opening from Menu ?

Well I've had this problem for ages after I messed about with menu editing in order to create a new folder showing my Emulators.
Lots of searches later I finally found the issue. I'd had an inkling it was because the application needed to be called from root. I initially put "sudo makeinstall" as the call in the command text box after opening properties in edit menu (right click on the menu in the left hand corner).
This did not work. I finally found I was correct but the command was "gksu mintInstall".
Fixed !

Saving a webpage as PDF

Sometimes I want to save a webpage for viewing offline or it has interesting info I want to collate into a package to read all at once with related info. I used to save this as a HTML complete webpage and cut out the info into a word document.
then I used an online service like Evernote but this one didn't want you to sign up (which i didn't want to). That stopped working a while ago.
So now the easiest way to take that page offline is to use the CUPS to PDF printer option.

Terminal

sudo aptitude install cups-pdf

Then its just   FILE > PRINT using PDF option from the web browser.

The PDF will have the webpage title as its filename and is found in your HOME directory.

On start up asks for Login Keyring

To get rid of this every time you start up, although only useful if you are on a secure Computer, try this

Terminal or ATL-F2

seahorse


Right click on where it says password on the tab to the left. Click change and put old password in then when it asks for a new one leave both spaces blank.

If you just see a "Plus" sign in the top left of the command bar, this just means you do not have the left hand tab visible. Use the "View" menu item. Just select it and choose "By Key ring". this will bring up the side menu where you can see passwords, login. Right click on this to continue.

Installing VICE (Commodore Emulator)

The only issue I had installing this was where to put the ROM files.

It needs


Every emulator requires its own ROM set. For the VIC20 and the C64, the ROM set consists of the following files:

• `kernal', the Kernal ROM (8 KBytes)
• `basic', the Basic ROM (8 KBytes)
• `chargen', the character generator ROM (4 Kbytes)

The C128 needs the following files:

• `kernal', the Kernal ROM (8 Kbytes)
• `basic', the Basic + Editor ROM (32 Kbytes)
• `chargen', the character generator ROM (4 Kbytes)

The C128, VIC20 and C64 emulators also need the following DOS ROMs for the hardware-level emulation of the 1541, 1571 and 1581 disk drives:

• `dos1541', the 1541 drive ROM (16 Kbytes)
• `dos1541II', the 1541-II drive ROM (16 Kbytes)
• `dos1571', the 1571 drive ROM (32 Kbytes)
• `dos1581', the 1581 drive ROM (32 Kbytes)

I took mine from my C64 Forever Disk (which uses VICE) and going in as ROOT (for the elevated privileges  placed them in 

~/usr/local/lib/VICE/ or ~/usr/lib/VICE/

(Oh "~" this means HOME FOLDER, it's placed there to replace whatever you have named your home folder as because its impossible for the person to know what everyone's named their home folder right ? That would be creepy.

placing the right files in each folder named after the machine e.g. Vic 20, C64

Link to VICE Manual:

http://www.viceteam.org/vice_4.html

Hardware technical Info

Make sure you have dmidecode installed

sudo apt-get install dmidecode

Motherboard model

sudo dmidecode -s baseboard-product-name

Motherboard details

sudo dmidecode -t baseboard


hardware info

sudo dmidecode

Gimp Hints

Try holding crtl, alt, and/or shift when you use the shape tools, or when resizing things. Most people know something like hold shift to make a circle/square/keep proportions, but often Alt will let you draw/resize from the centre instead of from the corner.

uTorrent Easter Eggs

Go to 'About uTorrent' under 'Help' and hit 'T', you can play Tetris

Turn your speakers up and click the utorrent logo in the about box

Tricks in Google Chrome

Just type "askew" in the Chrome search bar .... or "tilt"

Do a Google Image Search for "Atari Breakout"

Most websites have a /robots.txt after the .com, .org etc.. It shows a list of URL's websites don't want searching by search engines.

More useful.

Press F6 to make your cursor go immediately to address bar.

CTRL + and -   Zooms in and out of screen.

CTRL and F search text within browser page.

CTRL+SHIFT+V paste without style 

Press F5 to reload page

CTRL and F5 to delete cache and reload page

Still forget about these sometimes LOL :

CTRL+C to copy

CTRL+V to paste

Chrome Search: If you visited a site often in the search bar just type TAB after the site to search that site

Google Search History - www.google.com/searchhistory/

If enabled on your account you can see your google search history from the day you created a google account (gmail, drive, google+ etc.)

Once you navigate to this page, you can type anything in the search field and find any search related query. (Ex: type in "cat" and any search with the word cat in it will pop up)

Google Earth flight simulator

*Click Tools > Enter Flight Simulator

*Press CTRL + Alt + A

Google Sets

Open a Google spreadsheet, type any sequence of any words (ex: New-York, Los Angeles, Dallas,..) scroll down while holding control and see Google trying to complete your logic. Its called Google sets.

Convert Youtube videos on the fly

Use VLC to convert and save the audio (for example) from youtube.

Open VLC

Use CTRL + R to open Media Tab and move over to Network Tab

Paste in URL of the file from the browser bar

Go to the bottom of the tab and press the upside down triangle next to the "Convert/save" button

This opens the options screen where you can change the quality  and other options.

Change output to mp3 or flac (whatever your choice), change anything else you want to

Name your output file and path

Press convert/save button


Alternative that may work to download Videos directly.

