Category: Open Source

With advancement of wireless technology, bluetooth has become a de facto standard for transferring files (and synchronizing data) between mobile devices (PDA, smartphone) and personal computer.

In this post I’m going to show you how to send and receive files over bluetooth using obexftp and obexpushd package from OpenOBEX project.

Send files to mobile device
First install obexftp and obexpushd

sudo apt-get install obexftp obexpushd

Insert a bluetooth dongle and activate bluetooth on your mobile phone. Do a scan of nearby bluetooth device (your mobile phone) by executing :

obexftp -b

obexftp then will display the scan result on your screen, like this :

Scanning ...
Using  00:15:A0:53:6F:85   Nokia 6680
Browsing 00:15:A0:53:6F:85 ...
Channel: 10

Pick a file, and try sending it over bluetooth by executing :

obexftp -b 00:15:A0:53:6F:85 -p example.txt

obexftp will then send the file to your bluetooth device (address : 00:15:A0:53:6F:85 – taken from previous command). Make sure that you set the mobile device to accept the file.

How to receive files over bluetooth
Insert bluetooth dongle and turn it into discoverable mode

hciconfig hci0 piscan

Continue reading “Howto Send and Recieve files over Bluetooth with Ubuntu Linux”

The most usual (and popular!) way to create a “mixed-tape” Audio CD is to burn it from a collection of MP3 song taken of several sources.

However as these mp3 are ripped from several sources, there would be inconsistencies of the volume loudness which would create an annoyance if one had to readjust the CD player volume from song-to-song.

A “Normalization” process would automatically fixed the audio so that all song would have the same amount of volume, but sadly the default Serpentine Audio CD creator that comes with Ubuntu does not support normalization.

How to Normalize MP3 song
First of all open a terminal and install normalize-audio package :

sudo apt-get install normalize-audio

Then change directory to your mp3 collections to be burned and execute:

normalize-audio -m -v  *.mp3

normalize-audio will then compute the files level one-by-one and then will apply normalization on all mp3 files.

You can then use your favorite CD burner application (like Serpentine) to burn the normalized MP3 files to make an audio CD.

normalize-audio also supports ogg files for normalization.

Happy burning!

[tags]mp3,audiocd,burning,cd burn,audio cd,ogg,vorbis,opensource,open source,gutsy,gutsy gibbon,ubuntu[/tags]

Among the main cause for loosing digital photographs are corrupted filesystems, and accidental SD card formatting. These photographs are still recoverable using photo recovery softwares available on the internet.

However, a quick survey on the internet reveals that most of the commercially available photo recovery software are either too expensive or is not available for Linux users.

How to Recover photo files with Photorec
Enter Photorec, a free and open source file recovery software from CGSecurity. As the name implies, photorec was originally developed to recover photo files from flash/memory card.

It has since been expanded to support more file types covering popular document files (doc,xls,mdb), archives (zip,rar,gz,bz2,tar) and multimedia files (mp3,wav,avi,mpeg).

Here’s how to recover your lost files using Photorec :

Continue reading “How to Recover photo files from SD Card / MMC with PhotoRec”