Thursday 31 December 2015

Sharing a Laptops WiFi through Ethernet

Here are 3 different ways you can share your laptops WiFi through ethernet to another computer so that that computer can access the internet.
(When your set-up is like the following diagram.)

Desktop --- Ethernet --- Laptop --- WiFi --- Router

A desktop computer connected from its ethernet port to the laptops ethernet port using a cable and that laptop connected to a wireless router via WiFi.
In order of easiest to complicated.

Friday 23 October 2015

Nvidia Drivers on Ubuntu 15.10

Nouveau seems to be both difficult to disable and difficult to spell.
I had a little bit of trouble installing official NVIDIA drivers off of the NVIDIA website in my fresh install of Ubuntu 15.10 however, after figuring it out it was actually quite a simple process.
This is a tutorial for if you want to install the latest drivers that NVIDIA offers on the website, otherwise you should just go into "Software & Updates", navigate to the "Additional Drivers" tab, and select the NVIDIA proprietary binary that you would like to use.

Here are the links to NVIDIAs drivers:
NVIDIA drivers: nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx
NVIDIA beta drivers: nvidia.com/Download/Find.aspx

For the purpose of this tutorial the filename of my binary is:
NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-358.09.bin
And it will be saved in my Downloads folder in my home directory, which will be represented as either of the following:
~/user/Downloads/
/home/user/Downloads/

Friday 17 April 2015

Custom Spray in L4D2

A common problem problem in Left 4 Dead 2 in Steam on Linux seems to be when attempting to import sprays, resulting in the error:
Spray Import Error
Unable to write output spray file. It's possible the current user doesn't have permission.


Whether this happens in other source games also, I do not know, however the fix should be the same.

L4D2 seems to perform half of the action needed, it just has problems when copying the actual image file into the folder it needs to be in.

So here is the remedy:

Saturday 7 February 2015

Pitch Correction (Auto-Tune)

Pitch Correction is the process of correcting the intonation of an audio signal without affecting other aspects of its sound. Pitch correction first detects the pitch of an audio signal (using a live pitch detection algorithm), then calculates the desired change and modifies the audio signal accordingly.
There are two popular pitch correctors used in the professional world of audio; Antares "Auto-Tune" and Celemony "Melodyne". According to wikipedia Auto-Tune has versions for Linux, however I was unable to find them. Melodyne is Windows and Mac, and they provide a demo version of their software which I have played with before on Windows and it's fantastic, with a graphical way to easily shift notes and create harmonies, also now with the ability to pitch correct single notes in a chord of notes (a feature which I think Auto-Tune has in some of their devices).
Unfortunately there are no Linux versions for either of these programs (none which I can find) and even if their were; they are quite expensive. So let's do it the free open source way.

Friday 2 January 2015

Flash, Shockwave & Unity3D


One nightmare problem across operating systems and device platforms (including Gnu/Linux) is; world wide web pages being created with incompatible browser plug-ins to the device trying to view it. That is the majority of plug-ins only being made to work on Microsoft's Windows and Apple's Macintosh (? whatever an Apple is called nowadays). Reading that statement some people may say "Who cares. Nobody uses (Gnu/)Linux.", however they would be forgetting the amount of other devices that can browse the web nowadays, including (but not limited to); Android, BSD, PlayStation consoles, Xbox consoles, iDevices, and Chromebooks.


Common Browser Plug-ins

Three of the, probably, most used plug-ins are:
  • Adobe Flash Player - used by many sites to display video and other sites to watch flash animations and play flash games.
  • Shockwave Player - not really used since the 90s (:P) and mainly used to play shockwave games.
  • Unity3D - a somewhat new player to the table for 3D games, and despite Unity3D SDK being able to compile games to Linux, there is no native Linux web browser plug-in.