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Offline dictionary - GoldenDict
Install the GoldenDict dictionary application for your Linux distribution.
By default, the application only seems to use online dictionaries for English to English dictionaries.
Download the free offline dictionary Wordnet3 from here.
Unzip the downloaded file and place the file that ends with .dz in /usr/share/dictd
Now open GoldenDict. Go to Edit -> Dictionaries (or press F3). Under the Sources -> Files, you'll see the directories that GoldenDict looks for dictionary files. Press the "Rescan now" button in the right pane to index the newly added dictionary.
Optional: You can also make WordNet3 the dictionary with the highest priority by dragging it to the top in the Dictionaries tab.
Network Tricks
Connecting to two networks - one Wi-Fi and one wired
Wi-Fi network has internet, wired does not. Then, disable the gateway of the Wired network for internet access.
Show the networks
$ ip route show
Smaller metric number means higher priority for the gateway
Remove the gateway of the wired network
$ sudo ip route del default via 192.168.1.1
Gnome tricks
Creating a desktop launcher on Gnome
Install gnome-panel
sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends gnome-panel
Open the Create Launcher dialog and enter the details for the launcher
sudo gnome-desktop-item-edit --create-new /usr/share/applications
Done.
Reset Gnome configuration
Run this command as your user
dconf reset -f /org/gnome/
Logout and login.
Video Editing
Trimming a video
ffmpeg can be used to quickly trim a video from a given start time to end time.
ffmpeg -i video.webm -ss 00:00:00 -t 00:05:04 -c copy video-cut.webm
ss and t can be skipped in case of start of video or end of video respectively. The same works for mp3 files.
See this for joining videos.
PDF Editing
Using PDF toolkit on Debian to merge or split PDF files - http://net2.com/how-to-install-and-use-pdftk-on-linux-to-merge-or-split-pdf-files/
pdfsam is another alternative which I didn't use.
Ebooks
Create ebook from a website using Calibre
Some free books on the internet are available as HTML pages.
An epub file is simply an archive of HTML pages that can be treated as an ebook.
A book website can be stitched into an ebook using wget
and calibre
wget -r --no-parent -erobots=off http://www.hpmor.com/ ebook-convert index.html hpmor.epub
Convert ebook to audiobook
I wrote a babashka script for this: ebook-to-audiobook
X Window system tricks
Switch to Colemak layout in X window system
setxkbmap us -variant colemak
Natural scrolling
Run the following command, then logout and login.
echo "pointer = 1 2 3 5 4 6 7 8 9 10 11 12" >> ~/.Xmodmap
VirtualBox tricks
Adding a new virtual USB disk to a virtual machine
- Enable USB controller for the virtual machine. This can be done from the VirtualBox UI.
- Create a new virtual disk and add it using the USB controller.
- Run this command as root inside the box.
# mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb
GPG and Thunderbird
To renew an expired GPG primary key,
gpg --edit-keys <key-id> >>> expire 1y >>> save
For subkeys, you have to first enter the key number like "key 1"
Send the updated keys to several keyservers
gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --send-keys <key-id> gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --send-keys <key-id>
Export the secret key to a file.
gpg --output private.gpg --armor --export-secret-key <key-id>
In Thunderbird, open PGP Key Manager and import the new key. Delete the above secret key file.