Media

Introduction Given what’s happening in the world right now, I really want to minimize my reliance on US-based services and Big Tech (“Les GAFAM” for French readers), even more so than a few months ago. Here’s a quick summary of what I use and do in an effort to become independent from those corporations. Almost everything mentioned is FOSS (Free and Open-Source Software). This is mainly addressed to tech-savvy people, but it can give you some ideas to get started if you’re not one (yet) :). Each solution will be attributed a “pain level”, which rates how painful the setup was for me, with my knowledge at the time. It’s therefore entirely subjective and is mainly just for fun. Feeling interested but lost? Feel free to reach out! See about page. ...

I often find myself needing to share text from a device to another, like a link from my phone to my laptop for instance. I thought, wouldn’t it be great if I had a simple webpage where I could just paste text from a device, so that it could be read from another? Some sort of LAN clipboard, if you will. I could use Nextcloud notes as a medium, but that requires me to login, and it would be a pain to log out and login every time I need to just share some text on a shared/untrusted target devices. So it’s important that this hypothetical webpage does not require authentication. ...

I found a neat little Android app the other day that removes EXIF data from pictures before you share them. It’s called Scrambled Exif and it’s available on F-Droid. The name is a bit misleading, since it really does remove EXIF data altogether instead of just scrambling it. The way it works is simple: when using the share menu with a picture in Android, select Scrambled Exif instead of the destination app where you want the picture shared. Scrambled Exif removes the metadata and displays another share menu, where you choose where the EXIF-less picture should go. And yes, it works for multiple images too! ...

Sifting through a several hours-long DJ set, concert or podcast to find a specific portion is a pain. If you happen to store your tracks locally and use Poweramp as a music player on your Android device (probably something like 0.000001% of Earth’s population), there is a solution - or small hack, whatever you want to call it. You can use the “LYRICS” ID3 tag to store chapters as if they were lyrics: ...

While writing my latest post, I realized the number of images might make loading quite slow, and that’s when I found out about jpegoptim and Oxipng. Those tools can, losslessly, significantly reduce the size of JPEG and PNG files (among others) thanks to black magic operations involving the Huffman algorithm, as well as stripping metadata. There are a number of GUIs that make use of those utilites. I personally like OptiImage: 72% decrease in size from a digital camera. Not bad! ...

I recently stumbled upon corrupted music files randomly during playback. My player (Poweramp) would skip them before the end, and I was worried more might be corrupted and started looking for a way to easily check my whole library. FFmpeg is great for the job (of course it is). Here’s the command I ended up with after browsing multiple Stack Overflow threads. The command recursively checks FLAC files in the current directory. You can adjust the file extension, or remove it entirely to check all files. Add -maxdepth 1 after find ./ to disable recursion. You might want to run it in Screen since the process will read through your entire library, which could take some time. ...