Firefox plugin: Markdown Editor

In my ongoing saga to assemble a method of storing personal notes in a way that best suits me, I stumbled across a Firefox plugin named Markdown Editor. As its name suggests, it is a Markdown editor which can be used to edit locally-stored text files in Markdown markup.

It provides a split-pane view, with one pane being the editing pane and the other an automatically-refreshed HTML view. The editor is quite basic with undo, save and save as features.

If you use Markdown markup but don't want to use a standalone application, try Markdown Editor. It makes a very useful addition to Firefox. It's quite basic in its functionality at the moment and could perhaps benefit from some enhancements and new features.

Try it and see for yourself. If you do try it, please write a review on its Mozilla Firefox plugins page as so far there it has had very few reviews.

Firefox's recent changes have impressed me

I am impressed by recent changes and changes in progress to Firefox, namely:

• an optional PDF viewer written in Javascript;
• a new Downloads dialog box, with a matching Navigation bar button to show/hide the dialog. I definitely prefer this to having an entirely separate window opened (available only in the Nightly build at the moment);
• an option to open links in a Private Window. This is an improvement over the previous option, which was to switch the entire browser into Private Browsing mode (OK - I may have the name of that feature wrong) (available only in the Nightly build at the moment).

Yay Mozilla!

Note: I am well aware that these features have been available in Chrome for some time. I give Google credit for the excellent browser that is Chrome but my preference is for Firefox.

HOWTO: Cut the end off a video file using ffmpeg

I had a video file from which I needed to cut the end off from a specific point. I didn't want to use a video editor since it seemed a simple enough task, so I went look for alternate solutions.

The following page gave me a solution using ffmpeg:
http://quickhowto.blogspot.com.au/2011/02/how-to-truncate-video-using-command.html

ffmpeg -vcodec copy -acodec copy -i [inputfile] -ss [start] -t [duration] [outputfile]

My first attempt failed because I specified a duration of 36 seconds and I wanted 36 minutes. Reading ffmpeg's man page confirmed that the duration needs to be specified in the format hh:mm:ss. In my case I needed "00:36:00".

HOWTO: Store notes online and offline

I have mentioned on this blog several methods of storing notes so that they're available both online and offline. Since when online I usually have a browser open, it seems logical to seek browser-based solutions to the problem. The problem then was how to make these same notes available when offline. So far none of the services I have tried offered all the features I wanted.

Help is here, though, because I have thought of another method and am trialing this now. I won't go into a long explanation as to why I'm trying this method or how to set it up but simply present my current solution:

Installation Method

1. Install Dropbox client
2. Create a subdirectory in the Dropbox directory to contain the notes

Storage of notes
Individual notes are created as plain text files and stored in the "notes" directory (or a sub-directory).

Searching
Use the command-line tool 'grep' to search notes' content. An optional feature would be to added specially mark-up "tags" so that you could search by tag, finding matching notes. Example tags could include "todo", "project", "howto".

Formatting
While the notes themselves are plain text files, an optional extra is to use the Markdown markup method to apply formatting. When viewed in a text editor they are still easily read but when viewed using a Markdown viewer, their formatting makes complex notes more legible. One method is to install a Markdown viewer in your browser, give each note with Markdown markup an ".md" extension and associate files with an ".md" extension with the browser. I can then easily browse my notes in a file manager and easily view their contents.

Although I am using Dropbox in my current experiment, I could use a FLOSS alternative.

The beauty of this approach is that it is cross-platform, since each component is itself cross-platform.

AsciiDoc - I think I see the light at the end of the tunnel...

..and I hope it's not a train coming the other way. :P

I am trying to use the AsciiDoc application to produce the Frugalware Linux newsletter. AsciiDoc is a tool which takes text written in a "light" markup language and converts it - via various tools - into formats such as HTML, ePub, DocBook etc. I have only just begun learning about it and I tend to be a slow learner.

I first made the mistake of taking an existing newsletter issue in HTML format and manually converting it to AsciiDoc format. This all looked good when I used the basic AsciiDoc tool to convert it to HTML. However when I tried to do the same using the more sophisticated 'a2x' tool, I got validation error messages. I asked for help on the AsciiDoc Google Groups' group and quickly got help, highlighting some invalid syntax I had left in the file. With that corrected, the file now converts successfully to HTML.

Now I am looking at using various configuration options to get the desired result. The results so far are encouraging. It's when I see what other people and groups are doing that I get a little scared. Of course I need to realise that I need to do only the minimum with AsciiDoc to get what I want. If later our requirements change and we need to use a more complex configuration then OK, I'll do that. For the moment, though, the simple configuration I have is working.

AsciiDoc is part of a plan to make the production of the newsletter easier. Right now it's quite labour-intensive when more of the production steps could be automated (or at least semi-automated). I will report my progress here.