Niche tech tips are the cornerstone of this website, and here is another. How to upgrade an iTunes/Music library whilst maintaining the database. I know everyone streams music these days – hence this is likely a very niche tech tip – but I still maintain a large music database on a server. The data in […]
Tag: tftb
Tips From The Blog XVII: determining playback speed of a video
Generating movie files for publication can be a bit tricky. We have a protocol for making them for microscopy data, which simplifies things. However, we recently got this question from a journal: please state the playback speed of each movie file How can we do this? What information is needed for movie files? Usually movies […]
Tips From The Blog XVI: fast check of two directories
Here is a quick method for checking parity between two directories. Let’s say we have two directories dir1 and dir2. They are large and have thousands of files and subdirectories. How can we check that they have the same contents? I found myself in this situation recently during a server migration. Method 1: rsync To […]
Convertible: using ffmpeg to convert audio files
A quick tech tip. I usually use Audacity for converting audio files and I have a few simple macros set up in there to make life easy. I had some opus music files which do not play in Apple’s Music app and therefore needed converting to MP3 format. Annoyingly, Audacity 3.1.2 on macOS does not […]
Tips from the Blog XV: locating the php.ini file for WordPress on Raspberry Pi
If I struggle to find the answer to something, it must be worth a post to help out others. So, here’s where to find the php.ini file on a standard WordPress install on Raspberry Pi. I installed a LAMP stack and WordPress on a Raspberry Pi following these excellent instructions. The aim was to import […]
Tips From The Blog XIV: embedded file locations in an Adobe Illustrator file
I was working on a figure in Adobe Illustrator today. The ai file had 32 embedded TIFF files (we tend to embed images rather than linking them for portability reasons). I wanted to change all of the images, but to do this I needed to know where the originals were. Clicking on the file shows […]
Tips From The Blog XIII: siunitx, Helvetica and LaTeX
I searched several times in vain to solve this problem. After finding a solution, I thought i’d put it up here. The problem Formatting of units using siunitx in LaTeX does not match the typeface of the body text. We like to use the helvet package to get a close approximation to Helvetica in LaTeX. […]
Find The Answer Within: using grep to find lost code
A short tech-tip this week. How can you find a line of code somewhere on your computer? I often find that I need to write a line of code and I can’t remember the exact syntax. To add to the frustration, I can remember writing a similar line before, but can’t remember in which file […]
Tips From The Blog XII: Improving your Twitter experience
This is a quick set of tips to improve your Twitter experience. YMMV on these tips. Plus I can see Twitter changing things so that they no longer work, but this advice is correct as of today. I see a lot of people on Twitter complaining about two things: These things seem to plague Twitter […]
Tips from the blog XI: docx to pdf
A long time ago I posted a little Automator routine to convert Word doc/docx files to PDF. Not long after that, this routine ceased to work due to changes in Microsoft Word (I think). It’s still very useful to convert a whole folder of docx files to PDF in order to avoid Word and just […]