Covid-19, Work and Free Software

Year 2020 started with an unexpected rage.  The spread of Covid-19 has caused lots of deaths, fear, job losses, and an enormous uncertainty.

Anytime I turn on the news, my heart hurts.  Seeing so many people struggling, governments totally lost, and medical services collapsing sometimes makes me lose hope.

Here in my country we haven't had such a bad time as bigger nations, to which I send my best thoughts.  Still, the chaos is evident everywhere.  The authorities have instructed us not to leave our homes unless it is strictly necessary and thus, I (as many other people in the world) ended up working from home although I was totally unprepared for that.

My university literally sent us home with the command "work from there" and nothing else but an institutional platform that cannot hold such a heavy traffic.

Anyway, I am lucky if I compare myself to many of my colleagues.  They were much less prepared for the drastic change and some were heavily against online classes.  The same is true about most students here; they are not used to self learning and are very dependent on teachers telling them what to do. (*sigh*)

Fortunately, I can always count on Free Software.  Thanks to the army of tools available as Free Software, I can plan and make my online classes, even if I am totally inexperienced.

I don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. Coronavirus has really changed the way we live... many people are gone or will pass away due to this virus. I am deeply thankful to the great heroes who work long hours trying to assist the sick. Those of us who are not medics, nurses or workers in hospitals can help by staying home and following the safety measures.  I'll do that while I work from my house.  Please, let's all help by staying home!

A New Year with New Learning!

This was my first attempt.

2020 has started and I have taken Santiago's advice to use Inkscape. He commented on my blog when I mentioned my experiments with GIMP.


At first, I didn't get very far.  All I got after trying like crazy was a weird humanoid image.


Still, I didn't get up. I had learned the basics of vector images by trying to give shape to that odd creature.


Later, I could get something a bit better. I aimed at
drawing one of the images that I can do easily by hand: a cat!

To simplify my life, I chose the rear view.  This is what I got:

A cat ignoring me!

Then, I started drawing all sorts of things. Of course, my drawings look more like cartoonized versions of everything, but that's OK.  I am glad to say I learned something new!

Firefox and Cookies...

I realized today that Linux does not store cookies as I remember Windows used to do it.  If my memory does not fail me, Windows used a special folder named "cookies". 

Well, I looked for such folder under var, etc, usr and other folders to no avail.

Then, I started my search online "where does Firefox store cookies on Linux?"

Fortunately, the page Unix & Linux from Stack Exchange came to my rescue.

Firefox uses this:

   ~/.mozilla/firefox//cookies.sqlite


 That is a sqlite database.

Also, you can view on Firefox some info of the cookies from any site you visit.  To do so, you go to "Edit / Preferences / Privacy and Security" and there, you look for "cookies and site data".  There, you can view the number of cookies and space each site has.  You can also delete cookies from there.

Those Old School Games...

A couple of days ago, I stumbled upon some of the games I used to play during my time using Windows. Fortunately, many of them run fine thanks to DOSBox (Yes, I am talking of old-school games!)

Yet, some of the old Windows games I liked did not work back then through Wine, or others were kind of clunky.


I decided to try three to see what happened and was pleased to see that now Wine runs them well.

Of those games, one of my favorite ones was Swarmers.  Now I can play it again!

You pilot a ship in an alien planet and battle a plague of giant ants

Then, I tried "Odento todono osakana tsuri game" (what a long name!) to see if it still ran.  Fortunately, it still does!

You fish to feed your family. Beware of junk or non-edible creatures!

Finally, I tried installing a pinball game named "Roll 'm Up" and it worked perfectly, too.

This is a great pinball!

I wish that "Crystal Caliburn" worked without the awkward lagging it suffers from, or that "Kung-fu Kim", that throws a fatal error, also worked. Maybe they will, eventually.

A Windows 10 Update Broke the Office's Printer (and MX-19 is the Patito Feo?)

Two weeks ago, some colleagues reported that the office's printer was not working.  I did not pay much attention to it because I seldom use that printer and I assumed that they had broken the hardware.

However, later on I learned that it was not a hardware problem.  The issue was with the software.  Indeed, my brother Mechatotoro could print seamlessly using OpenMandriva LX.  I tried then one of my MX-18 Live USB systems and could also print. 


At the end, we realized that it had been a Windows 10 update.  I tried to fix the issue, but since nobody has administrative rights, nothing could be done.  When my colleagues asked my brother why he could use the printer and how that problem could be prevented, he said "You can do it by using Linux."

Since my colleagues are not willing to use an OS that works, they will have to wait until someone comes to fix what was functional but that Windows graciously broke.

In the meantime, I guess I will download MX-19 "Patito Feo" and see what's new.  I want to install it on my laptop, too. Then, I'll make a live USB clone of my system to take it everywhere I go.  Let the Patito Feo fly majestically!

The Beauty of Customized Live USB Systems

Yesterday, I upgraded the kernel of my Linux laptop (MX Linux 18.3) to an antiX kernel 5.1.2.  The upgrade went well and the laptop now boots very fast.

Encouraged by that, I tried the same with my HP laptop, which runs antiX 17.3.1.  That laptop seems designed to discourage anyone from running Linux on it.  It gave me all sort of problems and, apparently, I'm not the only one who has had headaches thanks to such laptop.

Fortunately, when I finally got my system up and running, I made a snapshot and put the system into a live USB. That way, if something went wrong, I could run the live system with all my tweaks already applied and install it easily.

Well, the kernel upgrade did not work. I lost my wireless connection and there was no way to get it back.  In addition, my wireless stopped working on the old kernel, the one that previously worked without problems.

It was time to run the customized live USB.  It worked flawlessly.  After seeing the wi-fi back on, I installed the system from the USB stick.

Right now, I am posting this from the HP laptop.  Customized live USB systems are simply amazing!

Two Methods to Remove Vocals from Songs (Using Audacity)

Audacity is a very handy tool to edit audio files.  Lately, I've been testing its capacity to remove vocals from songs, using two different methods and obtaining mixed results.

The first method:  The "Vocal Remover" tool:

This is simple and relatively fast.  You need to go to "Effects" and once there, all the way down to "Vocal Remover".  Depending on your version, you might need to look for it under "Effects/Plugins/"

Once there, you run it, making sure you chose "remove vocals" from the drop down menu of the plugin.  And that's it! 

Vocal Remover will work well with some songs.  An important observation is that you need an unsplit stereo track for this method to work. What is an unsplit stereo track?  What can you do if you tried Vocal Remover and you didn't like the result?  Please read the second method to find out the answers.

The second method: Using "inversion" for one channel:

This is more difficult.  Stereo tracks have the audio in two different channels (left and right), and such channels are merged (unsplit) in most songs.  The second method consists of splitting both tracks and then applying the tool "inversion" to one of them.  Once done that, both tracks must be set to "mono" to be exported. 

That sounds a bit confusing, especially if we do not know much about sound edition.  Fortunately, several people have posted video tutorials.  This is one by Jimmy Ruska:

There you go!   The second method has worked better in my case, but it's a matter of testing to see what works best for you.