Editing videos can be a huge pain if you don’t have the right tools. We know that there are a lot of tools available for image editing. You can quickly crop, resize, or manipulate an image without skipping a beat, but you can’t do the same for videos. Let’s say you want to resize a video, extract a 10 second segment from it, and then convert it to a different format. Can you do it quickly? Well, not unless you know how to use some bloated software whose GUI usually has a steep learning curve! A lot of people tend to get stuck when they want to play around with videos. The good news is that you don’t need some fancy commercial software to edit videos. FFmpeg is here for you and you can do a lot of things with it. Let’s go ahead and see how to manipulate a video using this amazing tool, shall we? Continue reading “How To Edit Videos Using FFmpeg”
Category: Hacking and Fiddling
How To Take A Screenshot On Mac OS X
One of the many good things about Mac OS X is the built in support for taking screenshots. But then again, in this day and age, what operating system doesn’t? Well, this is where it differs a little. I am sure most of you know how to capture a screenshot on OS X, but there might be situations where your requirements change a bit. There are many different ways to capture the content being displayed on your screen. Each one of those methods has something different and unique to offer. These methods are very handy at times! I have described a few different methods here. Let’s see what they are. Continue reading “How To Take A Screenshot On Mac OS X”
Adding Hacker News Button To Your WordPress Blog
Every blogger writing about technology or any related field knows how important Hacker News is for promoting good articles. If your article reaches the front page there, it will have a stronger effect as compared to more general sharing sites like Reddit, Digg and StumbleUpon. Hacker News junta is more tech-oriented, and so their opinion would be more valuable. If you have hosted your blog on WordPress.com, you know that it provides very nice features for sharing on different sites. Unfortunately, Hacker News sharing is not supported by WordPress.com. Luckily, we have an option to add custom sharing button, that makes it really easy to create a custom button yourself. Here’s how you do it: Continue reading “Adding Hacker News Button To Your WordPress Blog”
Why Do We Need CocoaPods?
Linker errors are painful to deal with. When we are working on our Xcode projects and when we almost done with everything, these linker errors pop up to make their point! Even if we can see the libraries right there in the GUI, it still can’t find that library. Sounds familiar? Why do we have to set linker flags in more places? Wouldn’t it be easier if you could just start developing your project without having to worry about these things? Say hello to CocoaPods! CocoaPods is a library dependency manager for Objective-C projects that solves all these issues. CocoaPods is a ruby gem that downloads all the third party libraries you want for your project, and links everything so that you don’t have to. Continue reading “Why Do We Need CocoaPods?”
Display Caller Of The Current Function In Python
If you have spent enough time coding, then you know where I am going with this. As the code gets bigger, debugging gets trickier. Keeping track of everything becomes difficult, especially when you collaborate with others and your functions are being called by someone else’s functions. A lot of times, you may want see where your function is being called so that you can pinpoint where things went wrong. Luckily, Python has a neat way of doing it. You can get a list of all the locations where your function is being called, along with the line numbers. Continue reading “Display Caller Of The Current Function In Python”
NTFS Write Support On OS X Mountain Lion
If you have noticed, Mac OS X doesn’t support writing onto NTFS disks. But not to worry, you don’t have to install any third party drivers to enable this. Mountain Lion 10.8.3 already has native write support for the NTFS. OSX Mountain Lion does have built-in support for NTFS, and it can read and write. However, Apple does not enable it by default. Continue reading “NTFS Write Support On OS X Mountain Lion”
How To Reset The Admin Password In Mac OS X
So you have finally gotten yourself in this situation! You have a Mac in front of you and you have forgotten the admin password. You don’t have the cd either. What we do we do now? Well, as it turns out, there is a simple procedure to reset the admin password: Continue reading “How To Reset The Admin Password In Mac OS X”
How To Convert An Existing Django Project To Eclipse Project
So you have a Django project and you want to use Eclipse IDE to modify and control it. When I say “existing Django project”, I mean a Django project created without using Eclipse. If you are not sure how to use Eclipse to manage your Python project, you can check out this blog post. You basically need to install PyDev and configure the Python path for Eclipse. Once you install everything, you should be able to see PyDev listed when you start a new Eclipse project. Continue reading “How To Convert An Existing Django Project To Eclipse Project”
How To Install Valgrind On Mac OS X
As your code gets bigger, keeping track of memory becomes critical. These things often become the source of huge crashes and annoying bugs. Detecting them manually is a very tedious process. So we need a tool to manage all this for us. This is where Valgrind comes into picture. Valgrind is a programming tool for memory debugging, memory leak detection, and profiling. It can be used to keep track of all the memory allocated at all stages in your program. Although it was initially meant to be a memory debugger, it has grown to become a generic framework for building dynamic analysis tools. You can use Valgrind to build new tools as well. There are Valgrind tools like Memcheck that can automatically detect many memory management and threading bugs, and profile your programs in detail. Valgrind is widely used in the industry and it’s well respected within the coding community. Let’s see how we can get it up and running on Mac OS X. Continue reading “How To Install Valgrind On Mac OS X”
Non-ASCII Character Syntax Error In Python
So you played around with Python enough to get to this error? Good. Now let’s see what happened here. When you copy something and paste it into a .py file, some of the characters may not be copied correctly. Given below is the error Python usually spews out when that happens: Continue reading “Non-ASCII Character Syntax Error In Python”
Perpetual Enigma 