First of all, this blog post is about a somewhat specific problem. Despite
this, I think it is quite useful to most readers looking for some Linux
knowledge as the tools I used are very general. Let's start with the
explanation of
The problem
Sometimes I have good ideas when I'm outside. Sometimes I really wanna
preserve these ideas, but it's very inconvenient to use phone keyboards,
especially on the move. One solution is recording my voice. But then, I
would want to transfer those recordings to my computer for future reference.
But what if I also want to read the text version of those voice recordings?
Let's handle these problems one at a time.
Syncing files
Syncthing
Syncthing is an open source cross-platform program that can sync folders
accross multiple devices. It's perfect for this problem, as it allows for
P2P syncing (for example from a phone to a computer).
It's very easy to set up aswell, you download it on both devices, open a
browser (Synthing has a web frontend) tab on 127.0.0.1:8384 and scan the ID
QR with your phones camera. Then share whatever is the folder that has your
audio recordings.
If your init system is systemd, to start synthing (and enable autostart
at boot) you can run (where USER is your linux user):
systemctl enable syncthing@USER.service --now
Synthing has configuration options for encryption and file filtering.
If you want more robust syncing, you could also host a Syncthing instance
on a server.
Speech to text
To convert my speech to text I use the SpeechRecognition python package:
pip install SpeechRecognition
It supports many speech recognition options, including offline ones.
It's also really easy to use, check
my script.
I use vimwiki
vimwiki (a (neo)vim plugin) that makes managing markdown files in a
wiki-like manner extremely easy. Vimwiki also has a diary option. To store
the recording path and text in my notes, I wrote a few scripts.
The speech-to-diary.sh script calls the speech recognition script
on a selected file, appends transcription to a vimwiki diary and
(optionally) moves the voice recording to the vimwiki folder.
it has a bunch of flags, you can get a help message by running:
./speech-to-diary.sh -h
The text that it puts looks like this:
20220328_162342.m4a 16:24:05
Whatever speech recognition returned
/home/tea/vimwiki/diary/resources/20220328_162342.wav
I have a vim shortcut that plays an audio file under the cursor so that
I can also listen to it if the transcription is not accurate enough.
If you don't use vim or vimwiki, you can just change the last
line of the script to save the text to a file of your choosing.
Tying it all together
Actual Linux knowledge
Now, we need a way to react to new files appearing in the syncing
directory. For that, we can use the linux inotify interface, that
waits for changes in files. For syncthing, the following command
works:
inotifywait -c -r -m -e attrib $PATH_TO_WATCH
You can also see it used in a script. Be sure to read the readme
on the repo for some additional information on setting up
a systemd service (if you don't know how).
Now, if you autostart syncthing and the watchscript at system boot, it
will process all new audio files.
MPV is one of my favorite open source projects. It's a simple-looking
video player with an enormous amount of features while also being
highly extensible through the lua programming language.
MPV-splice Script
MPV-splice is a script that allows you to use MPV as a video editor.
You set the start and end timings for fragments, and then
the script cuts the video and concatenates the fragments.
I made a fork of it to extend it's abilities.
I added an option to automatically upload
the video (to any platform, but the default config works for Streamable).
I added an option to reencode the video, making the timings frame perfect.
By default, the script does not reencode the video, allowing for extremely
fast results.
I fixed the editing of online videos. The script will only download the
selected portions of the video, which allows you to cut out fragments of even
hours long YouTube videos for example.
Another useful script I forked is 8mb, which compresses your video to 8mb, changing
it's FPS and resolution to appropriate values.
The most basic way to play music is using some website.
Most people prefer Spotify, but I never liked it.
For the longest time I've been using
Soundcloud, it has most music I like,
especially the quirky electronic type.
It also allows you to upload songs without
any additional setup. But,
of course, there are songs that are not on there.
The worst part is that some more main-stream artists
have their songs region-locked or only available with
soundcloud premium.
Local Music Library
A year back I decided to begin storing my music locally.
This approach ensures that I have access to all my
favorite music, in best quality, offline, forever.
It is honestly really freeing and opened a bunch of
possibilities for me.
DeaDBeeF Music Player
I first settled on DeaDBeeF, as it's highly customisable,
extensible and actively developed.
Configuring takes some time to get used to.
You have to enable 'design mode' in the 'View' submenu to
start adding and removing panes. It allows you to use a lot of
GTK3 (UI library) widgets to structure your window
however you like.
You can find my config in the GitHub repo linked below.
I especially like the visualization plugins that I found.
On Arch-based systems it is extremely easy to install plugins:
yay -S deadbeef-plugin-spectrogram-gtk3-git \
deadbeef-plugin-musical-spectrum-gtk3-git \
deadbeef-plugin-rating \
deadbeef-plugin-waveform-gtk3-git
Some plugins are configured through settings, others through
the right-click menu.
There are 2 main problems with DeaDBeeF for me:
Lack of dynamic playlists or being able to go though
artsts/albums without creating playlists for them manually.
No playback queue display (it only shows the song position
in the queue next to it).
Both of these features are in plans so at some point in the future
I hope we'll get them.
MPD Music Server
Recently I started using
MPD. It's a bit technical.
It might sound scary at first but all you need to do to set it up
is create 1 config file and run the server.
