In my job as a mechanical engineer, I work with large text files for finite element analysis models. I sometimes have to run several iterations to evaluate different design proposals and I need to check my models against the baseline to make sure that only the intended changes are included. The tool I use to compare files is diff. Continue reading
One of the older posts on this site shows how to resample MP3 files on Linux with LAME. One of the problems with that process is that the MP3 tags are not maintained when resampling, so I had to work around the issue by copying certain tags from the original files to the new files. As it turns out, there’s a way to use the GStreamer framework to resample audio files and maintain the tags. In this post I’ll show the commands you can use to resample audio files to both constant bitrate and variable bitrate MP3’s. Continue reading
There are times when editing or viewing text files that it can be handy to display line numbers for the file on which you’re working. In this tutorial I’ll demonstrate how to show line numbers in Vim/vi/gVim.
Lately I’ve been using Vim quite a bit to edit text files for my work. One of the things I wanted to do recently was to remove all of the comments from a text file in order to reduce its size prior to uploading it to the server over my relatively slow internet connection. In this post I’ll show how to remove lines that begin with a given character or character string using vi/Vim/gVim. Continue reading
In today’s post I’m going to show how to embed a text message into an image file. This type of messaging is known as steganography. Steganography is the practice of hiding secrets in such a way that only the intended message recipient would know to look for your hidden message.
In this basic form of secret messaging we’ll be adding text onto the end of a file. I’m going to use the following image of Tux for my example. Continue reading