Put an 'ss' if front of 'youtube' in the url

Terminal View of System Information

Terminal


sudo dmidecode -t baseboard

Tells motherboard information

sudo dmidecode -t memory

Tells memory information

free -m

Tells how much memory

youtube-dl

youtube-dl can download from media sites. Install from software centre

Terminal

To update;
youtube-dl -U

Use;
youtube-dl "http://www.**************.com/watch?v=foobar"

* Copy the website address and change foobar to name you want to call file. File will be saved a "flv" Flash Video format file.

use -f switch to check formats available to download.

youtube-dl "http://www.**************.com/watch?v=foobar" - f

shows formats

example (also downloading subtitles as mp4 to current folder with original name)

youtube-dl "http://www.**************.com/watch?v=BlAhBlahBlah" -f 18 --embed-subs

For help;

 youtube-dl --help


GYD is a frontend for youtube-dl

Strip languages from large (extremely long or with multiple language options) subtitle files using “Handbrake”

I have come across subtitle files that would not open in Gnome Subtitles or any other editor due to their size (multiple languages). I just wanted the one subtitle language burned into file not an option to choose all the languages available in the original.

As I said all the Linux subtitle editors I tried just could not cope with such large files with the scripts for many languages in them.

So I needed to find a way of removing the superfluous language scripts first before hard coding the single language subtitles on top of the video feed to stream from Plex media Server to my TV.

This is also a quick dirty way to "burn in" idx, SUB files for use on media players that do not support these forms of subtitles. My Plex Player for example.

Open MKVMerge

First we will add our SUB, IDX or stb to the film in one Matroska container / Wrapper.

Click "add" and add the video file to the place entitled input box then "add" again to place the subtitle file in there too.

The box below entitled  Tracks, chapters and tags now shows all the elements you have added. If you have multiple text / sub files in different languages and you only need your language just deselect the boxes with other languages named next to them. This will leave you with a Video stream, an audio stream and a text file in your language.

Hit  "start muxing" at the bottom.

Wait a few moments until it has finished. Have a look where it saved the file  by checking the "Output filename" box for the path and name (you could have changed this but you didn't).

Remember this path.

You now have new container combining all files needed.

Open Handbrake. (handbrake is not officially supported as of writing and is not in the repositories, you will need to add it's source and then install)

Open subtitles tab.

It should say TRACK and underneath {language} (VOBSUB)

4. Select “burned in” button. Re-encode file by pressing start.

5. Done.

Convert SUB files to SRT

Use sub2srt

NOTE; Does only "subrip" and "microDVD". It does not convert "vobsub" or DVD-Subtitles.

This is a perl-script. Place it in a directory in your $PATH

eg.

/usr/local/bin 
or
/usr/bin

sub2srt --help for switches and use of.

Download entire websites easily.

Use GNU Wget

Terminal

wget http://(website-name).org/

* exchange brackets and "website-name" for name of site downloading.

Wget can download all images and other data nested within the site and linked from top page. Use;

wget -r http://(website-name).org/

If a site refuses to allow you to do this and try to detect if you are using a browser or not. There is a -U option to identify Wget as one. Use;

wget  -r -p -U Mozilla http://www.stupidsite.com/restricedplace.html

To prevent being blacklisted for downloading the site use;

--wait=20     (example is 20 seconds wait between getting each retrieval)

--limit-rate=20K      (Limit the rate at which you download set in bits so add K to make it realise you want KB/s

EG.

wget --wait=20 --limit-rate=20K -r -p -U Mozilla http://www.stupidsite.com/restricedplace.html

To make sure you do not download contents of folders nested below that which you are downloading;

--no-parent

Install .rpm Packages in Linux Mint

Linux Mint Supports only deb package installation, If you have some software in rpm package you can install it in Linux Mint.

To install open Terminal (Press Ctrl+Alt+T) and copy the following command in the Terminal:
sudo apt-get install alien dpkg-dev debhelper build-essential

Then use this command to convert the RPM package to a DEB package;
sudo alien (packagename).rpm

* Remove quotes and replace here with package name.

To install;
sudo dpkg -i (packagename).deb

How to close a program that has frozen.

Options:

1. Close all programs related to that program (including multiple windows of the program)

Use the KillAll feature to kill a program.
Press Alt+F2 and type in gnome-terminal to open a terminal session.
Inside of the terminal type in sudo killall <application-name>.


2. Close a program with your mouse cursor.

Use the xkill feature to kill a program you click on

Press Alt+F2 and type in gnome-terminal to open a terminal session.

Inside of the terminal type in  xkill; then click on any window to kill it.

Convert Bin / Cue to ISO

How to convert Bin / Cue files to ISO

Use command line programme bchunk (BinChunker)

Terminal

sudo aptitude install bchunk


BinChunker syntax

bchunk [-v] [-p] [-r] [-w] [-s] {image.bin} {image.cue} {basename}

Available options:

-v – Makes binchunker print info messages
-w – Makes binchunker write audio tracks in WAV format.
-s – Makes binchunker swap byte order in the samples of audio tracks.
-p – Makes binchunker go into PSX mode and truncate MODE2/2352 tracks to 2336 bytes at offset 0 instead of normal 2048 bytes at offset 24.
-r – Makes binchunker output MODE2/2352 tracks in raw format, from offset 0 for 2352 bytes. Used for MPEG/VCD.
Example:
bchunk IMAGE.bin IMAGE.cue IMAGE.iso