There are a lot of clients that allow you to connect to an
MPD server with relatively conventional interfaces.
I am currently using
Cantata, as it's the most feature rich one I could find.
The great thing about MPD is that you can connect as many clients
as you want and they all will be synchronized with each other.
There are clients for scrobbling your music to
last.fm (with mpdas),
setting your discord 'rich presense' and controlling
playback with media keys or a notification (with mpdris2).
It's the most modular music playing experience and I love it.
My config looks like this:
music_directory "~/Music"
db_file "~/.config/mpd/database"
playlist_directory "~/.config/mpd/playlists"
sticker_file "~/.config/mpd/sticker.sql"
log_file "syslog"
auto_update "yes"
restore_paused "yes"
audio_output {
type "pulse"
name "pulse audio"
}
audio_output {
type "fifo"
name "my_fifo"
path "/tmp/mpd.fifo"
format "22050:16:2"
}
'sticker_file' allows for custom music ratings (supported by Cantata),
'fifo' audio output allows for latency-less audio
visualization with
Glava.
To install everything I mentioned on Arch you would run:
yay -S mpd mpd-discord-rpc-git mpdas mpdris2 cantata
Remote Music Library
But what if I want to play my music on a device where
I don't have my audio library?
MPD Does it All
You can create an http output by putting the following lines
in your config:
audio_output {
type "httpd"
name "My HTTP Stream"
encoder "lame"
port "8000"
bitrate "192"
format "44100:16:1"
max_clients "0" # 0=no limit
}
I host an MPD instance on my server and can control playback with
any client. On my phone I use
MPDroid (which can also stream the aduio).
To stream audio on desktop you have to connect to the specified port
through a music player that can play http streams, like mpv,
or a web browser.
MPD clients, such as Cantata, can also play http audio streams.
The delay is a little annoying. There is a setup that allows for 0 delay
playback ( with local mpd using a remote music library) I saw here:
www.joram.io/blog/android-streaming-mpd/
But I want my recommendations!
MPD :)
There is a
client
that automatically queues new songs based on
last.fm recommendations.
Incomprehensible and unstructured jumble of code scattered
across a range of highly specific tools that is one
typo away from crumbling into ruins.
This is how I would describe
My static-site generator
To write a new article, I go to my blog-post directory,
open a new file with vim and use a snippet (powered by
UltiSnips)
that inputs an html template with todays date, it
also uses some python to automatically set ids
to article titles.
After that I am free to use any html I please inside
the article body. When I'm done, I set a flag
(an html comment) to indicate to my site generator
that the article should be published/updated/deleted.
Yep, it's all plaintext. I don't know what will happen
if I mess up any of it.
This is how I roll.
The site-generator itself is written in python and
just parses the file for the
fields I mentioned and then compiles all blog-posts
into html pages. It's NOT recommended for use yet but
you can
check it out.
What I would recommend is Luke Smith's
lb.
So what's new?
New and fresh additions to the site:
Posts are now tagged and
each tag has it's own page.
Each blog-post now has an id, try clicking on
the title of a post to get a link directly
to it!
I also rewrote a lot of the code to make future
changes easier.
What's in plans?
I didn't have enough time to implement everything,
in the future you can expect:
RSS feeds.
An index page and a separate page for each post.
Better explanation of the inner workings
and a more general implementation.
Hello! First week already proved challenging.
Unfortunately I fell ill which also made it more difficult
to finish something meaningful in time, but I have some results.
The Idea
I really like art based around very simple concepts.
An example of such a concept is pixel art.
The idea of pixel art is about as simple as it gets -
you draw with little squares.
So, I was doodling around trying to come up with something
similar that looks cool.
I came up with a modification of pixel art,
with non-parallel lines and variable line width.
I tried recreating it in
inkscape, but quickly encountered multiple problems, like
differently angled lines being at different distances from each
other and the ends of lines looking off.
How to GUI
In the end I just decided to write my own program to make
this kind of designs. Only experience writing GUI I had
was using QT (C++); it was painful. I decided instead to
use Godot, as using a python-like language with dynamically
typed variables seemed like a much better idea for a GUI.
I had a few ideas I wanted to implement in my Goo-e:
shortcuts that the user can set/unset just by right-clicking
the element instead of going into settings menu and
searching for it there (I prototyped it but didn't yet use).
Another idea was giving the user to ability to save
any value as default (again, by right-clicking), for
now I implemented it with a button next to a value.
How do I optimize this ;-;
As you can see the UI is incredibly bare-bones. Main features
are there: you can pan, zoom, draw and erase lines on a grid.
Changing the angle of the grid is incredibly laggy as the code
has to update a huge amount of individual nodes (objects).
I will probably completely rewrite the entire program at
some point.
Was it worth it?
Writing an entire program just to make this very specific
type of designs might seems silly, especially considering
how I realised that this effect can be achieved just by
applying a simple image transform on a picture made using
a normal square grid.
Regardless, the experience is valuable.
I felt good programming, abusing the hell
out of Godot's signal system and other features that make
my life just a little bit easier. And damn does it feel
good accomplishing something at the end of the week and
posting about it here. Here is something I doodled in
the program: see if you can figure out what it says,
each letter is made out of 1 line.
That's it for this week! Let's see what lies ahead :)
You can find my config in the GitHub repo linked below.
