Category: All

All posts across the whole website belong to this category. They might also belong to some other categories as well, but this one holds all of them. Hence the descriptive name – All.

Biometric passports coming to Cyprus

Cyprus Mail reports that biometric passports will be implemented in Cyprus later this year:

Parliament also gave the green light to the introduction and implementation of biometric passports as of this autumn.

The new passport will bear the owner’s fingerprints, installed by microchip, eliminating the risk of theft and identity fraud. All passports must be replaced once the system starts operating in October.

The new law contains a clause ensuring that fingerprints will not be used for any other purpose and that this data shall be stored for a period of just 48 hours and then deleted.

Diplomats will be the first to obtain their biometric passports, in early September, followed by the rest of the population in mid-October.

The new passports will cost €70.

Finally! Per account signatures in Gmail

I’ve been waiting for this feature for years and finally it arrived!  For those of us who have multiple accounts configured in Gmail, custom per-account signatures are supported.  No more copy-pasting from templates, Greasemonkey scripts, and Canned responses trickery.  Go to your Settings and configure a separate signature for each account.  And it gets better than that – you can even do rich-text signatures if you use HTML emails a lot.

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you to the whole Gmail team and those guys who made this handy feature happen. I wanted this for a while!

flac2mp3

I was going through Fedora Planet stream when I noticed this blog post about converting Flac files to mp3 on Linux.   That reminded me of a couple of folders with files that I can’t listen to in my car.  So I thought I’d convert them now, especially that I have the guide handy it only consists of a couple of steps.  I tried and it worked, except that default options used resulted in the mp3 file of 128 kbps, which is a rather low quality.  So I played a bit with it and ended up with the following shell flac2mp3.sh script:

#!/bin/bash

# Convert flac file to mp3 with best quality VBR

for file in *.flac
do
    base=`basename "$file" .flac`
    # Convert flat to wav
    flac -d "$file"
    # Convert wav to mp3 with variable bit rate, best quality
    lame -V 0 "$base".wav "$base".mp3
done

As mentioned in the comments, it creates variable bit rate (VBR) mp3 files with maximum quality.

Update: The moment I finished this blog post I felt weird. It was almost like I did it before. And indeed. I should have searched my own blog before posting. Here is the post I did five years ago which has pretty much the same script in it.

Day in brief